Monday, April 11, 2005

A Klee Painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we preceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angle would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings which such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debries before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

*Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
** From the book, Modern Architecture, a critical history by Kenneth Frampton