The topic of this week's session of the Tate Modern course Modern Aesthetics was Walter Benjamin's famous and remarkably prescient essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. At the core of this is the idea that the comparatively new technology (he was writing in the 1930s) of photography had actually transformed the nature of art, democratizing it, moving it from the realm of ritual to the everyday. Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis, was passionately anti-fascist. In photography he saw the possibility of a democratic alternative to the aestheticization of politics characteristic of fascism: namely a politicization of aesthetics. In complete contrast with a thinker like Clive Bell, Benjamin saw that the art of his age could be intimately connected with the realities of daily life. Art for art's sake was the antithesis of what Benjamin stood for.
'That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura'. The aura of an original painting stems from its uniqueness - the fact that it is an object with a particular history, perhaps including wear and tear, different ownership and so on. True, students have always painted copies of great paintings, and the printing press brought about significant changes too (William M. Ivins jr. has written brilliantly on this in Prints and Visual Communication
In the galleries we visited two rooms of the Exposed exhibition - Rooms 1 and 4. Philip-Lorca diCorcia's large candid photographs of people in Times Square have some of the presence of a conventional painting, both in terms of their scale and Caravaggio-esque lighting (there are moral issues too raised by these - some people don't want their images to be used in this way). A small reproduction does not communicate their effect. They exist as physical gallery pieces, albeit intrinsically reproducible. To some extent they have the aura of an original painting and much is lost in postcard reproduction. This contrasts with the framed press celebrity photographs in Room 4. Despite being in an art museum, most of these might equally have been viewed in a book or magazine. There was no notion that we were looking at an 'original' image of which others were derivative. If Benjamin is right about the withering of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, this may vary still from image to image. Not every photographic print of an image has equal status...
The invention of digital photography and the new online modes of dissemination, sharing and copying of images puts us in a new world of technological change. Perhaps, even more than in Benjamin's day, we are living through a period of technological change in which our attitudes to images will be transformed irrevocably. The ease and speed with which pictures can be located, copied and used today (ease of performance - copyright restrictions are a practical obstacle in this respect) is exhilarating. New modes of visual communication are opening up. Indeed, re-reading Benjamin today is a very different experience from reading him a decade ago...
From a victim of Nazism, to a Nazi: next week Heidegger...brace yourselves...
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