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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 artworks––but 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 art––the communist project Benjamin lauded––in 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.

 

 




Updated 1st June 2005


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