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.

How beautiful is the street?

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist.

Use the Feuilleton to guide you from the statue of Christopher Columbus to the Jardines de Walter Benjamin, where you will see some sculptures by the artist JD Holden (1965, Switzerland), made as a temporary memorial on the eve of Benjamin’s death in Port Bou, Spain.

In 1839 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of Flanerie in the arcades. [M3,8]

You are passing through a great city that has grown old in civilisation and your eyes are drawn upward, for in the public squares stand motionless figures, repeating to you the solemn legends of Glory, most heedless of men, the most unhappy or the vilest, a beggar or a banker; War, Science and Martyrdom. Some are pointing to the sky to which they aspired, others to the earth, from which they sprang. They brandish, or they contemplate, what was the passion of their life: a tool, a sword , a book, a torch. Even if you are the most heedless of men, this bronze phantom takes possession of you for a few minutes, and commands you, in the name of the past, to think of things which are not of the earth. Such is the divine role of sculpture. [J34,3]

Fees for feuilletons went as high as two francs per line. Authors would often write as much dialogue as possible so as to benefit from the blank spaces in the lines. [U9,3]

An intoxication comes over the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets. [M1,3]

The best way, while dreaming, to catch the afternoon in the net of the evening is to make plans. The flaneur is planning. [M3a,2]

The Press brings into play an overabundance of information, which can be all the more provocative the more it is exempt from any use. [M16a,1]

On the feuilleton: It was a matter of injecting experience - as it were, intravenously - with the poison of sensation; that is to say, highlighting within the ordinary experience the character of immediate experience. To this end, the experience of the big-city dweller presented itself. The feuilletonist turns this to account. He renders the city strange to its inhabitants. [m3,a2]

The student “never stops learning”; the gambler “never has enough”; for the flaneur, “there is always something more to see.” [m5,1]

“Man as civilised being, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sensually.” [m5,6]

Rest assured that when Victor Hugo saw a beggar on the road, he saw him for what he is, for what he really is in reality: the ancient mendicant, the ancient friar that forbade ownership of property, subsisting mostly on alms, on the ancient road. [C5,1]

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. [K6,4]