The Arcades Project - Operi

The multiple deployment of figures in the wax museum opens a way to the
colportage phenomenon of space and hence to the fimdamental ambiguity of the
arcades. The wax statues and busts-of which one is today an emperor, tomorrow
a political subversive, and the next day a liveried attendant; of which another
represents today Julia Montague, tomOlTOW Marie Lafargue, the day after tomorrow
Madame Doumergue-all are in their proper place in these optical whispering-galleries.
For Louis XI, it is the Louvre; for Richard II, the Tower; for Abdel
Krim, the desert; and for Nero, Rome. 0 F1&neur 0 [Q7,2]
Dioramas take the place of the magic lantern, which knew nothing of perspec­
tive, but with which, of course, the magic of the light insinuated itself quite
differently into residences that were still poorly lit. "Lanteme magique! Piece
curieuse!" With this cry, a peddler would travel through the streets in the evening
and, at a wave of the hand, step up into dwellings where he operated his lantern.
The cifJiche for the first exhibition of posters still characteristically displays a
magic lantern. [Q7,3]
There was a georama for a while in the Galerie Colhert.-The georama in the
fourteenth arrondissement contained a small-scale natural reproduction of
France.4 [Q7,4]
In the same year in which Daguerre invented photography, his diorama burned
down. 1839. 0 Precursors 0 [Q7,5]
There is an abundant literature whose stylistic character forms an exact counterpart
to the dioramas, panoramas, and so forth. I refer to tl,e feuilletonist miscellanies
and series of sketches from midcentl1ry. Works like La Grande Ville , Le Diable Ii Paris , Les Fran,ais peints par eux-memes
. In a certain sense, they are moral
dioramas-not only related to the others in their unscmpulous multiplicity, but
technically constmcted just like them. ]0 the plastically worked, more or less
detailed foreground of the diorama corresponds the sharply profiled feuilletonistic
vesturing of the social study, which latter supplies an extended background
analogous to the landscape in the diorama. [Q;2,6]
The sea-"never the sanle"5 for Proust at Balbec, and the dioramas with their
varied lighting, which sets the day marching past the viewer at exactly the speed
with which it passes before the reader in Proust. Here, the highest and the lowest
forms of minlesis shake hands. [Q7,7]
The wax museum a manifestation of the total work of art. The
universalism of the nineteenth century has its monument in the waxworks. Panopticon:
not only does one see everything, but one sees it in all ways. [Q7,8]
r.;Navalorama." Eduard Devrient, Briefe aus Paris (Berlin, 1840), p. 57. [Qf,g]