Analysis of Angels: A Modern Myth

His book Angels: A Modern Myth demonstrates how angels as message-bearers move between those systems. With the portrayal of angelic connectedness Serres illustrates his notion of time and links between past, present and future. In a conversation with Bruno Latour he maintains that “time doesn’t flow according to a line, nor according to a plan but, rather, according to a complex mixture a visible disorder. ” [1] For him every historical moment is multi-temporal with multiple folds and pleats. Just like folded handkerchief through which angels pass, making connections.

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Most westerns upon hearing the word ‘angel’ think of Christianity and its associated portrayal of angels. Many assume that only Christianity and Judaism belief in such creatures and those only Christian artists have depicted them since Jewish law forbids such representations. However angels appear in classical myth and philosophies, in shamanic visions, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam. The idea of the angel is older than the Jewish bible, where they are first mentioned. It is believed to be ‘invented’ by Zarathustra, going back to around 1500 BCE, (about 500 years before the belief in the Jewish God.) The biblical text, the books of Daniel and Enoch, in which angels are widely featured, believed to be written in Babylon and brought back with the exiled Jews, together with the actual word ‘angel’.

Regardless of the origin of the concept, angels, of some sort or another, feature in almost all cultures and religions across planet. Archaeological and anthropological findings indicate that angels were part of pre-historic belief systems. It seems that since the onset of human life, belief in such winged creatures was universal.

In recent years, angels and their intermediary status have become objects of inquiry for many disciplines in the humanities (other than the study of religion): philosophy (Massimo Cacciari’s L’angelo necessario; Michel Serres’ The Troubadour of Knowledge and Angels, a Modern Myth; Bruno Latour’s Angels without Wings), aesthetics (Giorgio Agamben The Melancholy Angel; Paul Colilli’s The Angel’s Corpse), cultural studies (McLuhan and Powers’ who dedicate a chapter from angels to robots: The Global Village, H. and Harold Bloom’s Omens of the Millenium) to name a few. Moreover, the idea of the angel is explored by contemporary artist from different cultures, among them: Susan Hiller’s Witness 2000, and Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, 1998 from the UK; Anslem Kiefer’s The Hierarchy of the Angels (Die Ordnung der Engel), 2000, from Germany; Heri Dono’s Flying angels 2006, from Indonesia; Jin Feng’s Flying Angels 2012, from China; and Khadim Ali’s On Angels and Devils fromAfghanistan/Australia.

Serres explores the nature of communication and claims that angels as message bearers are part of the contemporary world. Bruno Latour^[2] recounts Simon Schaffer’s paper in which he shows that angels were the carrier of gravitational force for Newton. Furthermore, he claims that angels have room in a flat ontology, since “there is no such thing as a “visible world” any more that there are invisible worlds.” ^[3]

At this point, not only are we not able to grasp the exact meaning presented by the angel, but as Paul Colilli points out, we should not forget that the angel is a sign which points beyond itself. In his book The Angel’s Corpse he says “knowing the angel is closely linked to an unknowing… the closest we can come, then, to knowledge of the angel is in its imprinting itself in human thought.” [4] That is, the idea of the ‘angel’ resides in a realm for which we are cognitively ignorant. It is a realm of void that is housed in the poetic sign and in artistic expression.

In 1940, Walter Benjamin devoted part of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on a monoprint Angelus Novus(New Angel) by the artist Paul Klee. In Benjamin’s interpretation it Klee’s figure becomes the angel of history, driven into the future by the storm of progress, yet his face looking back to Eden.

In it he wrote

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That, which we call progress, is this storm.[5]

In the above quoted passage from On the Concept of History, Benjamin has created of the etching a kind of theatrical stage which involves not only himself, but also the reader. After a short description of the figure with spread wings, and an open mouth he states that “the Angel of History must look just so.” In contrast to ‘looks as though” in the previous sentence, the unequivocal ‘must’ creates a forceful force, creating a necessary connection between Klee’s figure and the general idea of angelic history. After introducing a tension between possibility and necessity, Benjamin expands staged drama by interpreting the angel as looking back at the wreckage of history as well as Paradise. This means that according to Benjamin, while we are viewing the picture we are facing the future standing in the middle of piles of rubble, while Paradise behind us. Through the text, the scene becomes a simultaneous gaze directed both towards the past and into the future, reflecting to the viewer the devastations of history that the angel sees.

Benjamin’s reading of a Klee’s Angelus Novus is a short interpretation of the moment of viewing itself. The piles of rubble can only be seen by the angel, while the viewer has to imagine these events. We comprehend and see the catastrophe only when guided by the text. Nevertheless, the image of the angel watching our historic debris, unable to act as he is being driven backwards has a strong resonance and has inspired various artists, writers and musicians.

Paul Klee Angelus Novus, 1920

The image of a petrified angel of history inspired Kiefer’s three-dimensional lead aircraft, Poppy and Memory, exhibited initially in 1989 in Cologne in the exhibition, The Angel of History. Furthermore it links up with Kiefer’s petrified paintings The hierarchy of Angels[6]and The Daughters of Lilith[7]. Against a background of a cracked surface hang fossilized, ash-covered dresses in different sizes. In the latter artwork, small lead aeroplanes fly around the largest garment. The only indication to the artwork’s subject matter is the handwritten inscription sprawled at the top (Lilith’s Töchter).

According to the Kabbalah, a mystical Jewish doctrine, Lilith was the first wife of Adam in the Garden of Eden. She was created at the same time and in the same manner as Adam, and represents the rebellious woman. Her name, in Hebrew, means ‘woman of the night’, suggesting she is both a mother goddess and a winged demon (sometimes linked to Isis, the winged Egyptian angel/goddess). Her characteristics vary according to narrative of a given culture. She can be destructive, and she can be a symbol of sexual pleasure. Both her sensuality and fertility are limitless.

The work uses a restricted palette. The ashen dresses are crude and as plain as hospital or prison uniform. Together with the black hair, dialogically, they evoke Benjamin allegory of ruins. For this somber image allegorically figures the dead in their present absence. Perhaps they represent the ancient Jewish ritual of mourning and by associations extending to the Jewish holocaust, since hair shaved off heads of the victims and discarded items of clothing have come to symbolise the holocaust. Likewise, the lead aeroplane has multiple levels of meaning. Lead is the foundation from which alchemists believed gold and silver could be created. However, in addition to the suggested magical powers, heavy lead turns the airplanes in both Poppy and Memory and The Daughters of Lilith into monument to history and memory that is, in line with Benjamin’s catastrophic view, a requiem for the dead.

kiefer, the daughters of Lilith 1990

Kiefer’s painting is an image frozen in the folds of time. It might be impossible, to read the image completely, but then this difficulty is precisely because it refers not only to its own illegibility, but also to the illegibility of images of and from history. Like the glance backwards of the art historian, Kiefer and other artists who are absorbed by events of the past, manage insightful dialectic. In Kiefer’s case, glances back at history are means to critically engage with sources of German national identity.

[1] P. 59 (Serres 1995)

[2] (Bruno 2009)

[3] (Latour 2013) P. 181

[4] (Colilli 1999)

[5] (Benjamin, Adams, and Prochazka 2009)

[6] Die Ordnung der Enge), 2000, Oil, emulsion, shellac, and linen clothes on canvas, 950 x 510 cm

[7] Lilith’s Töchter, 1990, sand, ash, oil emulsion, gelatine silver prints, wire, fabric, hair, snake skin and lead, 380.4 x 280 cm.