disapproves of the contempt for gastronomy”). Cindy Sherman’s self-portrait as a high-society art donor is paired with convolute titled “The Collector,” suggesting Sherman’s career arc as a collector of personae Joel Sternfeld’s photos of oddball utopian communities accompany a convolute stuffed with minutiae on the radical socialist Charles Fourier (“Fourier. Each convolute is matched with a single art work, turning each piece into a kind of illustration of the concept Benjamin was exploring. The range and depth of “The Arcades Project” presents a challenge for a curator: How to prevent the avalanche of theory from burying the art? The curator of the Jewish Museum show, Jens Hoffmann, has put a great deal of effort into finding works that fit into Benjamin’s labyrinth of convolutes. The subjects of the convolutes run from “Panorama,” “Mirrors,” “Fashion,” and the famous “Flâneur” to the more arcane “Dream City and Dream House, Dreams of the Future, Anthropological Nihilism, Jung.” Within the maze are, among other things, a history of Paris as the first modern cityscape, a Marxist study of spectacular commercialism, and an attempt to think through the way cultures envision the future-the expansive, sometimes muddled riches of a brilliant mind’s passion project. “The Arcades Project,” which he’d left to the author Georges Bataille for safekeeping, never progressed beyond a tangled collage of notes and copied quotes, divided into thirty-six folders known as “convolutes” (from the German “ Konvolut,” which means “sheaf” or “bundle”). PHOTOGRAPH BY ULLSTEIN BILD / GETTYīenjamin fled Paris in 1940, fearing Nazi persecution three months later, after being informed by border authorities that he might be extradited back to occupied France, he committed suicide on the Spanish border. Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, “The Arcades Project,” is the inspiration for a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. What began as a short essay on the glass-ceilinged Paris Arcades of the mid-nineteenth century (the modern shopping mall’s ancestor) spiralled out into a warren of notes, citations, and commentaries forming a restless survey of modernity. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is an undergraduate art-history staple, but true Benjaminiacs consider his massive, unfinished “Arcades Project” to be the writer’s magnum opus. Walter Benjamin describes this conservation of idleness well: “To store time as a battery stores energy: the flâneur.” But Benjamin, who popularized this term for the detached city-stroller, also knew that the freedom of leisure could be deceptive: the flâneur is also the person “who abandons himself to the phantasmagorias of the marketplace.” The city wanderer, he suggests, can easily become an acquisitive browser, “a spy for the capitalists” entranced by the city’s commercial possibilities.įree movement in a world overflowing with merchandise-how to manage it, how the images we take in change us-is a challenge at the heart of the Jewish Museum’s ambitious show “The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin,” which brings together contemporary art works inspired, consciously and unconsciously, by Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s most original and enigmatic thinkers. Others may prefer a quiet gallery for a breather, and perhaps a chance to examine a work or two a little longer than others. The sheer bulk of work, old and new, quickly deflates any idea of “taking it all in”-witness tourists at the Met studiously snapping iPad photos of every painting in a room. In New York City, museumgoing can be a kind of wandering. Art works by Adam Pendleton: “Black Dada Reader (wall work #1),” 2016 “what is.?/Chagall (study),” 2017 “Dada Dancers (study),” 2016. A view of “The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin,” at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.
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