“The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin” Exhibition
The Jewish Museum
This event has ended.
The German Jewish writer Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), one of the most important philosophers and cultural critics of the twentieth century, began The Arcades Project in 1927 as a short piece about Paris’s nineteenth-century iron-and-glass vaulted shopping passages. With their labyrinthine architecture and surrealistic juxtapositions of disparate objects and people, past and present, the arcades offered an ideal prism through which to examine the era’s capitalist metropolis and the phenomenon of modernity that had its origins there. Benjamin worked extensively on his manuscript, which grew into a sprawling compendium of quotations, reflections, and notes. When he was forced to flee Paris to escape Nazi persecution, he entrusted it to his friend Georges Bataille. Some years after Benjamin’s untimely death, the text was discovered and published.
The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin will explore The Arcades Project and its ongoing relevance through works of contemporary art representing the subjects of each of the book’s thirty-six chapters. The exhibition will combine archival material from the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin, architectural models, and artwork to evoke the elaborate structure of Benjamin’s text.
Transposing Benjamin’s arcades to the galleries of the Museum, the exhibition invites the visitor to take on the role of the flâneur, the archetypal leisured city dweller who strolled through Paris at ease, coolly attentive and open to happenstance. In addition to traditional wall labels, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith will annotate each work with appropriated texts, extending Benjamin’s reflection on Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century into New York as the capital of the twentieth.
Participating Artists
Erica Baum
Walead Beshty
Milena Bonilla
Andrea Bowers
Nicholas Buffon
Chris Burden
Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer
Simon Evans
Walker Evans
Claire Fontaine
Lee Friedlander
Rodney Graham
Andreas Gursky
Raymond Hains
Pierre Huyghe
Voluspa Jarpa
Jesper Just
Sanya Kantarovsky
Mike Kelley
Tim Lee
Jorge Macchi
Adam Pendleton
Martín Ramírez
Bill Rauhauser
Mary Reid Kelley
Ry Rocklen
Markus Schinwald
Collier Schorr
Cindy Sherman
Taryn Simon
Joel Sternfeld
Mungo Thomson
Timm Ulrichs
Guido van der Werve
James Welling
Cerith Wyn Evans
#TheArcades
The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin is curated by Jens Hoffmann, Director of Special Exhibitions and Public Programs, The Jewish Museum, assisted by Shira Backer, Leon Levy Curatorial Associate, The Jewish Museum. The exhibition and its accompanying publication have been designed by Project Projects.
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Schedule
from March 17, 2017 to August 06, 2017