Wednesday, January 23, 2013

There Is No Aura: Distinguishing Reinterpretation from Replication

I wonder if my youthful disregard for the sacred cows of the academy has deadened me to the sort of materially rooted awe that Walter Benjamin ascribed to great works of art. Though I suppose its possible to think of Benjamin's aura as nothing more than the complex congregation of social discourses which sacralize the notion of the unique original artwork, the whole idea still smacks too much of mysticism for my liking. Perhaps I'm too philistine to appreciate it properly, but when I stood in front of Da Vinci's Ginevra at the National Art Gallery I felt none of the intense aesthetic attachment that seems to afflict Benjamin in his most famous text. Certainly, I appreciate the painting's historical uniqueness - it's kind of fun to be in the same room as something Da Vinci himself touched - but that sense barely approaches trivial curiosity, much in the same way I like very much to look at baby capybaras in the zoo. In the end I wonder why in our time of copies upon indistinguishable copies should there be an aura at all? Why do we not dispense with the notion of an aura entirely?

In their article "The Migration of the Aura," Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe seem to have some sense that Benjamin's aura feels awkwardly out of place in a world of reddits, Pinterests, and Tumblrs (look I'm hip!). They challenge the geographical and physical rootedness of originality that Benjamin's aura requires, arguing that the artwork's historical facticity has little to do with its originality. Rather, the artwork's status as an original depends upon its "fecundity," its ability to produce many new copies of itself, which is to say without the copies the original is inevitably lost. This leads Latour and Lowe to paradoxically describe artworks as more or less original. Like a cornucopia, works of art exist along a continuum, gradually opening up as the copies become more dispersed.

Though I appreciate their negotiation and adaptation of Benjamin's aura in the context of digital replication, their commitment to the very existence of the aura leads them to make some curious claims. In order to illustrate the sense in which copies of artworks both prove and mobilize the aura of originality, Latour and Lowe attempt to equate the myriad variations of King Lear to the intensive material reproduction of Le Nozzi di Cana. They argue that what makes poor reproductions of art lesser than the original is their lack of imagination, and that in approaching the practice of artistic reproduction we should reserve for ourselves the more generous expectations that we use for stage productions. We do not, Latour and Lowe rightly suggests hope for the exact replica of King Lear every time we see it. In fact, much of the pleasure of seeing a production of King Lear comes from the way it diverges from the expectations we may otherwise have had from previous renditions of the text. While I wholeheartedly agree that our expectations for a play function in just the way Latour and Lowe describe them, I reject the notion that a new interpretation of Shakespeare's text (or whoever's text King Lear is) is tantamount to even the most liberal conception of replication. Interpretation != replication. Though I am sympathetic to the argument that replication does in fact produce greater desire (and greater sanctity) for the original, and I am even willing to admit that repeated reinterpretations performs a similar social function, I refuse to equate them as cavalierly as Latour and Lowe. In foreclosing on the difference between interpretation and replication, they collapse the role of the conservator with that of the critic, the copycat with the analyst. They ignore, therein, the crucial ideological distinctions which underly and motivate the essentially conservative project of art preservation and the essentially progressive undertakings of the art theorist. Their conflation of reinterpretation and replication is symptomatic of their commitment to the aura. Without the aura, the art conservator is an archeologist, a historian, not an aesthetic authority.

Dispense of the aura, I say.

 

8 comments:

  1. While I can understand your sense of dissatisfaction with how the DaVinci painting affected you, I think you might be a bit too hasty in your dismissal of an aura of an original (or of the copy). Perhaps this might be linked to how exactly we might be defining a copy-- I think there's a distinct difference between an exact replica, and a JPEG distributed on a tumblr. I think there is a complete difference in the effect of an original work of art versus the effect of a re-posted picture of, say, The Mona Lisa with a mustache on my Facebook page. Perhaps, then, we need to qualify the different levels of copies before we dismiss the idea of an aura of a copy...then we can work on discussing how that aura differs from that of an original.

    Now, if I were more savvy with computers, I would upload a picture of a Beanie Baby capybara...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree that there is a clear qualitative difference between Da Vinci on the wall and Da Vinci on the screen, but I don't see that as any more special of a distinction than a coffee mug and a banana. The differences we see are material, for certain, but I cannot see the sense in attributing to them a particular aesthetic mysticism.

      Delete
  2. To copy, as to interpret, is to select. You can’t clone _Ginevra_. Some elements will make their way into _Ginevra'_ and some won’t. Pick what you wish. Likewise, my interpretive account of _Ginevra_ requires that I select--and then discuss--the bits I think salient. In each case we offer the text, if in difference, again (and again and again).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is absolutely the case. The selections for conservation/replication however are guided by a massively different paradigm (necessarily, I would argue) than the consciously interpretive. That paradigm shift seems enough reason to suspect that uncritical conflation loses us more than it gains.

      Delete
  3. Speaking of The Mona Lisa with Mustache, I was thrilled to find Duchamp's fountain in the Pompidou museum in Paris. And then, I learned that the original has been lost, and that someone commissioned Duchamp to make some replicas. At first, I was rather disappointed; then I realized that it was probably exactly what Duchamp wanted.

    Which is to say, I invented an aura of my own for one of Duchamp's Fountain(s). The hangup I read you having is that while in a Barthes or Normand Holland sense, I may have created "my" Fountain, I did not materially create a urinal signed by Duchamp under the name "R. Mutt." In fact, I created nothing material.

    So, does it help to reframe your objection if we recognize that what Latour and Lowe are doing is committing the ironic and time-honored poststructuralist sin of conflating the metaphyiscal for the material? And secondly, while I agree with your != in the context of a physical art piece, when we're talking about a text, do you disagree with them as strongly? I read their point as suggesting that because nobody is particularly interested in the original copy of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (particularly since the "original" would have to be compiled from serials, and in that case, which serial is the original? only the first issue of each edition?), my reading of the text replicates the text?

    I also suspect that we should bring in Deleuze's Repetition and Difference , but that's probably a few comments down the line.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Let me just say, that invoking Duchamp's readymades is just the right move here I think. They (and similar work) seem to complicate things in a way the Latour & Lowe doesn't explicitly anticipate...

      Delete
  4. Some copies are actually remarkably expensive --- dig around for some good quality copies of famous paintings and you’ll be paying a price comparable to that of recognized, new and original artwork (this stuff exists in the same art market with original art – at least a mote of the original’s aura must be present in the copy, plus the fact that its an accurate, and therefore artful copy may provide excitement and appreciation --- I’m crazy busy preparing for class, but I’ll get around to posting some links to stuff regarding high-quality copies of famous artworks).

    On the Latour and Lowe, I think some of the disagreement with them expressed in the above posts has to do with the notion of authorship at play in the chapter --- if you take a look at page 279, you’ll see a claim about the ‘possibility’ that The Iliad, “might have remained stuck in one little village of Asia Minor.” The authors then argue that the promulgation and therefore reproduction of the text is what causes Homer to be "considered a (collective) author of such originality” (279). Since Homer’s is one of those antiquated text that move scholars to seek to excavate older and older versions (and thus more original and desirable, according to the way of thinking that Latour and Lowe are diagnosing), I’d suggest that the problem is that most of us as graduate students in the humanities conceive of originality perhaps as being reinterpretation (so to reinterpret something is to do something that is, in our western liberal culture, written under the sign of originality).

    A revamped performance of Lear – say King of Texas () or that Kurosawa one – that not only changes setting but also actually alters the dialogue, stage direction, and moral/ethical context, is seen as worthwhile because of both the ‘real thing’ value ascribed to Lear AND because of the sign of innovation that indeed marks these texts as original in a culture for which innovation and originality seem to coincide (Staci’s modified Mona Lisa, in other words, might be considered an ‘original’ piece of art, especially if nobody has presented a modified Mona Lisa as art before).

    ReplyDelete
  5. I can share a somewhat related anecdote. When I was in Vienna last summer, I saw the "original" version of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss. Photography was prohibited in that particular museum (ostensibly to prevent such things as flash photography which could potential damage the material artifact; recall Latour and Lowe's discussion of the effects of a painting's restoration upon its aura), but for whatever reason, I decided that I wanted to document the fact that I had actually been there to see the original. So I sat down on a bench, took out my phone, pretended to text, and covertly snapped a photograph. Unfortunately, the security guard was attuned to this sort of ruse and forced me to delete the image (forced, as in he stood over me and watched as I deleted it).

    Of course, a digital phone camera without flash can in no way damage the material integrity of a painting, and therefore should have no affect upon the aura (if it even exists, which is obviously the subject of debate). However, it is still perceived to exist and rigorously protected by various institutions. Countless digital versions reproductions of the image exist; what difference does mine make? I posit that the extra-physical (discursive?) aspects of the aura are integral to the idea's efficacy--things like intellectual property rights, who owns the "data" of the painting's visual apparition, etc. Perhaps the aura isn't a strictly theoretical construction, but contains some sort of material apparatus to sustain it?

    Proof of fecundity:
    http://bit.ly/10Uyo2t

    ReplyDelete