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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I've got one brain cell left, and you're getting on it. I'm struggling with my readings for school, trying to get a grip on the context. Since a lot of the writers we're looking at right now are studying ancient Greek and Roman art it's a bit of a stretch. But, in the midst of my misery, I have come across two very charming characters.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a gay aesthete living the Baroque era who hated all the art of the Baroque era. Instead, he just adored the Ancient Greeks - mmmmm....slave boy...mmmm. He had a lovely gentle approach to his studies, and reflected on the role of the historian as one who experiences (and mourns) the loss of the culture he studies. He was a Prussian who moved to Rome because there he could be a tour guide and meet boys. He had a sculpture of a faun in his apartment. I'm imagining a tragi-comedy about his life starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Winckelmann and Brad Pitt as the noble naked Athenian who appears to him in his dreams. (update: the movie should be titled Death in Athens and it should be directed by Gus Van Sant)
The other guy I like is Aby Warburg, who died in 1929. He was really pissed off with the prevailing art history of the day that championed an autonomous formalist approach. For Warburg, everything interesting happened in the transitions between cultures, and he was just as interested in bad art as in good art. He suffered from mental illness and won his freedom from five years in a mental institution by delivering a great big lecture on the Pueblo Indians and the symbol of the serpent. He was worried about technology and the way that civilization's advancements were destroying cultures. Like Winckelmann, he also reflected a lot about the objective/subjective dichotomy in the role of one who studies history. Unlike his contemporaries, he was invested in content, myth and the dark murky side of meaning.
Warburg opened his own library that was an all-over-the-place collection of stuff designed to foster interdisciplinary scholarship. He also worked on a massive picture book, which he never finished. The book was to be a big collection of diverse images, arranged collage-style in a non-heirarchical fashion (and without captions or comments). The book had several working titles, the most official one being Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) and the funner ones being Ghost Stories for Grown-ups and Picture Book for a Critique of Pure Unreason. Exhibitions of Warburg's images were mounted (I think by him) at his library. You can see documentation here. The first thing I think of is Luis Jacob's Album III at Documenta. I think the Warburg movie should be titled Ghost Stories for Grown-ups and Willem Defoe should have the starring role. (update: on second thought it should be an illustrated novel and Von Bark should write it and Scott Carruthers should do the drawings)
augh. sibling rivalry is always bad, but when one sibling gets a video made about their artwork with sexy German voice-over narration, it gets really really bad. Go here and click on "loss of signal."