Making Histories

Vince Leo, writer, photographer lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Walter Benjamin's Angel of History is caught in a line of relationships she can't change. Obsessed with the errors she can see in the past, she is powerless to change them, but not because of her lack of understanding or because she is being constrained by evil. Benjamin's Angel is held in abeyance by something Benjamin calls "a Wind blowing out of Paradise," which catches her wings and prevents her from moving toward the past. This Wind lies further in the past than the sins of history, an elemental force arising from a preexisting state of goodness, innocence, and natural beauty. The most powerful force in Benjamin's metaphor, the Wind from Paradise is a deeply personal proposition, a mystical belief in the relentless assertion of righteousness in the universe. But it is also that very Wind -- actually the misunderstanding of Paradise in the shape of Progress -- that lies behind the human catastrophes Benjamin's Angel yearns to mend. Her tragedy isn't that she can't mend the past, but that she can't perceive the nature of the Wind that paralyzes her, and so can't see the development of human consciousness for all its transgressions, can't understand that the past can never be fixed, only be redeemed with the aid of that Wind in the present for the future.

Like Benjamin's Angel, Dorit Cypis struggles with the sins of the past, unwilling to forget. Through her use of historical representations, Cypis has wrestled with the continuing power of the past to effect the present through the circumstances of the female body (X-Rayed (Altered), My Father's Nudes) and the creation of human identity (The Body in the Picture). Like Benjamin himself, Cypis's understanding of time and human history is radical and mystical, exhibiting a dogged faith in the transcendent power of sensuous experience and the undeniable order of beauty. Cypis's past doesn't begin and end with human history, but includes something more, something beyond and before, something unseen and unknowable. Call it a spark of eternal optimism or a Wind blowing from Paradise, it moves through Cypis work and back into the world of human destinies.