“Jumping into the Void” by Juan Antonio Molina |
chapter I | chapter II | chapter III | chapter IV
III
Photography has a degree of vulgarity that was detected from its very beginning and that has been the center of the debates regarding the medium. It incorporated a touch of vulgarity to the system of the arts, which pretended to be elitist or aristocratic. Photography initiates a new age in media, an age of a relative “democratization” of the access to media (obviously putting aside the control of the meanings). This democratization entails a sort of vulgarization of the medium and of the ideas of production and reproduction of the images.
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The concepts of “distracted delight” and “technical reproductivity” are clearly stated in the work of Walter Benjamin. These notions are frequently used in the theory of photography, because they place photography within the context of what we now call “Post Modernism”. |
What Benjamin called the “age of technical reproductivity” was later labeled as the “age of the society of the masses”. I believe that we can take the coinciding points of both concepts to place the image in the context of the present epoch.
One of the most interesting aspects of Benjamin’s discourse is the idea of the transition of the image from a cultural function to an exhibition function. This transition would allegedly take away its “artistic” aura, which is evidently part of the vulgarization I mentioned earlier. The change of the image from monumental to relative and extravagant would have not been possible without the technical conditions that allowed for mass reproduction. The criticism is also applied to other early mass media, such as cinema. It would seem that there is something in Benjamin’s discourse that disagrees with the place of photography within the system of the arts, which would have meant to accept the idea that art ceased to be what it was at the beginning of the 20th Century and become what it is in the dawn of 21st.
The decline of artistry has been quite rapid and the results have been unexpected. It is not a decline of art itself, but a decline of models and paradigms that held the structure of artistry and that no longer work in the Post Modern context.
The Post Modern context, in which contemporary photography is located, can be seen from different perspectives (even using a different terminology). What Benjamin deemed a symptom of the vulgarization of culture and artistic production is the concept elaborated by Gianni Vattimo -in his efforts to minimize the concept of “the death of art”- the “explosion of aesthetics”1. The “distracted delight” would be considered a modality of aesthetic pleasure as an experience for the masses and an experience of reproduction. Both the work of art and the aesthetic experience are subject to the effects of reproduction. Let us say that the aesthetic experience is submitted to a kind of dispersion that contributes to its dwindling, or at least be conceived as a “weak” experience according to Vattimo. That is why I think concepts such as “beauty” become so vulnerable, since they refer to more consistent, immovable end even metaphysic phenomena. These phenomena, at any rate, no longer fit into this dispersion of aesthetics, which is not only a dispersion of the object but also of the way we perceive it. We are witnessing the decentralization of the aesthetic experience.
That is why today’s critics talk about an aesthetification of life that was not foreseen by the Avant Garde discourse. It has more to do with the way we asethtisize our experience of reality and the diversionist resources to perform such aesthetification. The decentralization of aesthetics somehow contributes to the taming of the aesthetic experience. The dramatic images of 9/11 are positioned in the imagination of society due to the contemporary processes of massification and aesthetification of reality. I draw attention to these photos and videos because I wish to suggest that we witnessed a process of aesthetification of reality. When I say that we are comfortably living the illusion of participation in history I also mean that we are aesthetically participating in history. We live in a world in which the experience of reality is filtered almost completely through imagination.
The concept of distracted delight on the one hand refers us to a festive, playful and hedonistic notion, on the other, to the new ways of the aesthetic pleasure. The object of pleasure is hardly traceable and quite erratic, as it is the identity of the subject that obtains the pleasure. This is where I find a key to understand the concept of “weak” subject introduced by Gianni Vattimo.
This erraticism of the object of pleasure –and the erraticism of the pleasure itself- is also an evidence of one of the conditions imposed by Post Modernism to the consumption of the image ant the enjoyment of the work of art. In this context the ideas of the “death of art” are minimized (or at least updated). I find these ideas useful for the analysis of contemporary photography since the dissolution of photography must be seen in the context of the dissolution of art. The distracted delight also affects the existence of photography within contemporary art. This is an effect of displacement similar to the one of the so-called “explosion of aesthetics” –this meaning the change of the traditional position, manifestations and “settlements” of pleasure-. I think it’s time to draw attention on the changes that have taken place within photography itself as an aesthetic object and as an object of aesthetics, but also as an artistic object an object of the arts.
We must look in detail the changes in position and space where photography used to be defined, constructed and “settled”. If it’s difficult enough to uphold that photography requires its specific field of study that separates it from the rest of the arts, is precisely because photography is submitted to the same displacements and erraticisms of all the other artistic media, technologies and methodologies.
The dispersion or distraction of aesthetics is consistent with the conditions and characteristics of the chief role performed by mass media in contemporary society, since they create the aesthetic consensus, a standardization of taste and the adjustment of the object to such standardization. This consensus is a must for the “explosion of aesthetics” to happen in a strict sense. What I mean is that the explosion of aesthetics is not a phenomenon that is exclusively related to the artistic destiny and manifestations. I tend to suspect that this phenomenon is taking place in the artistic field because contemporary culture has set the new conditions of production, reproduction, distribution and consumption of its symbolic goods.
1. I’m referring specifically to the chapter “Death or Dusk of Art” by Gianni Vattimo. El fin de la modernidad. Nihilismo y hermenéutica en la cultura postmoderna. Barcelona, Gedisa, 1985. For a complementary vision, see Stefan Morawsky. Las variantes interpretativas de la fórmula “el ocaso del arte”. In Criterios. Magazine No. 21/24. Tercera época. January 1987-December 1988. P. 123-153.