Of Warsaw shop windows in the 80s (or on the colonial gaze of Old to New Europe)
December 27, 2010
Rusting and moulding, their open structures and abstract mosaics revealed the system’s inability to rejuvenate itself. If the neon signs, escalators and refrigerators worked, they emitted a fatal buzzing like a Geiger counter…
David Crowley, Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 135
If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura….To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007) 222-3
