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– FIVE WAYS OF BEING A PAINTING – floating through a room. Repeatedly, he lost himself. Benjamin did not only get enveloped in matter and trapped in objects. When looking at photographs and paintings, he often found himself displaced into the picture. — Being a painting can make you strange, to yourself and to others. It has long been a means of exploring who we are and how we differ. Being a painting gives you an existence in both the inverted world and the familiar one. It displaces you through alienation and renewed attention. It can be used to reveal one person from another, one culture from another. But it also has other functions that draw on the almost occult power of what Benjamin called ‘opaque resemblance’. — At dusk on the dock in La Rochelle, two objects draw me in. A stack of lumber and a pile of goods unloaded from an absent ship. Men are cutting rough planks out of tree trunks. They stack the planks in a large square pattern that reaches twice their own height. On every other level of the stack, one plank protrudes. Together these protruding ends make a stairway spiraling around the pile, allow­ing the men to place a portable metal roof on top each night. 2
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– William Max Nelson – The evening light falling on the men is too good. It is light that does not really exist until we call it crepuscular and sublime and idealize it in a painting. Closer to the water, next to an empty ship berth, goods are stacked, waiting to be moved to a warehouse. There are six large white sacks that would look sublime in their plainness if it were not for the number thirty-one drawn on the side of one of them. These sacks and the sawyers in La ­Rochelle are the objects in a painting by Claude-Joseph Vernet completed in 1762 and displayed at the Paris Salon of 1763. Although it is too small to see in most reproductions of this painting of the port, a large Chinese character is written on one of the sacks. — Berlin Childhood around 1900 is one of Benjamin’s small masterpieces. It grew out of notes he took in the 3

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– FIVE WAYS OF BEING A PAINTING –

floating through a room. Repeatedly, he lost himself.

Benjamin did not only get enveloped in matter and trapped in objects. When looking at photographs and paintings, he often found himself displaced into the picture.

—

Being a painting can make you strange, to yourself and to others. It has long been a means of exploring who we are and how we differ. Being a painting gives you an existence in both the inverted world and the familiar one. It displaces you through alienation and renewed attention.

It can be used to reveal one person from another, one culture from another. But it also has other functions that draw on the almost occult power of what Benjamin called ‘opaque resemblance’.

—

At dusk on the dock in La Rochelle, two objects draw me in. A stack of lumber and a pile of goods unloaded from an absent ship.

Men are cutting rough planks out of tree trunks. They stack the planks in a large square pattern that reaches twice their own height. On every other level of the stack, one plank protrudes. Together these protruding ends make a stairway spiraling around the pile, allow­ing the men to place a portable metal roof on top each night.

2

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