11/22: Walter Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Chosen Passage: 

"The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room." - Walter Benjamin

Response:

The passage that I chose from Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" refers to the point in the essay where Benjamin begins discussing how photography has changed art. At this point he used a cathedral and a choral production as examples of art that have been pulled from their environment and placed into a foreign environment such as the studio and drawing room he refers to. This is owed to the reproducibility of these forms of art through photographic and recorded copies respectively. 

The reason I chose this particular passage was because of my previous post with Jünger and his reference to photography as something evil (Professor Murdaco also commented on this on that post I made). As he mentioned, after reading Benjamin, I did see the similarities between him and Jünger ideas on how technology has changed our ways of perceiving reality. While Benjamin doesn't directly refer to this being a negative thing, Jünger does basically outright say it (you can refer to my previous post on that). The point where they agree lies in the fact that technology has changed, and continues to change, everything in terms of how we view the world. The passage that I chose shows the way that something from another place in time and moment can be brought into our present time in our home. This was discussed in the lecture when referring to space and time. However, the primary reason that I chose this passage was because it made me think of a form of art we haven't discussed yet, which is hyperrealism. Hyperrealism is taking the traditional form of art such as painting and drawing and creating a work that looks as realistic as possible, to the point it is hard to distinguish it from a photograph.  

By Elizabeth Patterson

By Paul Cadden

by Juan Francisco Casas

These impressive works of art separate themselves from anything else we have seen by making us question our own perspective and really ask, is this a photograph? When looked in great detail we might see the small details, like the cross-hatching used for the shadowing and realize that it indeed is not a photograph. I've taken an art history class before where we examined the changes in art throughout history from the medieval, through the renaissance. This class we have looked at other forms of art like expressionist and dadaism. Benjamin discusses the different forms of art in the beginning of his essay and the fact that the age of reproduction has devalued them in various ways. Art is appreciated for many different reasons such as dadaism's unique "ugly" take and the work of the renaissance in its efforts to perfect the depiction of the human anatomy while also providing an "awe" element such as Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel work. Ultimately some people will tell you that there is nothing like seeing the real thing. While others might say the complete opposite and tell you it's not what they expected. This is particularly true for Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa which is a surprisingly small portrait that people can barely get close to even seeing at the Louvre in Paris. In this case people appreciate more the fact that this image is reproduced and can even be enlarged to better appreciate the artwork. The Sistine Chapel on the other hand is an enormous mural painted on a ceiling that one cannot even really imagine the difficulty of this task when Michelangelo was working on it and later on became nearly blind. The point is that overtime we have come to appreciate art for different reasons and sometimes reproduction has not taken away from the art but rather allowed us to appreciate it more because technology has helped restore it. 

Benjamin believes that this is not the case and in fact, photography in particular has devalued art that is produced by other means (hence the long rant at the beginning of the essay). Why would anyone paint a street anymore if you can just take a photograph of it is the question that lies beneath it all. Like the Cathedral in the Studio of an art lover that he mentions in my chosen passage, why find a need to visit it if you can have a photographic reproduction hanging on your wall? No need to spend money or time or effort fighting your way through hordes of tourist when you can enjoy the same exact thing (or not the same thing according to him) in your home. Can you see the negativity and nihilism in this? It is not that we no longer care about these amazing works of art now that we can have them hanging in our dens at home, its that no everyone has the means to tour the Sistine Chapel or stand in an impossibly huge crowd at the Louvre to see some amazing art. Jünger damns photography even more than Benjamin. However their views do intersect in this idea of the fact that photography does change the way we view reality. As I mentioned in my Jünger post, we are allowed to see life as it truly is more through photography than anything else. In the lecture the photograph of the collapsing fire escape made my heart stop for a moment as I see these kids falling into their deaths. Another photograph, and one of my personal favorites is the one below: 

By Robert C. Wiles 

This photograph is a very famous photo captured by Robert C. Wiles right after a girl committed suicide by jumping off I believe it was the observatory floor of the Empire State Building and landing on this car in an almost posed and angelic fashion. Another famous photograph is this: 

   

  

By Robert Browne

The image above was a famous photo taken in the 60's of a monk committing self immolation in protest. Photography such as these create a sense of shock of reality of the world that we see. It captures a moment in time that a painting does not capture nor a drawing can ever capture. It is a real moment in time. Of course at both points of each photograph, photography has advanced much more than when Benjamin was around and today photography has reached even new levels as we can photograph microscopic organisms through microscopes, things unseen by the naked eye. Photography has opened new doors into our consciousness as we now can see beyond what we normally would be able to. It doesn't alter reality but captivates it in a way that was never done before. 

Now going back to Hyperrealism, (I didn't forget about that!) it seems that now we are trying to find ways to create art that embraces photography by trying create art that looks like a photograph such as the water on a windshield by Elizabeth Patterson. Instead of damming photography as replacing art that is done by hand and with effort we are upping our own skills as artist by trying to create something so realistic that it makes us question what it is that we truly are looking at. So going back to Jünger, are we then trying to recreate a "magical possession" through art that looks like photographs? Why are we trying to hard to make everything look as realistic as possible? These are all questions I don't have an answer to but they do make me think about the way reality is perceived. A hyperrealistic artist can most likely recreate the photographs of the two suicides above but what makes these photographs so special is the fact that they were captured in the moment that they occurred, they were not moments conceived by the mind, these are real people in real situations. So sure, I don't believe that photography takes away from the art itself but rather takes away from the experience of the art. We travel thousands of miles to see magnificent things, not because we haven't seen them in countless expensively high-gloss printed books, but because we can to have the experience to see the ceiling Michelangelo stroked his brushes upon, the canvas that shows the tiny cracks of paint from when Leonardo Da Vinci painted and the size that he chose to paint in. Photography can take away from the experience of something but at the same time provide another kind of experience by showing you a moment that a painter or any other kind of artist would not be able to instantly capture. Hyperrealistic art is not of the moment either, that is were we know it is not a photograph but the techniques used are in admiration of what photography is capable of doing. 

The nihilism that underlines the thoughts of both Jünger and Benjamin are quiet obvious and in a way it is a small scale revolt towards technology. A revolt is when people fight to change things to a prior point in time while a revolution is more about changing something into something else, something new. Jünger and Benjamin seem to want to go back in time in a way, before technology of reproduction existed, they want to retain the experiences of art and moments as they are rather than accepting photography as a positive revolutionary invention that will allow us to capture moments for future generations to learn about.