A Passage for Walter Benjamin
I was first introduced to Walter Benjamin by Ralph Bernabei in 2008, when he took me and my now wife to see the Danny Caravan memorial to Benjamin in Port Bou. It was only this year that I started to read Benjamin’s works, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “Arcades Project”. I was particularly struck by his writings on ways to see and respond the city and the Flaneur, and realised that this would make a great subject for a street-based art intervention. A little more research and I discovered the concept of the Feuilleton, which, drawing on my “Groundworks” series would go on to provide one of the plastic elements to the work.
My concept was to give the audience a tool to slow them down, to look, to appreciate the city as a work of art in its own right. This tool was to be a feuilleton, created by embossing the pages with imprints of manhole covers and other street ironmongery. Onto this would be printed patterned paving slabs, and a linear woodcut of the three “Abstract Head” designs of Walter Benjamin. Having seen an exhibition of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, I thought I might fill the outline designs with smaller city based object prints, but after a brief experimentation period, I rejected this aesthetically as it took away from the embossing on the page. I finally added the dates of Walter Benjamin’s life, and one element that did work from Torres-Garcia, a stylised compass point.
To go around the rolled feuilletons, I made a wrapper on which I printed the title of the work, “A Passage for Walter Benjamin”, some brief instructions and some relevant quotes from Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”. This wrapper was the kind of paper that was often used to put around a newspaper in Benjamin’s day, and in fact a number of his notes were written on scraps of paper, including these wrappers. I printed both sides, in Spanish and English. As a practical measure and to create a starting point for the audience, I made a box to contain the rolled feuilletons, one to which I stuck a small poster with the title, a picture of Walter Benjamin and a QR code linked to the Facebook event page.
The route planned for the event was from the statue of Christopher Columbus to the Jardins de Walter Benjamin. The gardens are rather run down, and mostly used by a few homeless people. These two juxtapositions were echoed in my choice quotes on the wrapper. Along the route were placed fifteen empty picture frames, again to slow down the audience, and to guide them to look more carefully at the street and the city as a work of art. At the gardens, I set up a series of six paving stone sculptures. As these were the ones I had used for printing the feuilletons, they were different colours. There was also triptych sculpture, taken from the blue shapes of the Abstract Head: Walter Benjamin. This was echoed in the line prints in the feuilletons, with these shapes having been overprinted.
My concept was to give the audience a tool to slow them down, to look, to appreciate the city as a work of art in its own right. This tool was to be a feuilleton, created by embossing the pages with imprints of manhole covers and other street ironmongery. Onto this would be printed patterned paving slabs, and a linear woodcut of the three “Abstract Head” designs of Walter Benjamin. Having seen an exhibition of Joaquin Torres-Garcia, I thought I might fill the outline designs with smaller city based object prints, but after a brief experimentation period, I rejected this aesthetically as it took away from the embossing on the page. I finally added the dates of Walter Benjamin’s life, and one element that did work from Torres-Garcia, a stylised compass point.
To go around the rolled feuilletons, I made a wrapper on which I printed the title of the work, “A Passage for Walter Benjamin”, some brief instructions and some relevant quotes from Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”. This wrapper was the kind of paper that was often used to put around a newspaper in Benjamin’s day, and in fact a number of his notes were written on scraps of paper, including these wrappers. I printed both sides, in Spanish and English. As a practical measure and to create a starting point for the audience, I made a box to contain the rolled feuilletons, one to which I stuck a small poster with the title, a picture of Walter Benjamin and a QR code linked to the Facebook event page.
The route planned for the event was from the statue of Christopher Columbus to the Jardins de Walter Benjamin. The gardens are rather run down, and mostly used by a few homeless people. These two juxtapositions were echoed in my choice quotes on the wrapper. Along the route were placed fifteen empty picture frames, again to slow down the audience, and to guide them to look more carefully at the street and the city as a work of art. At the gardens, I set up a series of six paving stone sculptures. As these were the ones I had used for printing the feuilletons, they were different colours. There was also triptych sculpture, taken from the blue shapes of the Abstract Head: Walter Benjamin. This was echoed in the line prints in the feuilletons, with these shapes having been overprinted.
| Walter Benjamin Quotes |
