June252009
Angelus Novus
At various points in my artistic, and now it seems my professional, life I have been drawn drawn to Paul Klee’s image Angelus Novus “…the machine angel, who, though he no longer bears any emblem of caricature or commitment, flies far beyond both. The machine angel’s enigmatic eyes force the onlooker to try to decide whether he is announcing the culmination of disaster or salvation hidden within it. But, as Walter Benjamin, who owned the drawing, said, he is the angel who does not give but takes.” (Adorno - Commitment (1962) Tr. Francis McDonagh New Left Review I/87-88, September-December 1974 accessed 24.6.09 - )
Indeed, Benjamin saw it as depicting “the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.” (Theses on the Philosophy of History 249)
And now. How cruel. How apt.
Theodor Adorno: Commitment »
“…A work of art that is committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle past-time for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them…”
