Page 39 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 39
changing the mind
70 names, one would easily demonstrate a double barrier breaking effect
in most of the represented works of art. Artists from Valerio Adami to Ed-
ward Wright mostly broke aesthetic codes, defying norms of beauty, truth
and value. At the same time, many of them transgressed boundaries be-
tween different genres, techniques and artistic fields. And finally, not all,
but many of them, reached into the area of designing consumer goods, or
they intervened into the system of communication symbols of urban life,
or they mimicked in their “visual products” various aspects of life in what
was already defined as the consumer society. Such displacements within
and outside of the “borders” of the established system of culture were not
of course only a phenomena of the period in question, but they have been
going on throughout the age of modernity, mostly in artistic movements.
Indeed, such movements and changes in the system of stockpiling and pre-
senting the works of art contributed not only to new paradigms in the field
of artistic praxis, but they also substantiated a radically different new en-
vironment and different conditions of the production of works of art. Nev-
ertheless, even in theoretical minds, with very few exceptions, the reasons
for these changes and their meaning were not actually fully comprehend-
ed for quite some time, and subsequently many obsolete categories from
the realm of a “cult of art and spirituality” persist. In this respect, we come
across the question of the hegemony, but let us first re-think some basic no-
tions concerning artistic and cultural (re)production.
Perception of Perception
I am, yet again, recalling the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani-
cal Reproduction, which has been debated repeatedly, and still seems to be
an inexhaustible source of new interpretations and elaborations. However,
Benjamin gives some indirect arguments against some of the main points
of his essay in his own earlier work, which is permeated with highly aes-
thetical articulations on aesthetic matters. Only when he formulated his
notion of aura, Benjamin found an epistemological tool for a radically new
understanding of the world of the “mechanical reproduction” and the role
of art within it. In a sense Benjamin happened to be one of the first “de-
constructionists”, or as it could be assumed, one of those intellectual fig-
ures, who may be included into a “tradition” of deconstruction. Although
he actually never (not in this essay and maybe only barely in some other
writings) brought problems of the reproduction of works of art to that level
of abstraction, where these problems would be formulated in terms of the
37
70 names, one would easily demonstrate a double barrier breaking effect
in most of the represented works of art. Artists from Valerio Adami to Ed-
ward Wright mostly broke aesthetic codes, defying norms of beauty, truth
and value. At the same time, many of them transgressed boundaries be-
tween different genres, techniques and artistic fields. And finally, not all,
but many of them, reached into the area of designing consumer goods, or
they intervened into the system of communication symbols of urban life,
or they mimicked in their “visual products” various aspects of life in what
was already defined as the consumer society. Such displacements within
and outside of the “borders” of the established system of culture were not
of course only a phenomena of the period in question, but they have been
going on throughout the age of modernity, mostly in artistic movements.
Indeed, such movements and changes in the system of stockpiling and pre-
senting the works of art contributed not only to new paradigms in the field
of artistic praxis, but they also substantiated a radically different new en-
vironment and different conditions of the production of works of art. Nev-
ertheless, even in theoretical minds, with very few exceptions, the reasons
for these changes and their meaning were not actually fully comprehend-
ed for quite some time, and subsequently many obsolete categories from
the realm of a “cult of art and spirituality” persist. In this respect, we come
across the question of the hegemony, but let us first re-think some basic no-
tions concerning artistic and cultural (re)production.
Perception of Perception
I am, yet again, recalling the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani-
cal Reproduction, which has been debated repeatedly, and still seems to be
an inexhaustible source of new interpretations and elaborations. However,
Benjamin gives some indirect arguments against some of the main points
of his essay in his own earlier work, which is permeated with highly aes-
thetical articulations on aesthetic matters. Only when he formulated his
notion of aura, Benjamin found an epistemological tool for a radically new
understanding of the world of the “mechanical reproduction” and the role
of art within it. In a sense Benjamin happened to be one of the first “de-
constructionists”, or as it could be assumed, one of those intellectual fig-
ures, who may be included into a “tradition” of deconstruction. Although
he actually never (not in this essay and maybe only barely in some other
writings) brought problems of the reproduction of works of art to that level
of abstraction, where these problems would be formulated in terms of the
37
