Interconnectedness

What I found most appealing about this week’s readings was the interconnectedness they had not only with each other, but also with previous readings, and with photography in general, in spite of their topics not being photography itself.

In talking about Huyssen’s chapter (the others too, although to a lesser extreme), I can’t help but say the same as Adam regarding my comprehension and the briefness of my reference to this author. Nevertheless, there is something I’d like to reference. On page 9 of The Hidden Dialectic, he introduces the concepts of technology invading “the very fabric of the art object”, initially through collage and montage, and ultimately in photography and film. The fabric of art changed in the XXth century, and there is no denial of it.

In Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility, I can’t help but notice incessant connections to last week’s Kracauer and Bazin. First off, there’s the “pursuit of profit” (namely, time) we talked about in class, which makes photography necessarily capitalist: he does mention “the desire of present day masses to ‘get closer’ to things”. Benjamin also talks about how graphic art became “an illustrated accompaniment to everyday life”, which I can’t help to classify as the beginning of what Kracauer calls the replacement of memory and knowledge for images. Benjamin also connects to Bazin’s concept of “freedom from the resemblance complex” when he speaks of how “photography freed the hand from (…) pictorial reproduction”. Huyssen also makes a reference to this same complex when he talks about the art/life dichotomy in his chapter. Another one of the ideas that is frequent in our discussions and also present in Benjamin’s writing is the idea of photography “lacking something”, in this case it is the “here and now” of a reproduction, it’s context. This also links to Kracauer’s concept of the irrelevance of a photograph without “memory” to give it background and weight.

Staying within Benjamin, I would go on to say that I found his notion of the “aura” of an artwork remarkable, starting with his classification of the reproduction of artwork as a sensitive and “vulnerable” subject. If an artwork has an aura, as he says, which is at the same time it’s authenticity, weight, tradition, and “quintessence of what’s transmissible in it”, then it is an basically a given that photography, because of it’s “technological reproducibility”, will make this aura “wither with age”. Benjamin illustrates it outside the graphic as well, and I found this especially helpful in the comprehension of it. And so, Beethoven sounds exponentially less majestic to listeners as generations pass, Velasquez’s Meninas are less and less taken into consideration by the general public as it’s image is proliferated throughout the media. Their aura has been watered down, and herein lies the danger of reproducing a work of art.

Moving on to Adorno’s Looking Back on Surrealism, I found that, even before the author himself starts stating it directly, there is an undeniable parallel between Surrealist theory and idea and photography as a trade. On the third page of the chapter, Adorno mentions how Surrealism leaves the viewer with a feeling of “where have I seen this before?”, which comes from a “childhood lost” that is “common to everybody”. This same situation presents itself in photography, where nostalgic elements are frozen and captured, and then looked at with the same type of feelings inspired in the viewer. Adorno then states that Surrealism creates “nature morte” because it captures what is “out of date”, and the parallel with photography here is beyond obvious. His talk of libido and fixation is also relevant to photography, thanks to it’s inherently voyeuristic nature. The mention of Surrealism creating “mementos of what once aroused the libido” is also closely tied to photography, because the latter too creates mementos, of subject matter that is mostly chosen out of some type of social or economic arousal. At this point Adorno does mention that “Surrealism is akin to photography”, and he closes off the chapter with a sentence that links the both of them intricately: “Surrealism salvages what is out of date, an album of idiosyncrasies in which the claim to the happiness that human beings find denied them in their own technician world goes up in smoke.” Wouldn’t you agree that the same thing could be said of photography, in spite of it’s technical nature?

The relationship these texts have with themselves, with previous readings, and with our discussions illustrates, at least to me, the hard path photography and film followed into becoming accepted art forms, and also the inevitability of their claim to the art world in a changing society.