The Work of Art in the Age

Walter Benjamin – WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION

I In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artefact could always be imitated by men. Copying is a practice and the mechanical reproduction of a work of art is something new. The Greeks knew only two procedures : founding and stamping. The different change come within prints and lithography. Lithography enable graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But then photography came, and the eye is much faster than the hand. Also the sound film the age mechanical reproduction started. The reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form.

II Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced form the situation of the original. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and not only technical – reproducibility. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. The liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.

III Human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. It’s not only by nature but also by historical circumstances as well. The concept of aura which reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. This images makes it easy to comprehend the social based of the contemporary decay of the aura. The desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

IV The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. The unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basic in ritual, the location of its original use value. For the first time in de world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

V Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. Today the cult value would seem to demand that the work of art remain hidden. With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products.

VI In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

VII The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. Earlier much futile thought had been devoted to the question of whether photography is an art. The primary question – whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art – was not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked the same ill-considered question with regard to the film.

VIII This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

IX For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances.

X 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. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. Any man today can lay claim to being filmed. This claim can best be elucidated by a comparative look at the historical situation of contemporary literature. Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.

XI the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. How does the cameraman compare with the painter? Thus, 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.

XII Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses.

XIII The characteristics of the film lie not only in the manner in which man presents himself to mechanical equipment but also in the manner in which, by means of this apparatus, man can represent his environment. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film. 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. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

XIV One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial – and literary – means the effects which the public today seeks in the film. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations.

XV The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

Jos de Mul - THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL RECOMBINATION 2009

Media used here in the broad sense as ‘means for presenting information’, are not innocent means. Media are interfaces. Aesthetic experience us no exception: artistic media are interfaces that not only structure the imagination of the artist, but the work of art and the aesthetic reception as well.

Benjamin’s text connect to economics, politics and religion. Connecting these and yet other domains, it deals with a fundamental ontological change, a transformation on human experience., closely connected with the mechanization of the reproduction of nature and culture.

The invention of photography and film that mechanical reproduction became the dominant cultural interface. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. The ‘aura’ give the uniqueness of the work of art, and can be easily become an object of a magical or religious cult. The location of its original of its use value.

Exhibition value is about glamour, fame, popularity. Meaning is relational. Between the physical materiality of the work of art and its meaningful history. One of the basic claims of Benjamin’s ‘The work of art’ is that in the age of mechanical reproduction by means of print, photography and film, we experience a radical loss of aura. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. Mechanical reproduction of images brings things closer, spatially and temporally. Uniqueness and permanence of the auratic object are being replaced by transitoriness and reproducibility. ‘To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility'. (ibid)

These ‘cheats’ only confirm the loss of the aura of the work itself. However, that does not mean mechanical copy doesn’t have value at all. Photography and film, the cult value gives way to exhibition value, which is precisely situated in the endless reproduction of the copies.

Benjamin expresses his belief that the mechanical media possess a fundamental democratic and even revolutionary potential. Not only do they enable ‘access for all’, they also enable the progressive artist to ‘politicize the arts’ and mobilize the masses against the fascist ‘anesthetization of politics’. We should keep this fundamental ambiguity of the development of media in mind when we turn our attention to digital recombination.

Although the computer can simulate all kinds of classical mechanical machines and media, such as a typewriter a sound recorder or a device for the montage of images, it has some unique medium-specific characteristics that justify the claim that is represents a new stage in the development of media.

Database ontology is dynamic, because the data elements can be constantly combined, decombined, and recombined. The current development of database models shows a tendency to even more flexibility and rapidly growing range of applications. Database often function as material metaphors. In addition, databases may create a surplus of meaning, on top of their instrumental function. In that case the database functions as a conceptual metaphor which structures our experience of ourselves and of the world. As Manovich states, databases have become the dominant cultural form of the computer age.

Benjamin suggest, ‘by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value of the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental’.

In the age of digital recombination, the value of an object depends on the extent of its openness for manipulation. An autonomous work of art is its manipulation value. The aesthetic quality of a work strongly depends on the elegance of the structure of the database and its user interface.

Digital recombination brings the return of the aura. Especially in those cases where the user is enabled to change the contents of the database and to insert new element in the database, each query becomes a unique recombination. Its ritual dimension. Now no longer located in the history of the work, but in its virtuality, that is; the intangible totality of possible recombination.

The return is with a twist; what we experience is a series of ‘original, auratic copies’. The object are more transient than mechanical reproductions. Because of their manipulability, digital objects seem to be inherently unstable, like the performing arts process rather than product. Database ontology is not restricted to the domain of culture, but applies to nature as well. Digital recombination as a means of production is no less political than mechanical reproduction.

Digitally recombined works of art differ from other digitally recombined objects because they have a reflective quality as well. Work of art are not political because they manipulate politics, but because they reflect (on) the politics of manipulation.

Benjamin worries about the fact that mechanical reproduction alienates human beings. Realizing the possibility that we might be the first species that creates its own successors in the evolution of life by doing so makes itself redundant, Benjamin’s worries may soon become an object for nostalgia.