So far then we have Van Gogh's boots from the 1880s and Walker Evans' sharecroppers' boots from 1936. Each is a picture very much of its time, though Warhol's especially. Despite the negative image and the lack of space, we know we're dealing with shoes on sale. I'll leave you to figure out why. Warhol's work, often and in this case, deals with the "persona" and not the person, the former in our culture being more accessible, plentiful, transmittable, and therefore--perhaps--more substantial, important, and possibly true in the advanced capitalist society of our time. Bear in mind that Warhol never made political statements about his art. One could say that Andy Warhol's work would probably not ring true to us without the age of advertising that we're living in, in which advertisements (or other publicity or mass-media images) are often our first and most common education about things in the world. For Jameson, this is so postmodern.
Now, let it be known that Jameson's essay is not a discovery of postmodernism, but the crystallization of ideas partly his own, and mostly that had been floating around uncollected for at least half of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin was a German scholar who came of age between the first and second world wars. This period of German history was marked by political and economic strife, as well as flourishing in the arts and sciences. Benjamin was acquainted with the greatest of Germany's scholars at the time, though had the unfortunate fate of being Jewish, and perished while trying to flee Europe after the second World War began.
We are thus very fortunate to have the scholarship that he left behind. Benjamin was concerned in all of his texts about the formation of modernity during and after the 19th century, especially concerning the relationship of technology to the character and habits of the everyday public. You may notice that Benjamin's at times sounds a lot like Heidegger's--most notably in the effect on the work of art of its being transported for exhibition. I'm not sure what Heidegger thought of Benjamin, but we know that Benjamin detested Heidegger, or at least his scholarship; Benjamin was committed to a very leftist ideal, and Heidegger was clearly not. Nevertheless, they got compared a lot, much to Benjamin's chagrin. Moreover, Benjamin was very good friends with Heidegger's former student and lifetime lover, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who, by the way, was Jewish.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" underscores the major differences between them. For Benjamin, the question isn't what art has always been forever, but how the significance, particularly the political significance, of art changes at various periods in history. For Benjamin, Heidegger is laughably a-historical; that he would not deal with art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility would have been produced an audible snore. This essay, we might want to keep in mind, was completed the same year the Heidegger delivered his lectures in Frankfurt. Benjamin was at that time a refugee in Paris.
So why 1935? What would be the point of delivering treatises on art at that time? The answer has to do with politics and technology. By 1935, the film industry in Europe was growing, though it wasn't nearly as strong as it was in the US (which incidentally attracted many of depressed and tumultuous Germany's best talent); nevertheless, Europe, like America, was drunk on films, even more so after the advent of the sound film in 1927. Sound permitted the full illusion of space, completing the sense of absorption into the world of the film started by the invention of continuity editing. Movies did not mean the death of other arts, though many announced that; they did, however, by 1935, stand as the expressive force to be reckoned with, delivering an unprecedented reproduction of reality to an unprecedented number of people. Now, we don't know what Heidegger thought of movies, but we can guess at what he thought of the declining importance of the traditional arts. In 1935, the Nazi party had consolidated power, and had begun to purge Germany of those traditions and people that it did not like. For Heidegger, this was an opportunity to voice his concern for the aesthetic future of the fatherland; it should be noted that no one in Berlin was listening. The Nazis embraced photography and film for their power as propaganda, for the photographed world pretends that whatever it represents is already an historical success.
By contrast, Benjamin concludes that an artwork's mere existence in an age in which it can be mechanically reproduced means that important, gravely important, aspects of it have changed. Sure, it looks the same. But it doesn't exist the same way. For one thing, Benjamin says, mechanical reproduction means that art artwork loses its authenticity, its ability to simply be unique in history, and have been determined by its locations, and only its locations. This happens for a few reasons. A mechanically reproduced image carries a whiff of that work's present location, along with its photographic resemblance, all around the world. Thus, the work of art loses its ability to exist in one place at one time in history, and thus have a history unto itself. What the work of art is--whatever it is--is no longer authentically a part of it--it now partly belongs to its many reproductions.
Now, as the artwork loses part of its authenticity, it also loses a part of its aura. Benjamin has a great way of putting this: "the unique phenomenon of a distance no matter how close it may be," it being the work of art. Benjamin explains that artworks once had aura because they had cult value, that is, a value for ritualistic importance of what they represented, like the Virgin Mary, or the goddess Athena. This is like in Heidegger when the statue makes the gods present in the greek temple. Benjamin understands that so much of his culture's tradition in art is based on cult value, and thus he is careful to embrace the its crude demise under the photographic lens--what he likes about the loss of the aura is that it allows for a new political viability for the mechanically produced reproduced artwork, since he believes that the artwork, being massively reproducible, cannot be sacred, and thus he believes that it has the chance to be a message delivered to the masses for whom its function as art might very well be incidental. He is, of course, wary of the cult of personality, but this doesn't dissuade him from demonstrating a guarded political optimism.
We should ask a few questions at this point. First, how does simply existing in the age of mechanical reproduction effect artworks that haven't been reproduced mechanically? Clearly we've only seen reproductions of a small handful of history's paintings, and for most people, a trip to the art museum or the gallery means seeing at least a few new things. Can anyone think of a reason? Well, for one thing, as Benjamin notes, those of us who grew up in the age of mass entertainment have a different relationship to artworks than those who grew up in the middle of the 19th century. He writes,
This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. Namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.<4> Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction. Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a 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.
We are thus, according to Benjamin, not already equipped to deal with the work of art for anything outside of its exhibition value, our wish that it act as a scene, and not as an instantiation of cult figures or ideas. We want to absorb the picture--for us in the age of mechanically produced reality, this is what we do when we see a picture. According to Benjamin, even if our biology hasn't been changed by photographic processes, that idea that Maynard much later went on to dismiss, film has changed what we believe we should do in front of a picture, or what we expect it to do. We expect its effects to be immediately ready for our consumption; it is very difficult for us, if not impossible, to understand pictures that require concentration to be fully perceived. For Benjamin, this concentration comes with living with an artwork, developing habits of seeing it and being with it. He also notes that we still develop habits with film, though we should note, these are not habits we develop with respect to one particular film.
Thus in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the artwork changes because mechanical reproducibility changes our expectations for art, and the way we expect art to function. As we move into video and computers and a new stage of photography, it's important to keep in mind the kinds of viewing habits they require, and how this helps to bring about the newness or rebirth of various media. Now, we should note that much of what Benjamin discusses becomes somewhat true as time goes on, that is, as we move into the postmodern age. But here is a question for you to think about: how is Jameson's account of his own present different from the prediction that Benjamin makes about the future?
As you contemplate this, here's a few pictures of Marilyn Monroe. We talked a bit about these pictures in class, about her imperfect expression in the otherwise publicity-perfect source picture, the special reason why we know it's imperfect, and what Warhol might have found useful in this picture versus the many, many, many others he might have chosen for her. And then we saw the Richard Avedon portrait. Perhaps the difference between the Avedon and the Warhol and its source will help to color in the outlines of postmodernism that Jameson draws. They are in order:
Andy Warhol, American, Marilyn Monroe, 1962
Corbiss Bettman, American, Marilyn Monroe, 1961
Andy Warhol, American, Marilyn Monroe, 1962
Richard Avedon, American, Marilyn Monroe, 1957
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