The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

1. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Lecture from Terri Senft Delivered 20 February 2006Module:Digital Media Culture School of Media, Communications and Screen Studies University of East London Questions? tsenft@gmail.com

2. Talk Breakdown • Plato, the Sophists and the cave • Aristotle, mimesis and mimicry • Politics as art versus art as politics • Futurism to Fascism • Contemplation and Distraction • Brecht and Alienation • Case study: realistic war sims

3. Plato’s cave

4. Aristotle’s Poetics • Mimicry: representation for its own ends • sophistry • Mimesis: representation in the service of truth • Aristotle argued that a citizenry educated through mimesis was a good and responsible citizenship • A argued for catharsis as a purging device in civilized society • Important: only citizens could attend the mimetic presentations (theatre) of A’s day. The ‘masses’ were not allowed to participate.

5. Mimesis is about Politics as Art • The most extreme example of this is the contemporary notion of art for art’s sake. How? • Benjamin would say its because to state something is apolitical (that is, for its own sake) is the most political gesture of all: it is the embrace of the status quo!

6. Futurism to Fascism • Futurists (circa WW1) attempted to shock their audiences by celebrating modernization and the technological as art. • In a sense, war as the ultimate expression of technology, and thus, the ultimate expression of art. • Fascists like M. and H. take up this celebration toward their own ends, aestheticizing war through fashion, film, music and propaganda. • Benjamin is reacting to this historical fact.

7. Benjamin and Art • Benjamin wants to re-politicize art for the masses by celebrating mimicry over mimesis. • Where traditionalists mourn the passing of elitist art for art’s sake, and Futurists still play with the aesthetics of shock, Benjamin sees ordinary film spectatorship as providing opportunities for the masses to wake up from their slumber and claim their rightful due in society. • How does he see this happening?

8. Art as utility Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

9. Presence, Authority and Aura • The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. • What is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. • That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.

10. Aura and Distance • We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. • Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.

11. Breaking Ritual • for the first time in 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.

12. From Alienation to Alienation Effect • Alienation = Marx’s term for the estrangement of workers from the means and fruits of their production • Alienation effect = Brecht’s term for an artistic attempt to wake the masses up to their estrangement.

13. Benjamin on Alienation in Film: The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera…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.

14. Film changes art • Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. • Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.

15. Film as mental travel • 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 traveling.

16. Contemplation v. Distraction • A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it • Here, art is the subject, man is its object. • In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. • Here, man is the subject, art is man’s object.

17. War & Aesthetics • All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. • The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ. • Instead of instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

18. Fascism and 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.

19. Communism and Art • Communism responds by politicizing art.