Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, reprinted in Meenaskhi Gig Durham and Douglas Kellner, ed. 5, Media and Culture Studies: Keyworks, Oxford, 2001, pp. 48-70.
Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish Marxist literary cultural critic and philosopher has been influential in media theory. In his 1936 essay “The Work in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he wrote a theory of art that is “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art”.(1) He was a forefront postmodern theorist and discussed how mechanical reproduction was revolutionary and liberated the work of art from its dependence on ritual function embedded in tradition.(2) Due to mechanical reproduction, art became based in politics rather than ritualistic function located in religious and magical realms. This happened simultaneously with the rise of socialism. The result was a change in spectatorship, whereby the audience became the author of the work. Prior to this the aura was located in works of art having unique value of authenticity and deprived of any social function of art. The decay of the aura bought the work of art closer to the spectator. This change in perception gave unlimited scope for the masses. It served to give universal equality by the destruction of the aura making art more accessible and politicized. Art in the age of reproduction was able to tackle difficult issues to outrage and mobilise the masses. The cult value receded and the spectator became the critic, however Benjamin stated, ‘an absent minded’ or distracted critic.(3) The distraction was in the reception of the work of art.
The change in spectatorship as a result of reproduction exemplified the politicing function of photography. David Campbell highlights the importance of social context in the reading by the spectator of the pictorial image. (4) Like Benjamin he discusses the power of photography to provoke the spectator through the representation of atrocities in contemporary media. The Vietnam War photograph of Kim Phuc running down the road with almost two-thirds of her body seared by napalm was credited with undermining support for American involvement. (5) This politicising function of photography according to Sontag depends on the condition of reception as to whether there is widespread passivity or outrage. It is the political context, or larger system that the photograph is being placed into that can fail to induce action. (6) The political context portraying irresolvable situations can create public indifference to injustices. This coupled with the absence of photographs through the media of atrocities serve only to perpetuate crisis. Therefore the photograph has the potential to politicize as discussed by Benjamin, to outrage the masses but only if it can get through all the political and social screens and filters discussed by Campbell that serve to diminish its power to provoke. Thus the politicising function of the photograph is dependent on spectatorship and social context.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work _of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Its_Technical_Reproducibility. 21 August 2008.
(2) Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, reprinted in Meenaskhi Gig Durham and Douglas Kellner ed. 5, Media and Culture Studies: Keyworks, Oxford, 2001, pp. 53.
(3) Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, reprinted in Meenaskhi Gig Durham and Douglas Kellner ed. 5, Media and Culture Studies: Keyworks, Oxford, 2001, pp. 63.
(4) Campbell, David, “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004. Pp.55.
(5) Campbell, David, “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004. Pp.59.
(6) Campbell, David, “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004. pp.63.
(7) Campbell, David, “Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media”, Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 8, No. 1, Routledge, 2004. pp.70.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Globalisation and its Discontents - Generosity and Exchange
Fisher Jean, "Toward a Metaphysics of Shit", Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 63-70.
Jean Fisher lectures critical studies at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art in London. She is editor of Global Visions: A New Internationalism in the Visual Arts and Reverberation: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/Cultural Practices. Her discussion on Globalisation and its Discontents alludes to Sigmund Freud’s book on Civilization and its Discontents, where the individual quest is for freedom, and civilisations contrary demand is for conformity and repression.(1) According to Fisher, the by product of globalization (and civilization) is the production of ‘waste and wasteland: an abject excess of unproductive expenditure – of shit, garbage, disorder, discarded ideas, histories, ideologies, and people’ as a result of the global world of capitalism'.(2) The discontents or otherness expose unresolved conflicts and disjunctions in cultural flow in different contexts. The complexities of globalization and the disjunctures between economies, cultures and politics have been given a framework of cultural flows by Arjun Appadurai. As professor of Social Sciences in New York he explores the fluid nature of the five dimensions of cultural flow as categorized by ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.(3) The suffix of scapes points to the fluid nature of these cultural flows in a disjunctive global world resulting in cultural chaos, fractal societies and discontent. Fisher comments that this is fertile ground for art that deals with untranslatable, postcolonial, transcultural issues that attempt to connect a past with the present through lost histories, ideologies and people.
Fisher posed the question of whether art can function as an effective mediator of change or resistance of hegemonic power.(4) Art can act as an effective mediator of change through the universal desire for exchange. This can be achieved through actions of forms of expression and collaboration to contribute to a reinvention of humanist principles of ethics and justice. Politically motivated artists like Fiona Jack desire to rewrite history through ‘tricky tactics’ as a potential agent for change. She seeks to do what Richard Serres identifies as the universal desire for exchange that depends on networks of communication, differing methods of communication, for translation of concepts and the expansion of vocabularies and experiences.(5) Jack’s ideas around borders and boundaries are played out, or translated in projects both on the local and global front. Her work is marked by anti-authoritarianism, often a protest action or critique on post-colonialism. In April 2008, Jack explored ideas about land ownership and Auckland history in collaboration with iwi from Ngati Whatua o Orakei as part of a documentary by TVNZ. The tribe were squeezed by urban encroachment and lost the last remaining block of tribal land at Okahu Bay. With the exchange of knowledge with local iwi, Jack rewrote the history of the people and ‘brought to life the ashes of Ngati Whatua o Orakei’.(6) It was a grass roots protest action of rebuilding a palisade at Okahu Bay that had been burnt to the ground by the Crown in 1943. The project connected the past to the present to mediate the production of new insights and relations through exchange of knowledge of the histories and ideologies. Jack works through generosity and exchange to produce a new language. She has long engaged with the use of mediascapes, such as TV or billboards to achieve a political voice to expose unresolved conflicts and cultural exchange through the media. Her art is a successful mediator that anchors the actions of the hegemonic power of the past in the present, through generosity and exchange of knowledge.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_its__Discontents.htm. 10 August 2008.
(2) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 63.
(3) Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.37.
(4) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(5) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(6) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=355&objectid=10505261. 10 August 2008.
Jean Fisher lectures critical studies at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art in London. She is editor of Global Visions: A New Internationalism in the Visual Arts and Reverberation: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency in Trans/Cultural Practices. Her discussion on Globalisation and its Discontents alludes to Sigmund Freud’s book on Civilization and its Discontents, where the individual quest is for freedom, and civilisations contrary demand is for conformity and repression.(1) According to Fisher, the by product of globalization (and civilization) is the production of ‘waste and wasteland: an abject excess of unproductive expenditure – of shit, garbage, disorder, discarded ideas, histories, ideologies, and people’ as a result of the global world of capitalism'.(2) The discontents or otherness expose unresolved conflicts and disjunctions in cultural flow in different contexts. The complexities of globalization and the disjunctures between economies, cultures and politics have been given a framework of cultural flows by Arjun Appadurai. As professor of Social Sciences in New York he explores the fluid nature of the five dimensions of cultural flow as categorized by ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes.(3) The suffix of scapes points to the fluid nature of these cultural flows in a disjunctive global world resulting in cultural chaos, fractal societies and discontent. Fisher comments that this is fertile ground for art that deals with untranslatable, postcolonial, transcultural issues that attempt to connect a past with the present through lost histories, ideologies and people.
Fisher posed the question of whether art can function as an effective mediator of change or resistance of hegemonic power.(4) Art can act as an effective mediator of change through the universal desire for exchange. This can be achieved through actions of forms of expression and collaboration to contribute to a reinvention of humanist principles of ethics and justice. Politically motivated artists like Fiona Jack desire to rewrite history through ‘tricky tactics’ as a potential agent for change. She seeks to do what Richard Serres identifies as the universal desire for exchange that depends on networks of communication, differing methods of communication, for translation of concepts and the expansion of vocabularies and experiences.(5) Jack’s ideas around borders and boundaries are played out, or translated in projects both on the local and global front. Her work is marked by anti-authoritarianism, often a protest action or critique on post-colonialism. In April 2008, Jack explored ideas about land ownership and Auckland history in collaboration with iwi from Ngati Whatua o Orakei as part of a documentary by TVNZ. The tribe were squeezed by urban encroachment and lost the last remaining block of tribal land at Okahu Bay. With the exchange of knowledge with local iwi, Jack rewrote the history of the people and ‘brought to life the ashes of Ngati Whatua o Orakei’.(6) It was a grass roots protest action of rebuilding a palisade at Okahu Bay that had been burnt to the ground by the Crown in 1943. The project connected the past to the present to mediate the production of new insights and relations through exchange of knowledge of the histories and ideologies. Jack works through generosity and exchange to produce a new language. She has long engaged with the use of mediascapes, such as TV or billboards to achieve a political voice to expose unresolved conflicts and cultural exchange through the media. Her art is a successful mediator that anchors the actions of the hegemonic power of the past in the present, through generosity and exchange of knowledge.
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_its__Discontents.htm. 10 August 2008.
(2) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 63.
(3) Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.37.
(4) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(5) Fisher Jean, ‘Toward a Metaphysics of Shit’, Documenta 11. Platform 5. The Catalog, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 64.
(6) http://www.nzherald.co.nz/topic/story.cfm?c_id=355&objectid=10505261. 10 August 2008.
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