- Creation
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Creator (Definite): Walter Bendix Schönflies BenjaminDate: From 1927 to 1934
- Current Holder(s)
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Full title:
Benjamin, W. 'Experience and Poverty', in Jennings, M.J., Eiland, H. and Smith, G. eds. Selected Writings: Vol. 2 (1927-1934) (Cambridge, University Press; 1999), pp. 731-736.
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Quoted byBrita Brenna, 'The Frames of Specimens: Glass Cases in Bergen Museum Around 1900', in Liv Emma Thorsen, et. al. (eds), Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History. 2013. pp. 37-57.
Description:'"Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets" - Walter Benjamin.' (37)
'In his essay "Experience and Poverty," Walter Benjamin writes of Glass that it is "such a hard, smooth material to which nothing can be fixed." It is a material on which there can be left no traces, according to him. Trying to focus my gaze on the glass cases in Bergen, Benjamin's description seems perfectly valid.' (53)
'"Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets," Benjamin wrote, continuing, "it is also the enemy of possession."' (54)
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Related toPaul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart
Description:'A complex artist like the painter Paul Klee and a programmatic one like Loos - both reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man, festooned with all the sacrioficial offerings of the past.' They turn instead to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the daipers of the present. No one has greeted this present with greater joy and hilarity than Paul Scheerbart... Scheerbart is interested in inquiring how our telescopes, our airplanes, our rockets can transform human beings as they have been up to now into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures. Morover these creatures talk in a completely new language. And what is crucial about this language is its arbitrary, constructed nature, in contrast to organic language...
... he placed the greatest value in housing his "people" - and, following this model, his fellow citizens - in buildings benefitting their station, in adjustable, movable glass-covered dwellings of the kind since built by Loos and Le Corbusier...
Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free themselves from experience... No one feels more caught out than they by Scheerbart's words: "You are all so tired, just because you have failed to concentrate your thoughts on a simple but ambitious plan."' (733-734)
