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This is not Leon Wansleben.
Not yet anyway.
It's a 1940 picture of
Walter Benjamin with a headache.
Leon Wansleben is a thin man, with a slight German accent. He's just finished his MA at LCE. A sociologist. The title of his thesis is
Of Ragpickers and Heroes - A case study of creative survival techniques in the post-colonial ruins of Deptford but I didn't know that at first. He came round to the studio and said he was doing some writing on creative space and could we have a chat…
We spoke about Walter Benjamin for an hour or so. Wikipedia describes him: As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas of historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was an entirely novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory.
Benjamin's most famous work was The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction but the one most relevant here is The Arcades Project - a magnificent, multimedia maesterwerk that remained unfinished after twenty years labour (he died on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940 pursued by the nazis. It is a study of an area of small shops in Paris built in the late 19thC as an early shopping mall. Benjamin's interest lay in the use people made of the space, its contents and the relationship this 'artificial' space had with the 'real' world outside. But the most interesting thing, at least from my point of view is that its structure is not linear or didactic but rather he pours everything he can lay his hands on into the mix, from architect's plans to arrest warrants, to create a kind of circumstantial truth rather than an academic treatise.
Anyway, it seems that Benjamin, Leon and I share a view that the present rests on the 'wreckage' of the past, so the reason for our chat was that he rather liked the inside of my studio. Then, when he kindly sent me a copy of his thesis I said why don't you write an article for DnA? And he did…
As a small diversion however, you might be interested in this short extract from Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History of 1940:
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.
Small
Change and Big Profits
Life in Deptford's Post-colonial ruins
by Leon Wansleben
Below:
Angelus Novus by Paul Klee,
purchased by Walter Benjamin in 1921
