encountering WB: a re reading

The re reading of Birds of America consists of 346 pages of narrative text removed from the spine of the book, with the recto and verso worked as individual images.

Black gouache redacts all but the significant words, names, places, and ideas that relate to Benjamin’s own physical [flâneur] experience of Paris.  The original book, 1965, Harcourt Brace, is by Mary McCarthy. It carries  an introductory dedication to Hannah Arendt, a second cousin to Walter Benjamin. The overlap doesn’t seem totally coincidental; and thus my interest to work on this particuliar text with its bildungsroman quality and story line parallel to Benajmin’s own, spanning 1913-1940 as student, flâneur, german jewish intellectual.  The McCarthy novel presents a somewhat brighter 1960s mirror to Benjamin’s 1930s exile, and is situated during the American’s  Vietnam [Indochine] War.

Gouache on 346 newsprint book pages, each 38 x 56 cm.  2016.