Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

[00:00:00]hi students we'll be talking about Walter Ben Amin hi students just having fun with the technology so this week we'll be discussing Walter Bennett means the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction which was written in 1935 before we start I want you to think about the first time you saw a famous painting in person and what it felt like to see it in person right so if you were aware of it before you had probably seen different images of it either on a computer screen or in a book and I want you to think about what it was like to actually be there and see it in person did it feel kind of magical did you have a different experience with it so the example I always think of is Vincent van Gogh because his paintings in person are completely different than seeing them on a screen or in a book his use of paint and texture you just get such a different sense of it and there's something very special about seeing one in person and it's especially special because his images are just everywhere you can get a Vincent van Gogh shower curtain or mug or t-shirt or dog painting you can really see Vincent van Gogh's artwork in all these different ways so seeing it in person feels different partly because you've seen the image so many different times in so many different ways and yet there's still something really special about going there and seeing the painting in person and then recently there was an animated film made about Vincent van Gogh where a bunch of artists actually did oil paintings to animate his art so this is even a completely different way of looking at Vincent van Gogh so I want you to think about the difference between a painting a replication of a painting especially one that you would get in a gift store and then especially animated images and how they're different from a painting so Walter Bette Amin was born in 1892 and died in 1940 he's a german jewish philosopher and he's a cultural critic he's part of the frankfurt school of critical theory if you want to read more about Ben Amin or if you find his work really interesting you should definitely look into the Frankfurt School and as is evident in the first paragraph of this essay you can tell he's a Marxist he is very interested in material conditions he's very interested in how technology has transformed the world has transformed labour has transformed social and political relations and he's mostly known for his aesthetic theory and his philosophy of history so I highly recommend him he's actually one of my favorite philosophers to read so one of the things he points out is that works of art have really changed over the course of history art objects used to kind of have a cult value they used to be a part of sort of sacred spaces and practices and rituals and traditions so for example you'd have to go to a cave to see these cave drawings you'd have to go to a private space that might have a special purpose or a lot of artwork for many many years was actually religious and so a painting would be created for a cathedral or a statue would be created to go in a specific place and so works of art really belonged to specific times and places and even sort of traditions and practices and rituals and that required special access so you had to go seek out that work of art you had to go to that space and it was special and works of art kind of shift a little bit when we move from sort of sacred art to museum art and they have a sort of presenta bility that matters that like will this look good in a museum well this draw an audience the sort of monetary value starts to matter and how impressive it is and so it moves from this sort of sacred thing to something where it's trying to attract an audience and with works of art either in sort of sacred spaces or in museums for Ben Amin he thinks they have an aura this sort of authenticity of an original work of art and that aura is partly due to its history it belongs to a specific time and place and if you think about what makes a work of art unique maybe it has a sort of patina to it it's aged and it bears witness to how old it is there's sort of signs of wear and tear that give a sense that this has a past and all of that gives us a sense that this is an object that has a real presence in a world it belongs somewhere it has a context and what changes when we get mechanically reproduced objects is that things are removed from their specific time in place because you have like a lot of them so they don't have this aura anymore in fact if we're looking at a work of art that is mechanically reproduced anything you can think of that you purchase right is not the original it's a copy of a copy of a copy it's one of many many copies is what I mean and that means that there's no such thing really as the authentic anymore so if I download a song I'm not concerned if it's a copy or an authentic song it is the song right that's what it's meant to be it's meant to be distributed it's meant to be reproduced it's meant to be streamed from many different places all at the same time so with mechanical reproduction having things in multiples is an important part of it because it makes it accessible and many people can kind of consume it at once and he points out that you know to a certain degree all art has always been reproducible he talks about this in the first section he says that you know apprentices would make copies of the Masters and sometimes there are many different versions of same sculpture you see this with Michelangelo and even Van Gogh would paint the same flowers over and over and over again and he'd do different copies of the same thing so there is a sense to which art has always been reproducible but when you get into this mechanical reproduction this sort of assembly line where you're getting the same object and multiples of it then you get a different sense of what reproduction means it's not the same thing as an apprentice reproducing his masters work of art and the first difference that Ben Amin really points out is you have a difference in speed so photography and film are mechanical reproductions in a way that is different than someone copying a work of art or inscribing something and copying it multiple times and so he says for the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormous Lee that it could keep pace with speech so this is a really interesting moment is the creation of film where you have something that can kind of keep up with the speed of experience and it can replicate that experience and it can disseminate that experience in other spaces right so it can keep up with things painting right kind of create and sculpture kind of create a frozen moment and they take a great deal amount of time to create and then you have to kind of ship them or move them to other spaces if you want to share that experience in a different place and film doesn't do that right film captures this moment at the speed of it and then sends it in other spaces so we have also an increase in availability and accessibility with mechanical reproduction so when Ben Amin is talking about mechanical reproduction he means like the fact that we have industrial factories where we can create many many many versions the same thing just multiple copies of something and and many people can have the same thing because it's been mass-produced so he quotes valerie and says just as water gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs and responds 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 right so if you can imagine what life was like before you could just see images and listen to music at your will I mean if you wanted to hear beautiful music you could play music at home with your own instruments which would require you to have that knowledge but you would save your money so that you could go to an opera or you could go to some sort of symphony or performance or maybe going to some sort of religious ceremony that had music would be the only time you would really get to hear music you couldn't just have it with you all the time the way that we do and you know we're at a point with technology where we have even more accessibility to music than ever before I can just stream any song I want anywhere I go and always have my music with me right so there's this availability to images that we have with mechanical reproduction that we never had before and that changes the way images are a part of our life and it changes our sort of relation to the world so we were able to consume images faster and more efficiently and with less effort than ever before and this increasingly has become the case with more and more technological advancements an enamine says one might generalize by saying the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition right so if I'm reproducing an object it's no longer part of a sacred space I don't have to travel from far away to go to a particular Cathedral or sacred space to see this object where it belongs in its tradition it can come to me I can see it on my computer screen I can open up a book and see the Pieta so I don't have to go out of my way it's been detached from where it belonged and brought to me by making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence right so the unique existence of something no longer seems to matter as much because we have so many copies of something so sometimes you experience this when you see a famous work of art like the Mona Lisa or a sculpture of David and you've already seen it so many times in different spaces and like the sculpture of David maybe you have even like on your you can get like a little miniature and put it on your desk or something and so the unique sort of aura of a work of art has been transformed by the fact that we have so many reproductions of it so he says in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder in his own particular situation it reactivates the object produced so this object meets me where I am at and that kind of reactivates it and I experience it but that image has become very different now and one of the things Ben Amin points out is that what this reproduction is doing is shifting our relation to time and space so if I think about what happens with film film is capturing a particular events or a computer experience and it takes that moment and it brings it to me in my presence this is partly why we take so many photographs and so many little you know videos on our phones is we want to be able to share that moment with people who aren't there right so I can share my you know cute dog with other people and send that to them so even if they're not with me they get to have that experience or I might take a video because I know when I'm older I'll want to look back on it and so that moment becomes present to me again when I watch it later in life and the same thing is true if we look at old footage right if we we can learn about history if you're watching all sorts of film so this makes the past present again and it means that this sort of ven in there of that particular time the moment can be brought here now to me but at the same time right this is you know this is a real advantage this is something we enjoy as part of this technology but at the same time it means that objects lose their sense of history or their aura because there's no temporal distance anymore that aura has to do with the work of art belonging to its time and place it sort of being a part of a context it kind of having this gravity that places it somewhere specific and that is authentic in particular to it but if I can just detach it and put it in time wherever I want and replay it over and over and over again that kind of gets rid of that particular aura and it also ships space there's all sorts of ways that film plays with space so a lot of times film might capture something we could not be able to see something that would be impossible to view otherwise there's all sorts of point of view shots that we normally won't have any access to and it also allows something happening in another place to be present to me where I am so one of the huge things that happened with film is globalization right being able to see what other places in the world are like what other people are like so you can share all these particularity ''s of these unique places and they can be shared with the entire world in any place so this changes our sense of space and distance in a way the world feels a lot smaller if anything that happens on the world can kind of be made present to you if you can kind of travel around the world through film and photography it makes the world seem smaller and like there isn't so much space and distance and this also affects the aura of something because we're able to make everything present to us where we are and so it no longer is a part of that specific place it's part of where I am now so if you want to think more about spill and how it plays with space and time I highly recommend this documentary that's available on Hulu so if you have a who account or if you have time and you can I think do a free week on Hulu but the birth of cinema is the first episode of this documentary series called the story of film and Odyssey and it really does a great job thinking for different aspects of film so one of the things that the story of film and in particular the episode called the birth of cinema points out is that cinema kind of involves new innovations and editing this sort of storytelling that we have now where we have things like shot reverse shot like in this clip I'm showing you right now you have one character looking at the other then you have a reverse shot of him looking at her then you have the dog reacting to it so these types of cuts that happen in editing were actually invented at a very specific time when people first started creating films they were using storytelling methods that were very similar to theater which is you never see someone's back to you you're always speaking straight forward the camera kind of always stayed in place they didn't really make cuts they didn't do close-ups they really had to figure out a lot of editing techniques and if you think about it the camera moves a lot through time and space like in the shot just between these two characters and the dog right you have the camera shifting space a lot so that we can make this sort of coherent connection between these different reactions so this episode really helps you to think through editing and how it happens and the other thing it does is it talks about the sort of technical technological advancements that had to be created for films so it talks about Edison and the Lumiere brothers and these sort of inventions that led to the camera and then it also talks about this sort of global innovations and not just in this episode but in the other episodes that they really look at film as a sort of global invention and not something that just happens in Hollywood so they look at Japanese film they look at African film they look at Scandinavia they look at all these different areas to see sort of interesting sort of innovations that are made in film and it also talks a lot about cinema as an empathy machine and is a sort of repetition of ideas and images so a lot of times when you're watching a film the sort of techniques the tropes the storytelling devices that are being used are very old and they've been used multiple ways and they've kind of changed over time so this is a really good documentary if you want to learn more about film and kind of contextualize it and its history and learn more about it as the sort of technology as well so Ben Amin points out that because we have this different relation to space and time through film we have new perception right we see the world differently because of this technology so he's this example of a close-up with a close-up space expands with slow-motion movement is extended right so we have all these sort of ways of filming things that change how we see something slowing it down bringing it closer than we normally get and this isn't just a different perspective it actually reviews he says reveals new structural formations we see something different about people when we get close-ups right so I never really you know you usually don't get super close to someone's face but in film you can be really close to people you can see the slight tremors in their face or a tear fall down their cheek right so it brings us very close and it creates the sort of intimacy and this different knowledge of the subject that we would normally have and he says evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera that opens itself to the naked eye right so the camera the eye of the camera is very different than how I normally lurks I can't zoom my eye in on things I can't slow things down with my eyes and it opens up a new space that we can explore and this is really interesting to Bethany but it also kind of betrays a certain desire we have to bring things as close to us as humanly possible and it's this desire to kind of pry into things to take something away from it she'll some whatever is separating us from an object we want to bring it as close to us as possible so there's a sort of violence of curiosity that the camera expresses that I want to be close I want to slow things down I want to control the way this thing is seen so I can see it in penetrate into it in this way I'd never have before so he sees the camera eye as prying into things and he says this is a mark of perception whose sense of the universal equality of things has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction so there's also this sense in which everything is universally the same or equal because everything can be filmed I can capture everything with my camera and so everything is the same in that sense I can make everything available to me there's nothing that's so sacred or so far away or so distant from me that I can't make it available to myself because my camera makes everything available to me and he says that you know because of this we have the sense of perception that cares more about availability than reality or authenticity so if I can capture some with my camera that's what matters right pics or it didn't happen right so I really care more about whether something is fillable whether I can make it available whether I can reproduce that thing in film and photography rather than is it authentic is it real has it like what is the reality of that situation and the individuality or uniqueness of something matters less than this sort of reproduction of it in film and photography and this is the case like there is this max Vader in the Grand Canyon and people go to see the IMAX movie that shows you the Grand Canyon and takes you on a tour of the Grand Canyon and that's actually far more popular than people actually going on the trails for the Grand Canyon and part of it has to do with accessibility of course it's a lot easier to sit in an air-conditioned theater and watch the Grand Canyon than it is to hike through the Grand Canyon but at the same time there's something about the fact that people would frequently rather watch movies of traveling or watch movies of beautiful natural spaces then actually be in those natural spaces themselves and travel and experience things right so even though the photography and film is a secondhand experience in some ways it's preferred because it brings things to us it reproduces it and it gives us this sort of control over that experience and for Ben I mean this means that everything kind of becomes equal in the same right all things on my computer screen or all things on my television screen they're the same they're equally present to me and so India and like New Paltz New York are equidistant from me on my computer screen so if we look at desi Guevara toff this Russian director he kind of describes this interesting power of the camera he says I am an eye a mechanical eye I the Machine show you a world the way only I can see it I free myself for today and forever from human in mobility and in constant movement I approach and pull away from objects I creep under them I move alongside a running horse's mouth I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies this is I the machine maneuvering in the chaotic movements recording one moment after another in the most complex combination freed from the boundaries of time and space I coordinate any and all points of the universe wherever I want them to be my way leads towards the creation of a fresh perspective of the world thus I explained in a new way the world unknown to you right so very tough this Russian director is seeing this intense power of the camera to completely transform space and time to make new perception available to us to see things we normally wouldn't be able to see like the silhouette of a horse running and in slow motion and to see in space as normally we click go so the camera makes so much available to us and it rearranges things it creates new relations new boundaries new coordinates new new ways of putting information and ideas and images together and John Berger ways of seen his first episode is sort of a response to Benjamin and that it means really sort of suspicious so Ben Amin has kind of an ambivalent relationship to film and photography he can see how powerful and interesting it is but he also sees a kind of danger in it in making everything the same and making everything available to us it kind of asserts a new form of control over the world that he's a little suspicious not alone he's very suspicious of it and John burgers really interested in this so for John burger he thinks that taking away the aura of a work of art kind of removing it from this sort of spiritual space is actually good and reproducing it so it's available in all these different ways to people he also thinks that's good he thinks it's good to decontextualize art it's good to take art and bring it closer to us and he talks about why that is so this is why I assigned this episode for this week as I wanted you to kind of see someone who's engaging with Ben yameen and thinking about the same idea but kind of gets a different conclusion from it and I want you to think about how you feel about these sort of observations about film if you're thinking there are sort of reasons to be suspicious of film and to say that there's a loss of aura and that there's something really fundamentally lost there or if you think that it creates something new and exciting by bringing things closer to us and making images available to us so for betta mean he he does talk about John Berger and Ben you means both talked about the fact that reproducing images takes them away from ritual and it allows a sort of mass consumption of images right so people everyone can see a work of art nowadays if they have access to a computer anyone can see that work of art if it's been made available and before you would have to go to the museum to see the work of art so this makes it so that everyone has access to it and that sounds very democratic right that everyone kind of can see something and sharing it together and for Ben Amin he's looking at this mass consumption of sort of reproduced objects and he's thinking about how it relates to politics so this is really important for him is that he's looking at film and photography specifically in relation to how it's been used in politics and we have this sort of collective experience with the work of art he says that art allows simultaneous collective experiences right so a lot of times people will watch live film and watch everything together and kind of share in this experience right everyone was watching the 1969 moon landing and that was a huge moment for humanity to kind of see this landing on the moon and for taking this world historic moment where the meaning of humanity had changed forever and at the same time um you know we're sharing this collective experience that means that we end up having not individual responses but we end up having what he says are sort of mass audience responses we have this sort of predetermined response to things how we react to the experience because it's shared with everyone and it's kind of put in this particular form it's kind of right any image that comes to us on a screen is going to be edited and it's going to be presented of specific way and so our reaction is already sort of determined and you could you know film and photography are so incredibly influential on our emotional reactions like if you go see a movie right everyone is jumping at the same moment or laughing at the same moment you get to experience that with others and sometimes you know if you are alone you notice you react a lot less than when you're watching something with other people and so and this is also why sitcoms used to use canned laughter all the time where you have this sort of recording of laughter and clapping is it kind of sweetens the experience for anyone who's watching it right we'd like to be a part of this sort of collective experience and collective reaction to things and um it also means that you know even though we're in our individual homes consuming these images we get to be a part of public spaces meaning of public space has really been transformed by film and photography and so the public spaces we used to belong to you know going to your sort of neighborhood tavern going to railroad stations or factories or places where you're with other people in a way you are with other people in your own home and your home also if it has a television gives you access to the outside world you can he says calmly I'm adventurous we go traveling from home but it also um has this sort of distracted thought and I chose one of the most distracting images I think I could 1980s aerobics right very distracting very eye-catching and flashy and cheesy there's nothing about moving average images that are just so simulating that we're constantly distracted by them I don't know if you've ever been at a party where someone turns on the television and all of a sudden no one can talk to each other and everyone's eyes are drifting and also the difference between going to a restaurant where there's TV screens versus a restaurant where there's no screens you know which restaurants are you gonna have a better conversation if you want to have an intimate romantic dinner are you gonna go somewhere that has television screens or not right so our eyes are so drawn to moving images and we're so distracted by it it's like we're arrested and for Ben I mean he's this really leaves us no time for contemplation and this was something that not just been Ameen but a number of sort of critical theorists from his time we're really concerned about is you have people working in factories right people doing this really intensive kind of mind-numbing labor it's really mesmerizing to be on an assembly line because you're just doing the same motion over and over and over and yet you're exhausted at the end of the day right so you haven't really been using your mind that much you've been doing something really repetitive and then you go home when you're tired from working and what do you do is you turn on a television and again you're not thinking and so people were really concerned that televisions would cause the sort of complacency because they don't encourage thought they only encourage distracted thinking they mesmerized me with your images and so you can't repel against unjust labor against unjust laws against unjust rulers if you're constantly in front of your you know your screen mesmerized by the images so he takes this quote from duomo and says i could no longer think what i want to think my thoughts have been replaced by moving images this was what they were concerned with is that maybe the images that you're consuming start to think for you instead of you thinking for yourself and this is why people are so concerned with the images that we consume is because they seem to be really influential on how we think how we view the world and what is possible for us to think and he also thought that this form of distraction could be a way of converting controlling people so for him you know there's possibility and film and photography there's great possibility there's amazing things that they do but there's a sort of danger there as well and he thought that fascists and totalitarian leaders were particularly good at exploiting film and photography in this way so we see this in Adolf Hitler in mind calm he says that he realized that people are not as convinced by what they you're not convinced by reading something silently to themselves they're convinced by hearing people by the spoken word and he says every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators not great fighters and Hitler really used the radio and television and film to become powerful there are historians who have sort of tracked how he used radio and how he taught himself to kind of have this strange vocal style that is really hypnotic and mesmerizing and hard to kind of turn off and so he really used this technological innovation to gain political power and to create a mass movement behind him right he needed everyone he needed a huge amount of support to be a totalitarian fascist right so and Hiller's also really waged a sort of war through film as well he created so many propaganda films during his sort of Third Reich and this was one of the ways he had power over the imagination of Germans was through showing them particular types of images and they were deeply convincing and they kind of you know they get stuck in your head and they become your reality and he was aware of this and used that to his advantage and Ben Amin says that fascist know that people are sort of mesmerised by images and that if they can provide the right type of images that really fuels public support for them he says that war can supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology so the way we relate to the world's really been transformed through technology in a way it's made us more passive we become these sort of receptacles for a great deal of information sometimes more information that we can sort through and sometimes things that are very implicit and quietly telling us certain messages and fascists have really used this to their advantage with all sorts of propaganda films and movies and even you know this it's had these amazing musicals with you know farmers in the fields making wheats and looking healthy and happy that they're farming and harvesting weed and it's like oh how lovely is labor how great is our country and so there's it's really interesting to kind of look back on these films and see what kind of messages are there and and how they're being used to promote certain political ideals and there is a sort of addiction to war footage that Ben Amin is interested in right so when we watch newsreels or film footage from Wars it's very shocking and something about it's still beautiful even though it's so shocking so we have this addiction to it and we desire to consume it I'm sure you've experienced this like when something happens and you start watching the news a lot you kind of get addicted to this way of receiving information like over the coronavirus oh and here's another graphic about it and it's an animated thing and it shows how the corona virus works and viruses are kind of pretty and interesting all right so there's this way that even things that are deeply horrifying when they're presented to us through moving images were kind of like ooh this is nice I'm enjoying watching this even if it's horrifying and he says that this is a sort of self alienation if we're taking so much pleasure and really horrifying moving images so he says humanity self alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order right so we experience our own destruction as pleasurable we were viewing it through a camera lens it's kind of disturbing and we have so many movies that take this a step further right so it's not just watching the news like there's so many movies about war and when Saving Private Ryan came out in the late 90s everyone was just completely mesmerized by Steven Spielberg's cinematography and how he shot like like how are you gonna shoot you know this Battle of Normandy and taking Normandy like how is this going to be shot because it seems so impossible and so you know there is this way that as an aesthetic object the Battle of Normandy right it's been a set asides that's been created into something beautiful and interesting through film and this was exactly the type of phenomenon Ben Amin was interested in so Ben Amin is suspicious of our televisions he's suspicious of the way that we have moving images brought to us so easily and readily and how susceptible we are to them and how passive we can become but he also realizes there's real power there so there is power for democracy there is power for collective action there is power for profound political movements in film and photography but there is also possibility for totalitarianism and fascism and oppression and people shutting down their minds and being complacent with unjust world full of destruction and so this is what been immune is really thinking about in his essay and this is what we are thinking about this week and Susan Sontag next week is going to give us more reasons to kind of think about the ethics and social political ramifications of film and photography so this is something we're gonna be thinking about is what are we trying to capture when we film something why are we doing that what's the impact of that how does that change our relationship to the world and to ourselves thank you