“
The Arcades Project comes to us today as a massive collection of notes on 19th century industrial culture in Paris. One of its major interests to artists is its methodology which is fragmentary, collaged, aphoristic, and imagist. It is, in short, a philosophical project
whose structure is allegorical. Benjamin’s interest in Baudelaire had to do with the way
the poet collected the scraps of his time as a means of constructing allegories of the
Modern: “in order to express the universal, human problem of evil within the changed
context of Modern Life.” Benjamin saw in his allegorical process a dialectic that was
transformable, not only in the sense of transforming life into art but in transforming art
back into life.
“Notes on Walter Benjamin & Allegory”, Doug Hall
(Source: doughallstudio.com)
