Our class visit this past Wednesday to the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe) and the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror) presented me with one of most emotionally challenging trips we have gone on during this course. Floating on top of the steady waves of sorrow that […]
Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on […]
I’ve been thinking about the museum as a site for possible (cross)cultural didacticism: a reinscription of the spectaclized social order that still manages to drive itself beyond the seemingly clear hegemonic strictures it reproduces and codifies—a tenderly productive idea thoughtfully presented in the first essay we read for this course: “Escape From Amnesia: The Museum […]
Well, I was successfully nauseated by the architecture of the hallways underneath the building. The forced perspective of the sloped floor and uneven angles of the hallways left me feeling properly destabilized (this architecture is very intentional) before we were led on what what as a half-lame tour of only a very small part of the Museum. […]
In many ways, I was lucky to find this small work by Paul Klee among the vast numbers of Picasso’s in the Berggruen Museum, a private art collection rendered available to the public via the cleanly whites and baroque architecture of the historically sited state funded gallery, a space very different from Sammlung Boros’s rough […]