‘A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air amid a landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds, and, at its center, exposed to a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body’.

For Walter Benjamin, the German art critic and philosopher, this summarised the problems, the questions, of modernity.

Modernity was about mass.

Mass-democracy.

Mass-media.

Mass-culture.

Mass-commodification.

Mass-transport.

Mass-warfare.

Accounting for and interpreting that massive change was, for Benjamin, the essential task of that moment, those precarious interwar years. For much of his life he tried to make sense of this monumental change.

In 1921, the first autobahn opened. In 1927, Charles Lindbergh made the first air crossing of the Atlantic. In the same year, Benjamin himself flew for the first time. Radio, telephones, cinema were suddenly everywhere.

Benjamin was fascinated by how human experience was sculpted these historic changes.

As a Jew and a Marxist, he fled Germany in 1932 as Hitler took power and in 1936 published The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction from France.

In what would become his most influential essay, Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction not only changed how art was developed or distributed, but changed the very definition of what art was.

The essay starts by exploring what’s been lost as a result of reproduction. Primarily, a piece of art’s authenticity.

He writes that, ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.

This ability for artworks to be copied, to be everywhere, produces new possibilities but represses something too: their aura.

This ‘shattering of tradition’, this ‘renewal of mankind’, are ‘intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements’, he wrote.

So what is ‘aura’?

Benjamin argues that it arises out of an object or phenomena’s uniqueness. And consequently, of being close to that uniqueness. The aura of a sunset or of a mountain range and the awe it inspires.

The uniqueness of a work of art though also arises from its place in a tradition.

Historically, artistic objects were at the centre of ritual – objects of magic, cult or sacred status. This later developed into appreciating art’s beauty, and the idea of art for art’s sake.

What was important with all three was that art’s value lay in either the object itself or in the coltishness that gave it its value. The cult of beauty, the cult of art for arts sake. The artist or the object, the leader, the god or the prophet.

As art becomes designed more and more with reproducibility in mind it becomes less dependent on ritual and more on something else: politics.

Cultish art existed for its own sake.

Paintings pointed inwards. They venerated religious figures or family members.

Cults are about their one-of-a-kindness – singular figures. Politics is a different. Politics points towards the future, to deliberation, to persuasion.

But reproducible art is made with its potential for exhibition in mind, its potential to be seen by the masses.

Cinema, photography, radio all lose their uniqueness and their aura, the ritualistic aspect dissolves, but Benjamin is also interested in what we get in its place.

In particular, we start to focus on the way things are framed, on montage, on cuts, on the text on the plaque, on the article next to the photo, on the location, on the political significance of art.

The result of reproducibility is most aptly seen in film and how it can be cut, rearranged, and manipulated.

For Benjamin, this has revolutionary consequences. Art becomes scientific.

Film is also a communal experience in the way it brings its subject matter to the masses. Slips of the tongue go less unnoticed. Objects can be analysed more precisely. Audiences can react together across the world.

‘Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-clung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended’.

The moving along of a film, scene after scene, cut after cut, leads you somewhere in a way paintings don’t. Benjamin quotes the French author Georges Duhamel: ‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images’.

For Duhamel, being distracted by quickly moving images was a bad thing.

But Benjamin thinks distraction can be revolutionary. Being distracted away from your own thoughts means the viewer absorbs the art. Absorbing the habits that the filmmakers intends.

Benjamin’s essay ends with a brief but influential analysis of the way fascism utilises mass reproduction and how art must counter it.

He argues that fascism gives expression to the proletariat – to the masses – without changing economic structure. The bourgeois, the Fuhrer, the cult holds its place, while only representing the masses.

‘The logical result of fascism’, Benjamin writes, ‘is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’.

If technology isn’t used for positive purposes, it utilises aesthetic form for the expansion of man’s domination, his imperialist expansion.

The last line reads: ‘communism responds by politicising art’.

It’s a difficult, winding and far-reaching essay, and the Marxism that runs through it doesn’t have to be accepted to find value in its arguments.

In 1995, David Douglas gave Benjamin’s analysis the digital treatment. What was new, he asked, about art in the digital world?

Not only could art now be mass-disseminated, it could also be mass-edited. Reproduction was followed swiftly by variation. Individuals could put their own stamp on almost anything.

Benjamin wouldn’t have been surprised about the doctoring of images, and fake news emerging out of carefully selected perspectives. Nor how the cult of film stars persisted and grew. In fact, he wrote that, ‘The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity’.

But Benjamin also would not have been surprised about the impact of documentaries and their revolutionary ability to change habits, to make people think.

A lot of this seems obvious now, but was powerfully prescient at the time.

Walter Benjamin wanted art to change our view of the world. To change something it had to change the material world somehow. To give the masses expression without change was the formula of fascism.

Today we’re surrounded by art without really acknowledging that it is art. I think it’s fair to assume Benjamin would be cynical about the direction art has taken. If anything, to read him is to be reminded of its power.

I think at the very least he’d think we still haven’t come to terms with this huge change.

Sources

Uwe Steiner, Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to his Thought and Work (especially the introduction)

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

David Ferris, The Cambridge Introduction to Walter Benjamin

David Douglas, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction