Art
as an expression of citizens within a capitalist society is commonly
viewed as an outlet, like a vent, through which people can healthily
subscribe to variation from the system. Particular artistic endeavors
serve to assist those with aspirations to live in a manner that is
uncommon amongst average careers (desk jobs, customer service, etc),
and yet still helps one to accumulate some form of finances to
survive in our society. Art as a form of this kind of health has come
to be seen as customary, and as such, acceptable within everyday
practices of capitalism. Given this, the average reaction is simply
to accept matters as such, and to view art as one career amongst
many. Is it not problematic to take the side of the demon as opposed
to attempting to thwart the monster's endeavors? The imposed
necessity for finance and property accumulation can serve as a
restriction on those types of expression that may not be useful for
financial gain, but regardless are honest as to the feeling of the
citizen. Art has taken many forms over the course of its existence
through various types of cultures, and one of its most prominent
features has been the assistance of ritual, and traditional
foundation. This paper will discuss the dilemma Benjamin views our
artistic careers as, and will include his criticism of art's origin
in ritual. From this discussion I will offer a glance at the
directing style of Ed Wood, as challenge to capitalist
systematization as it has been proposed here.
The
examination of our predicament will focus on Benjamin's text, “The
Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the start of
which includes a proposition of a certain theses of art:
However, theses about the art of the proletariat after
its assumption of power or about the art of a classless society would
have less bearing on these demands than theses about the
developmental tendencies of art under present [capitalist] conditions
of production. Their dialectic is no less noticeable in the
superstructure than in the economy. It would therefore be wrong to
underestimate the value of such theses as a weapon. They brush aside
a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal
value and mystery—concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present
almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data
in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the
theory of art in what follows differ from the more familiar terms in
that they are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They
are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary
demands in the politics of art.
Rather
than for the artist to cooperate with our capitalist system, that
Benjamin identifies as Fascist, such practices are proposed as being
a possible weapon against the system. Thinking in terms of what it
would be like for art to exist in a society in which the proletariat
has prevailed does not assist our current condition. Benjamin wishes
to build on a style of art that challenges any kind of rational
participation in financial gain to the extent that one's practices
seem to jeopardize one's chances at success. At first glance, some
may be troubled by such notions. Current artists might even take
offense at such criticism that any sort of participation in financial
gain affiliates one with Fascism. As stated above, artistic
enterprises are often viewed as a type of variation from
systematization. This doesn't seem to be the case for Benjamin in
that such practices do not succeed, or in some cases do not even
attempt to disrupt the system, but instead seek compromise. Another
aspect that may seem troubling is what is proposed as “brushing
aside” ideas like creativity, genius, eternal value, qualities
often seen as essential to art and its practitioners.
The
customary foundations of art are placed on the chopping block as
Benjamin seeks to cut away from attributes that are usually viewed as
essential for artistic practices. Seeing as current art participates
in financial gain, which indicates one's allegiance to the system,
one cannot hope to sabotage fascism through current practices. The
system is only fed by our desire for financial security, and that
desire is driven by success. There can be only specific ways in which
one can be successful in our modern age, and thus the face of art is
determined by financial desires. The finished product of one's work
has to have a certain appearance that is assisted by specific aspects
of personality: creativity and genius are two. As he states, Benjamin
also thinks that the product itself must harbor particular attributes
to acquire success: eternal value and mystery to name a few, but
these are key in that they signal to audiences the special quality
that the product has is the result of unique personal attributes.
Access, by audiences, to art is thus limited to those with such
attributes. This is not to deny that anyone can be audience to such
works, but the understanding
of them as art is for the
unique few who then offer authoritative commentary over any given
interpretation. Traditional thought concerning the given properties
and personal attributes are more a weapon against the masses rather
than being marks of accomplishment by a society for they indicate a
dichotomy between certain people in which one set is elite, in that
they are successful, and the other is lacking in some degree. An art
project that is seen as qualitatively poor by society cannot be an
example of success, so it's thought that its creator cannot be an
instance of genius. Society is driven to this judgment by a history
that has put the dichotomy in place, but how is it that it acquired
so much force in the first place? As Benjamin examines the history of
art within ritual, he paints a picture in which the creatively
plentiful elite are placed in a position to command while the lacking
masses are subject to obey.
The interpretation of history that is offered is
saturated by Benjamin's notion of “aura”. His analysis of the
aura is rather vague, but what can be gathered is that the aura of an
art object consists of its being situated within its particular time
and space of origin. One way he helps us to understand is to consider
newer practices of mechanical reproduction due to advances in
technology. Photography is one he places great emphasis on, and with
the development of the camera, one is able to sneak a picture of what
some culture may consider a sacred object. An example would be to
consider statues of the virgin Mary, and how they are covered in
order to maintain that only those with the proper sight, which can be
translated as the proper “understanding”, are permitted to see
them. This sort of treatment assists in embedding certain objects
into the framework of ritual, as the objects are taken to be sacred
and available to only a select few. With the advent of the camera,
however, one can capture the image of an object, and take it home to
treat as eye candy regardless of whether such a person has the unique
attributes that grant access. While the photograph, as an instance of
reproduction, may grant one sight in one's own home, it fails to
capture the aura in that what cannot be reproduced is the object's
unique existence within a certain time and space. It's in this way
that Benjamin notes that instances of reproduction always depreciate
an object's “historical testimony”.
The primary way in which we are assisted to grasp the
idea of the aura is to consider it as that which is lost in the
process of mechanical reproduction. While tradition may see this as a
bad thing, Benjamin will ultimately come to say “good riddance!”.
The aura does not travel with the image produced by a camera because
a crucial aspect to the aura is that it is marked by distance. More
will be said about this when we return to the idea of “eternal
value and mystery” as necessary properties of an art object, but
for now consider mechanical reproduction as a technique to bring
closer what was once distant. With the example of hanging the
photograph in the room, this is an attempt to erase the gap between a
sacred object and the public, but reproduction depreciates an
object's aura in that it cannot capture its historical testimony. We
can think of this testimony as the object's use in ritual within the
time and place it was initially created. An object's use within
ritual grants it authority: only that object will do, and it must be
used and thought about in a certain way; it is also a beacon for
particular values that participants seek to embody and teach. Its
authority is maintained by its authenticity, which holds so long as
the object is accessible by a select few who use the object to
conduct rituals. Any attempt at reproducing the object outside of the
context of ritual diminishes its authenticity, which in turn injures
its authority. This last idea is crucial to Benjamin's critique in
that this is exactly what we want to do.
The process and structure of isolating a unique factor
of an art object from the public has helped to develop people into a
systematization that pushes them into subjecting themselves to the
authority of those who claim to have access to the authenticity of
the art object. This is the tradition of expertise and knowledge that
Benjamin identifies with fascism. Glancing back out our initial
examination of creative personal attributes, affiliating genius with
artistic practices assists in instigating the notion to any onlooker
to a work of art that she only wishes she can do that. If we were to
question the onlooker as to why her participation is dubious, the
response would most likely appeal to standards of success. We can
identify those properties that an object must have in order to
maintain success as the ones listed before: eternal value and
mystery. These are both key aspects of the aura that is meant to
imply distance. Regarding natural objects, while we may be able to
see a mountain range, we are unable to grasp or fully harness it.
What slips through our fingers is the aura. Seeing as the aura is
something that does not give itself over to reproduction, its
existence can be thought of as eternal in that while the reproduced
object decays in time, the aura is something that does not travel
with it. As it concerns an object's mystery, this is to return more
to the personal attributes in that not everyone can fully access the
object given that its authenticity is aligned with its distance.
Similar to ritual, only those with certain expertise can understand
an object as being a work of art, for everyone else the matter is an
unsolvable riddle. As long as art remains the best kept secret of
those with the understanding, the onlooking public will always be
held captive by the authoritative relationship between genius and
mystery.
Returning to our example of the onlooker, we can
imagine she makes an attempt at art, but very few, if any, appreciate
the work. Furthermore, we can suppose the attention it receives is
one of disdain. The onlooker's doubts are confirmed: lack of success
is clearly an indication that she is not a creative genius, and the
gap between her and the authenticity of art works is wider than she
previously imagined. Her old attitude is amplified, she now leaves
art to the “experts”, the evidence of their status being held
tightly in their wallets. The onlooker succumbs to the system by
acknowledging that the evidence is didactic. Genius and mystery aid
in systematization by substantiating, or representing, certain values
that the onlooker is necessarily inclined to submit to. Even though
the minute details of ritual may not be as common as they used to be,
the same exploitation of mystery is still expressed through the
arbitrary allegiance between authority and success.
Film and photography may not be the first instances of
new technology making reproduction of art works more common, but they
are huge steps toward possibly shattering the authoritative
foundations of aura and financial success. For values in ritual to
manifest there must be an autonomy between the art object and the
cult figures. This is similar to the autonomy maintained by the
successful in regards to accumulated wealth and creativity. Benjamin
expresses great faith in film's ability to disrupt such autonomy by
its ability to shatter the distance, and show that an arbitrary
organizing of fragments is what's at work. There is no doubt that
contemporary works of cinema are thought of in terms of success and
failure, and that film can also assist capitalist structures, but
Benjamin believes that it is in a better position than other art
mediums to exhibit weakness in the autonomous structure between the
elite few and art. In this sense art has political purpose and
acquires the capacity to have social significance. Art as it pertains
to its place in ritual has significance more for the isolated elite
in that their access is direct and managerial: it is prepared for the
public so as to better express systemic values.
The
production of film involves the arbitrary piecing together of
recorded fragments that are the visual reproductions of particular
environments and actors. The final product is a constantly changing
array of images that prevents audiences from perceiving any type of
aura. Instead, audiences are placed into the position of developing a
critical attitude. The goal of reproduction is to eradicate the
distance factor, bridging the gap between different aspects of
reality, such as our case of the photograph brought home, and when it
does not seem to do so a critical attitude takes shape, and the
public becomes more aware of the fragmented plight we are in. Simply
put, in our capitalist system, it is those arts that fail, that are
not marketable, that serve a political purpose. In the practice of
cinema, I find no better example than Ed Wood. Pop culture regards
Wood as the worst movie director of all time. His magnum opus, Plan
9 From Outer Space, is viewed as
one of the worst movies ever made. The elite attitude considers his
work to be vacant of any of the necessary properties of success, and
thus Wood cannot be consider a genius in any way. Certain films are
considered successful, and because of which these features obtain an
authority that enables a judgmental juxtaposition to take place.
However, what failure pieces do is help indicate that successful
works are involved in the same kind of reproduction that failures
are. The only manner in which failures differ from successes is that
the latter is profitable. Otherwise, all films are involved in
optical testing: audiences are brought “closer” to the
environments and actors through the fragmented recordings of the
camera.
Both actors and environments lose any sort of authority
in front of the camera. These notions of aura and authority attempt
to support that the artist is creative and exhibits genius because
the product has qualities of eternal value and mystery. Film is not
the only reproductive technology, but it does well to indicate that
geniuses are involved in reproduction like anyone else. Oscar winning
films are essential in supporting the authoritative foundations that
genius and mystery purport. Failed works, like Wood's, have the
potential to pull away the curtain and show that the distinction
between “author and audience” is not so clear. Wood's films
incorporate tons of stock footage from unrelated films, single-take
shots, poor lighting, crude sound recording, cheap sets, and actors
whose skill is definitely in question. Each of these aspects is more
than obvious to any eye, elite or not, and yet the product is a
feature film. Any audience member is able to see that something is
amiss as the different pieces of the filming process are glued
together in way that indicates that a piecing-together process is at
work.
The photograph and other forms of reproduction may be
able to better fool those who obtain such works that they are in
touch with unique authoritative content. A failure film strips any
objects that are being filmed from having any authoritative power.
The actor is separated from the audience, and is unable to adjust to
the mood of the crowd, as one might on stage. An adjustment seeks to
stabilize authority, and does so by accommodating to the mood of the
audience. The audience is unable to perceive that something is amiss
amongst the authoritative figures as their so-called genius is really
a kind of “playing to the crowd”. A similarity can be drawn
between the stage actor and the cult figure within ritual, as the
latter is more able to bestow values to a crowd if the figure's
genius eludes all doubt. Before the camera, the actor, and everyone
involved, has no idea how the audience will react, and if the
temperament of the people is not accommodated to, then critical
emotions may arise. The film attains social significance in that the
public comes to be distracted by the critical attitude and starts to
apply it towards their living environment. Our cities are filled with
streets, buildings, sidewalks, sign posts, all sorts of edifices that
are meant to direct the movements of people so as to allow better
participation within the system. The design of these different
entities work very much like art in that they exhibit an
authoritative power given that they come from the minds of geniuses.
The average citizen is not qualified to put up a sign post, it
requires someone with expertise that understands the framework of the
city; expertise offers the position of telling others how to move.
Wood was trying so hard to be one of these figures within the
aesthetics of cinema, but his inability to glue fragments of filming
together left visible gaping holes through which audiences are able
to question authoritative foundations—the onlooker is now able to
say to oneself, “I can do that!” Seeing as Wood was so
emotionally inclined to organizing fragments in the manner we see in
his films, what enables us to think that those experts are doing
anything different? It's in this way that Benjamin feels that the
divide between author and audience is blurred, and that anyone can
take up instruments around them are start piecing together the
fragments of our world together in any which way they please. An
awareness of the arbitrary nature of the construction of cityscapes
begins to stir as the public questions the genius of the art around
them, as well as the success that tends to follow.
Wood's films failed to acquire any sort of financial
success, and so his films were useless in establishing any
authoritative foundation. His reproductive processes are viewed as
nonsensical, such as in scenes in which characters are knocked over
in a graveyard, taking down the plastic tombstones beside them. These
kinds of blunders are shocking for audiences in that they are used to
being accommodated to: we all thought we were in the hands of
experts! The disruption of comfort presented by Wood's features makes
salient the discord between filmed fragments, and one begins to
wonder “if a yahoo like Wood can gain access to cinematic processes
of capturing and gluing visual fragments together then why can't I?”
The political significance that comes about is the undermining of the
artistic autonomy of genius and mystery. The language of aesthetic
criticism, then, is nothing more than an appeal to marketability.
Wood's films are bad insofar as they do not secure profits; genius
and mystery are simply a way to keep intact the capitalist structure
in which profits are the goal.
The critical eye that accumulates within audiences
potentially aims itself at environmental structures and authoritative
figures—if Wood is involved in arbitrary construction of elements,
then perhaps everyone else is as well. The critical response towards
art works helps the public in collecting courage to administer the
questioning eye towards cult figures, and doubt is placed on whether
or not such figures possess the genius that they claim to, or if the
mystery of an art object is not just some ploy produced in the
process of piecing together fragments of reality. It's clear that
Wood is no authoritative figure, and if we interpret his works as
being involved in similar processes of those we thought to be
authoritative, then the authenticity of such figures and works is
jeopardized and loses its value administering power over people.
Wood, by ironic consequence within the framework of
capitalism, is a revelatory hero by passing authorship amongst the
public. Art is not for the special few, but is for anyone who has the
will to create. Mechanical reproduction cripples the soundness of the
aura, but this is all for the better. Anyone who takes up a camera is
an expert—the processes and motions of the elite few are made more
available to the public in the advent of new technology. Similar to
how reproductive processes devalue an object's authenticity by
removing it from its historical testimony within ritual, the elite
lose their grasp on authority the more removed their practices become
from genius and the distance factor. As the quantity of experts
increases in the wake of mechanical reproduction, the fight over
quality starts to shift, and those works that stray away from
aspirations of success are a crucial weapon against an oppressive
system that demands of its public to excel in a way in which wealth
determines value.
