Ch. 5 - Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction PDF

Preview

Summary

This is a summary on the Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction from the "Pratices of Looking" for the HUMI 16 class, Spring 2021. These problems were of special concern to Walter Benjamin, a German critic of the 20th century who still has some influence on his work today. Benjamin suggested in...

Description

Ch. 5 - Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction Class: HUMI16 Spring 2021 - Summary Book: Practices of Looking 3rd ed., Marita Sturken Chapter: Ch. 5 — Visual Technologies, Reproduction, and the Copy Date: 05/9/2021 Short Description: This is a summary on the Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction from the "Pratices of Looking" for the HUMI 16 class, Spring 2021. These problems were of special concern to Walter Benjamin, a German critic of the 20th century who still has some influence on his work today. Benjamin suggested in his 1936 article, "The Artwork in the Era of Mechanical Reproductions" that there is no genuinely original image in photography and cinematics. Instead, there are copies (prints) that replace the singular initial in the same way. Benjamin condemned the importance placed on the original in the patriarchal system for reifying works of art as commodities.

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction These issues were of particular interest to Walter Benjamin, a twentieth-century German critic whose work remains remarkably influential today. In his 1936 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin proposed that in photography and motion picture film, there is no truly unique image. Rather, there are copies (prints), each of which stands equally in the place of the singular original. Benjamin criticized the prior emphasis on the original for reifying the artwork as commodity in a capitalist system. With reproducibility an integral feature of the medium, the capitalist system of the valued singular object could be challenged. Reproducibility was a potentially revolutionary quality of art practice because it freed art from its market status as revered unique artifact. Art, newly understood as existing in reproducible and broadly circulating forms, could be a democratizing force and could now be used for a more fluid socialist politics that included reception by the masses. Reproduction no longer lessened the value of replicas or faked copies. Inherently reproducible forms could become much

more pervasively recognized and valued in their own right, transforming art-making and art-marketing practices dramatically. Reproducibility moved the artwork away from the centuries-long emphasis on uniqueness and authenticity, and yet the concept of the aura still held strong. Benjamin wrote that “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.” It is precisely this “presence in time and space” that Benjamin refers to as giving the original an aura, which he ties to its authenticity. Traditionally, authenticity refers to that which is true and real. The term also refers to an enduring, timeless quality, such as “authentically” classical beauty, a quality we discuss in Chapter 3 in a discussion about a Keri lotion advertisement and the Ingres painting it references. In Benjamin’s terms, the original artwork’s authenticity cannot be reproduced. The idea of the valuable, original artwork remains a foundation of the art market, affirming Benjamin’s concept of the aura. Despite the fact that replicas and multiple copies of paintings have existed throughout art history, the valuing of the unique artwork is key to art’s financialization. Continuing concerns about forgeries and fakes in museums and private collections highlight the material value of the original in an era dominated by copies. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, connoisseurs were responsible for authenticating artworks, as they were trusted to know the real thing when they saw it. Some authenticators licked, smelled, and touched the painting for evidence of material likeness to other works by the same painter. Sleuthing involved noting depicted elements that are from the era (the wrong style of clothing, for example, would indicate a possible fake). By the middle of the twentieth century, forgery detection entered the domain of laboratory science, with chemical analysis of paint and paper introduced to determine the use of materials from later time periods, and X-ray imaging, CT scanning, and infrared examination used to determine underlying paint layers and structural changes or repairs. Spectrophotometry is a laboratory process used to date pigment by analyzing its chemical composition. Authentication practices thus moved from personalized skill and empirical assessment (through smell and taste) to scientific data produced by machines. In recent years, several high-profile forgery cases have highlighted the possibility that many so-called authenticated works are fakes. In 2011, the respected New York Knoedler Gallery closed after 165 years of business when it was revealed that it had sold at least thirty-two modern art forgeries. They were produced by a Chinese immigrant working in Queens and sold to the gallery by a dealer.

As the global art market continues to value unique modern artworks as forms of economic investment and cultural capital, the forgery market continues to coexist with it. Benjamin noted that an original artwork’s meaning changes when it is reproduced, because its subsequent value comes not from its uniqueness but rather from its status as being the original from which copies derive. Reproduction thus plays an essential role in the dissemination of knowledge about an original work and the maintenance of its value. It is commonplace today for famous paintings to be reproduced in art books and on websites, posters, postcards, coffee mugs, and T-shirts. Exposure to original artworks remains a relatively rarefied experience, an option for those with the means and the incentive to travel to the museums and collections in which highly valued originals are displayed. Reproducibility thus means that viewers may come to know, love, and even own a copy of a valued work without ever having seen the original in which meaning and value are still understood to reside. The reproduction, paradoxically, becomes the form through which meaning and value are maintained in original works. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (known in Italian as “La Giocanda”), a portrait believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506, is one of the most famous, and most visited, paintings in the world. It is known to most people through its many reproductions in art books and on postcards, calendars, refrigerator magnets, and other trinkets. As we noted in Chapter 1, the original painting is on display at the Louvre, behind bulletproof security glass. Over 3 million people flock to see it each year, standing before it fifteen seconds each on average. Even those who have never seen the original have seen its reproductions. Christie’s auction house, discussing Andy Warhol’s reproduction of the icon in his Colored Mona Lisa (1963), has called the painting the “ultimate Pop icon.”16 The painting has been subject to countless parodies and remakes. For instance, in 1919 Marcel Duchamp took a cheap postcard version of the painting and drew a moustache and goatee on the famous portrait. This was one of numerous “readymades” that Duchamp produced, deploying a satirical irreverence that was characteristic of Dada art. He named the work L.H.O.O.Q., which when spoken quickly in French sounds like “elle a chaud au cul,” vulgar slang for “she has a hot ass.” As we noted in Chapter 1, the smile can have many different meanings, and historically the Mona Lisa’s smile has been seen as enigmatic. Duchamp recoded that smile as sexual and made lewd insinuations about the model, stripping away the reverence surrounding this icon. Later, the French Surrealist painter Salvador

Dalí paid homage to Duchamp’s prank by also remaking the Mona Lisa, giving her his own famous moustache. Two years after Warhol made his Colored Mona Lisa screen print, a Mona Lisa reproduction was one of the first images to be scanned and digitally reproduced on a computer in 1965, along with a portrait of computer scientist Norbert Wiener, who famously introduced cybernetics in his 1948 book Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The Mona Lisa remains fascinating, and science has been marshaled to tell its story. It has been subject to intensive forensic examination, for example, by the French scientist Pascal Cotte, whose examination of the work through a multispectral imaging camera revealed forms painted on the poplar board underneath the layer that contains the famous portrait. Cotte was portrayed by the media as using science to get the Mona Lisa to “reveal her secrets,” a trope sometimes used to describe scientists’ revelations about the human body and nature. The media attention to Cotte’s study suggests that although contemporary society is saturated with reproduced and mass-produced images, reverence for the original continues to hold strong. Visual technology becomes a means of confirming the truth of the original or of uncovering its previously hidden truths. The currency of scientific imaging in the twentieth-first century is contingent on the ability of such techniques to provide authentication and further information, shoring up the value of the unique work through techniques that analyze it as a physical object. Value thus rests not solely in the work’s uniqueness but also in its aesthetic, cultural, and social worth as a material and historical artifact. In the case of the Mona Lisa, this fascination with evidence of the real has extended to a fascination with the body of the model. In 2015, the international news reported with great excitement that bones suspected to be the skeleton of Lisa Gherardini, believed by some historians to have been the model for the Mona Lisa, had been unearthed from beneath a convent in Florence. Plans for DNA testing and a comparison of the skull with the head in the portrait were jettisoned when it was realized that the remaining skull fragments had deteriorated. As these examples make clear, images are still valued as original works with unique auras, even as their multiplicity undercuts that status. Digital images have no original— digital copies are of relatively equal quality and value. However, Benjamin’s points remain valid today: the reproduction of a singular image (such as a painting) can affect the meaning and value of that original, and the reproducibility of an image changes its relationship to rituals of display and the work’s social uses and value on the market....