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★★★★
The leftist German cultural critic Walter Benjamin remains best known for his enormously influential essay on photography, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, on which he worked for more than a decade, was left incomplete when he committed suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis. What survives is a collage-like text that intersperses Benjamin’s writing with quotations from other authors. It centers on the covered pedestrian “arcades”—proto-shopping-malls—of 19th-century Paris as a meditation on the origins of the modern era.
The Jewish Museum’s exhibition evokes Benjamin’s unfinished tome and extrapolates from it, grouping works of contemporary art under his thematic chapter headings—or “convolutes”—and filling the walls with appropriated texts, compiled and artfully typeset by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith. The project, like Benjamin’s, is hugely ambitious and rather esoteric, but almost surprisingly, it never runs off the rails to become academic, pretentious or dull. Curators Jens Hoffmann and Shira Backer deserve credit for their tight orchestration, which makes the show like a good book: It takes time and a lot of reading, but the experience proves entrancing.
Lacking a linear narrative, however, the exhibition meanders, fragmented and recursive. There are starting points and touchstones: The show opens with facsimiles of Benjamin’s papers, including manuscript notes for The Arcades Project, along with models and vintage photos of some of his favorite Parisian arcades. Recent photos of mannequins in reflective New York City shop windows, by the great Lee Friedlander, obviously tip their hat to Eugène Atget’s images of similar subjects in Paris in the 1920s but replace the French artist’s soft and romantic Surrealism with something more frenetic and sharp, like our own historical moment. Walead Beshty’s slide show of empty shopping malls, American Passages, rhymes with Benjamin’s ode to the vanishing arcades while updating its retrospective anomie with corporate blandness.
Some familiar works seem to gain additional nuance from the context of Benjamin’s categories. Cindy Sherman’s 2008 self-portrait as a graying matron in a picture-lined study illustrates convolute H, “The Collector,” and makes it clear that the artist has always been a connoisseur of types and subjectivities as much as anything else. And here, a hallucinatory and Freudian drawing of trains and tunnels by the self-taught and schizophrenic artist Martín Ramírez (convolute U, “Saint-Simon, Railroads”) suggests the hold of steam engines on the imagination, even though they were already long obsolete in the early 1960s when the drawing was made.
But in the end, it’s the unexpected choices that feel the canniest. In Triumph of Labor (2016), Andrea Bowers blows up an Arts and Crafts–period allegorical woodcut by Walter Crane depicting happy workers who look like medieval guildsmen. Rendered at monumental scale in marker on flattened cardboard boxes, the woodcut’s lines appear pixelated, drawing quiet connections between postindustrial labor, contemporary protest, homelessness and nostalgia for hopeful social movements.
The Jewish Museum, through Aug 6