Walter
Benjamin and Art
by Andrew Benjamin, Ed.
Continuum, London, 2005
272 pp. Paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8264-6730-X.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University
Center MI 48710 USA
mosher@svsu.edu
In the uncredited cover photograph, Walter
Benjamin (1892-1940) appears with eyes
downcast, the emblem of pensiveness, the
saturnine sage pondering culture. This
look might represent, were he alive in
2005, his own mixed feelings towards the
concerted analysis by scholars these days
of the single essay from the 1930s "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
Though claiming to be the first collection
of essays analyzing its importance, Walter
Benjamin and Art was preceded by Gumbrecht
and Marrinan's 2003 Mapping Benjamin:
The Work of Art in the Digital Age.
Part of Continuum's Walter Benjamin Studies
series, the authors that Andrew Benjamin
of Warwick University has collected in
this book discuss the earlier Benjamin's
seminal essay either as a work of philosophy,
amidst artworks and architecture and commodities
and poems, or in light of technological
advances.
Among the philosophers, Joanna Hodge locates
Benjamin's pessimistic philosophy amongst
Goethe, Kant and the 1920s work of Jewish
theologian Franz Rosenzweig. Beatrice
Hanssen, author of the 1998 Walter Benjamin's
Other History contrasts his aesthetics
with those of Martin Heidegger, who was
romantically deluded, professionally compensated
and morally compromised by Naziism. Arne
Melberg's strong essay "The Work of Art
in the Age of Ontological Speculation"
revisits Benjamin's essay in the context
of various 1930s ontologies of singular
works and art itself. Melberg notes how
several philosophers' negative theologies
contrast with the pragmatic modernism
of Benjamin's "Naples", a piece he wrote
in collaboration with his lover Asja Lacis.
Can imagery be trusted? Rebecca Comay
resurrects the bliderverboten,
iconoclastic strictures calling for the
destruction of unreliable images. The
trope fueled Benjamin's metaphysical debate
with the Theodor Adorno, who thought his
unconventional Marxist colleague seduced
by the visual realm. Howard Eiland elucidates
the concept of distraction and how commodities
distract the urban world. Other essays
map Benjamin's "techtonic unconscious"
of arcades and his subjective reading
of photographs by Hill, Atget and Sander.
The memorable, literate "Aura, Still"
by Robert Kaufman locates that historic
aspect of visual art that Benjamin noted
in the work of California poet Norma Cole.
The Language Poets that influenced her
translations of French poetry are juxtaposed
by Kaufman with the influences of Shelley
and Baudelaire upon Berhold Brecht. Cole
has collaborated with poet Robert Duncan,
painter Stanley Whitney and collagist
Jess, dialogues comparable to Benjamin's
with his friend Brecht.
In 2005, perhaps, it is the techies who
best know and drive the mechanics of Benjaminist
theoretical machinery. In an essay reminiscent
of Jonathan Sterne's work on sound reproduction,
Rajeev S. Patke writes on the impact of
gramophone records of Hindustani music
and in early twentieth century India.
This reviewer likes to wonder if grim
Walter would dance to the Bhangra music
and Bollywood movie soundtracks pulsing
this evening in Delhi, Dacca, and London
clubs. Saul Ostrow finds hope in recent
artworksbut not Warhol's photo
silkscreens, Mimimalism, or the postmodernist
recycling of forms that quickly reify
into fetishized commodities and discourse
that supports the status quo. It was in
the Fluxus actions and Allen Kaprow's
Happenings, where everyday unmediated
experience refused to become "art art",
and came closest to Guy Debord's Situationist
ideal for art: "rehearsing revolution".
Kryzysztof Ziarek's "The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Electronic Mutability"
uses Seiko Mikami's virtual spider and
Eduardo Kac's "Genesis" as a contemporary
politicizing of artthe communist
project Benjamin laudedin
the healthy spirit of radical Dadaist
gestures. The audience helps shape new
web-enabled artworks proves the art to
be open ended, mutable, and emergent,
and to cause us to rethink collectivity.
Walter Benjamin and Art sails with
both philosophers and artists of innovative
reproducibility on board. Karl Marx's
stated it, Walter Benjamin approved it:
the philosophers' goal is to interpret
the world, while ours is to change it.