The Aura of Walter Benjamin

I like Walter Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction---it's witty, cleverly written, and uses the occasional tinge of sarcasm to good effect. But it's well-writness is not of much significance to this post. Rather, what Benjamin states will be the focus and the topic of the day.

Not surprisingly, the essay proclaims consequences and effects that stem from the mechanical reproduction of art which was only just then (in 1935) beginning to turn into a fact of life. After a brief history of the general reproduction of art; as in forgery, woodcuts, currency minting, etc; Benjamin turns his sights on the present state of the mass reproduçability of art by means of machine and what that entails.

He posits that when machines are able to make mass copies of a piece of art those copies are inherently less authentic than the original, and are thereby not allowing the beholder of said copies to truly experience the art as the creator intended. Benjamin seems to disapprove of art being treated in this way, but doesn't come right out with such a judgement---instead choosing to center his discussion around the loss of aura, which he deems implicit to the process of art's mechanical reproduction.

Benjamin never concretely defines what aura is, relying on explications of where aura can be or will not be found in high or low quantities. The author also seems to be relying on his readership's ability to assume what aura is themselves. Technically the word aura describes something ethereal or intangible and Benjamin's own vague usage of the word in his essay shows a kind of parallelism at a meta level. The ingenuity of that rhetoric notwithstanding, this haziness of definition of a word so central to his argument is in poor form and is the only real complaint I have with the essay at large.

Despite all that, I agree with him. At least to some extent. Being in the presence of and participating in a proto-art (if you will) provides context---and therefore: content---for the beholder that is necessarily absent from the experience derived from a reproduction of the same piece of art.

However, no matter how far removed a duplicate may be from its original, a piece of art (in any form) still provides an experience for a beholder, whether good or bad. One does not simply have the capacity to judge that the experiences of any number of different beholders of a copy is categorically better or worse than the experience they'd get from an original. Beauty, to be as cliché as possible, is in the eye of the beholder after all.

Here, once again, there seems to be a kind of coincidence between his and my opinions. While Benjamin does harp on the important of aura in pieces of art, almost to fault---especially in his criticisms of photography/film for creating some manner of false auras---, he also admits that different types of art in various forms mean different things to different persons and groups of people. Which is an important, though seemingly obvious, point to make. I make mention of it merely because it proves Benjamin's sanity amid his staunchly high opinion of aura.

In fact, his particular opinions on photography and film's apparent lack of aura are the only part of the essay at which he and I truly disagree. He claims primarily that the manipulation of an image or images by a photographer, director, or producer voids the art of the aura it would have otherwise in a live performance/existence, thereby suggesting that aura must exist naturally and cannot be created.

I find this notion patently ridiculous. Every artist manipulates their art to have a certain aura about it. If they didn't, they wouldn't really be the artist, would they? In the most basic understanding that I can glean from his essay, Benjamin, though never fully defining it, sees aura as being some naturally present entity which surrounds every original thing---from mountain ranges to paintings. Simultaneously, however, he sees reproductions of art, original photographs, and original films (among others) as suffering from a dearth of aura. This is in spite of the fact that each of these things is its own individual being, and therefore original.

Yeah, I know a duplicate is obviously not the original version of something. But physics would support that each copy is its own original self, being slightly different (if imperceptibly) than any other thing in the world. As such, it should naturally have aura as far as my interpretation of Benjamin's vague idea supplies, just as much aura as any other original thing. And don't even get me started with why photographs and films have aura. That one should be obvious.

Aside from his paradoxical and arbitrary bestowals and deprivations of aura though, Walter Benjamin and I are cool.

"Running Fence" and Meditations on the Beauty of Art

In a very general sense, I'm a sucker for unusual things and things with very obvious order. So when presented with Christo and Jeanne-Claude's outdoor installation art piece Running Fence, my interest is already piqued. It was a twenty-four and a half mile long fence, 18 feet high, composed primarily of steel poles and cables which held up 2,050 incredibly large sheets of white nylon along its length as it crossed the prairied hills of two Northern California counties, ending in the Pacific Ocean. Unusual? Very. Obvious order? Yes. Check and check; I already like it on a base instinctual level, but there's so much more to it.

Running Fence was big. Really big. It was so big, that the only way to experience the full breadth of it (from some top-down cartographic image) would have, ironically, not even allowed someone to really get a feel for what the actual piece of art was. The fact that in order for one to view the art as it was intended to be viewed required them to physically be in the presence of the fence is so cool. It's the type of large scale project that can make a person feel miniscule and overwhelmed when they're near it, but it's small enough to be examined in its entirety given an adequate amount of time and a person's patience and endurance.

But the piece was only extant for 14 days; and then it was gone. So really, would the average artsy person even have enough time to walk along those 24.5 miles, taking note of each steel pole, every corner of white nylon sheet, the way every panel of fence is identical to the last and yet somehow different too? Unlikely. With a piece like this, looking too hard into the details seems pointless at best and frustrating at the worst.

It is what is---a giant fence of white sheets running along some hills and into the ocean. I can appreciate it for its intrinsic novelty and its strong patternistic qualities. I imagine other people can appreciate Running Fence for other reasons and feelings of their own; and just the same, I'm sure plenty of others don't care for it all. But it's the simple fact that it doesn't try to be something bigger than or deeper than what it is in the most basic sense that really excites me.

Seeing the Maysles Brothers' documentary of the preparation, construction, and completion of Running Fences is cool, not only because is shows the piece in video form, but especially because it shows the social reactions to the fence (even before it's begun construction). It's so interesting how things, specifically art in this case, make people feel, and how those feelings can be so strong or weak and so contrasting or consonant with each other. And all the while, the piece of art is completely impartial. It simply is (or isn't, in the case of Running Fences) and people react to it. That's where the real beauty of art lies, in various people's thoughts about it,and in their subsequent expressions of said thoughts, and in the mingling of those differing expressions. Art can only be something if people let it be.