Death and Entrapment
At the Cubitt Gallery in London (UK) I just saw Gustav Metzger's piece "Eichman and the Angel." Metzger links Port Bou, Jerusalem and New York. Port Bou is the border check point where Walter Benjamin and his assistant Lisa Fitko were held by the Nazis. Benjamin committed suicide here fearing for the worse. In Jerusalem the nazi leader Adolf Eichman was put on trial in 1961 and hung a year later. Eichmann was largely responsible for the logistics of the extermination of millions of Jews and others during what he called the "final solution." In New York, New School professor Hannah Arendt commented on Benjamin's work in her introduction to "Illuminations" and on Eichmann's trial in "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."Linking these historical paths is "Angelus Novus" drawing by the German artist Paul Klee (so weiß wie Schnee so Paul wie Klee).
In "Illuminations" Benjamin writes: "A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no
longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." The enigmatic German Jewish, London-based artist Gustav Metzger who is 79 years old is known for his work that inextricably links artistic and political concerns. He arranged in this installation a bullet-proof booth similar to that in which Eichmann sat during his Jerusalem trial. The door is open and one can sit insidde. On the wall it reads "New York. Port Bou. Jerusalem." A powered roller-belt conveyor in the gallery space invited visitors to take a piece of newspaper and let it be transported by the conveyor to a pile of crunched up newspapers on top of which on the wall one sees a pinned up photo of Klee's "Angelus Novus." The back wall is covered with piles of newspapers. It struck me that such political art projects, which may be more difficult to sell, are much harder to come by in galleries in the United States.
[Trebor]
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