Walter Benjamin
Mondrian ’63–’96 Video, transferred to DVD, 25min., English with Serbo-Croatian subtitles, 1987
In
1986, one could go to remarkable lectures and visit astounding
exhibitions in Ljubljana and Belgrade, for example, the Last Futurist
Exhibition 0,10 by Kasimir Malevich, and in the autumn the
comprehensive International Exhibition of Modern Art: The Armory Show.
These two exhibitions were held in very different locations before or
during World War I: 1913 in New York and 1915/1916 in St. Petersburg.
Further, in June 1986 a certain Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) held a
lecture titled
Mondrian ’63–’96. The works on show by Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) carried the dates ’63, ’79, ’83, ’86, ’92, and ’96.
In his lecture, which functions as a meta-commentary on the entire
exhibition History Will Repeat Itself, Walter Benjamin speaks about
copies (repetitions) and their epistemological value. Benjamin comes to
the conclusion that the copies of works by Mondrian are much more
“multi-layered and more complex with regard to its meanings, than the
original”. Through the process of copying, the original is not merely
repeated; additionally, meanings are activated that in the meantime
have been assigned to the original. In this way the copy becomes an
immaterial palimpsest, which accumulates all the other meanings that
have been created – including the idea of the copy itself.(1)
Walter
Benjamin’s lecture belongs to a series of artistic projects, which have
contributed to the development of a specific artistic praxis that is
based on anonymity and copying. These projects focus on authors,
artists, exhibitions, and institutions, which are of seminal importance
for twentieth-century art (historiography) and they re-and deconstruct
specific art-historical events and the narratives they contain with the
aid of copies.(2) Some of these projects, whose roots lie in the
(south-eastern) European art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, became a
central element of inspiration for a younger generation of artists.
Inke Arns
(1)
Benjamin’s idea of “telescoping through time” is a reference to Jorge
Luis Borges’story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quijote, written in
1935. In this story, a plan as unusual as it is ambitious is described
to write Don Quijote again.
(2) See Inke Arns / Walter
Benjamin, (eds.): What Is Modern Art? (Group Show), 2 vols., Frankfurt
am Main: Revolver – Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, 2006,
www.whatismodernart.de
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