The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin
The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin
$35.00
Hoffman, Jens. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin
Pap. Jewish Museum New York 2017
Book ID: 101014
The Arcades Project (1927 40), the monumental unfinished work of cultural criticism by Walter Benjamin, is the German philosophers effort to comprehend urban modernity through the 19th-century Parisian shopping arcade. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin combines artworks with archival materials and poetic interventions to form an original, multifaceted response to this collagelike cultural text. Jens Hoffmann astutely pairs works by thirty-six well-known and emerging artists, including Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Pierre Huyghe, and Cindy Sherman, with the thirty-six Convolutes, or themes, in Benjamins text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamins dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones, texts selected by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, reproductions of Benjamins handwritten notes, and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication.
136 pp. English
