A brief analysis of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay: Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

“For contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.”                                                      
                                                                                                          - Walter Benjamin.

Walter Benjamin

In Marxist fashion, Benjamin sees the transformations of art as an effect of changes in the economic structure.  Art is coming to resemble economic production, albeit at a delayed pace. The movement from contemplation to distraction is creating big changes in how people sense and perceive. Historically, works of art had an ‘aura’ – an appearance of magical or supernatural force arising from their uniqueness (similar to manna). The aura includes a sensory experience of distance between the reader and the work of art. The aura has disappeared in the modern age because art has become reproducible. Think of the way a work of classic literature can be bought cheaply in paperback, or a painting bought as a poster. Think also of newer forms of art, such as TV shows and adverts. Then compare these to the experience of staring at an original work of art in a gallery, or visiting a unique historic building. This is the difference Benjamin is trying to capture.

The aura is an effect of a work of art being uniquely present in time and space. It is connected to the idea of authenticity. A reproduced artwork is never fully present. If there is no original, it is never fully present anywhere. Authenticity cannot be reproduced, and disappears when everything is reproduced. Benjamin thinks that even the original is depreciated, because it is no longer unique. Along with their authenticity, objects also lose their authority. The masses contribute to the loss of aura by seeking constantly to bring things closer. They create reproducible realities and hence destroy uniqueness.

The traditional work of art is experienced mainly through distanced contemplation. In declining bourgeois society, this became an asocial stance. In contrast, modern cultural forms such as photographs, TV shows and film do not lend themselves to contemplation.

Benjamin argues that distraction became an alternative to contemplation. Distraction is fundamentally social. It replaces the viewer’s thoughts by moving images, stopping the viewer from thinking. Benjamin criticizes the usual account whereby true art is contemplated and the masses seek only distraction. For Benjamin, contemplation is a kind of domination by the author: the work of art absorbs the audience. In contrast, distraction involves the audience absorbing the work of art. Reception of art now normally happens in a state of distraction, especially in the case of film. ‘The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one’.

The film actor, unlike stage performers, does not face or respond to an audience. “The film actor,” wrote Pirandello, “feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.”

The audience’s view also becomes synonymous with the imperious perspective accorded to the camera. The net effect of these innovations is to place the viewer in the impersonal position of critic—something prior cultic experiences of art would never have allowed.

The prevalence of film, as well as other mechanical reproductions, also creates a culture of minor experts ready to judge art rather than lose themselves in participatory ritual. Benjamin also notes that film relies on a series of cut and spliced images that must be assembled to form an aesthetic whole. Like Dadaist painting, film’s swift juxtapositions and movements strike the viewer violently, disrupting contemplation and easy consumption of the image. Susan Buck-Morss develops this point further, commenting that for Benjamin art must “restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them”.

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. So long as the movie-makers’ capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today’s film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art. We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property. However, our present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is the film production of Western Europe.

Film has revolutionized art and the senses. “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring common-place milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.

Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones “which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.” Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, it extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.”

The deep political and social significance of these reflections are developed briefly in Benjamin’s epilogue, wherein he recognizes in fascism a final and terrible instantiation of the L’art pour l’art (Art for Art’s sake) movement. As a form of extreme capitalism, fascism ultimately does not alter the structure of property relationships. Instead it substitutes aesthetic expression into the world of politics, thus supposedly allowing the masses the right to self-expression. The result is a reinstatement of the aura and cultic values into political life, a process which inevitably ends in war. In a chilling final paragraph Benjamin suggests that self-alienation within fascism has become so extreme that the destruction of humanity becomes an aesthetic experience.

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

                                                    

The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its ‘Fuhrer’ cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.

It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments. Still, Marinetti says in his manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war:

“For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic, accordingly we state:  War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dream—of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the ceasefire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others . . . Poets and artists of Futurism! . . remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art. . . may be illumined by them!”

“‘Fiat ars—pereat mundus,’ says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’. Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.”

The Concept of Art

If poetry is what you can’t translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then “art” is what you can’t define. Nevertheless it is certainly worth a try. Art covers such a wide range of human endeavour that it is almost more an attitude than an activity. With the passage of time, the boundaries of the meaning of art have expanded, gradually yet inexorably. Raymond Williams, the legendary cultural historian cited art as one of the ‘keywords’ – one that must be understood in order to comprehend the interrelationships between culture and society. As with ‘community’, ‘criticism’ and ‘science,’ for example, the history of the word “art” reveals a wealth of information about how our civilisation works. A brief review of that history will help us to understand how the relatively new art of film fits into the general pattern of art.

The ancients recognized seven activities as arts: History, Poetry, Comedy, Tragedy, Music, Dance and Astronomy. Each was governed by its own muse, each had its own rules and aims, but all seven were united by a common motivation: they were tools, useful to describe the universe and our place in it. They were methods of understanding the mysteries of existence and as such, they themselves took on the aura of those mysteries. As a result they were each somehow or the other related to religious activity. The performing arts celebrated the rituals; history recorded the story of the race; astronomy searched the heavens. In each of these seven classical arts we can discover the roots of contemporary cultural and scientific categories.

History for example, leads not only to the modern social sciences but also to prose narrative. Astronomy on the other hand represents the full range of modern science at the time as it suggests another aspect of social sciences in its astrological functions of prediction and interpretation. Under the rubric of poetry, the Greeks and Romans recognized three approaches: Lyric, Dramatic and Epic. All have yielded modern literary arts

By the thirteenth century however, the word “art” had taken on a considerably more practical connotation. The Liberal Arts curriculum of the medieval university still numbered seven components, but the method of definition had shifted. The literary arts of the classical period – History, Poetry, Comedy and Tragedy – had merged into a vaguely defined mix of literature and philosophy and then had been recorded according to analytical principles as Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic (the Trivium), structural elements of the arts rather than qualities of them. Dance was dropped from the list and replaced by Geometry, marking the growing importance of mathematics. Only Music and Astronomy remained unchanged from the ancient categories.

By the late seventeenth century, the range of the word had begun to narrow once again. It was increasingly applied to activities that had never before been included – painting, sculpture, drawing, architecture – what we now call the “Fine Arts”. The rise of the concept of modern science as separate from and contradictory to the arts meant that Astronomy and Geometry were no longer regarded in the same light as Poetry or Music.

By the late eighteenth century, the Romantic vision of the artist as specially endowed restored some of the religious aura that had surrounded the word in classical times. A differentiation was now made between “artist” and “artisan”. The former was creative and the latter simply a skilled workman.                

In the nineteenth century, as the concept of science developed, the narrowing of the concept of art continued, as if in response to that more rigorously logical activity. What had once been “natural philosophy” was termed “natural science”; the art of alchemy became the science of chemistry. The new sciences were precisely defined intellectual activities, dependent on rigorous methods of operation. The arts were therefore also more clearly defined. By the middle of this century, the word had more or less developed the constellation of connotations we know today. It referred first to the visual or ‘Fine’ arts, then more generally to literature and the musical arts. It could, on occasion be stretched to include the performing arts and, although in its broadest sense it still carried the medieval sense of skills, for most part it was strictly used to refer to more sophisticated endeavours. The romantic sense of the artist as a chosen one remained: “artists” were distinguished from “artisans” but also from “artistes” (performing artists) with lower social and intellectual standing.

With the establishment in the late nineteenth century of the concept of “social sciences”, the spectrum of modern intellectual activity was complete and the range of art had narrowed to its present domain. Those phenomena that yielded to study by the scientific method were ordered under the rubric of science and were strictly defined. Other phenomena, less susceptible to laboratory techniques and experimentation, but capable of being ordered with some logic and clarity, were established in the gray area of the social sciences (economics, sociology, politics, psychology and sometimes philosophy). The areas of intellectual endeavour that could not be fit into either the physical or the social sciences were left to the domain of art.

As the development of the social sciences necessarily limited the practical, utilitarian relevance of the arts – and probably in reaction to this phenomenon – theories of aestheticism evolved. With roots in the Romantic theory of the artist as prophet and priest, the “art for art’s sake” movement of the late Victorian age celebrated form over content and once more changed the focus of the world; they were now ends in themselves. Walter Pater declared that “all art aspires to the condition of music”. Abstraction – pure form – became the touchstone of the work of art and the main criterion by which works of art were judged in twentieth century (A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams).

The rush to abstraction accelerated rapidly during the first two–thirds of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century the avant-garde movement had taken the concept of progress from the developing industrial technologies and decided that some art must be more “advanced” than other art. The theory of the avant-garde which was a dominating idea in the historical development of the arts from the Romantic period until the late twentieth century – expressed itself best in terms of abstraction. In this respect the arts were mimicking the sciences and technology, searching the basic elements of their languages – the ‘quanta’ of painting or poetry or drama: the more abstract the work, the better it should reveal the basics.       

The Dada movement of the 1920s parodied this development. And the parody was echoed in the minimalist work of the mid twentieth century. This marked the end point of the struggle of the avant-garde toward abstraction. Having reduced art to its most basic quanta, the only choice for artists was to begin over again to rebuild the structures of the arts. This new synthesis began in earnest in the 1960s.

The end of the avant-garde fascination with abstraction came at the same time that political and economic culture was, in parallel, discovering the fallacy of progress and developing in its place a ‘steady-state’ theory of existence. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we might say that art made the transition quicker and easier than politics and economics.

The acceleration of abstraction, while it was certainly the main factor in the historical development of the arts during the twentieth century, was not the only one. The force that counters this aestheticism is our continuing sense of the political dimension of the arts: that is, both their roots in the community and their power to explain the structure of society to us.            

In Western culture, abstraction and reductionism faded away by 1970s, the political dimension of art – its social nature would increase in importance. Now, from the perspective of the twenty first century, it appears that it hasn’t – at least not to the degree we had expected. Instead, most of the arts, “film” chief among them, have settled into a period of commercial calm. There is an evident increase in the political and social quotient of most contemporary arts: you can see it in the mainstream influence of Rap music, the flowering of non fiction film, dozens of reality based TV channels, and even the YouTube revolution. However, the politics that these arts reflect hasn’t progressed much beyond the stage it had reached by 1970: more or less the same issues concern us now as then, except in some 3^rd World and mid-eastern countries. “Don’t kill the messenger” (and don’t blame the artist). And, while the artists have understood and accepted the passing of the avant-garde, the politicians haven’t yet freed themselves from dependence on the Left-Right dialectic that fed the logic of the avant-garde. So there is more politics in art – it’s just unsophisticated politics. Moreover, the explosion in the technology of arts since the mid 1970s has overshadowed and often displaced the renewed relevance that we expected.

This technology is the 3^rd basic factor that has determined the history of the arts during the past 100 years. Originally, the only way to produce art was in “real time”: the singer sang the song, the storyteller told the tale, the actors acted the drama. The development in prehistory of drawing and of writing represented a quantum jump in systems of communication. Images could be stored, stories could be preserved, later to be recalled exactly. For seven thousand years, the history of the arts was, essentially, the history of these two representative media: pictorial and literary. 

 References: Virginia Wexman 

                     James Monaco

                     Satyajit Ray

                                                                                                           

The Advent of Recording Media: Cinema

The development of recording media, different from representative media in kind as well as degree, was as significant historically as the invention of writing seven thousand years earlier. Photography, film and sound recording taken together shifted dramatically our historical perspective.

The representation arts made possible the re-creation of phenomena, but they required the complex application of the codes and conventions of languages. Moreover, those languages were manipulated by individuals and therefore the element of choice was and is highly significant in the representational arts. This element is the source of most of the aesthetics of the pictorial and literary arts. What interests aestheticians is not what is said but how it is said.

In stark contrast, the recording arts provide a much more direct line of communication between the subject and the observer. They do have their own codes and conventions, it’s true: a film or sound recording is not reality after all. But the language of the recording media is both more direct and less ambiguous than either written or pictorial language. In addition, the history of the recording arts has, until recently, been a direct progression toward greater verisimilitude (representation of reality). Colour film reproduces more of reality than does black and white; sound film is more closely parallel to actual experience than is silent; and so forth.

This qualitative difference between representational media and recording media is very clear to those who use the latter for scientific purposes. Anthropologists, for example are well aware of the advantages of film over the written word.

Film does not completely eliminate the intervention of a third party between the subject and the observer, but it does significantly reduce the distortion that the presence of an artist inevitably introduces. That is, until now. The application of digital technology to film and audio, which began to gather momentum in the late 1980s, points to a new level of discourse: one that is now revolutionizing our attitude toward the recording arts. Simply put, digital techniques like morphing and sampling destroy our faith in the honesty of the images and sounds we see and hear. The verisimilitude is still there – but we can no longer trust our eyes and ears.