1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – The Angel’s Gaze
a museum wall? The answer is as simple as the question: images. Not just
any images, but photographs and artefacts of disasters; artworks and
documents that reveal the unimaginable that became real in the course of
the past century.
In this sense, Lost Paradise has attempted to employ the angel‘s gaze as
the structural principle of the exhibition, and to create an adequate setting.
The two versions of Angelus novus, i.e. the drawing and the watercolour,
have been placed in a central location, in the middle of the long wall opposite
the entrance. The rectangular gallery itself is empty; there are no
dividing walls, no niches, no cabinets, no sections. The visitor who enters
the great black chamber sees himself facing Angelus novus in a straight
line; she is the angel‘s accomplice, eye to eye, adopting his perspective, as
it were: The Angel‘s Gaze – a panopticon of more than 150 disaster images
from the 20th century.
Surrealistic, abstract, figurative, central-perspectivist, collage-y, photorealisticall,
painted, drawn, filmed: no matter how different the styles, no
matter how great the scope that assembles in a great synopsis the full range
of formal aesthetic achievements of the 20th century – the subject always
remains the same, repeating itself in 150 variations. There is no vanishing
point, no side gallery for Lost Paradise-visitors to retire. And the gallery
provides no irony or de-construction whereby to distance oneself. Wherever
you look, there is disaster; or – to quote Benjamin, this time from his
Arcades Project: “Pan-opticon: not only seeing all, but seeing in all ways.”
Even at the risk of dissociation in this windowless house (W.B.), the panorama
does not release anyone from its world view, unless we close our
eyes. But whether the images will become invisible is a different question
and one that is immediately followed by the next one: can a museum be
one of the paradisal oases where we are free to choose whether to remember
or forget the images we have seen?
Finally, when we have left Lost Paradise, Angelus novus again awaits us
outside, in the wide expanse of the front garden in the “Fertile Country”,
a few steps beyond the motorway. Immediately identifiable as a clone,
because it is a triplet; hugely oversize; and thirdly, the angel triplets are on
a balloon. Paying humble homage to Klee‘s unfulfilled yen for flying, we
can rise into the sky in this balloon, borne aloft by 2,500 liters of helium,
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