Sublime

Walter Benjamin wrote shortly before his death in 1940, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”

The artist can correct the sense ratios before the blow of new technology has numbed conscious procedures.

In the hands of the Dadaists the work of art, from being a sight that seduced the eye or a sound that persuaded the ear, became a bullet. It flew towards the viewer, striking him down.

Walter had amassed a collection of hundreds of tapes, footage of wonder-workers that was otherwise impossible to find. He had clips dating back to 1896 and Georges Méliès’s vanishing act, Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin. A seven-year-old Ricky Jay changing a guinea pig into a dove on the 1955 program Time for Pets. Every magician who ever

The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting

Man no longer moves towards objects through an act of will, he no longer chooses or examines objects: the world has dissolved, the objects move incoherently past the incoherent man.