Exhibition Pieces: The Angel of History
The Angel of History (after Klee and Benjamin) Gif, 20 Frames, 1080 x 1920 px., 2023
// Reminted for Chris Coleman on his 50th Birthday. //
// Below is a passage from the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by Walter Benjamin, written in 1940:
“ IX
“Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück.”
– Gerherd Scholem, ‘Gruss vom Angelus’
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though they are about to move away from something that they are fixedly contemplating. Their eyes are staring, mouth agape, their wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. Their face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, they see one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurling it before their feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has caught their wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels them into the future to which their back is turned, while the pile of debris before them grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
//
3-Panel drawing created in Deluxe Paint IV on an emulated Amiga A1200 computer and composited in After Effects
// Artwork by Sabato Visconti // www.sabatobox.com // @sabatobox //
