Contemporary Art Seen through the Lens of Walter Benjamin's Magnum Opus

The writings of Walter Benjamin, the influential German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic, are the basis for a contemporary art exhibition at the Jewish Museum from March 17 through August 6, 2017. The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin will examine themes in the author's magnum opus The Arcades Project via contemporary artworks, in media ranging from photography and video to sculpture and painting, and annotations by poet Kenneth Goldsmith.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is widely regarded as one of the most astute commentators on early European modernity. He began The Arcades Project in 1927 as a short piece about Paris's nineteenth-century iron-and-glass vaulted shopping passages (arcades) and expanded it into a lengthy meditation on Parisian city life and the origins of consumer culture. Benjamin worked on the project for over a decade, leaving it unfinished at the time of his death by suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. The Arcades Project was ultimately published posthumously in its German version in 1982 and in 1999 in its first English translation. The book is a sprawling collage of quotations, notes, and reflections on the city of Paris, which Benjamin regarded as the cultural and commercial capital of the nineteenth century.

The exhibition will explore The Arcades Project and its ongoing relevance by highlighting contemporary artworks that relate to the subjects of each of the book's 36 chapters, called convolutes, from the Latin word for bundle, a reference to the folders used to organize the manuscript's handwritten pages. These subjects range from fashion to iron construction, and from dolls to Karl Marx. Visitors are encouraged to experience the exhibition as a flâneur, one of Benjamin's subjects in The Arcades Project. A flâneur was one who strolled through the city at leisure, encountering ideas, objects, and characters seemingly by chance and in no particular order.

The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin will feature works by Walead Beshty, Andrea Bowers, Chris Burden, Lee Friedlander, Andreas Gursky, Mike Kelley, Collier Schorr, Cindy Sherman, Taryn Simon, and Mungo Thomson, among others. New works by Nicholas Buffon, Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer, Sanya Kantarovsky, and Adam Pendleton will also be on view.

For Benjamin, the flâneur, a figure that dominated the literary culture of nineteenth-century France, was also the archetype of the modern artist and cultural critic. The glass-walled arcades were one of the flâneur's favorite habitats-included in the exhibition are photographs by Lee Friedlander that depict similar spaces in New York City.

When Benjamin was compiling his text, many of the 300 arcades that once dotted Paris had been destroyed, and most that remained were careworn echoes of their luxurious past. Among the heirs of the arcade is the shopping mall, which can be understood as equally emblematic of the cultural milieu that gave rise to it-namely, the car-commuting suburbs that proliferated across America in the second half of the twentieth century. To illustrate the convolute about the arcades and department stores, the exhibition will feature photographs from Walead Beshty's American Passages series (2001-2011), which depict abandoned shopping malls. These stark views of disused buildings chronicle the faltering or failure of a way of life.

The American poet Kenneth Goldsmith will annotate each artwork in the exhibition 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.

Also on view will be archival materials from the Walter Benjamin archive in Berlin, including facsimiles of pages of the original manuscript for The Arcades Project, historical photographs, and a number of architectural models of the Parisian arcades that inspired Benjamin.

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.

About the Catalogue
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press are publishing a catalogue, edited by Jens Hoffmann. The book will include the pairings of the contemporary artworks with the 36 convolutes in Benjamin's text. Bound into the main volume is a graphic novelette, from the imagination of Italian illustrator Vito Manolo Roma, of Benjamin's dream the night before he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis. Scholarly essays by Hoffmann and Caroline A. Jones; text fragments accompanying the artworks selected by poet Kenneth Goldsmith; reproductions of Benjamin's handwritten notes; and a list of the main Paris arcades discussed by him round out this extraordinary publication. Featuring 136 pages, and 50 color and black-and-white illustrations, the paperback book will be available worldwide and at the Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop for $35.00.

Support
The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin is made possible by the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations, the Goldie and David Blanksteen Foundation in memory of David Blanksteen, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Additional support is provided by the Melva Bucksbaum Fund for Contemporary Art, the Barbara Borowitz Contemporary Art Fund, the Jewish Museum Centennial Exhibition Fund, the Alfred J. Grunebaum Memorial Fund, and the Leon Levy Foundation.

About the Jewish Museum
Located on Museum Mile at Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street, the Jewish Museum is one of the world's preeminent institutions devoted to exploring art and Jewish culture from ancient to contemporary, offering intellectually engaging, educational, and provocative exhibitions and programs for people of all ages and backgrounds. The Museum was established in 1904, when Judge Mayer Sulzberger donated 26 ceremonial objects to The Jewish Theological Seminary as the core of a museum collection. Today, the Museum maintains a collection of over 30,000 works of art, artifacts, and broadcast media reflecting global Jewish identity, and presents a diverse schedule of internationally acclaimed temporary exhibitions.

The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York City. Museum hours are Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, 11am to 5:45pm; Thursday, 11am to 8pm; and Friday, 11am to 4pm. Museum admission is $15.00 for adults, $12.00 for senior citizens, $7.50 for students, free for visitors 18 and under and Jewish Museum members. Admission is Pay What You Wish on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm and free on Saturdays. For information on the Jewish Museum, the public may call 212.423.3200 or visit the website at TheJewishMuseum.org.

Test and expand your Broadway knowledge with our new game - The Broadway Match-Up! How well do you know your Broadway casting trivia?	Play the Daily Game, explore current shows, and delve into past decades like the 2000s, 80s, and the Golden Age. Challenge your friends and see where you rank!
How well do you know your Tony Awards history? Take our never-ending quiz of nominations and winner history and challenge your friends.	Can you beat your friends? Play today’s daily Broadway word game, featuring a new theatrically inspired word or phrase every day!