New York: Schocken Books, Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Malcom R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. New York: Verso, Buck-Morss, Susan. Hansen, Miriam. Knizek, Ian. Melberg, Arne.
Andrew Benjamin. New York: Continuum, Ziarek, Krzysztof. Film Although Benjamin discusses photography briefly, his argument focuses primarily on the revolutionary potential of film as a mode of mechanical reproduction.
Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. When Latour and Lowe meet Benjamin on his own terms, they actually agree with both his conception of an aura and his conception of reproduction, despite the fact that their paper reads as a challenge to his authority.
Second, one could focus on other, non-photographic modes of reproduction that preceded photography and that developed in parallel with it, especially the reproductive engraving of oil paintings on copperplates that was introduced sometime in the fifteenth century, and the steel engravings that replaced copperplate engraving in the s.
Earlier types of reproduction raise the same questions as photographic reproduction and show that we ought not to expect a revolution in the way that we perceive art, but rather a Whiggish evolution at most. Toward what end our art-sense is evolving remains an open question. Even to think about photographic reproduction as accelerating and intensifying changes that have a year history overstates the conclusion that we can draw. In my conclusion, I address the sociopolitical implications of the Benjamin thesis.
To anticipate the conclusion, a thicker description of the last years of the mechanical reproduction of works of art shows that Benjamin, Latour and Lowe, and prominent critics of reproductive engravings such as William Ivins, Jr. What is the aura for Benjamin? In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin explains that these photographs memorializing dead loved ones are the "last refuge" for the cult value of the picture.
This was a way of seeing that led to surrealism and also to "arty" abstractions of parts that did not make compositional wholes. In doing so, Atget "initiates the emancipation of object from aura, which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography. Now, to bring things closer to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction.
Every day the need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative. And the difference between the copy, which illustrated papers and newsreels keep in readiness, and the original picture is unmistakable. Uniqueness and duration are as intimately intertwined in the latter as are transience and reproducibility in the former.
Original works of art endure as a unique testament of artistic vision. Relative to such enduring statements, a photograph is disposable, "transient," and judged only by its use-value. Benjamin finds a political meaning in the function of the reproduction, which brings the masses closer to the work of art, which they may now cheaply acquire for their homes, use carelessly as a cheap reproduction, and strip of place and time and manner to gaze at the reproduced work of art in whatever manner they desire.
The reproduction divests even admittedly singular and unique things of their uniqueness, undermining memory and knowledge. Is it at the root of modernity or at the root of all art or just Western art?
Is the surrealist "estrangement between man and his surroundings" salutary? The alienation of the authentic individual from herself is often, and sensibly, a pejorative way of talking about an art "under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail.
For Benjamin, it appears to be a salutary and enlightening process to move from auratic art to photography. However, there are dangers at the threshold and in immersing oneself in this new world.
Photography-as-art is dangerous because of the potential for commercialization through advertisement. Benjamin not very kindly anticipated Warhol thirty-one years before his soup cans were first exhibited by writing that "photography…can endow any soup can with cosmic significance but cannot grasp a single one of the human connections in which it exists.
Such works can no longer be regarded as the products of individuals; they have become a collective creation, a corpus so vast it can be assimilated only through miniaturization.
In the final analysis, mechanical reproduction is a technique of diminution that helps people to achieve control over works of art—a control without whose aid they could no longer be used. Benjamin developed this ambitious and interesting explanation of our loss of control over our cultural conditions further in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
For him, fine art theory is shot through with mystifying concepts "creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery" that lend themselves to appropriation by fascists. A reproduction only reproduces a current time-slice of the original, and thus deeply violates the history of the original—all that is transmissible from its beginning.
Benjamin therefore believed that the authority of the object is undermined because its authority rests upon historical testimony of the work of art concerning its own authentic, unique existence and tradition. Some reproductions, perhaps all reproductions prior to photographic reproduction, do not unsettle time, place, and history in the way that photographic reproduction does.
Benjamin called these "manual reproductions" and offered a history of the previous years of reproduction, which unfolded in four stages: founding and stamping; the woodcut; engraving and etching; and lithography. As in the "Little History of Photography," Benjamin was primarily interested in the influence that each mode of reproduction has on the traditional art forms.
He found a kind-difference between the latest evolution in the modes of reproduction and their earlier precursors. As Benjamin said, photography which he subsumed under the process of technical reproduction takes away the work of the hand and substitutes for it the work of the eye. Most importantly, such photography enables relocation of the work of art into the home of the connoisseur or some other locale where it can be consumed at his convenience. The reproduction thus renounces uniqueness and place, and at the same time loses its hold on tradition.
This cultic value has been secularized as a cult of beauty and ultimately challenged by the revolutionary means of production—photography—and the political rise of socialism.
This is the era of art produced by and for the people, and no longer the era of art produced by the mystical genius for a suprahuman end. The first concerns photography as an art form and the second concerns the photographic reproduction of works of art. There are legitimate concerns that we should have with photography as an art form or as an element of a work of art, but Benjamin tends to exaggerate the potential authoritarian dangers of the photographic work of art. I will consider four examples.
First, writing about plays, Benjamin seems to equivocate in Section IX, where he ties the aura both to the physical presence of the stage actor and so the film audience does not perceive an aura around the actor, which seems wrong as a matter of fact and to the presence of an audience although the audience is not present for the painter or sculptor any more than for the screen actor.
Moreover, the fact that an actor can be startled by a loud sound and his reaction edited into or out of a movie is, for Benjamin, the strongest evidence that film abandons the realm of "beautiful semblance. Finally, Benjamin thinks it is only now, in the case of illustrated magazines, that "[f]or the first time, captions have become obligatory. There are similar problems with thinking that photographic reproduction of art necessarily transforms the values of art.
In all cases, we cannot fully escape either the handicraft element or the intellectual work done by framing a photographic scene. We, the masses, can bring art closer to us and force it to speak to us on our own terms.
We can see its reality in a new way that is different from the way the artist saw it and from the way that an interpreter engraving it would have seen it. Reproduction often creates a powerful and artistic copy and may even add luster to the original. As consumers of art, we seem unable to free ourselves from the type of cognitive architecture that makes colorful advertising, a multitude of copies of the Mona Lisa, kitschy paraphernalia sold at St.
They ask whether the reproduction is as valuable as the original painting now hanging in the Louvre. If it is not, why not? Latour and Lowe believe that the question of original or copy has been made moot by the decisive question, "Is it [a work of art] well or badly reproduced? By copying, they imply, you pay homage to an original and thus re-inscribe it with an aura. They use the analogy of tracing the Nile back to its source as an amusing game parallel to the game of asking "Is this an original?
They imply that they are interested in the entire trajectory of the production of the work of art, one that includes not only the original work of art but also stunning copies and works inspired by the original painting.
While Benjamin lived, art teetered on the precipice of a precipitous fall into popular culture, where it would be engulfed: simply an image among other images. Benjamin was interested in the new mode of perception ushered in by modern mechanical reproduction.
In other words, his essay recalls the anxieties of the Ninth Century Iconoclasts that the image might replace the authenticity of the Divine with a simulacra and anticipates the predictions of Jean Baudrillard that the simulacra will be substituted for the real. Of singular importance to this question is the association between Benjamin and the Weimar film writer, Siegfried Kracauer Kracauer, like Benjamin, had a Neo-Kantian background and was one of the intellectual pioneers in formulating a theory for film, a new art form and a new form of mass media.
The Benjamin essay, therefore, needs to be understood from a dual perspective. Art—or that special object set aside from normal social life—was always a cult object, viewed but never approached, venerated but never touched. He also understood that the entire apparatus of mass media reproduction, especially film, had a profound impact upon how people would perceive the world—through the mediating actions of images.
These images would be ubiquitous and would bear messages of all kinds. Unlike the work of art, these images would be partial, fragmented, un-whole, and conveyed via montage, which sliced through time and space, deploying incomplete impressions.
Nevertheless, such images could be powerful and impactful. These notions of origin and authenticity and the vanishing point of aura also refer to the bourgeois ego, also on the point of vanishing into the commodity spell of capitalism. Individuality had to be processed or expressed through commodities which substituted for uniqueness. The moment of the writing of this essay— in Paris—was a time of crisis for the work of art and for the intellectual freedom of the consumer, perpetually under the spell of an increasingly technological society fueled by commodities.
Thanks to technological reproducibility, art could be dislodged from its site of origin and from its place in history and could be magically transported into the present where it could be possessed or repossessed, used or misused.
Under such a system, aura would wither and decline. The psychological and physical space between the spectator and the relic created an aura that could be completely dispelled when the distance vanished. Mechanical Reproduction had the capability to bring that worshiped object down to earth, as it were, and place in within visual reach of the viewer. The gaze becomes a quick and casual look. Just now, as I was crossing the boulevard, and hopping in the mud, in quite a hurry, through the shifting chaos where death comes galloping from all sides at once, my halo slipped off my head, in one abrupt movement, into the mire of the macadam.
I considered it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to break my bones. And anyways, I said to myself, misfortune is good for something. Now I can walk about incognito, commit foul acts, and indulge in debauchery like ordinary mortals.
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