Who says the art object has to be original? And what do you mean by “original…”? – by Neil Baldwin

During the past six months – listed here in no particular order — I have felt compelled to visit the following art exhibitions:  El Museo del Barrio Biennial: The (S) Files 2011; Richard Serra Drawings, Cezanne’s Card Players,  and Rooms with a View, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Glenn Ligon, America, at the Whitney;  Rembrandt & His School at the Frick; The Making of Americans at the James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center; Painters & Poets at Tibor de Nagy Gallery; Laurel Nakadate and Ryan Trecartin at MoMA PS1; and, in travels farther afield, Against the Grain: Modernism in the Midwest, at the Southern Ohio Museum, Portsmouth; and Inuit Modern at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

I say compelled because, of late, these visits feel more urgent, necessary. They are beginning to go beyond my lifelong acculturated affection for and affinity with the visual arts, the kind of habitual gallery-going behavior you would expect from someone who grew up in Manhattan and has led an instinctively cosmopolitan existence.

My obsession has gotten to the point nowadays that as soon as the Weekend edition of The New York Times lands on my suburban doorstep I am feverishly, addictively, nervously flipping the Arts pages and hunting for what’s new, what’s on, what’s closing soon, what’s imminent (i.e., Ostalgia at the New Museum on the Bowery, my next goal, for sure – it’s in my calendar for Wednesday August 3rd).

On a parallel mental track, at first I assumed unconsciously, but now most likely not, I have devoted much of this same half-year to reading and re-reading everything I can get my hands on written by or about Walter Benjamin (1892-1940).  This year marks the 75^th anniversary of the publication of the great cultural critic’s most popular, oft-cited, and yes, “branded” essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility; a piece that needs no introduction to most readers of the Creative Research Center and this monthly blog.

But – faithful and/or new reader — if you are not familiar with this wonderful essay, follow this link to read it — but don‘t forget to come back here afterwards.

To set the elegiac tone for the May, 1936, third version of the Work of Art piece, Benjamin introduced it with a prophetic quote from the French poet Paul Valery which I cite at some length:  “Our fine arts were developed,” Valery wrote in Pieces sur l’art, 1934, “their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts, there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power…We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”

Astonishing.

It could have been written yesterday — or today, for that matter. Hold that thought as we turn our attention to the central motif of Benjamin’s essay, the concept of The Aura,  my inspiration for taking on this meditation in the first place.

By aura, Benjamin meant – and here, I am carefully selecting from among many and often contested implications — the singular status of the art work, its “authenticity,” its actuality, its essence within “a strange tissue of space and time,” its ineffable yet emotionally tangible beauty. The aura serves to attach the work to a specific tradition – a narrative, a history that becomes more remote as the thing itself is reproduced.

I first encountered the Work of Art essay in 1968; and until 1995 (a date that will become clear in the next paragraph)  I had comfortably taken the aura to be a quality I could feel in the presence of an original in a gallery or a museum or a private collection. The late 1960s, when my mind was maturing, was a time when I wholeheartedly embraced the “eternal” value of an original work, and my accompanying feelings of legitimacy, discovery and even relief in bearing witness.

However, the Web spread its massive, enveloping wings, and the virtual also became real.  As a result, it is exponentially more difficult for me (and, I wager, for some of you) to keep hold upon and maintain the informing significance of the aura.

Thoughtful contemporary exegetes of Walter Benjamin’s work, most prominently Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Miriam Bratu Hansen, in recently published offerings, will not agree with my line of thinking that leads toward a “pollution” or “dissipation” of the quasi-religious aura as conceived by Benjamin and re-visioned in the digitized world.

But I did not set out to write this essay to pick a fight with critics – and colleagues – who say that by reasonable (obvious) extension the virtual possesses its own aura; and who assert that art does not require a concrete (one might even say retrograde) rooting in so-called “reality,” because now we inhabit an utterly different reality altogether.  How else could I include the links embedded in the piece you are reading right now?

Now that a rudimentary context has been laid down, I return to and elaborate upon the admission of compulsion with which I began.

When, in search of my art infusion “fix,”  I succumb to the magnetic field of NYC, I accept a heavy measure of nostalgia attached. I sit on the train nearing the City and I see a holographic image of myself an hour in the future, walking quietly and anonymously among beige walls, taking in the ambience, exchanging unspoken acknowledgement with other strollers, tourists, flaneurs, whomever; welcoming the immediate sensory taste of the thing on the wall in front of me, erotically anticipating the next aesthetic thing to come along into view.

This compulsion — again, I insist — does not mean I am naively or crankily negating all the other forms of art work that have become manufactured out of the infinite digital wellspring of zeros and ones.

It means that, for me, in our present day, and in the current streaming mediatized sensory environment, I am driven to know art as it was once (not all that long ago) believed exclusively to be – and that I want to stand in the presence of it, and employ my imagination to conjure an emotional response, in a way that I cannot accomplish unless I am bodily there.

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Dear Neil: I want to send you some visuals inspired by your CRC essay. In July we went to Port Bou, on the Spanish coast, to honor Walter Benjamin. Attached below are the photographs I took there, including the official memorial (quite strong) and an unofficial one tucked away in the cemetery for people to pick up stones and place them on the rock. It was unbelievably moving to stand and look out over the mountains that WB had got through seventy years ago, and imagine him thinking he had to go back – and then, overwhelmed, taking his own life. Later, we went to La Jonquera, on the Spain/France border, where there is a Museum of Exile and Immigration. The first photo in this group is a detail of a color mural of Bosnian exiles, behind which is a black and white mural in which the Spanish Civil War exiles peer out.

With best wishes, Janet Sternburg
[A writer (Phantom Limb) and photographer, Janet’s work can be seen and read at https://www.janetsternburgphoto.com/]