Angel Climbing In

In 1923, the Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879-1940) gifted the subject of my research, German-Jewish literary philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), with the watercolour Angelus Novus (the New Angel), an effort visualize the rise of fascism and nationalism. ‘Angel Climbing In’ visualizes my creative and critical research, a literary novel of exile and its critical introduction. The introduction theorizes failure as a tool for creative writers, scholars, and others. In Angel Climbing In, the angel climbs from the burnt matches of my daily sitting practice but seeks to activate Benjamin’s methodical, everyday engagement, no matter the odds, with writing, theorizing, and the struggle to stay alive. The angel, climbs over earthen remains, echoes of the Neapolitan rag pickers inspiring Benjamin’s theorizing of ‘trace’. Lifted by muscular wings of faith and imagination, he aims to set upright the upturned and falling plastic medication bottle that in my own life, and in the novel’s contemporary story line, keeps Benjamin’s imagined HIV+ queer, great-great grandson alive. Boxes. Stone, copper, wood, plastic, polymer, steel, bamboo. 20 x 21 cm.