Copy / Original: Can Reproductions Truly Move Us?

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Exhibitionistas. I am your host, Joana P. R. Neves, and this is your Art Wonderment Podcast. We always start with a question, basically to open up the gates of this space and to give you a general direction to my natural wandering inclinations.

[00:00:25] And the question today is, can the reproduction of an artwork, an original, unique artwork, truly move us? And to answer this question, I'm going to heavily rely on a seminal book of 20th century critical thinking, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by the German theorist Walter Benjamin, published in 1935.

[00:00:53] So some of you may very well know the name and the book. Some of you perhaps are hearing it for the first time. But the reality is that this book truly is a phenomenon because it is nearly 100 years old. And still, it is widely studied, at least in humanities, from sociology to even business school to marketing.

[00:01:20] It is often quoted. And we cannot say the same thing for most of Walter Benjamin's peers, perhaps with the exception of Hannah Arendt, whose concept, banality of evil, is very mentioned. But still, I'm not sure that when it is mentioned, we really read the text. It really upsets me to read quotes of the book so often.

[00:01:48] And those quotes completely misunderstand what Benjamin is trying to say in this book. I mean, the misquotes are of some magnitude because they touch precisely on the point that Benjamin is trying to make, which is that technologies are forcing art to redefine itself rather than destroying it. So when this book is mentioned, you hear the word aura.

[00:02:18] So the aura is the here and now. It's being in the presence of the work of art. Now, Benjamin does say, and I quote, what shrinks in an age where the work of art can be reproduced by technological means is its aura, unquote. But he doesn't say that it's a bad thing.

[00:02:39] In fact, he discusses what is going to happen in this new era because he believes that technology affects the way we perceive things. And so our perception grows, expands, changes with the changes in technology. He starts with a quote by Paul Valéry. He was a French author. And note that the word that Valéry uses in the end is magical.

[00:03:09] So he says, quote, We must be prepared for such profound changes to alter the entire technological aspect of the arts, influencing invention itself as a result. And eventually it may be contriving to alter the very concept of art in the most magical fashion.

[00:03:29] Benjamin chooses this quote, which begins by saying that the establishment of categories of art was built by people who had a lot of power at the time. People like the historian Giorgio Vasari, who was the first one to have written the history of painters such as Michelangelo, Giorgione, and many of the painters of the time of the Renaissance, starting a history of art by promoting the notion of genius.

[00:03:58] Not only is Benjamin saying those categories are now being questioned by new technologies, Paul Valéry and Benjamin through Paul Valéry is saying magical stuff can happen from this new configuration. So he's looking at technology that started in the 19th century.

[00:04:19] And then he is perceiving and noting, remarking upon the way that technology has evolved from the 19th century to the 1930s when he's writing this text. And then he tries to see the potential of its future, which means now, the era that we are living in currently. So this is rather exciting.

[00:04:48] It's not a book that functions as a sort of a diagnosis. Actually, this book is an open analysis and it waits for our action. It tells us the possibilities, the potential of the era that he was living in, but also potentially the future. And so it almost functions as a sort of a critical thinking tutorial.

[00:05:11] And it is up to you then, once you have thought about technology and the work of our art with this book, to do something about it, to take position, and maybe also to contribute for technology to evolve in the right direction. And so, I think Benjamin would agree.

[00:05:38] Because while he was paying close attention to technologies of reproduction, he was also advocating for the figure of the flaneur, which he took from the French poet Charles Baudelaire. The flaneur means the flaneur means the wanderer, the stroller, the person who is in the here and now of the city. And so Benjamin is really taken by this notion. And he acts as the flaneur, both in his life.

[00:06:07] He travels quite a bit and spends a lot of time looking and discovering cities and countries and different areas of Europe. And he also does it in his writing. So his writing is a bit cryptic at times. It is unexpected. You never quite know what is coming up next. And, therefore, he is the observer.

[00:06:35] Walter Benjamin, if one were to define the way he writes, the way he thinks, is really as an observer. He will see things that the hurried crowds won't and catch the invisible truths of modern society. So in that spirit, I will go back to a personal experience to illustrate the question first. So to contextualize the question and the reason why I'm asking it.

[00:07:05] Can the reproduction of an artwork, an original, unique artwork, truly move us? So I grew up and was born in what can be described as a peripheral country, Portugal.

[00:07:24] And so Portugal has lots of poets, writers and artists, but not a huge history of visual arts or even artifacts that you visit in the big museums of the Western world, such as the British Museum, the Met, the Louvre. And so I had a book called History of Art, spanning years and years of human creativity.

[00:07:52] And I spent hours in my room, on my bed, leafing through that book. It was the 80s. And I fell in love with a few paintings in that book. And the one or one of the paintings that I loved the most was The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, which was produced in 1818. So between 1817 and 1818.

[00:08:22] So it is a painting, quite famous, of a man on the top of a mountain or at the edge of a cliff, admiring a sea of canopies drowned in what looks like a sort of sea of fog and clouds. They almost look wavy. And in the background, there's a silhouette of a mountain, which is at the eye level of this man.

[00:08:49] And behind that mountain, the sky and the clouds merged, traversed by lines of sunny pink light. It's a sort of a blanket of blue with these lines of pinkish lights that kind of pierce through. But the most important thing about this painting is that the man is at the center of the image and he is turning his back to us.

[00:09:19] And so I remember loving this painting because it was clearly about the role of being a spectator. And I, leafing through this book, was witnessing this man witnessing that spectacle. So I was a spectator of the spectator, first and foremost.

[00:09:41] So I had this instinct that the really important thing about this painting was the person looking, even though it was important to have a sense of what the person was looking at. So I imagined also this painting to be about nature, about the acres and acres of forest, about the geological masses across the earth.

[00:10:10] You know, a mix of the vast expanses of beauty, but also the dread that comes with it from feeling so small and perhaps even the idea of losing it at some point. You know, death. But I never saw this painting in the flesh.

[00:10:30] So I imagined this painting to be very big because it was someone looking at an immense perspective of nature and different varieties of it.

[00:10:48] So I imagined this painting to be very big because it was a mere meter by 75 centimeters. So it's portrait format.

[00:11:14] So about 37 inches by 30 inches. So not big at all. So the small size showed me that the painting was about an inner state brought by the idea of nature. The landscape is not painted in a realistic way. It's atmospheric. It's hazy. It's textural.

[00:11:43] And then I realized that the man was not dressed as a mountaineer. He was dressed as someone in an urban setting, quite chic. And he's not in a domineering position. He is contemplative. So he's leaning on his left leg. And his body language is not the body of a conqueror. It's the body of someone that has been conquered, if anything.

[00:12:12] And then there's another painting. This really was my favorite one, not the wonder above the sea of fog, which is called Sea of Ice. It was a commission to paint an image that depicted the North. And so he thought about the Pole. He thought about the Arctic, but he never really went there. The painting is fascinating.

[00:12:37] These blocks of ice all pointing to the superior left-hand side of the painting. And they look yellowish and rusty. I read that he was observing ice in a smaller scale. I don't know what ice he was looking at, but this really looks nothing like ice. The painting is not about nature.

[00:13:02] It really is a religious feeling stimulated by contemplation, which is a sort of a deep and strange form of introspection that connects through the scenery to higher planes of existence. So the here and now, but also eternal time. And therefore, romanticism here, because he's considered to be the height of romanticism.

[00:13:30] This idea of the sublime, which was a term coined by Edmund Burke. So an art historian who talked about this feeling of being crushed by the immensity and the beauty. The sort of a sort of unbearable beauty of nature.

[00:13:49] In the case of Friedrich, who veers onto abstraction, not particularly in this painting, that is already quite apart from other depictions of nature of the time, which were very, very realistic or at least very detailed and really trying to convey nature through precision. But do you know what?

[00:14:12] This painting, the sea of ice is actually much bigger than the wanderer above the sea of fog, which is peculiar because that was produced based on a secondhand experience of a glacier. But as a first experience of art, because in front of the work of art, that is the or, it's the here and now.

[00:14:37] When we are in front of the painting by Casper David Friedrich, we are having a firsthand experience. Or in my case, a secondhand experience of it. So does this imply that art is a secondhand experience of something as a firsthand experience?

[00:14:58] Or does this mean that images are firsthand experiences of themselves, whatever they are in whatever medium they get to you? And the artwork is the firsthand experience of craftsmanship, of uniqueness, of genius. So the artwork is aura and the image will always be a firsthand experience of a secondhand experience or a secondhand experience of a firsthand experience.

[00:15:27] As a profoundly religious man, so Friedrich was raised in a very, very rigid and strict Lutheran household. Friedrich probably thought that art was simply a vehicle to achieve a contemplative state faster, a technology, if you will. And speaking of firsthand experiences, did you know that I have an art space?

[00:15:57] So allow me this little break to tell you about a place called Worlding in Elephant and Castle in London. So as promised in the last episode, the workshops are starting there. So as I told you, we are going to start launching different workshops. We already have a sound residency on the 27th of this month. But this week, on Friday 19th, we have two workshops.

[00:16:24] So this week we joined forces with our partner Collective Aid. It's a charity preventing border violence. They are absolutely awesome and they're linked in the show's notes. And so they are our partners. And as our partners, they invited the third partner, SOS Méditerranée, who is a French charity that rescues people in the Mediterranean Sea.

[00:16:51] And so these two charities are working on land and on sea. And therefore, we decided to curate an exhibition together that opens on Tuesday, where we are through artistic means and artistic language conveying this crossing

[00:17:15] and these experiences that are absolutely tragic, that are incredibly difficult, and to bear witness in the ways that art gives us to do so. So there's a VR set and experience. There are photographs. There's text. There's a lot of ways for these two charities to convey not only what the people they support go through,

[00:17:43] but also what it is to bear witness to those stories, those thousands and thousands of stories that they encounter every year. So on Friday, I am doing a workshop around words, because one of the things that we talked about with Collective 8 quite often is the difficulty in conveying a message,

[00:18:07] but also the care that needs to go into the way one expresses oneself when it comes to these situations. And so the workshop is going to explore awareness of words through sounds, through their graphic expression on paper or through mark making. So really going to an elementary experience of words. And who knows?

[00:18:35] It will help unleash a new relationship with them. And also, who knows, for those participating in the workshop to find their own words or to rediscover them. There is also a watercolor workshop, which is, again, expression through other means, through image, which is going to be awesome as well. And, you know, fear not. I'm not the one delivering it. I know nothing about art making techniques.

[00:19:04] My thing is language. So do go on the links in the show's notes if you're interested, if you're in London by any chance, or if you live here and if you have some time on Friday. So the workshops are from three to five. And then in the evening, we have a talk with three different perspectives on courage. So this exhibition is taking place also because it is a refugee week. And the theme of refugee week is courage.

[00:19:32] And the people involved in these charities that I'm working with, they decided that the idea of courage is a really, really intense and crucial one. Because there are different kinds of courage. There is very weird, inconvenient, almost uncomfortable ways of being courageous.

[00:19:56] And that's what we're going to be talking about in this talk that starts at 630. So doors open at 6. All links to tickets are in the show's notes. Please do come. So that's it. That's the break over. And now we're moving on to the first real in-depth exploration of this topic.

[00:20:21] Hannah Arendt has a text that was published in the New Yorker in the sixties that really defines Benjamin. She says that he was sui generis, not only one of a kind, but he's also the only one of his kind. He's neither a follower nor someone who has a following. So he's really an isolated thinker.

[00:20:44] I discovered recently, and I will tell you why and how, it was through this book that I have here in my hands called Radio Benjamin, a collection of texts by Walter Benjamin edited by Alicia Rosenthal, Verso Books. And it was published in 2021, so very recently. And it is a collection. The cover is absolutely magnificent.

[00:21:10] I don't know if it comes off in the image, but it is a green sort of blue-green cover. It has these concentric lines that become thicker in the center on the right side of the book that suggests broadcasting waves, which is really wonderful. This book has all the texts that Benjamin wrote about and for the radio.

[00:21:38] So I think I can safely say that Benjamin was a colleague. He was a podcaster or a proto-podcaster. He was really taken by the medium. Of course, in his correspondence, he talks about radio as being something that he does for money, basically, for survival.

[00:22:00] But I do believe that it's also because he sees the potential of this medium that is not being utilized in the way the Russians do. For example, there's a text where he complains that in Germany, they're not really building a real understanding of the medium as they are doing in Russia. I quote from a text that was published in 1932. So a year before he left to Paris called Two Kinds of Popularity, Fundamental Principles for a Radio Play.

[00:22:29] He writes, quote, in this way, the external relationship between scholarship and popularity that prevailed before is supplanted by an approach that scholarship itself cannot possibly forego. So, for here is a case of a popularity that not only mobilizes knowledge in the direction of the public, but mobilizes the public in the direction of knowledge.

[00:22:58] In a word, true popular interest is always active. It transforms the substance of knowledge and has an impact on the pursuit of knowledge itself. Unquote. So he saw in radio, and as we'll see in technology in general, a vehicle of knowledge that connected actively.

[00:23:21] And that's what he complains about when he talks about the discrepancy between German radio and Russian radio.

[00:23:29] A potential of interactive listening and communicating and transmission between the people listening, so the audiences, and the radio and the people broadcasting shows through this new technological form of reaching masses and masses of people, as opposed to a theatre play, say. So this is really important.

[00:23:58] So there's really something new that he's pointing at here. And he's complaining about the fact that we are not exploring that potential. And we can also ask ourselves, are we really exploring the potential of the new technologies that we are using? And as you know, last time I talked about digital hygiene. You can go and listen to the episode if you haven't.

[00:24:21] And one of the ideas that I had behind that idea of a sort of hygiene, a sort of massive cleanup of the way we relate to digital media, was that we have this idea that everything is in there. We have access to absolutely everything. And perhaps the question we should be asking is, what are we not getting from this technology? What are we not looking at?

[00:24:54] So you remember that I started by saying that Benjamin is misquoted most of the time. And so the idea is that, and this is absolutely something that Benjamin says, which is the here and now of the work of art, that is the aura of the work of art, is withered. And it's losing its power because of the mass reproduction of images.

[00:25:19] If you can have a painting, the Raft of the Medusa, for example, in your living room, copied or a photograph of it, it loses a certain mystery. But again, he's not saying that that's something bad.

[00:25:38] In fact, what he is saying is that this new era is now questioning the categories that were established before the establishment of this technology. And later on, these are Walter Benjamin's words, quote, page two of the classics, Penguin edition.

[00:26:01] So the change, these new technological standards, they oust a number of traditional concepts, such as creativity and genius, everlasting value and secrecy. Concepts who's uncontrolled and at the moment scarcely controllable application leads to a processing of the facts along the lines of fascism.

[00:26:21] So this idea of sort of monolithic culture and this establishment of value, which abides only by one single aesthetic notion, is a form of authority over art itself. It provides a static notion of quality.

[00:26:45] So when he talks, and this is really important for Benjamin, when he talks about everlasting value and secrecy, he is talking about the authority of values that are established and transmitted by the ruling classes and classes that have access to education.

[00:27:05] And when we think about the quotes that I shared before about radio and his interest in having a back and forth between the audiences and knowledge and those who convey notions of knowledge to these audiences,

[00:27:27] and how interested he is by the fact that those audiences are going to demand that knowledge might be conveyed in different ways and might be adapted to their own needs. And therefore, that culture becomes a sort of a dynamic, a dialogic relationship through the work of art or through creativity or whatever you want to call it.

[00:27:56] Between instances of reception and transmission that influence each other. So it's a very different thing than just saying, you know, there's no value, everything's the same. But it is important for Benjamin to question these categories. How does he start this text? He doesn't start it with the aura. He starts by stating something even more shocking, which is that the work of art has always been reproducible.

[00:28:25] This is not something new. Anyway, we'll see that later. It's time for a break. And I'm very chuffed to introduce a new segment called Art Etiquette, where I invite guests to bring in a question that we then discuss together. I have Kathy Barron as a guest. She is the brains behind the Women Who Podcast magazine and many other projects, amongst which a podcast, Women Who Southcast, where I was invited.

[00:28:52] So I will link that also in the show's notes because that episode is epic. We talk about sarcasm and I had such, such fun. It was wild. So have a listen. Anyway, I'll leave you to it. The Art Etiquette segment. Art Etiquette. It is my absolute delight to welcome Kathy Barron to be the first guest to ask me a question.

[00:29:22] No one knows what contemporary art is, let alone art etiquette. But first, I'm going to introduce Kathy. She's a very special person. She is across the pond, so in the US. And she is the founder and the chief editor of a really, really important piece of media, which is the magazine Women Who Podcasts. It's a really great way for you to find out about podcasts that may interest you, indie podcasts that you can support.

[00:29:52] So Kathy, welcome to the first Art Etiquette segment. Well, thank you, Joanna. And it's an honor to be here and be the first, you know, as the youngest of six kids, it's always nice to be first at something. Well, I created Women Who Podcasts magazine because there wasn't really anything out there supporting independent women podcasters. So that's when my muse piped up and said, well, then you're going to have to create it.

[00:30:18] I went to art school, so I kind of knew a little bit about the software, but I didn't know the whole ins and outs of publishing a magazine. It's been amazing to meet all the women podcasters, yourself included, all over the world, like Australia, England, UK, Finland, India. Art Etiquette.

[00:30:43] There's only one rule for this game, which is that you come in with a question and I will do my best to reply. Well, my question is, does art always have to have a meaning? You see comedy sketches sometimes where someone's looking at a piece of art and they're just like, what am I supposed to do with this kind of thing? And, you know, and I think that's kind of part of the etiquette because there's supposed to be meaning. You're so right. But you went to art school.

[00:31:11] So what is your adventure with art? I went to art school for video production and it was a great experience. I went to art school in Seattle, Washington. So you were separate. So you were the realism school of like, I'm doing documentaries. I'm not like one of those weird kids who are contemplating the color blue and are strange. Or was everyone mixed? How did that work? Well, the school does have different mediums.

[00:31:39] They have photography and video. There used to be a film, TV film school in Canada on Galiliano Island. I went there for a week intensive for documentary filmmakers. And that was like heaven for me. That was like the best time of my life. And so on the island, I knew a woman, Jane Rule, who was huge in the gay and lesbian community because she wrote the book Desert of the Hearts and it became a movie.

[00:32:08] She agreed to be part of the documentary. It was kind of a talking head documentary. And our instructor was like, yeah, talking heads really aren't, you know, the best way to go with a documentary. We're like, no, this is going to work. And it did. It worked. It's still on YouTube somewhere. Can I put the link on the show's notes? Sure. Yeah, yeah. The instructor, she would tell us, love nothing.

[00:32:36] Because if there's part of the film that just doesn't work with the other parts, you have to let it go. And that just really stuck with me because it's true. So if we presume that meaning is connected to story, then there is a little bit of a catch when we're talking about visual arts. Is that why you asked that question?

[00:33:03] Is it because there may be that kind of abstract element to visual art? I think so. I mean, Jackson Pollock is like one of my favorite artists. And that's because it is abstract. It's cool to look at, but that's as far as I go with it. I don't think about, well, what was he thinking when he just splattered the brush onto the canvas? There's no sense of obligation of knowing a lot about context. Is that where you're...

[00:33:33] Yeah, I mean, it is what it is. You don't go through the painting onto something else that is not there. It bounces back to you, but not in a navel gazing kind of way. But it depends on what you mean by meaning, no pun intended. In French, meaning is direction, sens. Does that make sense to you? Totally.

[00:33:55] But it also made me think that sometimes when I look at art or photography, I want to know about the photographer or the painter. That kind of goes back to my documentary fetish. I don't know if you want to call it a fetish, but my documentary. That would be a good one to play out.

[00:34:22] Because I'm interested in what equipment they used. How did they come up with the idea? What brought them to that point of creating what's in front of me? And you have that with Pollock as well? No, his stuff is so fascinating because it's just... Did any thought go into his paintings? Or was he just one day I'm just going to splatter this way and I'm going to use these colors and I'm good with it?

[00:34:52] Did it take months for him to create his canvases? Did he analyze each time he splattered or dumped paint on a canvas? But see, you do have a curiosity in regards to the making and to the prose. But not as deep as I think something else. I don't agree with you. I don't think deep is the right word.

[00:35:21] I think that's the deepest thing you can ask yourself. Because if you're looking at a documentary and you think, I had this experience and therefore I'm going, I'm working on this theme, which for me doesn't explain anything. It's just a... That's causality. That's like, oh, I hit the ball, the ball moved. Yes, great. So, but what's the deeper meaning of that? When you start thinking about the way things are done, and that's the thing that fascinates me as a curator,

[00:35:50] is that you look at the simplicity of the drip paintings by Pollock, and you think, yeah, just drip paint. Ooh, no, no, no, no. The viscosity of the paint, the kind of paint, and the colors, and will we see canvas? Will it be gessoed before and prepared before the primer? The meaning, or whatever you want to call it, the direction, doesn't come only from the artist. It is a collaborative construction with the materials.

[00:36:20] The meaning is not an explanation. Initially, when I came up with that question, it was more about the painting itself. It wasn't about the background. It was more of what you see in front of you and what the painting means. That's a really interesting question. The image is the thing that you steal from the experience, right?

[00:36:45] It's your memory or a digital file somewhere in your phone, but the work is physical. But I'm not against it being an image either. I think that's kind of the thing for me is meaning builds over time, doesn't it? Do you feel that people see an image based on their lived experience? Yes. Because my question to you is,

[00:37:13] how can you detach yourself from your lived experience? You cannot be anything other than what you are. Someone who knows a lot about calligraphy, art from China or Taiwan, and they look at Pollock, they're going to see something that is going to intertwine with whatever calligraphic knowledge they have. And that's why I feel like the meaning

[00:37:42] is also something that escapes the work and is always brought by you. If you read a book, I mean, if you read a book over and over, you pick up things that you hadn't before. And I feel like that's kind of like with visual arts as well. It's like you look at something and then you go away for a while, then you come back and it hits differently or there's something you didn't notice before. Why is it so pleasurable to you,

[00:38:11] the fact that Pollock's work doesn't have that, what we would call meaning in, you know, regular life? Why is it so liberating to you that you don't have to understand it, that actually you are detached from meaning? It's kind of straightforward in my mind. And I kind of like straightforward things. I like straightforward people. You see it how it is. It's hard to explain.

[00:38:40] I love his work because it's so expressive, yet so simple. I think the word expression is really interesting because paint is doing what paint does. A mark of a movement is doing what a mark on the movement does. And there's something that happened there as just like raw expression. It just shuts you up. It's just,

[00:39:09] you don't need words. Well, that's just it. With his work, I don't feel like I need to go inside myself to figure out what his painting is saying to me. Whereas other paintings, you're definitely introspective to be like, okay, so what does this painting mean to me? Yeah.

[00:39:38] And with his stuff, I don't do that. And sometimes it's nice to just be and not go within. It's really meaningful, I guess. Yes. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. I enjoyed it immensely. Art etiquette.

[00:40:13] Quote, in principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. What man has made, man has always been able to make again. Such copying was also done by pupils as an artistic exercise by masters in order to give works wider circulation, ultimately by anyone seeking to make money. An artist in the 18th, 19th century, a painter, they would take their new painting to the printmaker and the printmaker would copy as well as they could

[00:40:42] the painting and produce several copies of the painting, so interpreted by the printmaking techniques. So first, you have the copy. So that's an important element. And he says something that goes absolutely against the idea that we have of drawing today, which is that drawing was reproduced way before words and if there ever was a reproduction technique before machines,

[00:41:11] it was drawing. So stone printing is going to turn the reproducibility of drawings or of images much more important and on a much more and on a much wider scale than wood engraving. And so that is going to make it possible for graphic art to accompany everyday life with images and pictures. And that's the big change for him. So it's interesting because usually when you study history,

[00:41:41] you don't focus on visual arts. And that's another thing that I think is responsible for the misunderstanding of this text is that artists always copied. Copies are something that is intrinsic to art making because there was a desire to see images and there was also a desire to communicate images. So even in the Renaissance, you had something called cartons, which were these

[00:42:09] very thick papers that you would cover your first drawing with. You would puncture it. So you would prick it. Make these little holes so that you could reproduce this very successful drawing. The practicalities and the sociopolitics of images, they are not studied. What we study is how excellent artists were, who was influenced by whom, who cares? I want to know

[00:42:37] what moved him, who commissioned that image, what freedom did he have, where the hand went, where it was applying more pressure onto the paper, where did he breathe when he was drawing? That's the thing that interests me. I don't care where it comes from. I mean, that might be interesting, but then make a case for it in terms of a deep connection with an idea or with a value of some kind that was important to the artist. And that's why

[00:43:07] this book in particular is so misunderstood because what Benjamin is opposing here is the copy as opposed to the automated reproduction. That's the big difference. It's not the unique work of art and the mass reproduction technology. It is the copy which was still very much reliant upon hand-eye coordination,

[00:43:36] so observational drawing. So on page five, Benjamin says, the twin manifestations of this new standard of technological reproduction is that reproduction of the work of art is a new form of image making, but this new technology will also become a new art form. And that's

[00:44:06] the thesis. The thesis is not that that's it, we've lost all contact with the here and now of the work of art because if you think about it, it's absolutely false. People have started traveling much more on a wider scale in the 20th century than they ever did before and that's why we take a picture in front of the Mona Lisa and the picture weirdly is actually proof

[00:44:35] that you reactivated the aura of that painting. So saying that technology of reproduction has crushed art and the value of art and the excellence of art is not really practicing the art of wonderment because if you look around you there's nothing more than reproductions of artworks

[00:45:05] in our lives that marvel us we're so happy when we turn on well speaking for myself when I turn on the BBC for example and I'm able to see to watch a documentary about the new discoveries of Pompeii and I've never set foot there but I am relying on historians on people who know on people who actually know about the material so we are relating

[00:45:35] even to classic angles and topics of art history in a completely different way to go back to the mini history that Benjamin was producing after lithography what happens of course photography appears and that's the difference so that's automated reproduction technique and that takes me to another aspect of the book Benjamin

[00:46:04] talks about the technology that exists now automated as a technology that has the ability to relate to the work of art in a completely different way that is impossible to the naked eye we can do a close-up we can record the sort of voyage into the image so close that when we watch it and I must confess that I do that

[00:46:34] very often I love filming with my iPhone certain paintings that I love and then kind of having this feeling of completely being in them whatever art form that you encounter in a museum the fact that you can then film it and revisit it in a mediated way by a form of technology it actually turns the experience in the flesh of any art form even more uncanny the physicality the smell

[00:47:03] the mood you're in when you encounter a work of art shows you how dynamic actually it is and how overly precious we have been in regards to the relationship that we have with it another thing I wanted to highlight about this issue of accessibility and aura is that it I'm sorry to say I know we're all tired of accusations of privilege but this idea of

[00:47:33] the aura of the here and now and of preventing anyone who might have any relationship of an artwork they haven't seen in the flesh to be invalidated or to be validated preventing them from you know be validated in their feelings regarding that artwork it is an immense privilege you know still to this day even though we travel much more than ever before on a regular basis for one single person but there's some people who can't do it

[00:48:03] you don't travel and so this idea of accessibility and of establishing that the only experience of art is in the flesh is also a privileged and economically heavy affirmation and because you create that exclusivity European arts has had this massive influence and importance or as say arts in South

[00:48:32] Africa from the past till today maybe has been disregarded in certain areas of South Africa until recently because we were looking towards Europe so images transmission of images is also a question of power especially if we're talking about notions of genius of aesthetic value and of accessibility but having said all that one of the things that I wanted to finish with is

[00:49:02] this notion on page what was the page okay yes so the last thing that I wanted to highlight and to leave you with is that this notion of the aura as being embedded in a tradition is not the only point that Benjamin is trying to make he is also saying that with the loss of the aura is not only a way

[00:49:32] of breaking apart with certain categories of art it is also a way of disconnecting the experience of the work of art and the existence of art as a vehicle of ritual so it is disconnecting the work of art from its inclusion and embeddedness in religious or other forms of ritual

[00:50:01] so he gives a very simple example with the sculpture of Aphrodite would be for the Greeks the ancient Greeks included or in parts of some form of ritual religious or otherwise and then for the medieval European culture it would be a ritual from a culture that they were trying to contain so still

[00:50:31] an affirmation of a ritual of another culture and then a creation of artworks that would be part of the ritual of Catholicism so with technologies of reproduction this notion of ritual is completely cut away from the creation of art and therefore art is going to be more political and when he says that art is going to be more

[00:51:01] political it doesn't mean that art is going to have political messages or some form of activism say in the style of the gorilla girls for example what he is saying is that say in the film for example the actor is no longer engaging with a live audience the actor is playing for the camera and therefore he talks about photography also as a proof of a crime so there's a

[00:51:31] specific relationship with reality that is created through recording and editing and those are going to be the new elements that are going to redefine the artwork and that is absolutely fascinating because that's precisely what you and I are doing at this moment I I am in my studio you can see me in my house and at the same time you

[00:52:01] are watching something that I will have spent hours editing there's a form of consciousness that comes with automated reproduction as even a form of art and there's also a distance that is created because as soon as automated image making is possible everything is a decision and so weirdly what automated reproduction has created is a multiplication of the senses in regards to images we

[00:52:31] are even more aware of what images do to us the texture the angle there's this kind of like almost quantum consciousness of the richness and of the variety to quote post the kaleidoscope quality of experience anyway I'm going to finish with brainstorm in a teacup an unrelated thought that I pluck from my notebooks and this one I have to say is quite peculiar I have no memory of writing this

[00:53:01] text I even thought at a certain point that it was someone else's text that I out so I did write it but I have no idea when why for what reason for what in what context and in what state of

[00:54:13] All around him, the world would not stop, like in the painting. It kept on moving in circles. This seemed almost unbelievable when he was back in the dark, looking at the frozen scene, the only one he would ever see in his life.

[00:54:36] Back to the question of the quality or the value of emotions or simply being moved by the copy of an artwork. Are these feelings valid or are they not? Of course, if we go back to my example of the experience of Friedrich, one of the things that I want to bring in to the conversation is the question of absolutes.

[00:55:06] Here, the power of speculation is really important. We can't really just conceive the relationship to things as if we were these empty vessels that do not have an education, a history or even experience of objects around us. There is this tendency today of talking about digital spaces as if they were now the only experiences we have, as if we didn't make use of our bodies anymore

[00:55:31] and as if we had never encountered or will never encounter an artwork anymore. If you're somewhere out there in the world, you will see a mandala, you will see a Hindu temple, you will experience an enormous sculpture of a Buddha in the landscape, you will see an enormous Gothic cathedral in the middle of your city, you will go to museums and see other paintings.

[00:55:59] So of course you will acquire a certain knowledge and I think this art etiquette segment has a lot to do with that, hasn't it? I did contact Kathy afterwards and asked her, in fact, when you fell in love with Pollock's painting, did you see it in the flesh? How did you fall in love with it? And she replied, well, actually, I'm not sure it was from seeing it in the flesh. I can't remember. Leaf through books with amazing reproductions of artworks,

[00:56:29] all experiences are valid, even though they're different and we do need to think about them and to manage and curate the relationship we have with them. All right. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you for being here in the here and now of podcasting recording. Don't forget that in the show's notes, there's a lot of interesting juicy links for you.

[00:56:55] workshops, a talk, the welding website where you have our shop with lots of drawings, beautiful pieces, many things we survive with people listening, subscribing, following and leaving comments and even donating. If you donate, there's lots of ways to do it. And see you in two weeks. Until then, be an exhibitionista, visit exhibitions. See you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

[00:57:27] Bye-bye. Bye-bye.