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Time, which without respite creates beautiful abstract images, is my eternal and elusive rival. The pictures are a record of my attempts to get closer to this great creator. During my work in recent years, I am like the untidy child from Benjamin's One Way Street and other Writings – Each stone he finds, each flower picked and each butterfly caught is already the start of a collection, and every single thing he owns makes up one great collection. In him this passion shows its true face, the stern Indian expression which lingers on, but with a dimmed and manic glow, in antiquarians, researchers, bibliomaniacs. Scarcely has he entered life than he is a hunter. He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in things; between spirits and things years are passed in which his field of vision remains free of people. His life is like a dream: he knows nothing lasting; everything seemingly happens to him by chance. His nomad-years are hours in the forest of dream.[1]
In hunting, I interwoven coincidences, painter's flurry and tradition.[2] I did not use tradition as a repetition of what had already been created, but in a broader sense. Tradition, says T. S. Eliot, cannot be inherited, but must be acquired. The impressions of various giants of all kinds of spirit who lived before me are thus inescapably loaded in me. During work, I am both a medium and a personality, in which impressions and experiences come together in special and unexpected ways. The involvement of the spirit of the great thinker of the past century, Walter Benjamin, in my work is so imminent.
Spatial and temporal scales come into play in these experiments. Versailles is not too big for me, eternity is not too long for me and Palazzo Contarini Polignac is my home. Turning back time made me feel at home. To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave into which we're venturing, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein-isn't that the joy ... [3]
Natalija Šeruga Golob, August 2023
Notes:
[1] Walter Benjamin; One- Way Street and Other Writings, NLB, London, 1971 (Translators Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter), p. 73.
[2] Thomas Stearns Eliot: Tradition and individual talent, 1919
https://socrates.acadiau.ca/courses/engl/rcunningham/Winter2020/engl5013_poetics/texts/eliot_tradition.pdf
[3] Walter Benjamin; On Hashish; THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England 2006 (Translated by Edmund Jephcott), p. 123.
From the Collection of W. B.: Protocol of the same experiment from (…), t. s. (test subject) Augusta;
MMC KIBLA/KiBela, Maribor (Slovenia) September 2023
Walter Benjamin explains the meaning of the aura at the beginning of March 1930 in one of his records (protocols) of drug experiments.
… These statements concerned the nature of aura.[a] Everything I said on the subject was directed polemically against the theosophists, whose inexperience and ignorance I found highly repugnant. And I contrasted three aspects of genuine aura-though by no means schematically-with the conventional and banal ideas of the theosophists. First, genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine. Second, the aura undergoes changes, which can be quite fundamental, with every movement the aura-wreathed object makes. Third, genuine aura can in no sense be thought of as a spruced-up version of the magic rays beloved of spiritualists and described and illustrated in vulgar works of mysticism. On the contrary, the characteristic feature of genuine aura is ornament, an ornamental halo [Umzirkung], in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case. Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as Van Gogh's late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted together with the various objects.[b]
Notes:
[a] The concept of aura (from Greek aura, "breath," "air in motion") plays an important role in Benjamin's later essays "The Work of Art in the Age of lts Technological Reproducibility" and "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire." The term appears earlier in Benjamin's work―for example, in his essay "Goethe's Elective Affinities" (written 1921-1922) and in a piece from 1925, "Nichts gegen die 'Illustrierte"' (Nothing against the Illustrated [News])―and there are brief references to "aura'' in the first two hashish protocols. Benjamin's use of the concept is derived in part from the philosophy of Ludwig Klages, author of Vom Traumbewußtsein (Dream Consciousness; 1914) and Vom kosmogonischen Eros (Eros and Cosmos; 1922). Also important for his thinking, as he himself indicates in a letter of July 5, 1929, was the discussion of Aura in an article entitled "Lebensluft" (Vital Air), published in the Frankfurter Zeitung of April 19, 1929, by the poet and philosopher Karl Wolfskehl.
[b] The later works of Vincent van Gogh, the influential Dutch post-Impressionist painter, include self-portraits, a series of sunflower paintings (1888), and "Starry Night" (1889). They are characterized by bold, rhythmic brush strokes and radiant colors.
Walter Benjamin: On Hashish, Translated by Howard Eiland and Others
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts & London, England, 2006, p. 58.
From the Collection of W. B.:
Protocol of the same experiment from (…), t. s. (test subject) Augusta
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