By Christopher Squier

Reading the German Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin’s essay “One-Way Street,” I ran aground on a concept of exile derived from the world of theater but which could equally be applied to writing or the visual arts. It lies in a paragraph selected by his friend Hannah Arendt for the text’s English-language publication and refers to a recurring theme in Shakespeare’s plays. Which means that as a phrase it has jumped back and forth across languages, English to German and again German to English, before landing in the pages of his Schocken Books collection.

But first, I should offer some grounding in Benjamin’s larger project. The image of the one-way street from the essay’s title might suggest a narrative pull, a procession of images, events, and thoughts that proceed and are intended to be understood linearly. That’s how we might proceed along a street of numbered addresses, each organized in sequence and leading to the next. But Benjamin, whose unfinished Passagenwerk spanned thirteen years with extensive archival documentation of the Parisian arcades, is not entirely dedicated to concise directions or coherent city maps. Instead, we often end up lost, discovering something unfamiliar in what we thought was a well-trafficked location. And instead, “One-Way Street'' operates inventively within a formally experimental structure. It’s composed of short sections of prose and in each of these sections a title stands up in capital letters, as though an advertisement, a leaflet, or a street sign encountered randomly in the course of wandering: TO THE PUBLIC: PLEASE PROTECT AND PRESERVE THESE NEW PLANTINGS; MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR; CAUTION: STEPS; or POST NO BILLS.

The short texts commingle forms of writing, contaminating aphorism with philosophy, reminiscence with maxim, and dreams with political satire. In doing so, they recall the post-World War I avant garde practices of the Surrealists and Dada artists: the exquisite corpse and the photomontage’s unexpected juxtapositions, for example, or the dérives devised by the Letterist International to meander, flâneur-like, through the streets and arcades of Europe’s urban centers.

Assembled between 1924-1928 and only later published in 1955 following Benjamin’s death, “One-Way Street” initially was shared only selectively, with close friends and not the broader public. However, critics have argued it was notable within his body of work for some of his first forays into class critique, for its increased incorporation of Marxist thought, as well as for its incorporation of personal life and observations. (The dedication reads: “This street is named / Asja Lacis Street / after her who / as an engineer / cut it through the author.”)

As Peter Demetz notes in his introduction, it is also a text in which Benjamin’s “private shock (often articulated in terms of his incipient Marxism) and the social dissolution of the age closely correspond.” Benjamin wanders this street individually, yet he speaks of a collective errantry.

Passing through the essay, its images read like taxonomic strata of urban architecture. Filling stations, vestibules, construction sites, embassies, antiques for sale, polyclinics, and offices. And this leads to the idea I particularly like. Following the filling stations and polyclinics, offices and embassies, Benjamin brings us for a moment to the “Costume Wardrobe” of a theater, where he begins to muse on death and endings:

Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers “enter, fleeing.” The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. Their entry into the visual field of nonparticipating and truly impartial persons allows the harassed to draw breath, bathes them in new air. The appearance on stage of those who enter “fleeing” takes from this its hidden meaning. Our reading of this formula is imbued with expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of onlooking strangers.

As readers and watchers—as we reminisce on, preserve, and delve into the paintings, texts, and archives of the twentieth century’s prominent European intellectuals, its writers, and especially its artists—in many ways we have become spectators in this Benjaminian sense. We do not participate in their worlds. We maintain the ultimate privilege of neutrality as we read, watch, and seek to understand. Peering across time, we observe distant or nearby figures’ appearances similarly in the form of essays, paintings, correspondence, or ephemera. Writer and artist, fleeing, are brought to a momentary standstill before our gaze.

And in looking at Benjamin, Arendt, and Carl Heidenreich, a set of individuals who left behind radiant marks, it’s clear from our position as an audience that their lives bear witness to the indexes of wartime and to post-war patterns of flight, exile, and diaspora across Europe, through North Africa and the Carribean, before arriving in some cases in the United States.

For Benjamin who died in 1940 in Port Bau, Spain on his way to freedom, we’re fortuante that Arendt managed to rescue his unpublished manuscripts and transport them to the United States. Here, she arranged for their translation and publication.

Somewhat earlier, during the 1930s, Heidenrich joined the International Brigades of the Spanish Communist POUM (The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista or “Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification”) and was incarcerated in Barcelona’s Modelo Prison. In 1941, he was able to flee to the United States by way of Martinique. Meeting Arendt for the first time in New York, he joined a circle of German émigrés known as Das Dorf who became emphatic advocates and collectors of his new work.

For the writers and artists who were forced by circumstances of war and prejudice into exile, Benjamin’s phrase is particularly potent. In Benjamin’s case, his work entered the English language following his death. Therefore, for these works, their significance is derived partly from his entrance into exile, “fleeing.” Their audience could not know them in the same way if they had been lost en route. For Heidenreich, much of whose early work was lost or damaged after his departure from Germany, he too enters the archive of art history in “flight.” The paintings we recognize as his are not the full picture, and so questions linger on the margins: entrances and exits, stylistic influences and possible trajectories that are difficult to know.

This presents a paradox for interpretation: how do we reconcile the imagery of an artist with his legacy as a Communist and anti-Fascist, particularly when his political activity led to the destruction of his work and his own subsequent dislocation, imprisonment, and exile? Arriving in New York, Heidenreich adapted his artistic style to his new milieu, developing a radical vision of abstraction, full of spirals and drifting forms, layers of paint veiling and covering over what at first began as coherent landscapes, then formal compositions in which window-like spaces are edged in against the outside world, in which margins shunt in and out against form.

Or later, abstractions in which elegantly-rendered forms in watercolor and gouache blur the clear edges and boundaries of space and bleed across the paper.

And in the context of the time, in which abstract work in the U.S. was often understood as entirely devoid of politics, more closely attuned to spiritual and psychoanalytic disclosures (Pollock’s Jungian excess, Rothko’s sublime), how do Heidenreich’s abstractions operate within a separate strategy for reflecting on and mediating an experience of exile? Does his friendship with Arendt reconnect him with political thought or provide another outlet for his politics? Suddenly transported to another continent, does a different terrain lend itself to alternate strategies of expression?

In looking at the work of an artist whose entrance into the American postwar scene is itself a form of exit or flight, how do we reconcile the biographical and political threads of his life with their visual, stylistic termini?

In this series of essays and blog entries, I hope to consider a variety of approaches to this question of the artist who “enters, fleeing,” in order to locate Heidenreich’s work within current conversations about and around art in diaspora, exile, and migration as well as to point to its relevance to the politics of territory, geography, and visual modalities in the convergence of global art histories beginning in the 1950s and 60s.

We enter, fleeing is a series of essays and blog entries by Carl Heidenreich Foundation director Christopher Squier drawing inspiration from the work of the literary critic Walter Benjamin alongside discourses in visual culture and contemporary art. The series considers postwar painting and abstraction in the context of diaspora, exile, and migration.

Citations:

Benjamin, Walter. “One-Way Street.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.

Demetz, Peter. Introduction to Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, xi-xlvii. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978.