From The Discovery of Piranesi's Final Project:
29 September 2023 Friday
Will future academic Piranesi studies be different because of the discovery of Piranesi's final project? Or will future academic Piranesi studies ignore the significant discoveries here disclosed and simply behave as if Piranesi's final project never happened? I suspect the smart academics will acknowledge the final project, and the not-so-smart academics will ignore the final project and remain ignorant of it.
Seriously though, how can anyone henceforth claim to be a Piranesi scholar and not know Piranesi's final project and the role Laura and Francesco played in it.
2023.09.29
From The Discovery of Piranesi's Final Project:
29 September 2022 Thursday
Read late at night:
"The first step of the way will be to apply the principle of montage to history. To erect large constructions from the tiniest, sharply fashioned materials. Indeed to discover the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, discrete moment, thus breaking with vulgar versions of historical materialism. To grasp the construction of history as such. By way of commentary. The refuse of history." --Walter Benjamin
"As a collector of the "refuse of history," he would be the incognito of an author who, in this instance, seeks to abandon the traditional prerogatives of authorship for a more marginal, anonymous and subterranean position from which, ideally, to let the historical materials speak for themselves. The result of this experiment was to amount, quite literally, to a series of chiffons--not so much a collection of fragments, that by now well established genre, as an unclassifiable scrap-book, the ruined "death-mask" of its own "conception" which, like the tower of Babel, was perhaps destined to become its own ruin inasmuch as its ambitions rivalled Mallarmé's dream of a Work to end all works."
Irving Wohlfarth, "The Historian as Chiffonnier" in New German Critique (number 39, Fall 1986), pp. 144-45.
2022.09.29
How to paint an architect 1983/1985
2016.09.29
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