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Feb
03
2012

“Modernist Painting” by Clement Greenberg

THE MODERNISM OF MODERNIST PAINTING, 1960/1 

Clement Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting,” originally given as a radio broadcast in 1916 for the Voice of America’s “Forum Lectures,” was printed in 1961 in the Arts Yearbook 4 of the same year, reprinted in 1965, ’66, ‘74, ’78, and 1982.   The article achieved a canonical status and served as one of the definitive statements of formalism as a mode of visual analysis and of formalism as a critical stance, and possibly, of formalism as a mode of making art.   In his 1961 essay on “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) defined “Modernism” as the period (in art) roughly from the mid-1850s to his present that displayed a self-critical tendency in the arts.

Greenberg considered Immanuel  Kant the first Modernist.  The essence of Kant’s thesis was the employment of the characteristic “methods” of the discipline to “criticize the discipline itself.”  According to Greenberg, Kant used logic to establish “the limits of logic.”  The Modernist goal of self-criticism grows out of the critical spirit of the Enlightenment philosophical system which was based upon the belief in the power of rational thought and human reason. “Critique,” as a method, analyzes from the inside, from within the object being examined and does not judge from the outside, according to external criteria.

Painting must analyze itself to discover its inherent properties. Painting, according to Enlightenment methodology, must be interrogated according to its inherent purposes.  The key term here would be “inherent,” for analyzing an object according to its essential definition must preclude bringing forward any non-essential or external criteria. In other words, a painting telling a “good story” is not necessarily a good painting.   In this article, Greenberg carries on his attempt to “save” and to define “high art,” and “Modernist Painting” of 1960 can be compared to “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” of 1939.  Two decades had passed and Greenberg had progressed from being an up-and-coming art writer to being the arbiter of fine arts in New York, enjoying a truly hegemonic position.  His crusade was all the more urgent in 1961, as territory of the avant-garde was being invaded by popular culture and the forces of disrule, exemplified by Neo-Dada and Pop Art and Fluxus.  Greenberg had also shifted his political position, from being an intellectual Marxist, to being a Kantian formalist, a far safer situation which removes the critic and art from current cultural considerations.

Greenberg stated that art can “save” itself from being entertainment by demonstrating that the experience it provides is “unobtainable from any other source.” It is the task of art to demonstrate that which is “unique” and “irreducible”, particular or peculiar to art and that which determines the operation peculiar and exclusive to itself.  All effects borrowed from any other medium must be eliminated, rendering the art form pure.  “Purity” becomes a guarantee of “quality” and “independence” of avant-garde art.  All extrinsic effects should be eliminated from painting.

One could say that it is not the essential to the definition of a painting that it re-create the world realistically.  Today, that role can be fulfilled by photography or film.  Film and theater are defined by storytelling and narrative, enhanced by illusions of everyday reality.  Following Greenberg’s line of reasoning, realism and story telling and illusionism should be eliminated from painting.   For Greenberg, art was used to call attention to art.  Clement Greenberg logically worked out the limitations and peculiarities of painting, which are a flat surface, the shape of the support and the properties of the pigment. These physical and material limiting conditions became positive factors.

Once suppressed by artists through under-painting and glazing, these material aspects of painting were now acknowledged by Modernist painters.  Because he appeared to have considered and taken into account the limitations of painting as the application of paint upon a flat surface, or a stretched canvas, Édouard Manet is designated by Greenberg as the first Modernist artist.  Manet “declared the surface;” his follower, Paul Cézanne, fit the drawing and design into the rectangle of the painting.  In Modernist painting, the spectator is made aware of the flatness and sees the picture first, before noting the content.

Modernist painting abandoned the principle of representation of Renaissance illusionistic space inhabited by three-dimensional objects, giving the effect of looking through the canvas into a world beyond. Modernist painting resists the sculptural, which is suppressed or expelled.  The question is that of a purely optical experience.  With Greenberg, flatness alone is unique to painting.  For this critic, “art” carries within itself its own teleology.  As art seeks self-definition and determines its own uniqueness, it becomes more pure, more reductive in its means.  More is eliminated—subject matter, content, figuration, illusionism, narrative—and art becomes independent, detached, and non-objective, that is, abstract.  Content becomes completely dissolved into form.  Greenberg, in looking back selectively at the history of art, presented a map of progress and evolution of painting, away from representation and toward purity, abstraction, reductiveness; to flatness, to pure color, to simple forms that reflected the shape of the surface.

The essay noted that Modernism “resists sculpture” or three-dimensionality and reminded the reader that this “resistance” was by no mean recent. The critic pointed to Jacques-Louis David as an example of an artist whose work was flat and surface based.  Greenberg insisted that the scientific method justified the demand that painting (and art) limit itself to “what is given in visual experience.”   Greenberg equated the artist to the scientists, both of whom “test” and experiment.  The equation of art with science, replaces his earlier equation of the avant-garde with politics:  “…a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture.”  One can “only look” at a work of visual art, which is discernible only to the “eye.”  Poetry is “literary,” art is not and should not attempt to be, for as Greenberg reminded us, any translation of the literary into the visual “loses” the literary qualities.

Like Avant-garde and Kitsch, Modernist Painting, had a subtext, Enlightenment philosophy, especially that of Kant’s Critique of Judgment.  The 1939 article concerned itself with aesthetics but more with the “experience” of the aesthetic.  In Avant-garde and Kitsch, it is possible to believe that Greenberg was writing of the experience of the aesthetic in terms of the placement of art in the culture, in other words, it is not so much the “how” of the experience but of the “where” of the aesthetic.  In Modernist Painting, the experience of the aesthetic is located in the realm of the how one looks at a work of art.

The proper attitude of the spectator was important to Kant who recommended a posture of detachment from personal desire and indifference to artistic content in search of a universal means of judging the efficacy of art.  The Enlightenment philosophy cherished the idea of the universal or the absolute, for some kind of standard had to be erected to replace the all-knowing presence of the now-banished God.  Kant was not interested in defining what “art” was but in establishing the ground for the judgment of art.  Working in the new philosophical field, aesthetics, Kant attempted to establish the epistemology of art, based, not in individual works but in a method of knowledge.

Greenberg’s understanding of Kant led him to use the methodology of critique but the critic took “critique” in a rather different direction.  Writing two centuries after the German philosopher, Greenberg looked backwards in time and implied another favorite Enlightenment idea, that of progress.  Modernist art, if one understands the essay correctly, seems to “progress” and move forward in time, away from manifestations of extrinsic properties and towards a purity of means.  “Modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up, it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art.”

The ground has shifted away from a means of judgment (Kant) to a theory of the evolution of art along telelogical lines with a goal in mind: purity.  Even though as Greenberg pointed out, “The first mark made on the canvas destroys its virtual flatness,” purity seems to imply a historical rejection of representation and a validation of abstraction. The point of noting Greenberg’s development of Kantian theory and its application toward Modernist Painting is that, without the notion of progress, the critic’s theory of artistic development would have to include some of the masters of flatness, such as William Bourguereau and some of the masters of the surface such as Thomas Kincaide, both of whom Greenberg would have excluded from the family tree of modernism.

While Kant would at least judge these two artists (and perhaps find them wanting), Greenberg seems to imply a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde and establish ground for exclusion of the unworthy. The oppositions of the dialectic are implied: those who did not follow the path of Modernist reductionism were, like dinosaurs, left behind.  If one reads in a connection between Modernism and the avant-garde, even if only through the names of the canonical artists Greenberg mentioned and thought his previous articles, then the conflation between the continuity of art and the avant-garde, which supposedly breaks with the past, becomes rather awkward.     Indeed, Greenberg does not mention the avant-garde, he uses the term “authentic art,” instead.

“Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity.  Art is, among many other things, continuity.  Without the past of art, and without the need and compulsion to maintain past standards of excellence, such a thing as modernist art would be impossible,” Greenberg stated.

However, as pointed out in his earlier work, Greenberg refused to connect the avant-garde with a rejection of the past: “…the true and most important function of the avant-garde was not to ‘experiment’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep culture moving…” (Greenberg’s italics).  The underlying continuity of the two articles can be seen in the precursor remark in the 1939 writing on the role of the avant-garde artist: “’Art for art’s sake’ and ‘pure poetry’ appear, and subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like the plague.” Given the openness of the construction of this essay and the plurality of texts mobilized by Greenberg, it is no wonder that “Modernist Painting” lent itself to so many causes, whether as a rallying point or as a bête noir.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Jan
21
2012

Post-War Culture in America

FROM MODERNISM TO POST-MODERNISM

POST-WAR ART IN AMERICA

After the Second World War, the art world was characterized by “triumphalism” in New York and a feeling of having won, not just a military war but also a cultural war.  The French and their School of Paris had been routed.  Also defeated was American Scene painting and its nativist illustrations of a naïve nation.  Now, the triumphant society would be represented by works of art that expressed America metaphorically, through sheer size or potent symbols.  American art, like American culture, was a global phenomenon with New York at its core. There were “secondary” and usually ignored centers in the Midwest (Chicago) and on the West Coast (Los Angeles and San Francisco), but New York seized the lead, consolidating major art critics, major artists, major art dealers, and major art nstitutions, from museums to art departments, and, perhaps most important of all—important art collectors.  Until the 1970s, this scene was the site of rival movements, co-existing and reacting dialectically—Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Fluxus, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, Photo-Realism, Op Art, and so on, until the great seventies dissolve into incoherent Pluralism.  It can be said that, after Abstract Expressionism, most of these movements defined and positioned themselves against the aging artists of the New York School and their continuation of the European tradition.

This cacophony of movements was presided over by art critics and art historians who wrote for a small number of magazines that fulfilled the function of legitimation and validation of artists, their art reputations and careers.  As a financial town, New York provided the support system willing to invest in contemporary art, but only the art went through the system of approval from what Arthur Danto called “the art world.”  Danto and the aesthetician, George Dickie, conceived of the “institutional theory of art,” meaning that “art” was designated, not on an aesthetic basis, but upon the basis of institutional acceptance.   From Neo-Dada onwards, the traditional definition of art was in a state of crisis, brought on by the acceptance of Marcel Duchamp’s alternative concepts of art.

Instead of an attractive object, characterized by “taste,” a work of art was a concept.  Instead of an artist who worked with hands and heart, the creator was a conceptualist who conceived of art as language.  Far more challenging than Duchamp’s insistence that art should be put “in the service of the mind,” was the logical consequences of Dada’s new artistic freedom.   If art was a thought manifested by an arbitrarily found object, then any item from the world outside of the confines of fine art could be termed “art.” Once “art” announced itself with its significant presence, its beauty, its grandeur, its profound intentions, by the Sixties, Danto pondered the difference between a “real” Brillo box and a Brillo box by Andy Warhol.

What is the difference between a mural sized field of glorious color titled Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950), a painting hanging on the wall, where it belongs, and Monogram (1955) a stuffed goat with a tire girdling its middle, standing proudly on a canvas, laid down like a “field” on the floor?  The gap between the two is the distance between generations, the gulf between America before and after World War II.  What happened during the fifties and the sixties to produce such a schism between the nobility of “Man, heroic and sublime” and the ignobility of an abandoned goat, straddling a painted arena, where the heroic artist once did battle with the forces of art and tradition?

The Fifties seemed to be Clement Greenberg’s nightmare of popular culture come true, with the invasion of kitsch—Rauschenberg’s goat and stuffed chickens in the museum just one room away from the abstract purity of Newman’s absolute spiritual state.  Life had invaded art in a most unexpected way. Newman’s piece is all about the human spirit at its most glorified, idealized, spiritualized form.  Rauschenberg’s work is about life, the quotidian, the overlooked, the ignored.  But life in all its inglorious aspects, Rauschenberg is asserting, is worthy of our attention.  The distance between Newman and Rauschenberg is the long delayed consideration of Duchamp’s challenge to high art and all its serious pretensions.  Instead of the involvement of gesture, we have the detachment of gesture.   Instead of the triumph of art, we have the success of art’s acceptance of anything and everything as art.

The ground was fertile for the ideas of Duchamp by the 1950s because of the need to debunk Abstract Expressionism and because of the commercial success of American art.  The burgeoning demand allowed the artists scope and freedom to defy rather than to extend and re-define tradition.   The success of American art was inseparable from the tragedy of Jackson Pollock.  Pollock took a deep breath about 1947 and managed to hold it and his life together for about three years. During this dry spell, Pollock produced some of the most sublime images of the century, and then willfully, capriciously, childishly, he exhaled.  His life’s breath drifted out and his art drifted away, and one August night in 1956, Pollock drove his car into a tree, killing himself and a passenger.  Great story.  American art now had its martyr.  The New York School now had its Grand Récit, complete with the tragic arc.   Greenberg would recall Pollock’s “run” of about ten years, leaving behind a cult of personality and a Studio full of relics and a keeper of the flame, “the art widow,” Lee Krasner.

In order for the art world to move on, this hagiography had to be combatted.  Piece by piece the vaunted characteristics of Abstract Expressionism would be attacked and discredited and discarded, and by the Eighties, the movement was consigned to a Modernist history. Ironically, the “triumph” of the New York School was immediately followed by the challenge of Neo-Dada.  Neo-Dada eschewed originality for appropriation, bringing the jewel in the crown of modernism—creativity—to an end. It is here that Modernism ends and Postmodern begins. The art world’s continuing challenges to Modernism and its defenders, Clement Greenberg and his followers, would be expanded to that of a critique of Enlightenment and all that it had wrought.  That critique was Postmodernism.  Postmodernism was a re-examination of Modernism and was based in philosophy and literary theory, rather than in the visual arts or aesthetics.  Therefore, postmodernism could not generate a style or a movement.

As a philosophical critique, postmodernism or post-structuralism was a European phenomenon, dating from the decade of the mid to late Fifties to Sixties.  Fueled by the collapse of the Left, following “May, 1968” in France, postmodernism was a re-reading of Enlightenment philosophy, a philosophy that had proved inadequate to the challenges of the Twentieth Century.  In Germany, postmodernism was really a form of post-Marxism, again, generated by the inadequacy of traditional Marxism to social and cultural changes, especially mass media.  As an exercise of re-examination, postmodernism took the stance of “belatedness,” everything had already been done, all had been said, and the kind of historical progress promised by the Enlightenment was unlikely to occur.

For years, most Americans in the art world paid little attention to postmodern theories, whether out of philosophy or literary theory.  The reason for this neglect are various and include American self-satisfaction with the leadership position in visual culture, the slowness of translation, and the entrenchment of traditional art historical methods.  When Americans became aware of the significance of postmodern thinking in the 1980s, most of the important works had either been written or were well underway.  Suddenly belated, American art could only try to respond and to catch up to European thinking.  The visual arts shifted into “theory” and language and philosophy, as artists began to critique Modernist art and to reject or re-examine its precepts.

With the occasional exception excluding women and people of color, the post-war art world was an all male, all white enclave.  The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Women’s Movement of the 1970s challenged the art world and revealed the racism and the sexism that favored the production of white men.  After the Stonewall Uprising in 1968 and especially after AIDS, the gay and lesbian community also demanded more visibility.  Coincidentally or not, postmodernism became prominent in America during the Reagan presidency, which was characterized by attempts to roll back the gains of women and people of color and by neglect of the AIDS epidemic.  Because postmodernism re-reads traditions of the past, it is an inherently conservative study, re-examining the work of white males, mostly dead.  That said, “theory,” especially post-Marxist theory provided women, gays and lesbians, and people of color a theoretical basis to challenge the more reactive elements of postmodern theory.

For the visual arts the consequences were profound: there was freedom and anarchy and lack of a center.  Without an avant-garde, postmodern artists seemed doomed to reactiveness to the past.  But folded into the postmodern period, were Late Enlightenment adaptations of social theories, co-existing with postmodern assertions that revolution was now impossible. The so-called “minorities” had the tools to resist the hegemony of the status quo.   The question that begs to be asked is, if late modernism and postmodernism co-mingle, when did postmodernism begin or when did modernism end?  The answer depends upon where you are, which culture you come from—the Sixties in Europe, the Eighties in America—in terms of response to Enlightenment philosophy.  But if one uses another criteria, “the postmodern condition,” then the shift is more cultural, rooted in mass media, and therefore global.  This “condition” that is Postmodernism is a post-war response to the loss of mastery and the disillusionment in a disenchanted world.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

 

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Jan
13
2012

Post-War Art in California

 POST-WAR ART  IN LOS ANGELES AND SAN FRANCISCO

At first glance, California would seem to be an exceedingly unpromising place for major art to emerge in the second half of the Twentieth Century.  A new state with a throwaway culture without a history, California had small pockets of local art scenes, more or less picturesque and more or less obscure, with most of the available money going to architectural development and occasional decorative embellishments, with the bulk of the financing going to film. Art was often allied to these enterprises, acting as a pictorial inducement to move to the Golden State or as a partner to movies. Unlike New York City, which had Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 as the gathering place for local and European avant-garde art, California tended to be geographically isolated and culturally limited.

There was a small group of individuals who supported avant-garde in their own diverse ways: Walter and Louise Arensberg and Galka Scheyer.  Hollywood attracted artists and the oldest art schools, Otis and Chouinard, had an internationally known faculty: Alexander Archipenko, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Hans Hofmann. In San Francisco, the California School of Fine Arts dominated the San Francisco scene and was the site of important works by the Mexican Muralist, Diego Rivera.  In 1940, Rivera created a mural, Pan American Unity, (today located at the San Francisco City College, for the World’s Fair on Treasure Island in San Francisco.  California, like other American states, benefited from the WPA mural program and, even today, murals by Maynard Dixon and Millard Sheets and Helen Lundeberg remain in Los Angeles from those days.

The main avant-garde scene in Los Angeles could be characterized as a Surrealist scene, both European and home grown, supported by collectors from the movie colony, such as Sterling Holloway, Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price.  Man Ray lived in Los Angeles from 1940 and showed in San Francisco at the de Young and at San Francisco Museum of Art.  Ray married Juliet Browner in a double wedding with Max Ernst (now divorced from Peggy Guggenheim) and Dorothea Tanning in 1946.  The art of Ernst did not necessary please all Angelinos.  Indeed, the famous actor, John Barrymore, got drunk and urinated on one of his works at an art opening.

The remnants of Dada lived on with the Arensberg, in their important Duchamp collection, and from the occasional visits of the famous artist himself.  While New York City contemplated Surrealism as painting or as “plastic automatism,” Los Angeles understood Surrealism from the standpoint of the found object and in relation to anti-art subversive forces.  While New York City artists extended Modernism along formalist lines and were forced into de-politicizing their art from the late Forties on, artists in California, alone and neglected, were able to be engaged and political, producing content-saturated art.

This local Los Angeles taste for meaning and content in Los Angeles art existed in large part because of the Surrealist sunset in L. A.  Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim had visited the city in 1941 and their colleague Julian Levy rented space next to the (Frank) Perls Gallery.  Other gallery owners included Guggenheim associate Howard Putzel, Stanley Rose, and Earl Stendahl. Of particular importance to the conceptual trend in the art of post-war Los Angeles was the trace of Man Ray who lived in Los Angeles until 1951 and had an important retrospective there in 1966. In contrast to the lingering influence of Surrealism, artists in Los Angeles, now the dead center of a post-war military industrial complex, were impacted by the experience of being at Ground Zero during the Cold War.

The aging Surrealists arrived in a land of continuous boom and mass suburbanization on an unprecedented scale.  Between 1940 and 1960 no fewer than 60 new cities were incorporated, many of which served highly specialized constituencies in greater Los Angeles. Despite the apparent clash between the past and the future, the artists of Los Angeles embraced the nostalgia of the found object in a culture that threw everything away.  As will be discussed later, the artists of the fifties were witnesses to the possibility of immanent nuclear destruction, because this center of the defense industry would be ground zero for any atomic attack.

Los Angeles had been “made” by the Second World War.  An important port city, LA was ideally situated on the Pacific Rim, a jumping off point for the Pacific Theater.  People streamed into the city from all over America to work in the war industries and the boomtown bustled with the constant presence of service personnel.  The region’s prominence did not end with the fighting.  California had recovered quickly from the war, thanks in no small part to the large petroleum production.  The vast defense industry that emerged during the Second World War and remained intact for the Cold War continued the prolonged economic prosperity and population growth.

But for  artists, the prosperity had a dark side.  It seemed probable that at any moment a button could be pushed and everyone and everything would be blown away.  The assemblage works of Ed Kienholz and the casual craft of Wallace Berman was a mute testimony to their alienated state of mind—one gathered detritus and made comments upon a society that could not last in the shadow of constant atomic threat.  Art, for these artists, could not be permanent or universal or humanistic, as it was in New York.   Art could only be fleeting and ephemeral for tomorrow all could vanish in a mushroom cloud.

While artists contemplated an uncertain future in Los Angeles, the movie business or  “the industry,” bounced back from wartime restrictions and stringencies and remained the largest filmmaking center in the world.  In short, California was developing industries for the late Twentieth Century and becoming a high-tech industrial base while the East Coast was still dependent upon the fruits of the Industrial Revolution and heading towards a post-War future as the Rust Belt.  Without much fanfare the United States government shifted federal largesse to the West Coast, the site of the race to the future—outer space.

Art in California was very different from New York in the post-war era, but these distinctions were complex, ranging from the mindset of the artists to the realities of the art scene.  While New York was a single focused center, California had two art sites, San Francisco and Los Angeles.  In contrast to the relatively homogenous scene in New York, the two cities had entirely disparate traditions.   In San Francisco, the heritage European expressionist painting established a firm foothold; while in Los Angeles, the artists were more responsive to the lingering influences of Dada and Surrealism.  In New York, the impact of Duchamp could become Neo-Dada, which is rather different from the influences of Surrealism in Los Angeles. These two movements, Dada and Surrealism, could not be comfortably accommodated to the Modernist line of art development and was termed the “Other Tradition” by art historian, Rosalind Krauss.

The father of the Other Tradition, Marcel Duchamp was an active presence in Los Angeles and was well known in San Francisco, long before his work was remembered in New York City. The Dada tradition, an old one, dating back to the First World War, is both preserved and reawakened in the two major sites for art, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Art in California is essentially a post-World War II experience, in the sense that the region emerges as a particular site for art forms that would have international impact.

If one disregards, for the purposes of discussing contemporary art, the California Impressionists and contributions to the Arts and Crafts movement, then serious avant-garde art is a product of the wartime environment.  Before the Second World War, California was best known for its thriving scene in photography to the North and for its role as the movie capital of the world to the South. Less well known was the region’s importance for architecture.  Some of the most innovative early Modern architects practiced in the Los Angeles area, from Charles and Henry Greene, Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler, and Richard Neutra.

With ample opportunity for building single-family homes and small housing units, these architects, several of them immigrants, could forge forward into modernism.  Modernism in California, especially in Los Angeles is worth discussing in relation to the barriers of politics and war in Europe.  In contrast, the West Coast with its polyglot non-tradition of many styles was a fruitful site for experimental architecture.  Irving Gill’s now-destroyed Dodge House was built as early as 1916, predating Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, 1929.  While Frank Lloyd Wright and the Greene Brothers were descended from the arts and crafts tradition, but Neutra and Schindler produced very important examples of what would be called The International Style.  Both Neutra (Lovell Health House, 1929) and Schindler (Lovell House, Newport Beach, 1926) built houses for Philip Lovell, which were two of the best examples of modernist white walled architecture outside the Bauhaus.

As this international group of architects suggests, California was a land of migrants and immigrants of many cultures and ethnicities: an uneasy mixing bowl where Anglos insisted on maintaining a cultural, political, and economic domination.  The history of Los Angeles, for example, can be written in terms of the movement of ethnic groups around the city, shifted at the will of the Anglos.  Their voices will not be heard until the Sixties, making the Watts Towers constructed by Simon Rodia one of the rare public monuments asserting diversity and ethnicity and personal commitment to a sense of place.  But the Watts Towers were more than a statement of one person’s determination, they became, over time, a symbol of art in Los Angeles and the peculiar direction art in Los Angeles has taken.  Rodia worked as a bricoleur, a hunter and a gatherer, who worked with the objects found in his environment. Like the artists of Los Angeles who would begin their mature careers shortly after Rodia mysteriously left in the early fifties to return to his native Italy, he worked in isolation, without support or audience or appreciation, except by the few who were open-minded. Under such circumstances, without major museums, without patrons, with few galleries, the artists were in a curiously “pure” situation, making art for art’s sake alone, showing art for a truly elite audience–themselves.

In summation, both Los Angeles and San Francisco and their two very different art scenes have traditionally been ignored in favor of art in New York.  Broadly speaking, regardless of brief deviations, New York has always been a painting town, as was San Francisco, until the sixties.  Although people have always painted in the City of Angles, Los Angeles has always been an object making town.  To repeat, a very important factor the artists in Los Angeles was the shadow of the Cold War.  Acutely aware of the militarization of the nation, the artists of Los Angeles expected the world to end at any time.  There seemed no purpose to make art that was lasting, much less archival.  The LA artist has always worked with stuff, junk, detritus, and objects without history, without recognition, only to find out—over time—that something important had been wrought and their art was validated after the fact.

In contrast to this homegrown culture of the found object in Los Angeles, the artist in San Francisco was in a considerably more traditional milieu that of European painting and modern art, imported by artists from New York City, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko.  The impact of their influence as teachers and as artists was the famous Bay Area Figurative School, which evolved out of abstraction on the East Coast.  The New York aura was a short lived phenomenon, however, and the San Francisco period of Figurative painting soon gave way to something more home grown: object-based “funk art” created in a Dada frame of mind.  Indeed, Dada and Surrealism have an extended, albeit it American, life in California, north and south.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Jan
06
2012

The Beats, Art and Literature

BEAT CULTURE

1950s

Most cultural movements are large-scale shifts in thinking due to a collective action on the part of many people.  Beat Culture is unusual in that the concept of what it meant to be a Beat was based upon the writings and activities of a very few people who had an extraordinary impact upon America. Despite their small numbers, the original Beats tapped into something beneath the surface of American society in the 1950s, giving voice to unspoken feelings.  The term “beat” comes from black culture and from jazz.  However, “beat” does not refer to a musical beat, but to the way those who were black in America felt: “beat.”  “Beat” means “beat down,” “beaten up by life,” down and depressed, in a state of despair.

When a black person said, “I am beat,” s/he was making a profound statement, not of fatigue, but of alienation and of hopelessness.  Whites, in the segregated Fifties, would come into contact with blacks on the musical scene, coming to black jazz clubs to listen to the music.  To whites, outsiders and spectators of a culture they could hardly understand, blacks were the ultimate “cool” cats, possessing an impressive machismo that whites could only admire.  The coolness of the “hep cats” was copied by the whites to the extent that the famous author, Norman Mailer, wrote an essay in 1957 called, “The White Negro” about wanna-be coolness.

White men wanted to be as cool as black men because the black culture seemed to offer a freedom from the conformity of the Fifties.  Whites did not realize that the “freedom” from behavioral rules was the result of enforced segregation and exclusion from the larger mainstream society.  But the reason for the cool freedom was not important to the white admirers of black culture.  What the Beats wanted was freedom from the Fifties.  Writer Gore Vidal once characterized the Fifties as “the worst decade in the history of the world.”  If one was gay, like Vidal, the Fifties was catastrophic, and the only place society offered to someone who was “queer” was in the closet.  Being gay was grounds for dismissal from jobs and many gay men “passed” into straight society through marriage and children.

The plight of gays and lesbians who were forced to live a stunted and inauthentic existence was an extreme version of the life society demanded you live.  There were few choices in that decade, but the proscribed lifestyle was possible only for middle class whites.  Thanks to huge government programs, the white middle class prospered in suburbs, in a single-family home with a white picket fence, with a husband and wife, two children, a dog, a cat, a station wagon.  After a horrible Depression and a frightening war, suburbia and a lawn to mow seemed like paradise, but with paradise came a price.  Many people felt that their options were too limited and strained against the conformity and the conservative, even retrograde, attitudes of the Eisenhower years.

The Beats were those who rebelled against the complacency and the materialism that marked the years that Eisenhower was the President.  There were two Beat centers, New York and San Francisco, and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles.  The attraction for the Beats was the Jazz scene and black musicians had migrated to the West Coast where they hoped they would find less hostility. In his book Art After 1940, Jonathan Fineberg writes as though the Beats and the Neo-Dada artists were part of the same culture in New York.  They actually were not.

The only thing these two groups had in common was that both the Beat and the Neo-Dada figures were part of the New York underground.  There is little evidence that the groups had any impact upon each other’s art.  They would have known of each other but their differences would have kept them apart.  The Neo-Dada artists were underground because they were not yet accepted into the mainstream, an event that happened in 1958 when Leo Castelli debuted Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in his gallery.  The artists’ time in the underground ended.

The term “Beat” would have been applied to them long after the fact and not during the Fifties.  The Beats were not visual artists, but literary artists and were few in number. The Beats never wanted to be part of the mainstream, never sought success or acceptance.  The main “leaders” were a novelist, Jack Kerouac, who wrote On the Road (published 1957) and Allen Ginsberg, a poet who wrote Howl.  The two had met at Columbia University where neither fit in.  Kerouac was a nonconformist and Ginsberg was gay.  Although the University recognized their gifts, these rebels could not be absorbed into a formal system.  The third member of the literary trio was William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, published in 1959.  But the first of the three to achieve literary notoriety was Ginsberg, who debuted his famous poem Howl in San Francisco in 1955.

Fineberg stresses the New York art world and completely leaves out the significance of the West Coast.  This kind of neglect is common for East Coast art historians, but in the case of the Beat culture, leaving out the importance of San Francisco leaves a large blank space.  The visual artist who had the most connection with the literary Beats was a photographer, Robert Frank, who published his seminal, The Americans (1958).   Jack Kerouac wrote the preface for Frank’s book, which became the most famous book of photography of the Twentieth Century.  Frank took a road trip across America, photographing the country from his perspective as a Swiss expatriate and was in San Francisco for the first reading of Howl.

Howl is a great American poem—an updating of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.  At the time, it was considered “obscene,” but today, like all Beat literature, it is considered a “classic” and is part of the American literary canon. Ginsberg read his poem at the Six Gallery in San Francisco to shouts of “Go!” from Kerouac.  Also present was local poet, Michael McClure, who introduced Ginsberg, and Los Angeles artist, Wallace Berman, a Beat artist from L. A., who had far closer ties to the New York Beats than did the artists in New York itself.  Most publishers would refuse to publish a poem with “dirty words,” but one brave publisher and bookstore operator dared.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the famous City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, published the poem and was promptly tried for obscenity in 1957.  Defended by the ACLU, Ferlinghetti was allowed to publish the book and continued his career as a poet and as a defender of civil liberties, including the Chicano Civil Rights movement. Once a place of scandal, City Lights Bookstore is located at the corner of Broadway and Kerouac Alley, one of several streets in San Francisco named after writers, including via Ferlinghetti.

Ironically, the year that Howl got the seal of approval, one of the attendees at the reading, Wallace Berman, was also accused of obscenity for a show he did at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Tried and convicted and humiliated, Berman left Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, a more open-minded town where he lived for years before returning to L. A. where he died in 1970.

The year Howl was published, On the Road appeared.  Kerouac had written the autobiographical novel from a road trip he took in the 1940s.  Although the book claimed to be about one journey, it was actually composed of three separate trips.  He was accompanied on the primary road trip by Neal Cassady.  The Beat movement was all male with a few women on the fringes.  As a result of the sexual repression of the Fifties, the sexual torments and yearnings of the confused men are present in this book.  Written in 1951 on twelve-foot strips of paper, linked into a one hundred twenty foot scroll, the novel was finally published, with name changes, to instant success.

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs followed.  With a keen ear for the language of drug culture, Burroughs tapped into the lingo and introduced white American readers to key terms, still in use today.  Burroughs had much experience with drugs, having operated a marijuana farm in Texas, and with death, having accidentally shot his wife to death.   One of the most interesting terms to come from the novel was the name of a dildo, “Steely Dan,” taken up twenty years as the name for a famous avant-garde rock ‘n’ roll group, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.  The real underground Beat artists were the artists in San Francisco scene, such as Bruce Connor, Jay de Feo and her husband, Wally Hedrick, and in the Los Angeles scene, such as Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz.  The movement of the Beat artists in San Francisco’s North Beach evolved into the “funk”’ movement in the next two decades.

These Beat writers of the Fifties awoke something in American readers, who, despite the quietude of the decade, apparently yearned to hear dissident voices. Beats became famous and were renamed when the Soviet Union launched a tiny satellite named “Sputnik” in 1957.  Americans were alarmed, to say the least, and reacted by getting into the space race and by reinforcing math in school curriculums.  Beats were renamed “Beatniks,” perhaps to make them appear less threatening.  Mainstream Americans were horrified at the attire of male Beatniks: beards, black clothing, and sandals.

In order to absorb this dire invasion from the coffee houses, Hollywood invented its own tame Beatnik, “Maynard G. Krebs,” a character on a television show.  But an unknown group of young teenage musicians took the Beats as role models.  Wearing long hair, another establishment no-no, and black leather jackets, the leader of the band decided their new name would be the BEATles.  It is often said that the Beats inspired the Counter-Culture movement, but the connection seems to be questionable.

Certainly the Beats served as an inspiration for the Sixties youth culture.  But the original Beats were social critics did not want to be part of the mainstream culture; however, they were not social dropouts.  Kerouac scorned the hippies and disapproved of their “turn on” and “tune out” attitudes.  The counter-culture was politically active and the Beats preferred to stay outside of the political realm.  That said, Ginsberg was one of the first Americans to take LSD and Burroughs was a part of the East Village Scene in the Eighties that included Jean-Michel Basquiat who was a great admirer of the old druggie.  For a black, being “beat” meant being alienated for racial reasons, for a white being “beat” meant being alienated for social reasons.  Beatniks were literary artists who refused to enter the establishment and, despite their success, were never part of the mainstream.  Unlike the artists of the New York underground, they stayed underground, anti-heroes to the counter-culture, even today.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.   Thank you.

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Nov
11
2011

“The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939 by Clement Greenberg

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

OF

The Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 1939

by Clement Greenberg

What is life?  If one paraphrases the painter, Ad Reinhardt, “Life is everything that is not art or art is everything that is not life…” which means that much has been excluded from art…an exclusion, which would please the New York critic, Clement Greenberg.  In 1939, against the backdrop of European Fascism, the American art critic wrote The Avant-Garde and Kitsch. The prevailing and popular art style, American regionalism, was waning when Greenberg set out to make the distinction between a true genuine culture and popular art.  From the very beginning of the essay, Greenberg was very clear that he would deal with a question of “aesthetics,” or how art is defined, and that he would do so by examining the experiences of a “specific” individual and the “social and historical contexts in which that experience takes place.”

Greenberg was writing at a very unique time indeed.  It was rare for contemporary art to be under the kind of attacks that had been underway for years in Europe.  In the Soviet Union, the avant-garde was completely suppressed.  In German, avant-garde art was defined as “degenerate.”  The Avant-Garde and Kitsch was published in the new intellectual journal, Partisan Review, a good place for an up-and-coming literary critic to further his career. For years Greenberg, an English major in college, wrote mostly as a literary critic, and his first published article was on Berthold Brecht, a Berlin theater producer.  Brecht, a devoted Communist, thought of popular entertainment as a means to raise the consciousness of the audience.  Using the “estrangement” strategy, Brecht broke the “fourth wall” by addressing the audience directly from the stage and thus also breaking the illusion of “reality.”

As his interest in Brecht’s use of popular theater would suggest, Greenberg was not necessarily opposed to popular culture per se and it is important to understand the context in which this essay was developed.  The entire world was poised on the edge of another world war and was witnessing the horrifying spectacle of a fascist war machine rolling over Europe.  During this fascist period in Europe, “culture” had been appropriated by the totalitarian powers in the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy and turned into spectacle for the masses, resulting in mesmerizing entertainment and psychic manipulation.

The ability of Hitler and Mussolini to make war with little opposition from their own people who supported the aggression was the result of a years-long, carefully orchestrated campaign of propaganda.  Brecht understood all too well how “culture” both popular and unpopular could be mobilized to mesmerize the masses, which was exactly what happened in Germany. Any form of culture that could protest the philosophy of the Nazis had long since been shut down and dissident artists were brutally silenced.  German artists had fled to America or had retreated to an “inner exile” of non-confrontational art.  Indeed, Greenberg himself would later learn much about art from an émigré artist, Hans Hofmann.

Greenberg was repelled by the totalitarian seizure of “culture” in Europe. But the critic is an American living in New York.  If the examples of the demise of the avant-garde in Europe were extreme, the governmental use of American artists to its own end was also disturbing to an intellectual. Although many artists owned their careers to government patronage during the thirties, there was a cost to carrying on this kind of work.  The role of art under the New Deal was to communicate very specific messages to a public, which was largely illiterate about art and the artist’s freedom was often limited by the parameters of the project.  That said, in America, there was artistic freedom, and Greenberg equated the freedom to make art with the freedom to make avant-garde abstract art.  But there was also a small arena for avant-garde artists in America and the artists lacked the open playing field of art galleries that existed in France.

Writing at the end of the avant-garde in Europe, Greenberg explained the significance of the avant-garde tradition. He defined the avant-garde as a “superior consciousness” which coincided with the emergence of modern scientific thinking.  As a force for cultural critique, avant-garde art separated itself from the bourgeoisie.  This separation included the artists’ separation from subject matter and content and an adherence to art-for-art’s-sake. Greenberg made reference to the avant-garde artists,

“Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cézanne derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in,” and he adds, in a phrase which would be further developed in later essays, “…to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors.”

But, as a Marxist, Greenberg saw problems within the avant-garde in that this “…culture contains within itself some of the very Alexandrianism it seeks to overcome.”  Greenberg feared for the avant-garde artist, for this artist was dependent upon capitalism and wealthy patrons.  The artist was necessarily attached to bourgeois wealth by what Greenberg called “an umbilical cord of gold.”  He pointed to the paradox of artistic freedom being dependent upon an elite clientele, which is shrinking rather than growing. Greenberg wrote,

“…the avant-garde itself, already sensing the danger, is becoming more and more timid every day that passes. Academicism and commercialism are appearing in the strangest places. This can mean only one thing: that the avant-garde is becoming unsure of the audience it depends on — the rich and the cultivated.”

Greenberg looked elsewhere and wrote that the avant-garde was threatened by the rear guard, which, to Greenberg, was the dreaded phenomenon—kitsch, which he defined as,

“…popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc…”

Later, Greenberg would disavow his definition of kitsch, and, indeed, his later discussion of kitsch indicates that he is less concerned about popular culture than with what would be better termed “academic art.”  It would be correct to assume that Greenberg despaired of a nation that thought it was receiving “art” every week with the Norman Rockwell cover of The Saturday Evening Post, but it is also important to recall that what was considered art in the 1930s was “academic.”

As the following quote from Greenberg would suggest, an example of “kitsch” would be Alexandre Cabanal’s Birth of Venus as opposed to avant-garde work of Édouard Manet’s Le Dejeunner sur l’herbe.  According to the critic,

The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its lifeblood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

In other words, kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money — not even their time. And speaking of money, Greenberg noted that the avant-garde has not always “resisted” the “of temptation” to turn their art into kitsch.

Kitsch is popular or commercial form of high art, a product of the industrial revolution, manufactured for a middle class audience who had enough literacy to want “art” but not enough culture to understand the genuine article.  The urbanized proletariat was given an ersatz culture—fake art, kitsch, which used a debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture.  Kitsch operated, according to Greenberg, as vicarious experience, as faked sensations, taking advantage of a fully matured cultural tradition for its own ends.  Kitsch loots real art, borrows what it needs, converts inventions into formulas, waters down experiments and turns out familiar art-like images mechanically.

Often overlooked in the numerous analyses of this essay is Greenberg’s lengthy and perceptive discussion of the relationship between kitsch and the regimes in Germany, Italy and Russia.  These totalitarian regimes reject the avant-garde for two reasons.  First, the dictatorial government must get close to the people in order to rule them and no government wishing to disperse propaganda would use avant-garde art to do so.  The public simply would not understand the language. In point of fact, that is precisely what happened to the Soviet avant-garde which was deemed inarticulate. Second, Greenberg considered the avant-garde to be inherently critical and unsuited for governmental manipulation. “It is for this reason that the avant-garde is outlawed, and not so much because a superior culture is inherently a more critical culture,” he stated.

Greenberg was certainly prophetic in recognizing that kitsch would become an international language, taking over indigenous folk cultures; but he was wrong in assuming that avant-garde artists would succumb to actually making kitsch.  It is one of the ironies of art history that the kitsch-producing government commissions allowed financially marginal artists to become professional artists who would later become the center of the avant-garde. What Greenberg could not foresee was that, after World War II, a consumer society would be kicked into high gear, producing a generation of artists who grew up with kitsch or popular culture.

Greenberg may have repudiated his rather simplistic definition of “kitsch,” but his attitude that the public could not tell the difference between Tin Pan Alley and T. S. Eliot remained. Convinced of the serious mission that avant-garde art had to stand apart from society in order to critique it, the critic could not look upon Pop Art as “art.” This generation, called Pop artists (popular culture) used kitsch as raw material for their art and converted images from kitsch sources into artistic icons. Trapped by a self-imposed vocabulary of form and formalism, he simply did not have the concepts that would have allowed him to marvel—however cynically—at how kitsch became elevated to “high art.”  But Greenberg’s essay remains viable and perceptive in his analysis of the gulf between the elite and the general public.  The following words could have been written today:

Most often this resentment toward culture is to be found where the dissatisfaction with society is a reactionary dissatisfaction which expresses itself in revivalism and puritanism, and latest of all, in fascism. Here revolvers and torches begin to be mentioned in the same breath as culture. In the name of godliness or the blood’s health, in the name of simple ways and solid virtues, the statue-smashing commences.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Oct
21
2011

“The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” 1925 by Walter Benjamin

Trauerspielbuch

(The Origin of German Tragic Drama), 1925

by Walter Benjamin 

Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels utilized a thought floated by Marx, that all art would become “allegorical” as a result of commodification and of its transformation into a fetishistic object. In this notoriously difficult book, Benjamin foregrounded allegory as the structural underpinning of the Baroque épistemé.  Originally intended as his Habilitationsschrift, or an academic manuscript, submitted to the faculty of a German university as the necessary prelude for being accepted as a Privatdozent.  Once accepted into the university fold, the Privatdozent has the right to lecture on whatever topic s/he desires.  On the surface, the submission was exemplary.  Benjamin had made all the right moves: he found a long neglected area of culture to investigate—German Baroque tragic drama—-and analyzed this obscure topic with exemplary and labyrinthine thoroughness.

However, after being passed among departments, this complex tome was summarily rejected by the traditional academics at the university in Frankfurt.  The Ursprung was an uneasy but innovative work—ahead of its time in its willingness to combine exacting research with poetical interpretation.  The major complaint against this book from its main reader was that it is impossible to study the spirit of an age, but forty years later, Michel Foucault would do just that in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) when he studied the notion that each era had its own system or theory of knowledge.

But beyond the question of how or whether “knowledge” was a social construct, there were larger problems with the Ursprung.  In resurrecting an almost forgotten art form, Benjamin actually challenged the prevailing belief that the “Classical” was superior to the “Baroque.”  It seems clear that he had read or was familiar with the work of the art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin: Renaissance und Barock (Renaissance and Baroque) (1888), and Die klassische Kunst (Classic Art) (1898, and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) (1915). Wölfflin treated the Baroque as a co-equal of Classical, as simply another style and not as a “decline” from the Classical.  However, as the prompt rejection of Benjamin’s thought experiment on the Baroque would suggest, the ideas of Wölfflin were still not accepted among those favoring classicism as the epitome of any form of art.

For a century, Germans had preferred the “classical”, that which the poet Göethe had called “healthy” to the Baroque or the early version of the Romantic which was therefore “unhealthy.”  The Baroque had long been considered to be a decadent version of the pure Classical and its obscure manifestations in Germany were of little interest to anyone, but Benjamin, who revisited this manifestation for his Habilitationsschrift.  In a time when academics worked within disciplinary confines that were strictly limited and patrolled, Benjamin was writing an interdisciplinary work, crashing through the room divides between studies of German culture, art history and aesthetics. The writer looked through a prism that incorporated Jewish mysticism from the Kabbalah.

Of course art history is in many ways a Jewish discipline, a life-long Yeshiva school, where art is endlessly rewritten and debated.  However, art history, like any other religion or belief system, has its rules and its areas of conventional wisdom.  In his excellent introduction to the Ursprung, George Steiner noted that Benjamin’s manuscript found its way into the hands of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), author of Studies in Iconology in 1939. According to Steiner, Panofsky did not view Benjamin’s work favorably. Steiner posited that Benjamin could have found a home with the group of scholars in Hamburg, Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, Neo-Kantians, and Aby Warburg, the cultural historian in what became the Warburg Institute.

But Benjamin was probably too eclectic in his methodology even for this group and the moment passed and Warburg was dead by 1929 and Panofsky in America by 1933.  Benjamin gave up on academics and spent the rest of his life as a free lance writer and radio broadcaster.  Here, in short articles and lectures on the radio, Benjamin could roam free, indulging his wide range of interests as a literary and cultural critic.  “Criticism,” he said, “should do nothing else than uncover the secret predisposition of the work itself, complete its hidden intentions…”

For Benjamin, the power of interpretation was the power of the idea and he sought a synthesis between philosophical abstraction and aesthetic concreteness.  Using the idea of the dialectic, he thought that the universal would be revealed through that which was particular or in comparing the overall structure to the insignificant detail.  Benjamin sought the detail, an element thought unworthy of intellectual effort.  In contrasting the Classical to the Baroque, Benjamin is able to isolate certain defining characteristics: the symbol is the characteristic property of the Classical mind and the allegory is the characteristic property of the Baroque way of thinking.

Allegory, like the Baroque, had been considered a decadent form of symbolism.  Symbolism, in its purity, idealized and subdues the material object, totalizes its meaning and signification. The allegory, in contrast, is a sheer hemorrhage of significations that disrupt meaning and coherence.  This surplus of signification called “écriture” by later French writers, contrasted the purity of speech (the Classical) to the impurity of writing (the Baroque).

For the modern reader The Origin of German Tragic Drama is a difficult slog and the best advice one can give to skip over the obscure theatrical productions that languish (deservedly) in obscurity and to seek the fragments of insight from Benjamin.  The writer contrasted the Classical Hero in Greek tragedy who is silent in his suffering, in his tragic and unspeakable fate.  In his inability of speak, this hero become superior to the gods and thus transcends not just the deities but also history itself.  But the Baroque hero is mired in history that is natural and not timeless.  This hero must be noble so that his fall will be from a high place, suggesting that his suffering is more of a social humiliation than a preordained tragedy from a fatal flaw.  The Classical tragic hero wrestles with the inextricable workings of Fate but the Baroque hero is but one character amid a larger cast who—not gods—are his fellow actors.

Therefore, according to Benjamin, “tragic drama” is not “tragedy.” Tragedy is about mourning.  Tragic drama is about melancholy.  as Like Sigmund Freud in a paper, On Mourning and Melancholia, which had been delivered in 1917,  Benjamin separated “mourning”—classical tragedy form “melancholia”—tragic drama.  Indeed, Benjamin identified Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, as melancholy.  If the Classical is that which is timeless and transcendent, then its eternal life must be contrasted to the historicism and decay of the Baroque. If the Classical is that which is whole, complete, and self-sufficient, the Baroque is a mere collection of those  left-behind details, fragments of a melancholy cult of decay.  Benjamin forces the reader to examine these fragments, these “found objects” of the Baroque allegory.

Although Benjamin used the Hegelian notion of the dialectic to study an obscure and devalued topic, Baroque theater in Germany, Benjamin’s thinking was greatly influenced by Surrealist strategies for discovering the “marvelous.”  The marvelous was a mental state that resulted from the isolation of the object, resulting in defamiliarization and the shock of defamiliarity on the part of the now-dazzled viewer.  The frozen object is estranged from context and is freed to take on new meanings.  Like the Marvelous, the allegorical discourse is characterized by doubleness; the object is expressionless and yet possesses unbridled expression.  The object is purged of mystified immanence and is capable of multiple uses.  In its plurality, the frozen object can contain and radiate a bricoulage of elements, and because the allegory lays bare its devices (demystifies), the visual figure defeats symbolism.  Symbolism, by its very nature, “disguises,” as Erwin Panofsky would say, but Allegory ostentatiously displays its construction.  But its meaning is de-centered and refuses to submit to the totality of structure.

Benjamin connected allegory to the death of symbol and to the decline of aura in commodity production.  He linked the atomizing of the objects to Baudelaire’s observation of commodity culture where objects become abstracted and acquire an arbitrary status.  The commodity exists as fragment, ambiguous and ephemeral, and becomes fetish.  The object become overwritten, a palimpsest bearing unconscious traces of its aura and authenticity, neither of which exist, except as trace.  The object is reinvented as an emblem by Renaissance scholars and became the stylistic principle of Baroque art.  Rather than symbol, the emblem is code, pictorial codes or “thing pictures” (dingbilder) or a rebus, as Freud would have expressed it.  The allegorical form, however, is capable of capturing historical experience, which is why Postmodern Critical Theory would be so interested in Allegory.

Art, for the Critical Theorist, must be grounded in history.  Aesthetics attempts to turn an object into radiance and to transform exaltation into transcendence.  This process of aestheticizing the object idealizes the work but in a negative fashion, for the memory or history of the object is transfigured into a “sentimental glow”.  Allegory, in contrast, is not radiant and extinguishes, along with light, the false glow of totality.  Allegory admits that history is ruins and acknowledges the transitory nature of things.  The allegory, lodged in history, is beyond (idealized) beauty.  The allegorical form is petrified and frozen in the landscape of history, destroying aesthetics.  The governing law of aesthetics is not totality but antinomy and the dialectic is used as a mechanism of reversal of extremes.

Allegory depends upon conventions, which may be cheapened and degraded.  Allegory is a gathering, a collection of things, a combination of references that are assembled through a law that combines scatteredness and collectedness.  The arrangement of these collections is slack.  The most important allegorical figure is the fragment, which is imaged by an architectural ruin, ravaged by time.  For Benjamin, it was important to acknowledge that history was a ruin, in a state of decay, for history could be appropriated and idealized or aestheticized.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama brings together a number of tendencies in Germany at the early stages of the Twentieth Century.  Benjamin noted that Göethe, the Classicist, rejected allegory.  In his epic essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, German poet, Friedrich Schiller was correct in understanding his friend, Göethe, as being “naïve” in that the older poet was immune from history and created art from an internal force.  The “sentimental” artist, however, is more akin to Benjamin’s allegorical maker, who makes it very clear that an allegorical object is being put together through an act of bricolage.

It is important to note that the mechanics of the allegory are not concealed or, as Brecht would have it, “naturalized”.  The assemblage that is allegory is always grounded in the truth.  Schiller’s sentimental artist may have mourned the loss of innocence and may have suffered from alienation but this artist is deeply connected to the history of his/her period.  Karl Marx pointed out that in an era of commodification, it would be the fate of art to become allegory.  That is, art, in becoming commodified would loose its “halo” and in its unsacred condition could be appropriated and turned into a fetish.

Art as allegory is alienated art.  The allegorist is thus both elegiac and satirical, but Benjamin foregrounds the condition of mourning and melancholy, pictured in ruins.  And yet, like Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin is torn.  He mourns the loss of the Old Paris, but like a Baudelarian flâneur, strolls through time and collects fragments or “remnants” and recombines them into an excess of writing.  Benjamin’s writings were very metaphorical, as though he turned to the past to express the future.  He understood Baudelaire’s metropolis as a manifestation of space within which new technologies were displayed as spectacle.

In an age of secular spectacle, fashion would be king and anything could be fashion, which is the ultimate form of “false consciousness” and cultural distraction.  Benjamin is fascinated with death and that which is dead, the corpse.  Once the object becomes a fetish and is alienated from social production and social use, it becomes fashion and is worshiped as a commodity.  The fetish is inorganic as opposed the corpse, which is organic.

Feeling that European culture was in a condition of crisis, Benjamin’s gaze is Janus-like.  He understood the past could only exist as ruins and that its fragments would only be displaced into the present as fetishes.  The future was even more bleak and marked by a mourning for the past.  The future could never be authentic; art could only be allegorical; and Baudelaire as the quintessential poet-critic exemplified the only stance of the artist that of an observer of the spectacle, alienated and enlivened only by cynical commentary.  Although we can read his literary action as allegorist in The Arcades Project, the work of Benjamin was re-read by postmodern critics and philosophers as portents of Postmodernism.

The arbitrary and nostalgic piling on of historical traces torn from the fabric of time, decontextualized and overwritten by the present, while retaining the trace of the past would be the prime strategy of postmodernism.  The Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who survived Benjamin, would complete the setting of the stage for Postmodernism.  Critical Theory would be developed in its contemporary form after the Second World War, in the wake of the Holocaust.  “There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin prophetically remarked in his essay On the Concept of History of 1937.

Benjamin’s insight that a dislocated history could be nostalgically fetishized for the Nazi cause, that art would become allegory and could be fetishized as propaganda seemed both prophetic and tragic.  All that he feared came true. Towards the end of what would turn out to be his only book, Walter Benjamin wrote,

Allegory goes away empty-handed. Evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is.  It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.  The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories.  They are not real and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy; they are this view, which is destroyed by its own offspring because they only signify its blindness.

And then he concluded,

In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings…Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Oct
14
2011

“The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin, Part Two

Re-reading “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

by Walter Benjamin

Part Two

Decades after the death of Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility was often mis-read and misunderstood, but in its own time, this essay had a profound impact upon the thinking of Benjamin’s friend Theodor Adorno.  Almost a decade after the death of his friend, Adorno, working with Max Horkheimer, examined  ”The Culture Industry” in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).  Adorno and Horkheimer were alerted by Benjamin the unholy alliance between politics and art, but Benjamin’s larger project in his “Work of Art” essay was more subtle. Benjamin was interested in the new mode of perception ushered in by modern mechanical reproduction.  In other words, his essay recalls the anxieties of the Ninth Century Iconoclasts that the image might replace the authenticity of the Divine with a simulacra and anticipates the predictions of Jean Baudrillard that the simulacra will be substituted for the real.  The central question of the “Work of Art” essay is how do we see and how to we think now that we are exposed to reproductions?

Of singular importance to this question is the association between Benjamin and the Weimar film writer, Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966).  Kracauer, like Benjamin, had a Neo-Kantian background, and was one of the intellectual pioneers in formulating a theory for film, a new art form.  This essay, therefore, needs to be understood from a dual perspective.  First, Benjamin examined the idea of the substitution of the object for its reproduction and second, he was concerned with the new mode of cognition wrought by this new “Age.”  As Kantians, both film writers, Kracauer and Benjamin, would have been concerned about the impact of a mechanical apparatus mediating reality—a mass social experience that Kant could not have anticipated when he posited his “Copernican Revolution.”

A hundred years ago, at the dawn of mass media, Benjamin was concerned with the idea of “origin” or authenticity.  If the origin can be located or known, then authenticity can be assured.  “Aura” refers to that “quality” which defined “art”—its inaccessibility, its remoteness, its distance from the observer/worshiper.  Art—or that special object set aside from normal social life—was always a cult object, viewed but never approached, venerated but never touched.  However reproductive technology was in the process of dispelling “aura” by making a cult object visible and available through an endless reproduction.  As Benjamin wrote, “By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a  unique experience.”

“The masses,” Benjamin thought the masses wanted to get closer to the object in their “concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness.”  The precise thing that gave art its “aura” must be assimilated into a mass experience.  Benjamin understood that “art” needed to be understood from another point of view, one that did not depend upon the inaccessibility of the object.  He also understood that the entire apparatus of mass media reproduction, especially film, had a profound impact upon how people would perceive the world: through the mediating actions of images.  These images would be ubiquitous and would bear messages of all kinds. Unlike the work of art, these images would be partial, fragmented, un-whole, and conveyed via montage, which sliced through time and space, deploying incomplete impressions.

For wholeness and authenticity and completeness and, ultimately, “aura,” “technological reproduction” must suffice and substitute.  These notions of origin and authenticity and the vanishing point of aura also refer to the bourgeois ego, also on the point of vanishing into the commodity spell of capitalism.  The moment of the writing of this essay—1936 in Paris—is a time of crisis for the work of art and for the intellectual freedom of the consumer, perpetually under the spell of an increasingly technological society.  Thanks to technological reproducibility, art could be dislodged from its site and from its place in history and could be magically transported into the present where it could be possessed, used or misused.  Under such a system, aura would wither and decline.

“Aura” was an odd topic for this most Jewish of Jewish writers to take up, for traditional Judaism forbad “graven images.”  Art and its aura was a manifestly Christian tradition, but Benjamin understood art as having its origins in the rituals of the(prehistoric)  cult—an object of veneration upon which human feelings of awe was projected. He defined “aura” as that which is generated by and from the work of art when it functioned as a cult object within ritual due to the distance between the relic and the worshiper.  The psychological and physical space between the spectator and the relic created an aura that could be completely dispelled when the distance vanished. Mechanical Reproduction had the capability to bring that worshiped object down to earth, as it were, and place in within visual reach of the viewer.

“Auratic perception” could be defined as an atmosphere enveloping the object.  The subject’s position is one of contemplation or repose, a mental absorption in the object, an “intent attentiveness”.  But with the possibilities of reproductive technology, art was displaced from its position of distance and uniqueness and could be (re)possessed through mechanical reproduction. In addition that “attentiveness” was, in modern times, disrupted by the effects of mass reproduction of images, requiring little more than a passing glance.

Whereas both Marx and Baudelaire discussed the loss of the halo worn by those who had once made “art,” Max Weber used the term Entzauberung or “demystification,” or the loss of enchantment, in the world to explain the loss of “aura.”  Benjamin examined the possible role of the art object in a secularized and modernized culture.  Some twenty years later, André Malraux would take up the idea of reproducing works of art in his book, Museum Without Walls.  By then, art history books and reproduction of works of art was commonplace, but, in the Thirties, when this use of reproductive technology was in its infancy, and Benjamin was concerned about the fate of art.

The question for Benjamin is where did the status of auratic art begin to decay?  The atavistic, sacred, and mythic character of the cult object was transformed in the Renaissance.  “Art” was displaced from ritual and replaced into a cult of beauty and thus became profaned.  The result was contradictory—on one hand, art was emancipated from its dependence upon ritual, but on the other hand, the work of art became a fetish with mystifying character due to its former role as a cult object.  Benjamin asserted that, “mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new.”

For Benjamin the reproduction of works of art, which are unique, part of ritual and sacred practices, destroys the authority of art.  Loss of authenticity or aura destroys the very “rootedness” of art.  This “aura” Benjamin discusses is the result of distance which is decayed by the desire of the masses to bring things closer both in human and in spatial terms.  This loss of distance between the viewer and the work of art and the replacement of aura with familiarity lead to the universal equality of things, or what Benjamin called the “cult of similarity.”  On this point, his friend in the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, will not only agree but will also appropriate some of his colleague’s insights.  For Adorno, equality will lead to “identity thinking” and he will recommend the philosophical position of “negative dialectics” to counteract the deadly and totalitarian effects of demanding totalization of thinking.

Once the apparatus of mechanical reproduction is established, then art is produced for reproduction, fundamentally changing the character of art, which was once unique and original.  Without uniqueness and originality and authenticity, art has no aura.  Art is displaced from the cult and its cult value is replaced by its exhibitionary value.  Once art is on film (reproduced) or is film (photography or movies) its aura “shrivels” and ”withers” to the extent that the distance is diminished.  But Benjamin was concerned with the difference between the “first technology” or the desire to master nature and the “second technology,” or film, of which he said, ” The function of film is to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.”

Benjamin, however, had hope for mechanical reproduction.  Like his colleague, Bertold Brecht, he hoped that cinema, as a mass media, could, and would be an instrument to awaken the masses.  Film inherently tended to dissipate “aura” but Benjamin balanced losses against gains and the possibility of positive results.  There is the possibility of a catharsis, of a clean slate, which starts by admitting the modern poverty of experience in a disenchanted world.  New technology, used properly, could change the world.  The Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, had hoped that montage or editing would emancipate the thinking of his audience.

Benjamin understood that montage could work in another fashion: that editing and constructing a film role could build up an actor’s “aura,” an effect clearly seen in Triumph of Will—the “star power” of Hitler, who was framed in such a fashion to make him look like a god.  Plainly, Benjamin understood the danger of the “close up” to produce another kind of aura—a more dangerous cult could arise.  But he also had faith in the possibility that mass audiences could organize their own responses to film and thus, perhaps, emancipate themselves by using avenues of resistance and expression that “art” does not provide.  He stated,

“Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters preserve the magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its commodity character, but its counterpart the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses.”

For Benjamin, the loss of aura was deeply tied to a more profound crisis, and the loss of the aura of art was but a symptom of this crisis.  Borrowing from Marx and combining these insights with those of Freud, Benjamin dated the crisis from the end of the Great War to the end of the Weimer Republic, culminating in the seizure of power by the Nazis.  This crisis was the shattering of tradition, a tradition that had guaranteed coherence, communicability and the transmissibility of experience—the accumulation of unconscious data called “memory.”

“Erfahfung”, that assimilation of sensations, information, and events into an integrated experience had given way to “Erlebnis” or (modern) experience reduced to a series of atomized and unarticulated moments merely lived through.  Baudelaire understood modern experience, and Benjamin who wrote extensively on Baudelaire, while he was in exile in Paris, oscillated between celebrating this new culture and mourning the loss of traditional culture.  He was horrified by the new political barbarism he saw and was pained by the new poverty of experience, mediated by mass culture.

Indeed, in the early years of the Frankfurt School, the scholars did empirical studies which revealed that the masses were inherently passive and uninterested in rising up politically to help themselves through political revolution.  Benjamin watched while the forces of fascism took hold of the passivity of the masses and mobilized them to the cause of keeping property relations unchanged. In other words, fascism gave the proletarian mobs the illusion of participating in shaping their own destiny while they remained powerless.

The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction is often reprinted in a truncated form and was, in effect, intellectually and anachronistically “rewritten” for the purposes of re-contextualizing the work of Benjamin in the contemporary context of the art world.  Art historians who rediscovered Benjamin in the 1980s depoliticized his thinking.  However, this essay was very much concerned with politics, particular the rise of fascism, which manipulates the masses through art forms. Benjamin begins this essay by stating that under the “present conditions of production” (mechanical), “outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery” can be used by Fascism, or they can be used for “the formulation of revolutionary demands of the politics of art.”

Benjamin understood that Fascism, like the Roman Empire before it, would attempt to provide bread and circuses to distract the masses.  He also saw the danger that aesthetics and politics could be linked to war:

Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.  The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.  The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.  The violation of the masses, which Fascism, with its Fuehrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus, which is pressed into the production of ritual values.

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war…Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.

The “self-alienation” of society, Benjamin continues, “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.  Communism responds by politicizing art.”

****

Thus ends one of the most significant essays for the Postmodern Condition.  However, the historical context of this essay was lost, as, when the work was finally translated, it was released in America during the high verses low culture debate.  Certainly, Benjamin understood that once art was displaced from its auratic function, art could float from high to low, but his interest was more in what would later be termed “appropriation” or in what Clement Greenberg clearly saw was “kitsch” or the appearance or semblance of “art,” watered down for mass consumption.  After the emergence of Pop Art in the 1960s, the work of Benjamin was recontextualized and distorted to fit into Pop’s use of ready-made imagery.

In part one of this section on the “Work of Art” essay, the question was asked if this meditation on that which has been lost by Walter Benjamin has any value today, one hundred years later.  In the twenty-first century, we enjoy the fruits of mechanical reproduction and “technological reproducibility.”  We are inundated with images, bombarded by media, from twenty-four hour cable to radio stations that never go off the air to the faux intimacy of the Internet.  All “information” gets the same weight and accountability to the “facts” is often absent.  Media has become a commodity which needs to be bought and sold, meaning that intellectuals and ideas, as Marx foretold, are part of capitalist transactions.

Most people know “art” only from mechanical reproductions, augmented by occasional visits to a museum or gallery.  Television flattens the intellectual landscape by giving equal value to reality shows and Masterpiece Theater.  The movie industry produces entertainment for the lowest common denominator (the teenage boy) and news “papers” are becoming extinct and morphing into apps.  One wonders what Benjamin would have thought.  It is possible he would have delighted in the openness of the World Wide Web and would have been thrilled at the emergence of the “Arab Spring” via cell phone and blogging, but he would have grieved at television being appropriated by corporate interests, which use the concept of “news” to manipulate and dominate the masses.

When his essays were translated into English in the 1980s and made available for a wider readership, the cultural context of his essay made it clear that the writer was struggling between what he could clearly see as a misuse of “culture” and the great liberating possibilities of bringing images and people together.  Here is this benign field of entertainment the dominant ideology can be challenged and perhaps changed.  Years later, greatly indebted to Benjamin’s ideas, Theodor Adorno would write of a dominate “culture industry” that served to support the prevailing belief system.  Benjamin would not live to see how this culture industry came to dominate and shape “reality” or how the internet allowed the people to lay their hands on “the media.”  If he were alive today, Benjamin would probably be on the internet, blogging away.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Oct
07
2011

“The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936 Part One by Walter Benjamin

Re-reading The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936

by Walter Benjamin

Part One

Also know as The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, this essay by Walter Benjamin has been published in three different versions.   The definitive second, or “Ur,” version, as Benjamin stated, has been published most recently in the 2008 collection of essays, edited by Michael Jennings, et al. in a book titled after this famous essay.  And this is a famous essay—rediscovered in the 1960s in the wake of the age of youthful discontent, and read and re-read until this day. The question is, almost one hundred years later, is this essay anything more than a predictor of what we already know?

Much has been made of the fact that, when it was originally published in 1936 by the exiled Frankfurt School, publishing in German in their new home in New York City, the essay was shortened.  Or according to some, the essay was censored because the now famous last lines: Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism.  Communism replies by politicizing art.  In his excellent 1997 account of Benjamin’s life, Walter Benjamin. An Intellectual Biography, Bernd Witt explained that the writer understood quite well the precarious position of the exiled Marxist Jews in a nation that, on a good day, was barely tolerant of Jews and terrified of the Communists.

Benjamin agreed to having the essay shortened.  After all, the Frankfurt School was paying him a stipend and he needed the publication.  In addition, Benjamin was a professional writer.  Writers get edited; that is the nature of the work and not writer expects to have his or her work published in an untouched form.  Those who make charges against Theodor Adorno, claiming he had personal issues with Benjamin, are factually off the mark and are naïve in assuming that his peer group considered any writer’s work as being sacrosanct.

Benjamin himself had stated that one of the reasons why he left Berlin was because he was having difficulties in getting his work published.  Although he left the city very soon after the Nazis came into power, at the insistence of the wife of Theodor Adorno, Gretel Karplus, the repression of Jewish intellectuals, especially one of Marxist sensibilities, made his writing career hopeless.  Witt quotes Benjamin as writing, “…The terror directed at any attitude or mode of expression that does not completely correspond to the official one has reached a virtually unsurpassable level…” And so, Benjamin was forced into exile and went in 1933 to Paris where the “Work of Art” essay was written.

This work is best understood as a dual project between Benjamin’s flâneur wanderings throughout Paris that produced the Arcades project and his observation of the Nazi use of mass media in Germany.  Benjamin was uniquely positioned to understand how expertly Hitler utilized new technologies of communication, because, in an unusual move for a writer, he was an early radio personality from 1929.  Witt points out that “As one of the pioneers in this new medium, he may have gained here the experiences that enabled him, in the great essays written in exile, to formulate a theory of non-auratic art.”  According to Witt, Benjamin thought that he could provoke his listener to counter the “consumer mentality” of the listener’s passivity and that he hoped to create a model for the “people’s art.”

Benjamin acquired this notion of provoking the radio audience from his friend, theatrical producer, Bertold Brecht, who later spoke of the death of Walter Benjamin as the “first casualty of Hitler’s war on intellectuals.”  Indeed, the two writers were very much in tune in their interpretation of Marxism, the ideological enemy of the Nazis. Neither were scholarly Marxists, like those of the Frankfurt School.  Both were what might be called practical or activist Marxists who favored intervention by using popular culture to question conventional values.

For Brecht, the theater could still be an agent of revelation and transformation.  The playwright sought to break through the illusion of realism projected from the stage by shaking the complacency of the audience who was passively soaking in ideology disguised as “the theater.”  Brecht shattered with “Fourth Wall” or the subterfuge that the play was a reflection of reality.  By calling attention to the inherent artificiality of mass entertainment, Brecht hoped to challenge the bourgeois dominance of the social discourse.  Popular culture could be hijacked for the purpose of an ideological critique.  Benjamin called Brecht’s techniques of estrangement “Epic Theater” and gave a radio lecture on the playwright and wrote an essay, “Epic Theater,” on his Marxist ideas about jolting bourgeoisie complacency.

Indeed the basis of Marxism is critique—an analysis of society used to break through False Consciousness—and mass media presented an unprecedented and novel opportunity to challenge the dominate ideology.  Popular culture was a new way to indoctrinate the masses and the Nazis had seized the apparatus of communication and entertainment and turned the new mechanics of propaganda into a powerful weapon of indoctrination.  The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction was written in 1936 in the wake of years of Nazi rallies, designed by Albert Speer and after the successful films of Leni Reifenstahl. Benjamin’s essay needs to be understood within this cultural context.  Although the writer could not have foreseen the Holocaust, he was obviously aware that mass media presented both a danger and a promise.  Thanks to the effectiveness of the use of film and radio and large gatherings the Nazis had lulled the population into acceptance of what would be a series of horrifying acts starting in 1937 on Kristallnacht.

For Benjamin, that continuing promise of Marxism could be found in mechanical reproduction.  Here was a mode of production of information and knowledge that could reach the masses and present them with a social critique.  Where Benjamin saw the hopeful possibilities of reproductive technologies, his friend, Theodor Adorno, an unapologetic snob, disagreed and saw mass culture as the final annihilation of “autonomous art”.  Benjamin was less interested in whether or not popular culture was art.  In contrast to Adorno, perhaps as the result of his interest in Jewish mysticism, Benjamin was greatly concerned with the loss of the “aura” of art and investigated a different aspect of artistic autonomy.

The concept of the “Aura” of the work of art was inspired by Benjamin’s experiences with the old sections of Paris, the Arcades, where he strolled, like a twentieth century Baudelaire.  But unlike the poet, Benjamin was not reveling in the symptoms of modernité, he was searching for a past that was at the point of vanishing.  It is here at the “vanishing point” that the past can be grasped before it becomes invisible and confined to the discourse of history.  In the same way, the authentic work, surrounded in “aura” was vanishing, overwhelmed by a technology that was mechanical and ungovernable and indiscriminate.  In many ways Benjamin foretold the “flattening” effect manifested so clearly in postmodernism—everything would have the same value through the miracle of total reproducibility and universal availability.

Part Two of this essay on Walter Benjamin will examine the concept of “aura.”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

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Sep
30
2011

The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Part Two

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940)

Life and Work: Part Two

Working for German publications, Walter Benjamin earned enough money to spend some months in Paris where, in 1927, he began his famous and unfinished Arcades Project.  As one would imagine, he and his wife Dora divorced and in 1930 Benjamin published his Habilitation and a new essay, dedicated to his lover, Asja Lacis, One Way Street, in 1928.  This essay is a montage about Paris after Baudelaire.  Here Benjamin showed his knowledge of Russian films, which excelled in the use of modern editing techniques and we see the beginnings of his intuition that film was created a disembodied eye and a new way of perceiving.  The short snippets of his impressions of Paris are laced with cryptic observations such as, “All disgust is originally disgust at touching” and “Warmth is ebbing from things.”

Benjamin’s heightened sense of the overlooked, the passed by, the trace made him open to the ideas of Surrealism. In an essay of the same year entitled Surrealism. The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, he wrote,

The Surrealists’ Paris, too, is a “little universe”. That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day. It is the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports. And this must be noted if only to counter the obligatory misunderstanding of l’art pour l’art. For art’s sake was scarcely ever to be taken literally; it was almost always a flag under which sailed a cargo that could not be declared because it still lacked a name. This is the moment to embark on a work that would illuminate as has no other the crisis of the arts that we are witnessing: a history of esoteric poetry. Nor is it by any means fortuitous that no such work yet exists. For written as it demands to be written—that is, not as a collection to which particular “specialists” all contribute “what is most worth knowing” from their fields, but as the deeply grounded composition of an individual who, from inner compulsion, portrays less a historical evolution than a constantly renewed, primal upsurge of esoteric poetry— written in such a way it would be one of those scholarly confessions that can be counted in every century. The last page would have to show an X-ray picture of Surrealism.

 During the 1920s, Benjamin considered on two different occasions the possibility of emigrating to Palestine but rejected the idea. One can only imagine “what if” he had gone to this safe place. He would have lived, yes, but what would he have written about, cut off from the cities that nourished him, Berlin and Paris?  Benjamin remained in Europe and traveled back and forth between Berlin and Paris and made the transition from mysticism to materialism.  As would be indicated by the variegated influences upon the writer, Benjamin was never an orthodox Marxist and shied away from the use of the dialectic.  By the end of the decade, he was adrift as an home de lettres, a polite phrase for a literary career marked by written fragments and short reviews.  It could be said that he did not find his true voice until he completed his decade of apprenticeship and entered into the 1930s.

The beginning of the decade of the Thirties was the end of the old and the beginning of the new for Walter Benjamin.  Benjamin’s mature materialist work during the early 1930s was greatly impacted by Bertolt Brecht’s Marxist ideas of intervention with bourgeois complacency.  His friends in the Frankfurt School, such as Theodor Adorno, were not happy with the impact of the “crude Marxism” of Brecht on Benjamin’s thinking.  Benjamin wrote favorably of Brecht (who was not impressed with Benjamin) and elucidated the producer’s ideas in What is Epic Theater? (two versions) 1939. In addition, published after his death were Brecht’s “Threepenny Novel” and Conversations with Brecht.  Written in Paris in 1934 (but never published in his lifetime), The Author as Producer is perhaps his most Brechtian expression of the role and function of the writer in modern times.

Benjamin was dedicated to writing an engaged form of cultural criticism that responded to the every shifting environment of Berlin and then Paris and was, therefore, more attuned to modern times than professors in the ivory tower.  He was sensitive to the moods of his times and could veer easily among them, writing of smoking Hashish in Marsailles, 1932 and of The Destructive Character, 1931.  The latter work is precinct: “The character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away.  His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred.”  Benjamin’s earlier writing, Critique of Violence, was related to his interests in Kant’s moral imperatives—morality had to be universal and logical and disinterested.  He wrote in 1921 of legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence but a decade later, Benjamin notes the youthful unthinking destructiveness alive in his nation, a destructiveness that is all instinct and completely without moral foundation.

Benjamin was now acutely watchful of the political direction in Germany.  He was aware that the rise of the Nazis would mean trouble for all intellectuals, especially Jews.  Benjamin wasted no time in leaving Germany after Hitler came into power and went to his second home, Paris.  Paris was very different city from Berlin; Berlin was one of the centers of modernity in mass media and mass culture, from film to advertising to radio, while Paris was a place more connected to the past—at least in terms of how Benjamin would later write of it.   Although Paris, in its own way, was also modern, Benjamin seemed to have been sensitive to the history that haunted the City of Light, its streets, its structures, its arcades.  Benjamin assumed the mantel of the poet Baudelaire and became a flâneur, roaming the city’s past.  But it was here in this city that the writer was able to combine the rise of mass media and the resulting development of a new consciousness in Berlin with his sensitivity to the ghosts of Paris.

While in Paris, Benjamin wrote A Short History of Photography where his habitual way of thinking in terms of mysticism reemerges and he developed the famous concept of “aura,” which would reappear five years later in the 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproduction.  The “Artwork” essay is, like the essay on photography, almost epistemological, forays into the nature of photography and mass media in modern life.  Aura is used in two very different fashions.  For the “Artwork” article, aura is about the loss of “art” as it was once understood as a cult object, and in the “Photography” history, aura is about haunting.  The ghost of Paris that inspired the idea of aura was the photographer Eugène Atget who had recently died.  Like Baudelaire and like Benjamin, Atget had wandered the streets in Paris, capturing its unexpected corners and details with his big viewfinder camera.  With Atget Paris seemed eternal and unchanging and uninhabited except for that which has passed and left its traces.

And then this refuge became a place of danger.  From 1935, the Frankfurt School in exile in New York had been financially supporting Benjamin, who was loath to leave Europe.  But time ran out and Hitler began the war longed for by the German people and the Wermacht rolled east.  At first, it was the French who, at the outbreak of the War, indiscriminately rounded up all Germans and Austrians on September 3, 1939, and Benjamin was swept up and placed in the Internment Camp at Nevers.  It seems clear that from that point on Benjamin lost his moorings and was emotionally shattered by this sudden turn to his fortunes.  Once again, he had lost his place

In a brief 1988 essay, Walter Benjamin in the Internment Camp, Hans Sahl wrote movingly of the frail and fragile philosopher suddenly thrown into the “notorious Stade Colombe.”  The two men waited on the stone steps and Benjamin, as Sahl reported, like a good Marxist tried to unmask the reality but his gift for seeing the whole through detail did not allow him to grasp “reality as a façade.” When they arrived in Nevers they became part of a remarkable temporary society described by Sahl.  “Orderly” Germans organized groups and remade working society, complete with Benjamin, watched over by a young disciple, teaching an “advanced class” to devotees. Finally, the French PEN club arranged for the release of Benjamin but now he had only six weeks left before the Germans invaded France.

With France under the heel of the Germans, all Jews in France, refugees or natives, were now targets of an extermination machine.  After being in Paris for only a few months, in the summer of 1940, the Nazis seized his prized library.  For Benjamin, the quintessential wandering Jew, his books were his home.  One of his loveliest essays is Unpacking My Library.  A Talk about Book Collecting, in 1931. He begins, “I am unpacking my library. Yes I am.” He describes himself as a “collector” and ends with

“…a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.  Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.  So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.”

At the time of the seizure there were probably over 2000 volumes in his possession. All of Benjamin’s books were gone.  For someone who was so deeply identified with his books, to be stripped of his library was the equivalent of his being stripped of his soul.  The swift seizure of libraries and, indeed, all personal property of the Jews, was the beginning of stripping Jews, first of their social place, their jobs, and then of their private possessions.  This process of isolation and dispossession and hopelessness, which overwhelmed the Jews would culminate in the Final Solution and the near extermination of a people.

The stolen possessions of Jews, most of whom perished long ago in concentration camps, continue to this day to surface as stolen property, masquerading as “works of art” in museums who are loathe to give up their possessions.  Entire libraries were appropriated and dispersed, never to be recovered.  For Walter Benjamin, a write and a thinker, the loss of his literary possessions was a crushing blow.  When the Gestapo emptied his Paris apartment of his books, they only took away a small part of his collection.  Half of the books had already been smuggled out of Paris, and most of the remaining collection was given to the Bibliotéque Nationale by Surrealist writer, Georges Bataille, to whom it was entrusted.

After Benjamin was interned in a French holding camp at Nevers, he was returned to the Nazis by the collaborationist Vichy government.  He managed to obtain an emergency visa and joined a party of refugees, taking an unguarded road over the Pyrenees towards the Spanish border.  Like many of the other refugees seeking asylum, Benjamin walked on foot from France to Spain…a latter day pilgrim.  This and other routes had been taken to freedom by well-known cultural dissidents, but on the day Benjamin arrived, the Spanish decided to close the border.  Although Spain was a fascist nation, Franco ensured that the country remain neutral during the Second World War.

Switzerland used its neutrality to become the banker to the fascists and to become the keepers of Jewish wealth, but Spain became a conduit to freedom for refugees, opening and closing the border capriciously.  Seasoned refugees knew to sit and wait.  Benjamin was sensitive and highly-strung and dislocated from his home, his work, and his library.  Unlike his colleagues and friends, he did not want to go to America and had no great will to survive.  He had carried with him fifteen tablets of morphine (enough to kill several people) and when turned away at Port-Bou, Spain took them all.  He refused to have his stomach pumped out and died in agony September 26, 1940.  Horrified at such a gruesome suicide, the Spanish government.

Benjamin had long been planning to kill himself.  His death was simply a question of when. In 1931, he stayed on the island of Ibiza for three months writing a chronicle on his relationship to Berlin or a journey through his childhood.  Benjamin’s book was a summation of his life, a preparation for death. It was here on this island that he began to plan his suicide.  Even though he lived a few more years, it was clear that his time as a writer in Berlin was coming to a close and that his writing had reached a kind of apogee.  In a touching letter to Gershom Scholem, an old and dear friend and colleague, he wrote of “the deep tiredness” he felt as he watched the slow seizure of power by the Nazis.  Opportunities for intellectuals were vanishing, as was the way of life that had sparked his writing.  Ironically, it was in the last years of his life, while he waited for death, that his most influential work was written on the nature of “auratic” art. It is possible that he could have survived yet another displacement to New York, but Benjamin was not as tough as his colleagues and, when Spain closed its gate, there seemed no compelling reason to resist his longing for death.

The Frankfurt School was horrified and depressed at the loss of their eccentric colleague.  After Benjamin’s death, it was Theodor Adorno who struggled to preserve his friend’s works and insisted on keeping his reputation alive.  Along with Hannah Arendt, another intellectual refugee in New York, he labored to collect and publish Benjamin’s writings. As early as 1942, publication of his works in German began.  English translation of his works was to take four decades.  Some important essays by Benjamin were published in Reflections and Illuminations, including Critique of Violence, 1921, The Arcades or Passagenbeit, The Author as Producer, 1934 and The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936, and A Short History of Photography, What is Epic Theater?  1939, and Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 1939.  Of these essays, the “Artwork” essay is the most famous today and this writing will be discussed in the next post.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Sep
23
2011

The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, Part One

WALTER BENJAMIN (1892 -1940)

Life and Work: Part One

 Like many Jewish intellectuals in Germany, Walter Benjamin considered himself “German”.  His family was privileged and fully assimilated into the larger German society.  It would be this stratum of German society that would be the most unguarded and the most threatened by the Nazis.  Intellectuals thought of Hitler as a passing moment in the struggle of a desperate people to recover from and devastating and humiliating war and stood aside and let the masses have their say.  All too soon, those who could have formulated intelligent dissent found themselves faced with impossible choices: dissent and go to a death camp, remain silent and become complicit, slip quietly into exile before it was too late.  One way or the other, they would all be silenced.

As an intellectual and a Jew, Benjamin was doubly in danger.  Assimilated and privileged Jews assumed that they were “Germans” first and Jews second.  Indeed many Jews had converted or simply downplayed their religious identity.  It was a shock when they learned that “German” had been redefined, not as a nationality, but as a “race” and that “race” was Aryan.  The Nazis descended immediately upon the artists, the writers, the thinkers, and the Jews. The cream of German intellectuals left for other nations, becoming nomads and displaced persons.  Most of these scholars and artists survived and even thrived in their new surroundings.  Billy Wilder, film director, Erwin Panofsky, art historian, Marlena Dietrich, actor, Alfred Einstein, scientist—all contributed to American and world culture—and all would have died under Hitler.

Gentiles and dangerous literary figures, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann, migrated from Germany and became unemployed writers in Hollywood.  Brecht felt stranded in this sunny land of capitalism, while Mann was much more comfortable in his new home.  As writers, both were separated from their native language and from the culture that had nurtured their creativity, as were all the refugees. The State Department of America, a bastion of anti-Semitism, was willing to grant refuge to only a handful of certain Jews of privilege, such as Theodor Adorno, who was half-Jewish.  Head of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, arranged for Benjamin to get out of German-occupied France and obtained a visa to America for him.  But Walter Benjamin was a reluctant exile.

Unexpectedly, an entire generation of German intellectuals would become refugees and their work would be suddenly be divided into segments of before and after their displacement.  The oeuvre of Walter Benjamin is a case in point.  Although there are continuities in his ideas and preoccupations, the writer’s output can be divided into three sections: his youthful post-student work, aimed at getting him a post in a German university, his free-lance literary writings as a cultural critic in Berlin and finally the work of his exile years in Paris.

When Benjamin was born, Germany was barely twenty years old, a very new and very young modern nation.  That said, the new country acted in an anachronistic way, starting an imperialistic war on its neighbors.  The cultural mindset that dragged a modern nation into an old fashioned war was discredited, and after the Great War, Germany was forced to look forward into the future.  The result was the remarkable efflorescence of Weimar Germany.  Benjamin was a student during the War and came of age in city of the edge of trying everything new and daring, a city plunging into modernity.  For astute observers, Paris was displaced as the center of avant-garde innovation and Berlin took the lead in artistic experimentation.

Benjamin spent the years of the War translating Charles Baudelaire and studying German Romantic poets at the universities of Berlin and Munich.  He received his doctoral degree for his work on German Romanticism.  During his studies, he married and had a child and the young family returned to Berlin.  In the immediate post-war years, Berlin was awash with the casualties of the War, from prostituted war widows to crippled veterans to the psychologically maimed. Although he was opposed to the Great War, Benjamin explored the nature of violence in one of his earliest works, A Critique of Violence, 1921.  Benjamin’s later work would always be poetic, concerned with metaphor, and was deeply allusive and often elliptical in its references.

After the Institute for Social Research was founded in 1923, Benjamin made the acquaintance of Theodor Adorno.  On one hand, he began reading Georg Lukács and on the other hand, Benjamin was publishing work on Baudelaire.  However complex his intellectual interests, Benjamin was intent on becoming a university professor and continued his rather disjointed self-education by reading Lukács’ Marxist theories while writing the Trauerspeil on the Island of Capri in 1924.  Although Benjamin is often associated with the Frankfurt School, which was distinctly Marxist at that time, he was not a professional scholar, teaching at a university.  That said Benjamin shared with these philosophers an understanding of contemporary thought through a combination of neo-Kantianism from the Marburg School and Marxism.

In a recent book, 2011, The Messianic Reduction. Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time, Peter Fenves fully discusses Benjamin’s philosophical roots and quotes the writer’s own words, “In particular and in ever-repeated reading, during my time as a student, I concerned myself with Plato and Kant, in connection with Husserl’s philosophy and the Marburg school.”   However, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, while also deeply steeped in Kant, were rigorously Marxist and more fully conversant with Marxist theories.  In contrast, Benjamin’s more casual and personal “take” on Marxism was mediated through Kant’s concepts on morality and with Jewish mysticism, especially on the Kabbalah. Benjamin’s Marxism was personal and idiosyncratic and unorthodox.

During the first years of his literary career, in post-war Germany, Benjamin was not political but engaged in what he called “redemptive criticism.”  When he turned to Marxism, it was because he approached Communism as a moral imperative that demanded certain political forms of action.  But he was not systematically trained in Marxist though and arrived at his ideas through readings of his own selection.  Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, written in 1923 in the wake of the post-war political upheavals commented,

Capitalism, by contrast, is a revolutionary form par excellence. The fact that it must necessarily remain in ignorance of the objective economic limitations of its own system expresses itself as an internal, dialectical contradiction in its class consciousness.  This means that formally the class-consciousness of the bourgeoisie is geared to economic consciousness. And indeed the highest degree of unconsciousness, the crassest, form of ‘false consciousness’ always manifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest.

From the point of view of the relation of consciousness to society this contradiction is expressed as the irreconcilable antagonism between ideology and economic base. Its dialectics are grounded in the irreconcilable antagonism between the (capitalist) individual, i.e. the stereotyped individual of capitalism, and the ‘natural’ and inevitable process of development, i.e. the process not subject to consciousness. In consequence theory and practice are brought into irreconcilable opposition to each other. But the resulting dualism is anything but stable; in fact it constantly strives to harmonize principles that have been wrenched apart and thenceforth oscillate between a new ‘false’ synthesis and its subsequent cataclysmic disruption.

This internal dialectical contradiction in the class-consciousness of the bourgeoisie is further aggravated by the fact that the objective limits of capitalism do not remain purely negative. That is to say that capitalism does not merely set ‘natural’ laws in motion that provoke crises which it cannot comprehend. On the contrary, those limits acquire a historical embodiment with its own consciousness and its own actions: the proletariat.

Despite his erudition and sincerity, this book came under harsh criticism from Lenin and Lukács was forced to denounce his own work.  But Benjamin’s politicization can be dated from his reading of this book by Lukács in 1924, and his work took a new direction.  By the mid-twenties 1920s, Benjamin had shifted his literary ground.  He had broken with his family, and due to the financial crisis of the Republic, lost their financial support, and was adrift and living, as most commentators express it, “hand to mouth,” writing reviews on the cultural life in Berlin.  Suddenly thrust out of the middle class, Benjamin became aware of class distinctions and political issues. He might have found the work of the Hungarian Marxist congenial because Lukács also came from a neo-Kantian background.  Although they had acquaintances inn common, Lukács and Benjamin may not have met, despite the fact that the Hungarian was a refugee in Berlin from 1931 to 1933.

After his failed attempt in 1926 to find a place in the university system with his rejected thesis, or Habilitationsschrift, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels   (The Origin of German Tragic Drama or “mourning play”), Benjamin became a free-lance journalist and translator.  In pursuit of a woman with whom he had fallen in love, Asja Lacis, Benjamin took a trip to Moscow during the winter of 1926-17. The writer, an acute observer, combined an abject doomed unrequited love affair with an investigation of the workings of Communism.  Like many such pilgrims to the Soviet Union, he was shorn of any illusions he may have harbored and seems to have been able to separate the totalitarian regime of Moscow from the theories of Marx in his later works.

In Part Two of this brief study of Walter Benjamin, I shall discuss his works of the 1930s, the last decade of his life.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 


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