Page 102 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 102
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
Ocean Without a Shore
Many changes after a decisive transformation, caused by the technical re-
production, which Walter Benjamin found to be an irrevocable overwhelm-
ing social and cultural rearrangement, form folds, marked not only by re-
petitiveness and a potential for multiplying, but also by multifarious double
productive gestures. One of the many impacts of these changes, which fi-
nally made the Benjamin’s pre-war perspective fully comprehensible some-
time in the 1960s, was a reformulation of aesthetics, which had to deal with
many problems concerning the relevance of its categories, rooted in Ro-
manticism and in Kant‘s philosophy. Let us just claim that what is happen-
ing in the realm of exhibitions and performances in recent times compels
aesthetics to revise repeatedly its basic suppositions and core hypotheses.
However, the problems of ‘defining the beauty’ and the ways of describing
the sensual aspect of artistic objects as related to the subliminal dimensions
linked to the Subject, somehow paradoxically return through the very same
media, which made such categories seem almost obsolete. “In the most so-
phisticated arenas of electronic spectacle, theatrical performance, and mul-
timedia installation, new media artists frequently endorse a paradoxical
return to primitivism, mysticism and spiritualism. Particularly in the dig-
itized arena of electronic installation and performance, artists as divergent
in form and vision as Nam June Paik, Reeves, Dawson, and Viola have de-
veloped artworks that are often described, sometimes by the artists them-
selves, as soliciting a unifying, spiritualizing aesthetics in contrast to the
shifting terrain of politics and identity” (Murray, 2008: p. 50).
The case of Bill Viola‘s installation at the same Venice Biennale 2007,
we already mentioned above, illustrates this point well enough. The artist,
who in a video on You Tube, in which he himself explains his installation
in Chiesa di San Gallo, confirms Murray‘s point on both counts: the tech-
nological and, let us say, the metaphysical. In the Viola’s narration on his
own installation Ocean Without a Shore a line of explanation concerning
the border between life and death, fragility of human life, human condi-
tion and mortality interweaves with another line on the technological and
other aspects of making the videos, shown on plasma screens and mounted
on three altars in the church. Each screen displays a different slow motion
movement of human figures starting in black and white, passing through
the water ‘curtain’ and slowly gaining colour. Saying that he “came up with
this idea of the notion of the dead coming back to our world – just tempo-
rarily” Viola signals his use of a kind of primitive imaginary of the “liv-
100
Ocean Without a Shore
Many changes after a decisive transformation, caused by the technical re-
production, which Walter Benjamin found to be an irrevocable overwhelm-
ing social and cultural rearrangement, form folds, marked not only by re-
petitiveness and a potential for multiplying, but also by multifarious double
productive gestures. One of the many impacts of these changes, which fi-
nally made the Benjamin’s pre-war perspective fully comprehensible some-
time in the 1960s, was a reformulation of aesthetics, which had to deal with
many problems concerning the relevance of its categories, rooted in Ro-
manticism and in Kant‘s philosophy. Let us just claim that what is happen-
ing in the realm of exhibitions and performances in recent times compels
aesthetics to revise repeatedly its basic suppositions and core hypotheses.
However, the problems of ‘defining the beauty’ and the ways of describing
the sensual aspect of artistic objects as related to the subliminal dimensions
linked to the Subject, somehow paradoxically return through the very same
media, which made such categories seem almost obsolete. “In the most so-
phisticated arenas of electronic spectacle, theatrical performance, and mul-
timedia installation, new media artists frequently endorse a paradoxical
return to primitivism, mysticism and spiritualism. Particularly in the dig-
itized arena of electronic installation and performance, artists as divergent
in form and vision as Nam June Paik, Reeves, Dawson, and Viola have de-
veloped artworks that are often described, sometimes by the artists them-
selves, as soliciting a unifying, spiritualizing aesthetics in contrast to the
shifting terrain of politics and identity” (Murray, 2008: p. 50).
The case of Bill Viola‘s installation at the same Venice Biennale 2007,
we already mentioned above, illustrates this point well enough. The artist,
who in a video on You Tube, in which he himself explains his installation
in Chiesa di San Gallo, confirms Murray‘s point on both counts: the tech-
nological and, let us say, the metaphysical. In the Viola’s narration on his
own installation Ocean Without a Shore a line of explanation concerning
the border between life and death, fragility of human life, human condi-
tion and mortality interweaves with another line on the technological and
other aspects of making the videos, shown on plasma screens and mounted
on three altars in the church. Each screen displays a different slow motion
movement of human figures starting in black and white, passing through
the water ‘curtain’ and slowly gaining colour. Saying that he “came up with
this idea of the notion of the dead coming back to our world – just tempo-
rarily” Viola signals his use of a kind of primitive imaginary of the “liv-
100
