Page 98 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 98
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
ample, the institution of University keeps determining levels of education
as well as a global academic space and the notion of knowledge itself, but
at the same time, knowledge is increasingly being produced and becomes
available elsewhere as well. Still, the University ultimately keeps being the
instance of verification of knowledge as well as museum and/or gallery
functions as a safeguard that verifies ‘art,’ no matter where different arte-
facts happen to be shown or exhibited.1 Therefore, the institution of the mu-
seum should be taken as a specific materialization of a metaphor of itself,
which became universally recognised through the course of time of mod-
ernism and even more emphatically in the time-space of post-modernism.
Mieke Bal, explaining her “partly metaphorical use of the idea of ‘mu-
seum’,” subsequently points out: “The discourse around which museums
evolve, and which defines their primary function, is exposition” (Bal, 1996:
p. 2). There cannot be exposition without gestures “/…/ that point to things
and seem to say: ‘Look!’ – often implying: ‘That’s how it is.’ The ‘Look!’ as-
pect involves the visual availability of the exposed object. The ‘That’s how
it is’ aspect involves the authority of the person who knows: epistemic au-
thority. The gesture of exposing connects these two aspects” (Ibid.). The
idea of exposure points, as Mieke Bal elaborates further on the next page,
to a “subject/object dichotomy,” which is a fundamental aspect of the bina-
ry determination of the art and its notion as it happens to be recognised by
experts and wider public.
However, there is also an agency of double determination of expo-
sure in the process of the production of a contemporary artistic work. This
side turns out to be much more perceptible, when we take into account the
technological aspect of contemporary art, which works in conjunction with
the institutional aspect. The analogue electronic media, the technology of
CRT (cathode ray tube), which at first enabled television and the displaying
of videos, entered into museums and increasingly shaped artistic events
in the period of the peak of modernism, already entering the new age of
post-modernism. Such an exposure of art to itself presupposed a double
action within the very process of making an object for a video shooting.
This double action of arranging an object and ‘visualising’ it on the mag-
netic tape was able to produce an exposure in the form of a display in an
1 Paradigmatic cases for this are, among others, Christo‘s (and his wife’s Jeanne-
Claude’s) installations in all kinds of open spaces, but their artistic significance was
confirmed by museums which exhibited a range of artefacts related to the installa-
tions, like preparatory drawings, photographs, etc. It is understood that their work
is abundantly documented on the Internet.
96
ample, the institution of University keeps determining levels of education
as well as a global academic space and the notion of knowledge itself, but
at the same time, knowledge is increasingly being produced and becomes
available elsewhere as well. Still, the University ultimately keeps being the
instance of verification of knowledge as well as museum and/or gallery
functions as a safeguard that verifies ‘art,’ no matter where different arte-
facts happen to be shown or exhibited.1 Therefore, the institution of the mu-
seum should be taken as a specific materialization of a metaphor of itself,
which became universally recognised through the course of time of mod-
ernism and even more emphatically in the time-space of post-modernism.
Mieke Bal, explaining her “partly metaphorical use of the idea of ‘mu-
seum’,” subsequently points out: “The discourse around which museums
evolve, and which defines their primary function, is exposition” (Bal, 1996:
p. 2). There cannot be exposition without gestures “/…/ that point to things
and seem to say: ‘Look!’ – often implying: ‘That’s how it is.’ The ‘Look!’ as-
pect involves the visual availability of the exposed object. The ‘That’s how
it is’ aspect involves the authority of the person who knows: epistemic au-
thority. The gesture of exposing connects these two aspects” (Ibid.). The
idea of exposure points, as Mieke Bal elaborates further on the next page,
to a “subject/object dichotomy,” which is a fundamental aspect of the bina-
ry determination of the art and its notion as it happens to be recognised by
experts and wider public.
However, there is also an agency of double determination of expo-
sure in the process of the production of a contemporary artistic work. This
side turns out to be much more perceptible, when we take into account the
technological aspect of contemporary art, which works in conjunction with
the institutional aspect. The analogue electronic media, the technology of
CRT (cathode ray tube), which at first enabled television and the displaying
of videos, entered into museums and increasingly shaped artistic events
in the period of the peak of modernism, already entering the new age of
post-modernism. Such an exposure of art to itself presupposed a double
action within the very process of making an object for a video shooting.
This double action of arranging an object and ‘visualising’ it on the mag-
netic tape was able to produce an exposure in the form of a display in an
1 Paradigmatic cases for this are, among others, Christo‘s (and his wife’s Jeanne-
Claude’s) installations in all kinds of open spaces, but their artistic significance was
confirmed by museums which exhibited a range of artefacts related to the installa-
tions, like preparatory drawings, photographs, etc. It is understood that their work
is abundantly documented on the Internet.
96
