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The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Revisited
Thierry Du Duve
remarked 'Andy Warhol had an extraordinary awareness of what it means to
be an artist in the age of mechanical reproduction.'9
It is in relation to processed and reproduced images that we can situate
Warhol's work as a revisioning of Walter Benjamin's understanding of art
in the age of mechanical reproducibility. Benjamin relates mechanical reproduction
to the progressive elimination or withering of what he calls 'the aura
of artworks.'10
For him, the reproduction lacks unique existence, authenticity and authority.11
Warhol updates Benjamin in response to the society of the spectacle, mass
media and commodity signs. In a world traversed and indeed constituted
by circulating series of images, it is difficult to establish the kind
of secured position that Benjamin associates with 'aura'. While Benjamin
articulates the decline and subsequent transformation of aura in the mechanical
age, Warhol translates its alteration and subsequent resurgence somewhat
differently. He actually examines the notions of 'aura' and reproduction
in his work. So we might say that the theory of Benjamin is rearticulated
in the praxis of Warhol.
Much of Warhol's body of
work reveals a concentration on reproducing what is already an image.
The work of art is conceived not in relation to the real, but in relation
to the process of reproducibility itself.12
Warhol's films and images embrace the non-human, non-living passivity
of mechanical reproduction which is evident in Warhol's notoriety for
just letting the camera record unattended in the process of making a
film. Benjamin's meditation on the authentic and original work of art
is thus inverted by Warhol. While Benjamin focused on problematising
the ideological discourse that produces 'aura' through reification of
the original form, Warhol's work can be understood as emphasising the
copy without the original. Even the 'original' from which Warhol worked
on the silkscreens was a photograph or a newspaper clipping. Everything
was thus at multiple remove from the 'true' object, so that reproduction
was a work of art in itself. Reality is not preserved or sustained as
much as it is altered by the fact of reproduction. The mechanical reproduction
of commodities, itself reproduced in Warhol's silkscreens and films,
effaces the duality of essence and appearance, of signifier and signified,
of presence and meaning. Marilyn Monroe is so overdetermined as produced
that she is almost a parody effaced by meaningless repetition so that
she is nothing but an image.
For Benjamin, while
reproduction, or reproducibility, eroded the exclusivity of the object
it reproduced, it paradoxically enabled another sense of 'aura', that of
the personality, of which the most blatant example was the Hollywood star
system. He wrote that 'the film responds to the shrivelling of aura with
an artificial build up of the personality outside the studio…the cult of
the movie star.'13
While Benjamin seems to suggest that there is something secondary and fictitious
about the aura of the movie star in contrast to the aura associated with
the 'ritual value' of works of art made before the advent of mechanical
reproduction, Warhol was particularly interested in this 'star presence'
or 'aura', taking thousands of three minute screen tests of people who
entered The Factory to discern whether they possessed it. His films seek
obsessively to expose the 'aura' of the Superstars. Even as he insists
that 'aura' is not the real I, but only a commodity, Warhol takes the radical
step of locating 'personality' precisely in this aura. 'Star presence'
is thus a bizarre tautology: the mysterious quality revealed by the movie
camera is something that the camera itself has brought into being. Warhol's
films demonstrate that the 'unique aura' of the person is always already
artificial, that it is never anything more or other than the commodified
'spell of the personality.'14
To be photographed is to be transformed, to exist in a new way: as an object,
an image. For Warhol, 'aura' is manufactured and does not exist independent
of the cinematic apparatus.
Warhol's understanding
of aura as a commodity, a product, an image produced for and exchanged
with others is evident in his articulation of the concept within the
commercial sphere: 'Some company recently was interested in buying my
'aura'; I never figured out what they wanted but they were willing to
pay a lot for it. I think aura is something that only someone else can
see and only so much of it as they want to. Aura must be until you open
your mouth.'15
Here Warhol takes Benjamin's understanding of aura as a phenomenon of
the reception of art works and recontextualises it in relation to the
human form or personality. Under Warhol's gaze, 'aura' is both diminished
and expanded to be part of a wider trend of consumer culture and a something
perceived about, rather than inherent to, an object or person. Perhaps
we could say that Benjamin reads Warhol in advance; envisaging a world
that Warhol lived, and that Warhol's work can be seen as inflecting
and refracting Benjamin's vision.
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9
Thierry Du Duve, In Discussion at Duchamp Colloquium at the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design in 1989. Cited in The Definitively Unfinished
Marcel Duchamp, Thierry Du Duve (ed.) (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991),
308.
10
Benjamin, Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.' In Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),
221
11
Ibid, 221
12
Jonathon Flatley, 'Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics
of Prosopopeia.' POPOUT: Queer Warhol, Jennifer Doyle, et al.
(eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 109.
13
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.',
233.
14
Which Benjamin refers to as the 'cult of the movie star.' In 'The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.', 231.
15
Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975), 77.
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