Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction Politics of Representation Representations of Politics
To wrap up our semester onviz., our staff showcases new static content we've added to our "teaching" and "visual theory" sections. Below is my word of Walter Benjamin's approved essay on photography, moving picture, and the politics of mass media, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Each day this week, nosotros'll characteristic a new piece of static content on our weblog. Nosotros hope instructors, students, and persons interested in visual rhetoric volition browse our athenaeum (linked in the top bar) and find useful material for research, pedagogy, and all forms of intellectual inquiry.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Piece of work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Trans. Harry Zohn.Illuminations. 1955. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Reprint ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. 217–52.
By Laura Thain
In this seminal essay, originally published in French in 1936, Benjamin outlines shifts in the way art produces significant later the advent of the photograph. His essay takes places in fifteen parts, which explore how picture is physically produced, how that production influences the way that audiences interact with pic, and how those audiences reconcile motion picture with their pre-existing value structures and behavior. Benjamin ultimately suggests a method of reading photography and motion-picture show that accounts for both their material production and how that material production supersedes or alters prior methods of criticism. Primal to critical practice in the age of mechanical reproduction is the institution of critical distance betwixt audience and media grade, so that the audition can resist pure enjoyment and instead ask how photography and motion picture can help u.s.a. see differently, even as they attempts to perfectly replicate the way we already perceive the world. Writing from Paris, Benjamin, a Jewish German expatriate disturbed by the ascent of Hitler and the Third Reich, explores the political implications of new, mechanized art forms in a rapidly-irresolute 20th century.
I." In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. "
Benjamin begins by outlining a history of creative reproduction. Even the aboriginal Greeks had technologies to reproduce art, like founding and stamping. The principle difference betwixt earlier forms of reproduction and photography, argues Benjamin, is speed. Photography, which allowed the artist to create with his middle rather than his hands, somewhen developed into moving pic able to contain speech. This is the point from we might begin to consider mechanical reproduction an artistic form in its own right, rather than a mode to reproduce pre-existing fine art forms.
II."The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition."
Earlier photography, a piece of fine art'southward authenticity resided in the original copy. This is because the original work of art occupies a particular time and space, handed downward from person to person since its creation, begetting evidence of its ain provenance. Whatever copy that comes after an original work of art was a "forgery" of the original, and therefore, practically worthless.
Art created via mechanical reproduction doesn't fit into this old model for 2 reasons. We can't phone call the scene captured on film the "original" like we tin exercise with a painting, because the photographic camera lens creates fine art from its subject thing—the subject thing alone is not art. In this way, the camera can even surpass what the heart sees in the original scene, considering the lens can encounter slower, faster, or closer than the human heart under the right adjustments. Secondly, mechanically reproduced art does non occupy a single time or infinite like a painting does. Photography and sound recording are forms of telecommunication because they permit us to run into and hear things from a different fourth dimension and identify.
Considering mechanically-reproduced art has no claim to actuality by means of singularity or originality, Benjamin posits it loses some of its connection or essence. He coins the term "aura" to encompass that which the painting has but the photograph lacks—the aura is all the contexts a thing gathers since its inception. Photographs, by contrast, exist in multiple places simultaneously, and each viewer experiences them inside a distinct and divide context. No longer tin can we trace a provenance of photography. Thus, nosotros lose the creative object's relationship with tradition.
Three."T he adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a procedure of unlimited scope . "
Benjamin talks here nigh the relationship betwixt human senses and the media that humans use to communicate those senses. The fashion we perceive and procedure information has two causes: "natural" and "historical." Our natural manner of sensing is biological and grows with us innately. But our historical way of seeing is shaped by our culture—but the modes of art we sympathize and become familiar with. Benjamin claims that classical cultures did not realize this distinction, but wiser now and more than modern, we might.
The tension betwixt natural and historical sense is also the tension between experiencing something and seeing it represented in a mechanical representation. He uses the instance of a mountain vista. We similar the thought of seeing mountains on a warm summer day, and because nosotros seek the "aura" of the real experience, we consume endlessly reproductions of it in photographs and magazines. And because the public desires equality and accessibility in the industrial age, photographic representations of the mountain become a more stable reality than the mount itself. But the photograph can never have the aureola of the original experience.
Four."… for the commencement time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the piece of work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. "
Art's office, Benjamin argues, is historically tied up with ritual, and ritual depends on the being of an original, authentic piece of art. Even though the same piece of art might go tied upwards in several different rituals over time, ritual remained an of import mode that viewers made sense of fine art. However, as mechanical reproduction increased, artists needed to find new justifications for art exterior of ritual—"art for art's sake." This attitude toward art denied that art had any social function.
This is the biggest hint that fine art in the historic period of mechanical reproduction has an even clearer social function than ever before. Freed of "parasitic" ritual (in which the piece of fine art is the authorization), art was at present costless to be a form of communication congenital from new contexts and orders. Art was produced non for ritual and then, just for reproduction. In this sense, art can only be political when it breaks free from the "aura," and this process is only possible via mechanical reproduction.
Five." Works of art are received and valued on dissimilar planes. "
While works of art in the past were the middle of ritual and therefore were primarily of "cult" value, mechanical works of fine art are the center of exhibition. When works are created for ritual, they office as a type of magic and tin can only be recognized as fine art over fourth dimension. Nonetheless, when works are created to be exhibited, they are considered works of fine art from the start.
Half dozen."The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the movie."
Benjamin recounts a cursory history of photography. The get-go popular photographs were portraits that allowed loved ones to become cult objects, particularly after their death. However, soon, photographs became visual prove of certain places at certain times. Soon, people need captions for photographs to tell them what they are seeing. Rather than being cult objects, photographs become new centers of pregnant; therefore, they take on special political significance.
Seven."Earlier much futile idea had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The principal question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised."
Benjamin discusses how photography made possible a language of pictures that "transformed the entire nature of art," and uses this section to transition into a give-and-take of motion-picture show as a new site of artistic significant.
Eight."The audience'due south identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. "
Benjamin dissects the difference between a stage role player's performance and a screen actor's functioning. The film role player performs differently than the stage player considering his audience is not present, putting them in a position of "critic" rather than spectator. The camera forces the perspective and position of the audience, and this becomes a crucial tool in establishing the relationship betwixt actor and audience in the medium of moving picture. Because the audience'due south perspective is fixed by the camera'south lens, there is no possibility for the kind of "cult value" Benjamin ascribes to earlier forms of fine art and portrait photography.
9."[West]hat matters primarily is that the role player represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else."
While the stage actor constructs the narrative of the play, the photographic camera constructs the narrative of a motion picture. Disparate moments are reassembled by mechanical means to tell a story, sometimes beyond the intentions of the film role player. The flick thespian, then, is prized for his realism and the extent to which he tin can successfully provide the cocky-operation necessary to the film's narrative. The camera fragments and disrupts the actor's "aura" through mechanical reproduction, replacing the presence of the role player with the presence of the camera. This presents a new infinite for artistic reproduction similar to that which Benjamin ascribes to the photograph. No longer must audiences believe in the reality of functioning to sympathise that performance as creative—now, audiences can gloat the performance as constructed, and judge its artistic value based on that construction.
X."At whatever moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer."
Benjamin discusses the politics of labor involved in filmed performance. Through the technology of film, the actor is able to translate his "mirror" paradigm to the public, simply this aureola-less reproduction is a mere commodity to which the actor has no more connection than a factor worker to the products of his labor. To supercede the aureola, film studios construct "cults of personality" which attempt to hibernate the movie'south status as a article. While film has revolutionary potential, the material conditions of its production in Western Europe limit its political value.
Film also has the potential to make its audience its stars. Like other forms of mass media that precede it, specifically, print journalism, newsreels offer every day audiences the potential for filmic representation. In addition, film audiences feel, similar sports fans, compelled to critic and comment on the matter they lookout man, which makes them experience like participants in the picture show'due south cosmos of significant. For this reason, Benjamin argues, the line between reader and writer in the 20thursday century has go considerably blurred. There is enormous power embedded in an audience's conception of themselves as co-authors of moving picture, and for this reason, the picture industry relies on spectacle and lark to neutralize film'south revolutionary potential.
XI."The equipment-free aspect of reality hither has become the acme of artifice; the sight of firsthand reality has become an orchid in the land of engineering."
Benjamin farther elaborates on film's creation of spectacle. He explains that a spectator watching the procedure of filming (rather than the flick itself) could only avoid seeing the tools of moving picture product by looking through the lens of the camera itself. Otherwise, being present during filming means seeing the tools of film production all around you. This is a major difference between phase and screen that we might have a sign that engineering science has finally brought about its own invisibility.
Benjamin reads this phenomenon in terms of rhetorical altitude. He contrasts painting and film using the illustration of the magician vs. the painter. The magician increases critical distance to perform his magical healing, whereas the surgeon closes the critical altitude between himself and his patient by literally penetrating his trunk. Painting also relies on mysticism and distance to create aesthetic value. Movie, on the other hand, closes the altitude between the existent and the imaginary and so completely that the imaginary appears real.
XII."The greater the decrease in the social significance of an fine art course, the sharper the distinction betwixt criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with disfavor."
Benjamin now turns to a discussion of the implications of mass production to popular culture. Paintings, he argues, could not have a mass audience because they could not be reproduced and publicly viewed. But because films are manufactured via reproduction, we must consider how the mass public reads these objects. Benjamin asserts that the public "uncritically enjoys" the conventional—the thing they are used to and familiar with—and responds with "disfavor" to annihilation new.
XIII."The camera introduces us to unconscious optics equally does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."
Benjamin implicitly asks his reader to turn down and resist the "uncritical enjoyment" of conventional film and instead look at how nosotros tin can apply this new technology to perform new kinds of critiques. Because the engineering science allows us to rewind, revist, tiresome down, or speed upwardly activity, sound, and feel, we can use the moving-picture show to "come across" as we've never seen before. Just every bit psychoanalysis asks u.s. to call up most and articulate the unthought and the unspoken, picture show asks us to see the unseen.
XIV."1 of the foremost tasks of art has always been the cosmos of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later."
Benjamin argues demands for new forms of artistic expression predate the development of moving-picture show, and that this is a pattern we tin can trace throughout history. Creative expression ever demands more than technology tin provide. In fact, fine art can be seen to push technological developments as information technology provides the ideological context for them. Art understands that new media eventually become normalized, then fine art always strives to push the available means of technology beyond its nowadays capabilities.
Fifteen."The public is an examiner, merely an absent one."
Benjamin concludes by request the public to consciously understand the processes by which they view film and "apperceive" or brand sense of the picture in terms of their pre-existing beliefs. This, according to his larger argument, is what a larger method of film criticism should consider. The chief danger of film is its ability to hypnotize its audience into acceptance via its hyperrealism. Public attention to and involvement in how a film constructs narrative, reality, time, and motion is necessary if film is to reach its revolutionary potential.
Further reading
T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919).
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
Marshall McLuhan, Agreement Media (1964).
Roland Barthes,Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980).
Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation (2000).
Source: https://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/old/content/walter-benjamin-photography-and-film.html
0 Response to "Art in the Age of Mechnical Reproduction Politics of Representation Representations of Politics"
Post a Comment