(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

5: Benjamin in the Age of New Media
Lutz Koepnick
I
U
PON ENTERING THE MAIN EXHIBITION venue of the 2007 Documenta in
Kassel, visitors to the Fridericianum first encountered a rather unexpected
sight: Paul Klee’s 1920 painting Angelus Novus, famous mostly
of course because of Walter Benjamin’s penetrating interpretation of the
work as an allegorical depiction of the melancholic angel of history, trying
to pay tribute to what has been smashed in the catastrophic course of
modern time. Klee’s painting in fact is now inextricably bound to what
Benjamin wrote about it in the last months of his life. To look at it is to
hear Benjamin’s voice; to cast our eyes onto the painting is to access the
curious mixture of the messianic and the apocalyptic that structured Benjamin’s
late writing. There can be little doubt that the curators of Documenta
sought to draw on this association. Klee’s angel, in its Benjaminian
reading, here was meant to offer a road map to show how to navigate
the global array of contemporary art exhibited in Kassel. In this respect
the painting took on the function of a natural sign, one whose meaning
was given and granted, one that spoke to the viewer with unquestionable
authority. Hung as it was in the main stairwell of the Fridericianum,
Angelus Novus served as a signifier providing its own interpretation and
hence was in no need of further reading — a sign asking the viewers to
subject their interpretative freedom to a set of preordained meanings similar
to the way in which we allow a street map to guide us through a city
without (at least initially) questioning its referential accuracy.
Any visitor, however, who stepped closer to Klee’s painting and read
the adjacent label was in for a surprise. For here is what the label read:
“Paul Klee / Angelus Novus, 1920 / Ausstellungskopie | exhibition
copy / Fotografie | Photograph: David Harris.” Rather than presenting
the real thing and inviting the audience to be absorbed by the originality
of Klee’s brushstroke, the curators openly admitted to having violated
customary exhibition practices and offered a mere duplicate to the
beholder’s eye. While there may have been many good logistical reasons
for not displaying the original, it is more than tempting to understand
the curators’ intervention as both a systematic and symptomatic gesture.