dean martin call of duty - songs of civil & world wars

However, the debris caught in the angel’s stare might take on a different form today. We have become discarded objects and useless commodities caught in the gaze of a shell-shocked angel who drags us along as it is blown away into incertitude. We might be the debris of history, those who somehow made it through the twentieth century, but not unscathed. Or, to take it one step further: we, the spectators, might actually be the rubble. This means that the rubble is where we are. Since the angel faces us as spectators, and - according to Benjamin - also faces the rubble, the wreckage must be located in the hors-champ of the drawing. But this doesn’t mean there is no rubble at all.

There is no rubble depicted on the drawing whatsoever. But it has a surprising and overlooked consequence, if we take its spatial arrangement seriously. 1 Benjamin’s aphorism is well known and quite overquoted.

Walter Benjamin described the figure on it as a hapless creature, helplessly carried away by the storm of progress, while staring backwards at a rubble heap growing sky high in its wake. There is hardly a more famous watercolor painting than Paul Klee’s work Angelus Novus. This essay - first published in October - is collected in Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, out now from Verso and on sale for 50% off until January 1.

Dean martin call of duty - songs of civil & world wars