How does art shape ideas?
Join me as I explore this question through conversations with philosophers and thinkers about the influence of art on their scholarly work.
I’m Pat McConville, and this is Concept : Art.
In this episode I speak with Dr Lucy Benjamin. We discussed time and space on the streets of Paris; repairability and broken Cuban furniture; and developing her own perspective.
Dr Lucy Benjamin is a researcher in architectural theory and creative practise. Her work focuses on the intersection of environmental theory, architecture and philosophy, especially the emergence of repair as a design principle and the conditions for human rights in the age of eco-crisis.
Dr Lucy Benjamin, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thank you very much for having me.
Can you begin by telling us a little about yourself and how you came to be doing your academic work?
It’s probably a very boring story. I came from an academic family. My dad was an academic and my mum was a documentary maker. And so, it was not an unknown realm to me, I guess in many ways. I suppose some of those things people always used to say when I was a child and subsequently, like, “what is it like growing up with academic parents?”
And I’d always say, “well, I don’t know, it’s just how I grew up, you know?” I mean, they still drove me to swimming and they still, you know, made Halloween costumes. It felt normal. But, you know, I did have, when I was eight years old, I think, I had a pet rabbit called Walter, because my dad worked on Walter Benjamin.
And it just, I suppose, you know, that was all I knew that he did. People say, “what does he do?” And I would say, “I don’t know. But he writes a lot about this man called Walter Benjamin.”
You know, it’s funny. You fight really hard to be here, and you also stumble into it. I wasn’t a very good high school student. But I was good at French and so I did a French degree, which I sort of didn’t— I just had these grand expectations of what it would be based on my parents’ story of university. And I think that for most people going through the kind of contemporary neoliberal institution, it’s not that. I found it for very lonely experience; I didn’t excel academically at all. I did a major in Russian for two years and I scraped through with passes and then my final year of university, I did a film subject and I fell in love and so then I did an Honours degree in French film, Honours year in French film, and then I moved to the Netherlands and did a film degree.
And as I was doing the film degree I thought, “this is great, but it’s not quite right.” So then I did a literature PhD on Hannah Arendt, which was just the best thing I could have done. But because I’d gone this, kind of environmental-Hannah Arendt-avenue kind of opened me up to fields beyond literature – evidently, because I didn’t discuss literature – such that, you know, today I have a job in an architecture and design school, which is not where you would imagine me coming from first year with a French and Russian double major.
I think being in a design school with a non-design background is a really interesting place to be because you’re talking about ideas that people then put into, like, physical objects and into actual practical design ideas. And you can ask the dumb questions which people think are like, “it’s really interesting to frame it in that way” and I think, “God, I just—” So it’s a nice place to have ended up. I’m happy to be here, and I’d like to stay.
You mentioned your kind of first love there or your first academic kind of love of French film. So I wondered if you could talk about Louis Malle’s film Elevator to the Scaffold?
So I saw that film, I think in the year— In the first year of university when I was still really grouchy about what I was doing at university. And so it kind of went over my head. And then I saw it again in a film subject and suddenly it all kind of clicked. And I, you know, suddenly loved it.
It’s a kind of classic. Well, it’s actually between the French new wave and film noir, so it’s the story of, you know, a botched murder attempt like, you know, a lover— A woman, and her lover try to assassinate the husband to get the money, and it all kind of spirals and goes wrong. And there’s lots of these really amazing shots of the main character played by Jeanne Moreau kind of walking through the streets of Paris, so really plays into that, like the flâneur kind of figure, but the flaneuse, because she’s a woman.
And its soundtracked by Miles Davis. And so Miles Davis had come to Paris because he was having all these issues back in the States playing music and wasn’t having a great time. And so he comes to Paris and someone just kind of puts him in touch with this young film director, and he watches the film and over the space of three weeks he kind of composes the score. So it’s got an amazing jazz score in the background to the film and you watch Jeanne Moreau just walking through the streets of Paris thinking that her lover has abandoned her, with this just beautiful jazz playing in the background.
And I think I just fell in love with this really poetic image of, like what Parisian or French life was. And also, this really emancipated, you know, feminist figure. Like the female figure walking through the streets, which is a big trope of, you know, the French new wave and Cléo de cinq à sept [Cléo from 5 to 7] and all these other films are coming out at the same sort of time show that but I think, I know—
I travelled to Paris when I was in my undergrad and spent three relatively miserable months speaking bad French and walking the streets and thinking, like, “am I like these women?” And I obviously wasn’t. But I think that those kinds of mid-century films just show like a whole other world and this—
I don’t know, I just think they’re beautiful. I think it’s a really tragic ending. You know, the kind of, the woman figure is punished more so than the male figure, and she says like, “I did it for love.” Which is probably a really toxic romantic trope to have, but I was just suckered for it. I just loved it.
While you’re talking about the romance of Paris, I wonder if you could say a bit about the artist Marc Chagall and his painting Paris through the Window and the effect that it had on you?
Well, that’s a painting that my parents had as a print, framed, that sat above my dining room table for my entire childhood, so I spent every single day looking at that painting until I was— You know, I didn’t really leave home until I was 20.
So it was so familiar to me and I just both saw it and didn’t see it. And then— But I’d always— People would say, “what paintings do you like?” And I’d say, “oh, you know, Marc Chagall’s Paris through the Window.”
And then I went to, you know, I went to New York City when I was twenty-three or -four or something like that, and I was walking around the Guggenheim, the big— Kind of spiralling my way up thinking like, “this is really cool. This is great.” But then I was, you know, on one side of the spiral. And I looked across the void and then on the other side was Marc Chagall’s Paris through the Window.
And it was just this, like, oh my— You know, people say like, you go to New York City or you go to LA [Los Angeles] and it’s like walking through a movie set. And people who aren’t from there can’t really believe they’re there. And I saw the Chagall painting and it’s like, “oh my gosh, it’s a real painting. It’s actually a thing.” And it was just— I remember kind of, you know, you go to these big American art galleries and they’re full of tourists and full of school groups. I’m just like weaving my way through a bunch [inaudible], like “I’ve got to get closer to it, I can’t believe I’m seeing this!” and it’s just—
I just think it’s amazing. I think the, you know, all these primary colours and it’s kind of you see things and you don’t see things. I think it’s quite— In some way it’s quite a flat painting, although it’s clearly got, you know, obvious horizon line and depth and there’s the Eiffel Tower in the background, but there’s something sort of quite simplistic about it.
But then it’s kind of broken when you look at it again. It’s like the cat has a human face. The face has two faces, and there are people flying through the backgrounds. I just think it’s kind of really fun in a silly way, but also really—
It’s hard to describe something so familiar to one. Yeah, I just think it’s like a dream. It’s like looking at what a dream would look like. It has like depths and no depth, colour and no colour at once.
Yeah. So I mean that relationship between reproduction and realisation is interesting given the name of your rabbit and some of your other work and what you’re doing now on repairability.
You’ve got these two artworks that are pointing you towards France and seemingly sort-of deepening your appreciation of French culture and then French thought. I’m wondering what these works do for your – not just kind of your kind of enthusiasm for study or enthusiasm for immersion in those in those cultures – but what do they do for your academic work? What do they do to help shape your thought?
You know, when I first described my academic career, there’s no coherency to it. You know, I did degrees in different areas. I work in a different area entirely. But kind of through that there’s been this ongoing interest in space. So when I wrote my first, you know, Honours thesis about the Elevator to the Gallows film, I was writing about the way in which women walk through space and how women got driver’s licences and how they occupied that realm particularly in relation to time. So that’s the whole, you know, the classic thing of the flâneur who just wanders and has a kind of relatively abstract relationship to time. And I think that’s what you see in the Chagall painting is that it’s just this kind of dream like depiction of space where you have, you know, figures moving in different ways and there’s no clear sense of how space is encountered, even though there is that sense of depth, it’s still kind of quite magical.
And so I guess my interest has always been in how different media understand space and how they shape space and the way we walk through it and go through it. So I think often when I still look at things and whether that’s, you know, literally an architectural building today or a plaza or a square or something my interest, I suppose, is how we pull or push through that space and who isn’t pulled or pushed through.
So those are, yeah, I suppose my ongoing going interests in how we understand that space to already inform our actions is one of my big points of interest. So, I mean, you you talked about, you know French thought there, but I’ve invariably, led, been led towards German thought, and my interest in space has, unfortunately or fortunately, been heavily shaped by [Martin] Heidegger’s thinking on space and how we relate to the fact that we are placed beings.
I suppose that’s an answer.
Yeah, no, that’s a great answer. The stuff about time and the kind-of through line of these artworks about the relationship of time to place.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue of David is maybe not the most famous statue of this figure. The picture of David that many people are probably most familiar [with] is Michelangelo’s colossal sculpture. But could you talk about the influence that Bernini’s work has had on you?
Yeah, again, I mean, Bernini’s work— So last year I was teaching architectural history and theory, and I was wanting to show the students something that would capture the distinction between the Renaissance and the Baroque in terms of how we imagine, you know, sort of lines and symmetry and representation, but also how we imagine, again, our relationship to the space of, you know, Baroque space and Renaissance space.
And so you have the Michelangelo, as you say, it’s this very perfect figure. It’s, you know, incredible. It’s huge. But also it’s very— You look at the Michelangelo David and you, sort of, you know already how to look at it.
Because it’s this huge figure in front of you, and so you stand in front of it and you look at it and, sort of, the Renaissance kind of has this effect. You know, everything is perfectly measured and you sort of know already how you would traverse a particular, you know, Renaissance temple or church. But then you look at the Bernini David and suddenly there isn’t a front to it. You know, it’s this figure who is twisted and in motion. And it has those, kind of— That really classic Baroque plasticity. And like, there are fingers and there are all these sort of incredible little details. But also you look at the Bernini and you’re instantly pulled into these, you know— Around in different ways and there is no immediately correct way in which to encounter that statute. And so I think talking with students about like, well, how do we think that space could dictate our movement, for instance, and even our understanding of the time we spend in space because I think every perspective of the Bernini is new and is different because it’s seen in so many different ways and it captures this kind of real tension, you know, in marble. And I just think it’s a really interesting piece to look at to understand—
You know, I mean, they’re only just over a hundred years apart, which they’re made, but they’re showing such different things about the way they understand movement and the, sort of, freedom of movement, I suppose. And so that that’s why I like the Bernini one. I just think it’s this— It’s magical to look at something and think there isn’t a right way to look at this. I can stand behind it and I’d be seeing as much action, or I could stand on the side and I’d be seeing all these other things. So that’s why I like the Bernini. But I wouldn’t. You know, I have a photograph of it now on my desk at work in front of me. I’m just like, “you can go any way and turn around.” I just think it’s a fantastic, yeah, fantastic statue.
Thanks, Lucy. I think it’s important for us to talk a little bit about those influences of Heidegger and Arendt and others on your thought.
When I was in my Master’s degree, it was a two-year programme and in the middle of the year, in the summer, middle of the two years there was an ad for an essay competition.
And it was for a journal that I don’t think is run any more out of Melbourne Uni, I thought, “ah, I’ll spend my summer months doing that.” And it had always been in my head that my dad had said to me like, “you look like the young Hannah Arendt.” And if you know what I look like, you know that’s not true at all. Like, we’re both brunettes. And that’s where it ends, starts and ends. But I thought I’ll read some of this Arendt person. And then maybe I’ll write this essay just for the summer on her.
And I read— I think I read something like The Life of the Mind, her final, unfinished work. Like, not what she’s most famous for. And I just thought this is incredible. And I wrote this essay on love as a political statement because I, you know, I’ve just written all this thing, stuff about the French new wave. And so the politics of love and you know feminism was ripe in my mind still, and I read The Life of the Mind and I write this essay on love and then I Google “Hannah Arendt, love”.
And I discovered that this man called James Martel at San Francisco State University has written an essay on her. And I have not engaged his essay at all.
And in my sort of blind confidence, I emailed him and I said, like, “Dear James, my name’s Lucy. I’ve seen that you’ve written an essay. I haven’t read it, but I’ve written an essay. Will you read mine?” And James Martel is the loveliest person. And he reads it and he sends me back, you know, effusive praise and commentary and suggestions.
And I was so buoyed by this person’s just enthusiasm that I then wrote my Master’s dissertation on Hannah Arendt and love and film.
And it was great. And then I thought, “this is it, this is what I’m going to do.” And so my PhD was on Hannah Arendt. And at that point, you know, my PhD supervisor said to me, “you know, you’re really going to need to read Heidegger.” And in my absolute confidence, I said, “I just don’t think I do.”
Of course I had to, and so I did. And I’m, you know, I’m very pleased. I do think it’s a— I do think that if you’re an Arendtian it’s very important to at least be familiar with Heidegger’s work. So I’m happy that my supervisor really said “you can’t seriously proceed with this unless you do that”, although I have now kind of spent a lot of years really working through what it means to continue to engage Heidegger’s work and how you can do that responsibly, which I find very difficult but—
You have a paper with the journal Theory, culture and society called “Repairability as a condition of the World”. Can you tell us a bit about that paper?
Yes, certainly. So that is a paper that I wrote in 2022. I just got in my current position and my current boss had said, “I’d love to work on repair” and I thought “God, must work on repair.” So I set about researching everything I could on repair, and as I was doing that my iPhone screen cracked.
And I thought, “that’s fine. I’ll get this repaired.” And I went to a friend actually in my grandpa’s town. And he said, “well, I could repair it, but I’m not authorised, so Apple might remotely slow your phone down.”
And I thought “what?,” like I was insane, “but I own. I own my iPhone” or “I own my phone” – shouldn’t say brand – “I own my phone.” And he said, “yes. But you know, you don’t have— The company who produced the phone has the proprietary rights to repair.”
And I mean, this is obviously a major area of discourse. I mean, the right to repair is a huge thing across medical technologies and agriculture technologies and automobiles and these sorts of things, but it really got me thinking about the way in which some things don’t have repairability. Like if I don’t truly own my object then it’s not repairable because the systems around it have organised it to be unrepairable, and so I was sort of pushed to think through— Not, you know, there isn’t this, you know—
This science and technology theorist Stephen J. Jackson, who sort of talks about broken world thinking and everything’s got a bit of a break and a glitch in it. And that’s the place from which we should begin, you know: breakdown. And I think that’s quite a really— You know, it’s a nice emancipatory image of, you know, nothing’s ever perfect, so why would we ever, you know, strive for perfection, we’ll just – you know, not in a sort of nihilistic way, but – we’ll, you know, we’ll make things even through breakdown.
But, you know, this sort of encounter how my phone was that, well, this object can’t break because it can’t be repaired. And so the whole idea of broken world thinking sort of falls apart slightly when the possibility of repair is denied to you because of the negation of repair through not having the right to repair or through design principles.
So the other thing I was looking at at the same time was that in-ear headphones often can’t break because their design is heat sealed. So if you wanted to fix one, you’d have to break one. And so there’s this other sort of device or object that is designed to not be repairable, and so then the whole idea of what it means for that object to break is suddenly less straightforward. Like, that object can certainly cease to function, but can it break? Because it can’t be repaired.
And so that was, kind of, pushed me to think about repairability. And then I, you know, wrote this essay for my boss and I mean, it was, you know, I was being a bit overzealous because I hadn’t started the job yet. And so day one and I said, “alright, I’ve got my first paper done.”
Yeah, really interesting. I mean, I really, I enjoyed that paper, I enjoyed reading it. You mention the Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza in the subtitle of this paper: “Ernesto Oroza’s Archive of Dis/repair”. Can you say a little bit about Oroza and your reason for bringing his work into this paper?
Yes. Ernesto Oroza is this Cuban artist who’s now based in Lyon, in France. He’s an industrial designer by training, but he has this entire, sort of, website dedicated to objects of necessity. And it’s basically just his records of, I guess, vernacular Cuban design, where repair has been an imperative, and so people have kind of imaginatively and haphazardly repaired different objects and in the process designed new things.
And so in my paper I just looked at his archive of chairs, some of which he made himself, some of which he just recorded. He found and recorded. And these are chairs that have broken, and they’ve been kind of composited together might be a way of saying it.
So he’ll bring two different chairs together. Maybe one that is really badly made in terms of its comfort, but it has, like, very strong legs and then one that has a very comfortable seat, but is structurally quite, quite poorly designed. And he’ll sort of bring these two chairs together and so this is a repaired chair.
And I just really liked these really simple images of chairs and how they’re, kind of, recorded in these really bizarre settings, these amazing, you know, huge, cavernous rooms or like just by a roadside.
And again, you know the capacity for just dialogue to really inform and reinforce thinking. I emailed Ernesto and he was incredibly kind and generous in replying to me and talking through, like, where he found these chairs, how he’d made them, why he’d made them, what he thought of the, you know, what he was doing.
And I think that dialogue really was, yeah, very affirming and very sort of encouraging and so I, you know, I got to learn a whole bunch about the history of Cuban design in this process, which it felt quite bizarre to put down in my keywords for that paper “Cuba”, because I’m not a Cuban studies specialist, but it was a really fun place to be writing, you know, to be exploring for a while.
This paper on repairability that we’re talking about employs the thought of a range of people. So you’ve got Oroza. You mentioned Walter Benjamin, Amir Eshel, Hannah Arendt. And at one point you referred to the paper as “a paper of composite and reparative fragments.”
Is there a sort of deliberate relationship between form and function in your writing?
I’m going to say definitely, I think so. I spent years when I finished my PhD trying not to cite Hannah Arendt because I wanted to develop my own thinking. I was told repeatedly throughout my PhD that I was too deferential and that she wasn’t always right. I disagree with that. I think she pretty much was always right, but I really have worked hard to be like, hey, I’m going to find other voices. She’s not the only voice out there, and sort of embracing the fact that’s what I’m doing, which is something I tried to do.
That felt the first real paper that I wrote since finishing my PhD. Like I’d obviously done other things, but that was really the one where I was like, this is a really new subject area for me and I’m finding new people to engage with. So Amir Eshel’s book I read in, like in the afternoon, the middle of summer in Melbourne.
And then again, wrote to him and said, “I loved your book. It made my day.” And again got a really gratifying nice email back from him. And so yeah, I was trying to sort of pull together different voices and show similarities and thinking and where people are engaging a kind of reparative mindset for want of a better, another word.
But then I’d also say – and this you know, does fall back to Hannah Arendt – is that she writes a response to a somewhat critical review of her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she’s accused of having essentially too much affect in her voice and like this wasn’t a methodological scientific study.
And she says, “if I hadn’t had anger and indignation. I would have been complicit some way in the violence.” Like these events are inherently angry, like they cause anger, and so you have to be angry when you write about them. And I think I’ve tried to bring some of that into my writing, whether it’s— I mean, it’s not necessarily anger, but it’s certainly, I do try to bring voices of hope or even fear into my writing because I think that that’s what writing should be doing. It should be transporting us places, even if it is academic in nature.
The English artist Tracey Emin has worked across a wide range of media and I think a lot of her oeuvre is sort of described sometimes as autobiographical or confessional.
So she’s worked in painting and sculpture and installation art and, you know, given what you’ve just said there about kind of retaining your voice, I wonder if her work has had an influence on you?
Yeah, Tracey Emin’s a funny one because I love and hate her, which I suppose is actually quite common response to have to Tracey Emin’s work.
It’s funny, you know, I was looking her up the other day in academic journals and thinking like, “what’s actually being said academically about her?” And it was precisely this kind of around this thing, you know, the confessional. And it would be every second paper was, “Tracey Emin: authenticity”, “Tracey Emin: authentic, inauthentic?”
And it’s just, you know, like what? What, what? What’s the concern here? What is the matter with authenticity of confession? I mean, art has always been about a subjective view of the world. You know, anybody is painting with their own eye. Simply because Tracey Emin’s, you know, the content matter of her art is abortion or sex or is her own life, it doesn’t make it any more or less confessional or inauthentic or authentic than, you know, I mean the one that she always cites is, you know, Van Gogh painting his bedroom.
You know, there is still a figure in that painting, whether or not it is a subject or, you know, the subject matter is something particularly violent, and I think you know, I mean, there’s obviously a gendered element to this.
You know is women’s pain an appropriate subject matter for art? Or is it, you know, a personal confession? You know, it’s a non-question for me. Like it doesn’t lead us anywhere to ask that.
You know, I do think that Tracey Emin has an incredible capacity to make people feel, and I think this comes back in a way to the movement that’s shown in some of her artwork.
So she has this, this painting, which actually in the scheme of things is relatively recent: 2017. I will look for you in every sleeping hour.
And not only is that my most beautiful title of anything, ever. The way in which she kind of moves paint across the paper, I just think is— I just think it makes you feel, it brings you into it, you know what’s happening there.
It’s not My Bed, which is her famous kind of piece that was entered into the Turner Prize in ’99.
But they both capture a similar sort of experience of movement, which I think is quite interesting, being between— I think she can do things across media that is really interesting. But she says that My Bed is a painting. It is an installation of her actual bed. And so to say My Bed is a painting, I think is just mad and fascinating.
Although I must admit I saw Tracey Emin’s film How it Feels a few years ago in London. I was sitting in the white cube. It must have been late summer and the room was just rammed full of people and How it Feels is a film about her abortion and how it goes wrong. And I remember thinking, “I’m gonna be sick, like I’m gonna, I’m actually gonna be sick. This is so heavy and so intimate and so personal.” But I don’t think that response precludes it from being art in any way.
Thanks so much, Lucy.
What are you currently working on?
I am working on a second book now on Hannah Arendt called Arendt’s Architect, which is going to be a study of the spatial and architectural themes of Hannah Arendt’s writings. But I would say that I do have a personality beyond Hannah Arendt that hasn’t come across in this interview. But that will be my new project.
But that’s your second book. What’s your first book?
My first book is— It’s a rewrite of my PhD. It’s called Planetary Politics: Arendt, Anarchy, and the Climate Crisis. It’s coming out next year. It’s the study of the appearance of the planet and Hannah Arendt’s writing, and the role it has in relation to her political theory – so, notions of rights, justice and dignity – and I mean James Martel, who I have mentioned multiple times, he wrote a book on anarchism in 2022 after I finished my PhD. I read it last year, I think, and it like changed my life and changed my thinking and so I went back to my PhD and I rewrote it through the lens of anarchism and his reading of anarchism. And so now I’ve got this.
Yeah, this book coming out on, Arendt’s planetary politics and anarchist revolution.
Well, that’s very exciting. And listeners can find links to Dr Benjamin’s work and some of the art we’ve discussed on the Concept : Art website.
Dr Lucy Benjamin, thank you for joining Concept : Art.
Thank you very much for having me.
Concept : Art is produced on muwinina Country lutruwita Tasmania. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
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