August's Angels
Or, Rodin x Bin Laden x Hansen
It’s hard to imagine, today, but there are periods when humans feel good about the future. And sometimes, like in the 1900s, they even feel awesome about it.
Radio, air conditioning, the lightbulb, movies, the vacuum cleaner — all were being invented as, in North Carolina, the Wright Brothers bicycled into the sky.
People listened to ragtime, and went for dance crazes — the fox trot, the lame duck, the grizzly bear, the snake — almost always aping animals, as if to celebrate transcending their own creatureliness, which industry had channeled into (or maybe exorcised through) the rational latticework of the Eiffel Tower, shortly after whose completion Auguste Rodin was commissioned to design another structure, a “Tower of Labor” for the 1900 Paris Exposition.
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He made models for a Pisan spiral with ascending friezes exalting labor of every kind, presided over by a pair of massive angels, The Benedictions:
The tower was never built, I think for the better.
One problem was the old boogeyman: hierarchy.
Miners were stuck in a crypt at the very bottom, with other trades struggling upwards to the top, where the people nearest the angels weren’t laborers in any physical sense at all, but philosophers. And while the tower was never built, the statue of the philosophers was, and became famous as The Thinker.
And as many a nose-picking middle schooler, the odd colorectal surgeon, and Robin Williams have all noted, The Thinker has stunningly perfect toilet form, a fact which anticipates one of the stranger achievements of French philosophy, Dominique Laporte’s Histoire de la Merde, which argues that directing the flow of sewage is the root work of civilization: “surely, the state is the sewer.”
Rodin was anticipating Laporte by sixty years, a win for sculpture but a problem for the people he placed just below The Thinker: the poor Poets, who would presumably receive The Thinker’s “missives” and shape them into prose, turn turds into words and send them all the way down to the coal-faced miners.
Another reason to be glad this never happened—except it sort of did.
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By September of 2001, several hundred of Rodin’s works had made their way to the offices of a finance firm atop the World Trade Center’s North Tower, celebrating—plot twist—not the glories of labor, but of middle-market investment banking.
Among them was a 28-inch bronze casting of The Thinker, which met, per Rodin’s vision, with winged entities serving revelation: Wahhabis flying 767s, whose impact sent Rodin’s Thinker falling thirteen hundred feet down through the sky, landing in the rubble where workers of the kind it was supposed to govern found it, took souvenir pictures, then abandoned it to: a) the Fresh Kills landfill; b) a Jersey mobster’s villa not far from Bruce Springsteen’s house, the literal darkness on the edge of town; c) the marginalia of a Swiss insurer’s annual report.
There’s no right or wrong answer. No one knows where The Thinker ended up.
But that’s a story for September, a month (in Manhattan) of subtropical mists, and Biblical wrath remembered with Speersian light shows.
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We’re still in pagan August, where one gift of Rodin’s philosopher vanishing is that his angels are free of context, and can be encountered on their own terms.
I think they’re best approached through their own creation, the studio where Rodin transformed sculpture by rejecting static classical poses for the bodies of real, living humans, “I take life from movements,” he said, radically.
These are not ideals, but humans whose flesh was captured just as cinema was born, and it’s their moving bodies that are creating all the magic here, either as dancers or lovers, or both, captured in pas de deux. The wings turn gratuitous, even silly, as we see how the marble, so much more ethereal than bronze, bears them only with braces, as if in protest, “I want nothing to do with this charade.”
These aren’t divine beings breaking into the human plane, but more remarkable, mortals transcending the human plane, shirking the whole tragic tower, dipping toes outside of time, and (the glory) carrying an instant with them.
A perfect piece to visit in last days of a month whose magic is to make you think a moment can soar goldenly forever just before—as three of the pre-9/11 world’s finer poets once sang—in an MMMBop, it’s gone. 🪽