![]() ![]() But killing this particular cliché may be tougher than it sounds. “Unpack” has become a victim of its most enthusiastic users. I doubt MoMA will portray its acquisition of the Wright archive in any but the noblest of terms.Īt one point in the essay Benjamin uses a short Latin phrase, “ Habent sua fata libelli.” It’s a fragment of a longer saying, “ Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli,” which basically means that the fate of a given book depends on the capacities, the intelligence, of those who happen to pick it up. There’s no such subtlety or self-deprecation in Kaiser’s essay. And about poles: about the movement (some of which we can control and some of which we can’t) between order and disorder, excitement and boredom and youth and old age. It’s really about the habits, foibles and vanities of collectors. The essay is superficially about the act of organizing his large book collection on the shelves of his apartment in Berlin. On the other side of the country, the Museum of Modern Art will open a major exhibition Monday called “Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive.” The show is meant not only to mark the anniversary of Wright’s 1867 birth but to celebrate the fact that the architect’s archive, long held at his Taliesin compounds in Wisconsin and Arizona, is now jointly owned by MoMA and Columbia University.Īmong the questions that hover over the exhibition: What does it mean that a pair of Manhattan’s wealthiest and most august institutions have appointed themselves to safeguard the legacy of an eccentric architect whose relationship with cities in general and New York City in particular was iffy at best - and who made a point of removing himself to the desert, 2,500 miles away, for the long second half of his career?īenjamin was 39 when he wrote “Unpacking My Library.” He and wife Dora had divorced two years before. The introductory exhibition at L.A.’s newest museum, the Marciano Art Foundation on Wilshire Boulevard, is called “Unpacking: The Marciano Collection.” The curator, Philipp Kaiser, writes in the catalog that deciding which artworks from the collection of the Guess Jeans founders Paul and Maurice Marciano to put on view was a task that “invariably called to mind Benjamin.” ![]() In architecture and museum circles the essay is on its way from trendy to ubiquitous. For those of us who admire and continue to read Benjamin but wish “unpack” would pack up and go - who think overuse has left it nearly meaningless - this spring has not been a happy season. The German philosopher’s 1931 essay, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting,” first popularized the U-word as a metaphor. There’s so much unpacking going on at a typical symposium or conference these days that you begin to worry about tripping over all the empty luggage.īlame Walter Benjamin. The verb remains a favored bit of jargon among journalists and academics, who use it to mean pretty much any effort to break a complicated idea, theory or assumption into its constituent parts for easier analysis.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |