first pitch

pyramid_chewbacca

Boris Groys, Art Power, page 63 (this doesn't have anything to do with the above image but it does apply to my BLOG exhibition 3 years ago--I'm mainly using it to separate the above image from the pogs below):

...when the distinction between original and copy is merely a topological, contextual one, then it not only becomes possible to remove an original from its site and deterritorialize it, but also to reterritorialize the copy. [Walter] Benjamin... calls attention to this possibility when he writes about the figure of profane illumination and refers to the forms of life that can lead to such profane illumination: "The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flâneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic." One is struck by the fact that that these figures of profane illumination are also figures of motion--especially the flâneur. The flâneur does not demand of things that they come to him; he goes to things. In this sense the flâneur does not destroy the auras of things; he respects them. Or rather, only through him does the aura emerge again. The figure of profane illumination is the reversal of the "loss of aura" that comes from sitting the copy in a topology of undetermined circulation through the modern mass media. Now, however, it is clear that the [art] installation can also be counted among the figures of profane illumination, because it transforms the viewer into a flâneur.