One-Way Street

Flaubert: In the World, Out of Time

2009-11-06T09:16:09-06:00

Sorry about the infrequent postings lately. I've started a new job this week and things have been pretty hectic.

The last time we talked we were discussing the flâneur as a literary figure. The flâneur embodies a mobile point of view. He is the opposite of the distracted viewer. His devotion to seeing is so complete that he has, in effect, a kind of double vision. He is an investigator, but he knows that he cannot fully plumb the depths of mysteries. He is a connoisseur of fine things, yet he also knows their essential emptiness, because he is empty too. The flâneur can empathize equally well with people and objects. He is the perfect novelist.

In many ways the modernist novel begins with this scene from Flaubert's A Sentimental Education.

There was firing from every window overlooking the square; bullets whistled through the air; the fountain had been pierced, and the water, mingling with blood, spread in puddles on the ground. People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Frederic felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers kept coming up, driving the fighters toward the guard-house. The firing became more rapid. The wine-merchants' shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to the fight. A stray dog started howling. This raised a laugh.

The novel's hero Frederic is on his way to meet his mistress for their first assignation. All his romantic yearnings have culminated in this day. Unfortunately for Frederic, he scheduled his tryst on the day the July Revolution broke out, and he's extremely irritated that the mayhem is preventing him from reaching his mistress.

The telling detail here is the lifeless hand upon which Frederic steps. This detail ruptures the procession of details both innocuous and telling. The dead sergeant's hand is one of those small details that carries the full force of the real. Frederic may be a dreamy fool, but there's really a war going on.

Flaubert was the first novelist who allowed his characters to walk around simply observing things. The early chapters in A Sentimental Education contain several observational sketches as Frederic walks around Paris.

Besides the primacy of vision in his fiction, what makes Flaubert so modern is his way of handling details. On a per page basis Balzac probably stuffed more observed details into his novels than Flaubert. However, Balzac was content merely to accumulate details. His novels are great department stores, poems of display. His characters are fish swimming in an early capitalist sea, propelled forward by pure, insatiable desire.

Flaubert's novels are chapter after chapter of little boutiques. His details aren't simply seen; they are processed by a mind attracted, but not irresistibly so, by the thinginess of the world. The minds of Flaubert's characters feel older than the worlds they inhabit. Like the flâneur, the last incarnation of the 18th-century dandy, his characters' attitudes are out of date. Frederic, for instance, seems out of place in the country, where nothing ever changes, and the city, where everything seems to have changed all at once.

Frederic, the old flâneur, outlives his ideals, yet doesn't live quite long enough for his irony to coalesce into a way of being. He's too late for Romanticism, too early for Modernism.

The Flâneur in Bleak House

2009-11-03T09:54:36-06:00

Walter Benjamin constructed the figure of the flâneur from the writings of his friend Franz Hessel, as well as Baudelaire, Poe, Balzac, Dickens and Marx in his writings on commodity fetishism. The flâneur is a historical type, as we saw in my previous post, but he is also a mode of experience, a literary motif, and a means to see into commodity culture.

Benjamin started his elaboration of the flâneur from George Simmel’s observation that "interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear." For the flâneur, Benjamin writes, “the joy of watching is triumphant.” Mostly what the flâneur watched was the city itself. Flâneurie arose at the same time as the early novels of metropolitan life produced by restless, expansive urbanites like Balzac and Dickens. In their novels the city is a landscape, alternately familiar and alienating, comforting and dangerous.

Dickens used to roam around London at night, not an entirely safe activity, and the labyrinthine mysteriousness of the city appears most directly in Bleak House. The novel’s narrator as a flâneur whose freely ranging yet penetrating gaze permits us to see what the naïve eye Esther Summerson cannot. For a moment in the remarkable chapter 48 the flâneur assumes the guise of the moon as it gazes down upon the city and illuminates the shocking murder of Tulkinghorn.

Dickens showed the late Romantic strain of the flâneur, at once fastidious and macabre. Balzac, on the other hand, revealed the flâneur’s sociological bent. Dickens dramatizes the act of looking at the city; Balzac philosophizes it. Take, for instance, the opening lines of Balzac’s Facino Cane:

I walked the streets to observe the manners and ways of the faubourg, to study its inhabitants and learn their characters. Ill-dresses as the workmen themselves, and quite as indifferent to the proprieties, there was nothing about me to put them on their guard. I mingled in their groups, watched their bargains, heard their disputes, at the hour when their day’s work ended. The facility of observation had become intuitive with me; I could enter the souls of others, while still conscious of their bodies,--or rather, I grasped external details so thoroughly that my mind instantly passed beyond them; I possessed, in short, the faculty of living the life of the individual on whom I exercised my observation, and of substituting myself for him, like the dervish in the Arabian Nights who assumed the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words.

Here is the flâneur as undercover cop. He not only passes unnoticed, he can revels in his powers of empathy. He is the perfect guide to the still new phenomenon of the large industrial city. Under his guidance we see the city as one half novel of manners, one half vast criminal conspiracy.

In Balzac and Dickens the flâneur’s powers of exacting observation and empathy remain firmly in the service of a story. Everything they observe fits into a larger whole. The figure of the flâneur assumes a more self-conscious and modernist form in Flaubert and Baudelaire. In these two writers flâneurie becomes not just simply a way of seeing, but also a way of writing.

More on Flaubert and Baudelaire and the figure of the flâneur in my next posts.

A Turtle on a Leash

2009-10-28T11:34:30-05:00

If “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the best known by-product of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the best known figure to emerge from his study of nineteenth-century Paris was the flâneur. The term is now used to describe someone adrift in the city, a detached observers strolling through the streets at a leisurely pace. According to a Wikipedia entry, the flâneur is a term used in architecture and city planning to describe “those who are indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing.” In other words, people who take in their environments in a distracted manner.

This description couldn’t be further from the flâneur either as an historical figure or as a literary motif. The historical figure of the flâneur was the result of two developments in urbanism. One was the growth of the urban crowd. As early as 1798 the Parisian police fretted about the increased density of people on the streets. A police agent reported in October of that year, “It is almost impossible to summon and maintain good moral character in a thickly massed population where each individual, unbeknownst to all the others, hides in the crowd, so to speak, and blushes before the eyes of no one.” This was the period in which the city’s traditional sins—licentiousness, deviousness, ruthless self-interest, foul odors—assume a mass and anonymous form. For the first time, the sheer size of the city was a threat to the individual. At the same time, however, the urban masses provided camouflage for the flâneur. The anonymity of the masses freed him to move about without anyone paying any undue attention to him.

The second development in urbanism leading to the rise of flâneurie was the construction of the Paris arcades in the early nineteenth century. The arcades offered a respite from the bustling crowd outside. Dandies began to frequent the fashionable arcades, taking in the sights and offering themselves up as spectacles in their own right. Around 1839, Benjamin reports, it was fashionable to walk through the arcades with a turtle on a leash in order to enforce the slow pace really determined looking required.

The flâneur walked a fine line between the teaming masses of the great industrial city and the bourgeoisie protected by its private interests. The flâneur's ambiguous social position gave him a kind of dual vision. For him the city is "now landscape, now room," as Benjamin puts it, adding, “The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of the houses as a citizen within his four walls." The flâneur had a keen eye for the phantasmagoria of public space, where all distinctive characteristics, all traces of unique personality, have seeped out of the individual and into the commodity. If the flâneurs were useless and nonproductive, that was because the luxury goods for sale in the Paris arcades had no use value. The flâneurs were the first to express the notion that a complete lack of utilitarian value could be a social statement. In other words, the flâneur was the first sign of the slow death of the commodity's use value.

The Arcades Project was originally conceived as an exercise in flâneurie. In 1927 Benjamin published a review of Franz Hessel’s memoir Spazieren in Berlin entitled “The Return of the Flâneur.” Benjamin and Hessel briefly planned to collaborate on an essay about flâneurie, a dead form by that time. Flâneurie, like the Paris arcades themselves, flourished only for a brief period. The wide boulevards created by Haussmann starting in the 1870s destroyed the narrow streets that were the natural habitat of the flâneur. By then the city crowds had grown too big, urban phenomenon too overwhelming. The flâneurs lost another home when the arcades fell out of fashion. Flâneurie isn’t possible in a department store. The flâneur as an historical figure ended ignobly. According to Benjamin, “the last stand of the flâneur” was the decrepit figure wearing sandwich board advertisements.

However, as a literary motif, flâneurie had a longer and more robust existence. More on that in my next post.

A House of Dreams

2009-10-26T11:32:47-05:00

The poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in the introduction to his translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Philosophy of Furniture (1852), asks, “Who among us, in his idle hours, has not taken a delicious pleasure in constructing for himself a model apartment, a dream house, a house of dreams?” We dream of ideal houses to this day. Thousands of magazines, books, and websites are dedicated to helping us construct dream houses. However, we have very different dreams about ideal houses than they did in Baudelaire’s and Poe’s day.

“The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling,” Walter Benjamin wrote in the Arcades Project. The nineteenth century “conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case . . . embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.”

But by the 1930s the idea of dwelling had changed. The 19th century’s strict divide between public and private began to break down. Instead of a place of consolation for the travails of early capitalism, by the mid-20th century the home had become a place of rational convenience as appliances gradually took over for domestic servants. In the 19th century furniture and household objects were generally simple and durable, and people formed deep attachments to them, handing them down to succeeding generations. By the 20th century mass produced furniture and domestic objects flooded the home, making it harder to form attachments to them. The home was less of a refuge than a worksite for entrapped housewives vacuuming and dusting all their stuff. At the same time, changes in home fashions rendered once cherished objects obsolete. The shag carpeting and avocado appliances in my childhood home have no meaning other than embarrassment.

My parents don’t live there anymore, and all the traces of our 15 years there have been erased. Because the house was built in 1970 rather than 1950, it hasn’t been torn down yet, but eventually it will be demolished to make way for a larger and better-equipped house, whether anyone needs one or not. Rational convenience has tipped over into something irrational. Americans have kitchens outfitted with vast expanses of granite and restaurant-quality appliances, yet we're spending less time preparing food than ever before. How many of these gleaming spaces produce anything more elaborate than microwave popcorn?

In new homes size conveys comfort, historical styles convey stability. And yet the American home is a profoundly transient place. Susan Susanka, the Minneapolis architect and co-author of The Not So Big House book series urges us to create houses that “express the way we actually live,” which, in reality, means living as if we were going to hand our house over to someone else tomorrow. Resale value trumps all domestic comforts. Houses are not designed to be lived in by a family of four on a Tuesday in May, but for an MLS listing sometime in the future. The more affluent we are, the more likely we are to move, and the more likely we are to buy a house as if someone else is going to live there. The American home is a commodity like any other, forever ready to be passed on to its next owner. This is why every twenty-first century two-bedroom condo in every major American city has granite countertops in the kitchen: not because they’re universally appreciated for their functionality, but because they enhance resale value. Developers know this better than anybody, and it’s easy for them to ignore municipal misgivings about neo-Gothic details on a three-car garage. They’re not building homes, they’re building assets. Baudelaire wouldn't been surprised: our dream homes are still inside our heads.

Fun Friday

2009-10-23T12:11:08-05:00

At the end of every week my family has "Fun Friday," an evening of pizza, popcorn, and movies. My kids are age two and five, so the movies are invariably animated and the pizza cheese only. (I make a pizza with grownup toppings for my wife and me.) In the spirit of Fun Friday, here are some tasty items for your own Fun Friday.

Michael Hulse, who translated Herta Müller into English, says the 2009 Nobel Prize winner may be obscure, but not to everyone everywhere. Only four or five of her novels have been translated into English, yet all of them have been translated into Polish, for instance. Shamefully few novels are translated into English, Hulse says, and the ones left behind are usually dismissed as too difficult or too culturally specific. He also argues that since English is the most international of languages, it should disseminate works from less widely-spoken languages (Swedish, Estonian, etc) through translation.

Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's biography of the Gilded Age architect Grosvenor Atterbury has just appeared. (Buy here, read about here.) Atterbury apprenticed at McKim, Mead & White, where he learned how to design houses as a long series of rolling bays sheltered by a deep shingled roof, a prototype of the McMansion style. He was also the architect for Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, developed as part of the Garden City movement: curving streets, green parks, compact lots, mixed housing types.

Alain de Botton has a weakness for tough-minded philosophers. He introduces La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the 17th-century book that gave the French their taste for philosophical reflection. La Rochefoucauld's brand of bracing skepticism is laid out in forceful, sometimes sardonic aphorisms. He was equally unsentimental about helping others ("We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others") and falling in love ("There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard that there was such a thing").

After abandoning the cinema for years, Peter Greenaway is back with J'Accuse, a Dan Brown-style examination of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. (A still from the film is at top.) Greenaway argues that a murder has been committed before our eyes in the painting, and all 34 characters in the painting are suspects. If J'Accuse isn't playing at a theater near you and you've never seen a Greenaway film, for your own Fun Friday watch Drowning by Numbers (1988) and/or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) for a good introduction to his work. But send the kids to bed first.

Announcements:

Half Gallery in New York City will hold an opening reception for its Ry Fyan show on Monday, October 26. Details here. (At left: Fyan's The Reasons I Can't..., [2009])

Guernica magazine, a terrific art and politics journal, will host a Guernica at 5! benefit on Wednesday, October 28 in Brooklyn. Among those making an appearance are Jonathan Ames, the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, and the 3-piece band Brazilian Girls (only one woman, and no one is Brazilian, in case you were wondering). Details here.

The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO will hold a Portraits Exhibition starting November 6 and ending on the 28th. The exhibit is juried by Mary Ellen Mark. Among the 2,500 images from seven different countries on display is a portrait by Whitney Yeager, a talented photographer who also happens to be my sister-in-law. Her contribution is at left.

Metropolis magazine has issued a call for entries for its 2010 Next Generation Design Competition. The theme is One Design Fix for the Future. Come up with one design for an object that will have a positive positive impact in the future and you could win $10,000.

Speaking of competitions, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture won the competition to design Rotterdam’s Stadskantoor, a multi-use municipal building in OMA's home town. Reinier de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas designed the proposal. De Graaf says, "Rather than posing as the city's next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right."

How Do I Look?

2009-10-22T10:44:09-05:00

There are a number of concepts in Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but the two most important are distraction as a mode of reception and the mechanical reproduction of artworks. Architecture, as we have seen, is experienced in a state of distraction. But what about architecture and reproducibility? Benjamin has much to say about the relationship between art and photography, but what about the relationship between photography and architecture?

We have many photographs of the exteriors of nineteenth-century buildings, but relatively few images from their interiors, especially the interiors of middle-class homes. One reason may have something to do with the trace, Benjamin’s term for the impression left on objects by human activity. “If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s,” Benjamin explains,

for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive from it may well be, “You've got no business here.” And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark--the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the monogrammed antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire.

The inhabitant’s marks on the objects of a room are traces, residues of a life. This is why whenever something breaks, we get angry because a trace has been lost forever.

It’s not that traces can’t be captured by photography. Rather, in order to create a reproducible image, one that would be of interest to the public, it is necessary to eliminate all traces of particular individual’s daily life.

Modernist architecture views the trace the same way as photography does. Benjamin writes, "This is what has now been achieved by the new architects, with their glass and steel: they have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces." Benjamin declares that the “new” architecture—i.e., Modernist architecture, a term he never uses—will “transform humanity utterly.” By this he means that Modernist architecture will make bourgeois life more transparent, less inward-looking—in short, more politically engaged. The Paris arcades were an exemplary space in this regard because they were public spaces that were as comfortable as private ones. The arcades were the family room turned inside out.

However, after World War II the “new” architecture became the International Style, which became international because the style lent itself to being photographed. A new kind of photographer appeared during this time: the architectural photographer. The box cameras they used generally used black and white stock, the perfect vehicle for International Style buildings, with their boxy, unornamented shapes and translucent facades. Furthermore, Modernist buildings were unified images, with all traces of past use strictly eliminated.

Later, color photography popularized Post-Modernist architecture, with its colorful bricolages of past styles. Architectural elements became so many images to be manipulated to fit into a larger whole, ready to be photographed for later use in marketing materials. The Greek column, for instance, lost its ritual value as an element in a temple, and has become a decorative feature to be strewn about a building anywhere an architect pleases. Arthur Erickson even dispensed with the column’s structural function in his Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC (1989; at left).

Since World War II architecture has increasingly de-emphasized functional and symbolic values. Large commercial and public buildings are now designed primarily to be photographed. Like actresses in Hollywood films, they are always ready to be seen by the camera. They don't great people with "welcome" anymore. Now they ask, "How do I look?" Buildings and artworks are the only objects still commonly made by human hands, and yet both have been profoundly shaped by the technologies of mechanical reproduction.

Architecture and Distraction

2009-10-20T11:08:42-05:00

The cinema was the preeminent mass experience of the first half of the twentieth century, but architecture, according to Walter Benjamin, is also a mass experience, and a much older one. He argues in the Artwork essay that the cinema was designed to be received in a state of distraction. The same hold true for architecture. He writes, “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consumed by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Buildings, Benjamin says, are experienced through sight and touch. Both of these senses are susceptible to habituation, especially touch. Even the distracted experience of touch, Benjamin claims, can have “canonical value.” Historical changes in perception, such as the changes brought about by photography, are not disseminated by contemplation. New ways of perceiving become widespread only through habit. If a way of seeing can’t be appropriated through distraction, then it won’t last. It also won’t have any political importance.

Whether or not a distracted perception will have a transformative political importance is a different issue altogether. Take, for instance, Stereoscope's Project Blinkenlights in Toronto in October 2008, in which the Toronto City Hall was transformed into an interactive (through users’ iPhones) light show and video game. The technology was amazing, and more examples are on the way, no doubt. But did Project Blinkenlights make its viewers more involved citizens?

Large public buildings are becoming less tactile because of security concerns and swine flu hysteria. At the same time, they’re becoming more distracting, especially sports stadiums. The new Cowboys Stadium recalls the elephantine domes of the Sixties and Seventies. With its sprawling concourses, glassed-in suites, and trademark giant overhead monitor, the stadium offers almost limitless opportunities to make a Cowboy fan forget that the team hasn’t won a playoff game in 18 years. All the new sports stadiums built recently in the United States may offer better parking and more toilets than their processors, but they’ve made it more difficult to concentrate on the action on the field.

But what about architecture and reproducibility? More on that in my next post.

The Optical Unconscious

2009-10-16T10:49:09-05:00

As I mentioned in my last post, it's commonplace to argue that at some point in history--maybe when MTV debuted--we lost the ability to tell the difference between the image and the world, between the real and the artificial. Writing in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin was working with an older opposition, one derived from György Lukács, between first nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of thunderstorms) and second nature (our helplessness before the uncontrollable fury of the global economy). Benjamin was also highly influenced by Surrealism, which, like Lukács' theory of reification, asserted our view of reality is clouded by a faulty rationality. We don't prefer the artificial to the real because we're simpletons duped by the irresistible lure of the image, but because we've reshaped our reality so totally and so perfectly that we no longer recognize it as our own.

This is why Benjamin admired the work of the early 20th-century photographer Eugène Atget, a favorite of the Surrealists as well. Atget wasn't naive, but he saw himself as a tradesman making a living photographing ordinary street scenes in Paris. Oftentimes his photographs had no people in them, a motif that fascinated Benjamin and the Surrealists. (That's Atget's "Coin de la Rue Valette et Pantheon" [1925] above.) Before Atget, the human face and body were the primary subject matter of photography. Atget banished people from photography and with them the last vestiges of cult value in the medium. His photographs of a deserted Paris were like the scenes of a crime, Benjamin noticed. Atget's photographs provided no ground for contemplation. They were signposts, but without direction. The everyday objects of ordinary experience were revealed as strange and unsettling. In this way photographs acquired the first traces of political significance, that all was not as it appeared at first glance. To control meaning, captions became necessary for the first time. As Benjamin put it in "Little History of Photography" (1931), Atget "looked for what was unremarked, a forgotten, cast adrift. And thus such pictures . . . work against the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship."

Later, in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) Benjamin made a similar but more sweeping claim about the cinema. A different nature presents itself to the movie camera than to the naked eye. Instead of being something we enter into unconsciously or vaguely, in film we enter nature analytically. While a painter lovely caresses the surfaces of nature, the cameraman chucks a piece of dynamite at it, then reassembles the pieces:

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-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.

A movie camera can be mounted on a speeding locomotive, dropped down a sewer, or secreted in a valise and carried surreptitiously around a city. The camera reveals aspects of reality that register in our senses but never quite get processed consciously. Film changed how we view the least significant minutiae of reality just as surely as Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life changed how we look at incidental phenomenon like slips of the tongue. In other words, film serves as an optical unconscious. Benjamin asserts the film camera "introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."

In Benjamin's lifetime photographic and cinematographic technologies improved dramatically, thus widening the spectrum of visual experience that can be caught on film. The idea that improved technology can expand our sense perception and make the unconscious visible continues today. Digital video has improved to the point at which an entire television series can be devoted to the filming of ghosts.

Perhaps one day we'll have a revelatory film made from an iPod Nano video camera. More likely, though, we'll continue to get snippets of little kids doing allegedly cute things and locker-room peep shows. In either case, the result will probably get dumped into YouTube and forgotten. For all his bold assertions about the potential of rapidly evolving photographic technology, Benjamin equivocates at the conclusion of his Artwork essay. Film presents a whole new world to the masses, but the masses aren't necessarily paying attention. "The public is an examiner," he writes, "but an absent-minded one."

The Distracted Gaze

2009-10-15T11:01:16-05:00

Generally when you hear people referring to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" essay, they talk about how the mass reproduction of artworks allows them to be placed into different contexts, thereby changing their meaning. This isn't a bad summary of the Artwork essay, but there's a lot more to it than that. Benjamin's main subject in the essay is the cinema.

As I discussed in my previous entry, Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction destroyed the aura of artworks. Aura lies in the perception of distance, that a work of art is somehow mysterious and remote. Reproduction literally and figuratively brings art closer to the masses. Because a reproduction doesn't carry with it the sense of being in the presence of artistic genius, and because of the sheer wealth of images in the mass media, no one really contemplates a work of art anymore. One pages through a book about Florentine art of the Renaissance, but the experience is nothing like seeing the Mona Lisa in the context for which it was originally created.

Reproduction disperses the image to the masses, who absorb it in a distracted manner, as one of a number of images. Benjamin noted--remember, he was writing in 1936, before the society of the spectacle was fully in place--that the masses have come to prefer an artificial reality to the real one. It's now commonplace to argue that we can no longer distinguish between the real and the artificial because of the sheer wealth of images in contemporary culture. However, Benjamin differs from this line of argumentation in that he claimed that the preference for images over reality came from the distracted manner in which people in modern societies take in their world. Reproduction has created a new sensibility, the desire "to pry an object from its shell," which is the mark of a perception that sees "the universal equality of things."

Virtually since their inception, the movies have been denounced as mere entertainment for people who simply want to be distracted. Contemplation and the ability to make fine distinctions are reserved for elite tastes. Benjamin counters this opposition by asserting that film opened up a whole new way of perceiving reality (I'll expand upon this point in my next post). He also claimed that moviegoers identify with the camera, making their point of view that of a critic. Popular cinema is crafted to make everyone who sees it an instant expert. The masses may react negatively to Picasso, but they love Charlie Chaplin because he fuses visual and emotional pleasure for an audience that's an expert in the cinema. The lower the social significance of an art form, the more an audience can mix criticism and enjoyment.

This isn't to say that movies don't have their retrograde aspects as well. Whenever people try to argue film is an art form, Benjamin points out, they ascribe ritual qualities to it. One example is the entire phenomenon of the cult film, which developed in parallel with the concept of the cinephile. Auteur theory has left us with a pantheon of film geniuses, from Howard Hawks to Martin Scorcese. Hollywood studios compensate for the cheap reproducibility of their product by creating a cult around the movie star, "the phony spell of a commodity" as Benjamin puts it.

Since Benjamin's day movies themselves have succumbed to the universal equality of things. Watching a movie in a darkened theater uninterrupted from beginning to end is becoming increasingly rare. Movies are now everywhere, packaged with additional features on Blu-Ray disks and vying for disk space with MP3 files on an iPod. We watch movies in a distracted state, watching a movie and, at the same time, something else as well.

Movies have adjusted themselves accordingly, dispensing with distinctions large and small. The title character of The Dark Knight constantly struggles to remain in the foreground of the image as the settings alternate abruptly between a gleaming post-industrial metropolis and a grimy, ink-strained industrial city. His opponent is both maniacally focused and a bundle of tics and neuroses. Batman loses the fight against the criminal underworld and the overwhelming phenomenon of the city itself, eventually disappearing into the murky, confused world in which he lives. At the conclusion of the film, it's as if Batman had never existed. Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla is a compendium of tough-guy gestures grafted onto a plot that threatens to lapse into incoherence. There are no good guys or bad guys in the film because we know the genre so well we can dispense with such crude distinctions. All we really want is tough guy poses, and that's all we get, one after the other, immediately and all the time.

Stay tuned for more on the Artwork essay.

Art and Aura

2009-10-13T10:16:29-05:00

I've been talking about one origin of cinema from the Paris arcades. To continue that line of thought I'd like to consider Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), perhaps his best-known and most enduring work. The Artwork essay is one of the foundational works of film theory. Its contribution to cultural studies is immense. John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing is directly indebted to Benjamin’s essay.

Benjamin traces the history of art, which for him is not only a means of creating a beautiful object, but also a means of perceiving the world. Originally works of art had a role in ritual. Beginning in the fifth century, art began to shed its cult value in favor of display value. The beautiful object continued to have a religious function until the Renaissance, when the semblance of divine perfection began to be secularized into a cult of beauty. According to Benjamin, the Renaissance was the first crisis in the history of beauty.

Whether an artwork was a representation of the divine or the perfect embodiment of the ideal of beauty, the power of a work of art resided in its uniqueness in time and space. Michelangelo’s Statue of David was originally displayed in the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of secular power in Florence, so the statue’s meaning was entirely tied up in the larger glory of the Florentine city-state.

We now know Michelangelo’s David through its endless reproductions, but in the sixteenth century the statue retained its aura, which Benjamin defined as "the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be." Anyone who visits the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, where the David now resides, can see how the statue retains some of its auratic power. Even though it’s one of the most familiar objects in Western art, the experience of viewing the actual statue is nevertheless enchanting, evident in the hushed mobs circle it respectfully.

But seeing the David in a crowded museum isn’t the same as seeing it in a Renaissance piazza. Much of the attraction of the statue is that it’s the original of a series of copies. Artworks have always been inserted into different contexts with entirely new interpretations, and it’s always been possible to copy an artwork. However, the invention of photography in the nineteenth century introduced a form of reproducibility that, for the most part, destroyed the auratic properties of art.

The nineteenth century saw the second great crisis in beauty. For the first time, it was possible to make a more or less perfect copy of an artwork and distribute it on a mass scale. It was no longer necessary to travel the world to see great artworks. They were suddenly everywhere and available to anyone. During this time there were attempts to turn paintings and sculptures in mass viewing experiences in the manner of the world exhibitions and the proto-cinematic technologies like the panoramas, but the attempts failed. In reaction to the decline of aura the l'art pour l'art movement created a theology of art. "Pure" art denied any social function for art, or any categories. Photography itself initially tried to emulate art's old cult value. Earliest photographs concentrated on the face, which fed the cult of remembrance. Aura has its last stand in the photographed face, Benjamin declared.

No one, Walter Benjamin included, would claim that seeing a photograph of the David is exactly the same experience as seeing it in person. To get the full impact of Claude Monet’s 42-foot-long Water Lilies, it’s necessary to travel to MoMA. But in a world of ubiquitous images we no longer really stand before an artwork to contemplate it. We take it in, then move on. The Rothko Chapel only underlines how far the contemplative value of art has fallen; it’s necessary to construct a special building to filter out the noise of other images.

Mechanical reproducibility means that art is now appreciated in a distracted manner. The same may be said for our entire environment. As a result of the rise of mechanical reproduction, the seminal art form of the twentieth century was an art based entirely on distracted viewing: the cinema. More on that in my next post.