History is an angel being blown backwards, into the future.
History is a pile of debris.
And the angel wants to go back and fix things,
To repair the things that have been broken.
But there’s a storm blowing- from paradise.
And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future.
And this storm is called progress.
Laurie Anderson The Dream Before
In 1920 the artist Paul Klee made a small monoprint entitled “Angelus Novus” (New Angel). A year later it was purchased by a German philosopher named Walter Benjamin. Benjamin kept the painting as one of his few permanent possessions as he was forced to flee numerous times across Europe during the nazi occupations. In 1940 he wrote an essay in which he characterizes the angelus novus as “…looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixdly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise, it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” (Illuminations, Theses on the Philosophy of history; Thesis IX)
Benjamin died shortly after the publication of Illuminations, but his thesis lives, deeply rooted then and now in the philosophy behind modern, and especially, modern American, art. When Walter Sickert described artmaking as one unbroken chain from ancient to modern it was, although unintentional, a reference to angelus novus and the unstoppable progression of modernism in both art and culture. And when Barnett Newman said that “In the moral crisis of a world in shambles, it’s no longer possible to go on painting the old stuff”, he didn’t devalue the history of art but established that each moment in time has its own unique questions and answers. Therefore, as he ushered in the abstract expressionist movement it was in short, not necessarily a direct response to, but rather an outcome of his interpretation of current events, and his answer to the questions he asked.
I mention all of this only because I often question how the act of making predominately meditative still life works in this day in this age fits into the current sociological and political matrix of this contemporary period. The simple answer is that it’s not really for me to decide. It also seems an impertinent question to ask, but it’s something I inherently continue to struggle with- what does this all mean?. Within my pieces are elements of photography, painting and printmaking. They’re digital and analog both, electronic, implied, and ethereal going in but distinctly hand-made coming out. I’m not sure where they fit or how they fit, and not always sure what question they’re supposed to be answering.
The thing is- the further I travel along this path the less any of that seems to matter. That ubiquitous quote, “It is what it is…” never felt more perfectly placed, or more welcome. The only thing that has come clear to me is that we all travel this road, backward into the future, and ultimately can only judge where we are by looking at where we’ve been. And ain’t that a kick in the pants. To know that the life we’re living and seemingly shaping isn’t at all a series of events, but instead one single and long-lived episodic unfolding of the universe into which we travel quite blindly. Frankly it gives me a certain feeling of calm and reassurance- to know it all just keeps moving. All of it, everywhere, all the time. Forever. It moves and moves us with it. And I’ll take comfort in knowing that regardless of it’s place or purpose, I’ll always have my work to carry with me, and to perhaps shield me, from what the storm of progress carries with it…
Here is a link to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus
