★nijikon.net★ THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION

Kat Saunt 2010

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

“Just as water, gas and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

-Paul Valéry [1]

Never before in history have we been so bombarded with imagery. Technology has led to the proliferation of individual images and images in general. In the digital age, the act of making copies has been transformed. Now we can rely on lossless fidelity digital copies of potentially any form of information, even a work of art.

I am going to explore how this has both emphasized and challenged the status of the aura of originality or authenticity and the preference for original works over reproductions, both in the art world and wider visual culture. The title of my dissertation is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s renowned and influential 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. I am writing this in the age of digital reproduction an age where our understanding of art has been greatly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s essay, but we are also still grappling with the paradigm shift which technology has brought about in art, even as technology’s influence on art continues to deepen. As an artist I must now take reproduction of my artworks into consideration, whether or not I want to engage with it conceptually.

Even though a painting can be reproduced in ever increasingly high fidelity formats, our current understanding of art still operates on the belief that only the original has some intrinsic value of its own. The lowly status of copies can be attributed to the historical, Modernist distrust of industrialisation – where technology first allowed mass production of images and began their association with low culture. And also art market forces; original art objects being an investment commodity, images are less so and usually come second to an original object. For example, a gallery owns an art object in the form of a painting and it also owns intellectual property rights to derivative images of the painting. This is the traditional hierarchy of art objects.

“The music industry's struggle to come to terms with the Internet has over the last years dominated much of our thinking about copyright and about a communications medium that has fundamentally changed notions of distribution and use. At the heart of this industry's problems seem to have been out-of-date business models, wildly divergent values with a wish that new technology would not be used, and rebellious consumers and artists. Those same problems are already vexing non-profits with visual assets. Over time every business – including museums and libraries – will have to manage for these kinds of changes…” [2]

The above statement is in many ways analogous with the ‘problems’ faced in the field of visual art. Without control over ownership and reproduction rights of an original art object the traditional driving force of the art world is stalled. There is an assumption, a reasonable assumption, that a reproduction is made for the purpose of dissemination. Since copyright is imbued with such authority it somewhat demonises the means of reproduction, such as it undermines the control of the image owner. In the digital age we can copy and share images like we share music, technology has undermined the control held by copyright holders. Our simultaneous mass abuses of intellectual copyright and the belief in their relevance show that while confused, we still clearly we value images even though in the age of junk mail, newspapers, packaging and home printers their physical reproductions are utterly disposable.

Perhaps, with the rehabilitation and wider use of technology and digital media we will see less of a fixation on physical originals and a total liquefaction of visual culture. Yet on the whole we seem reluctant to engage with these concepts, despite the fact it has been a gradual process over centuries.

I consider printing and photography to be the only significant means of reproduction which challenged our way of thinking about originality and images. Once they arrived, coupled with the means of mass-production and globalisation encouraged the distribution of copies. A reason to make copies, the demand for them grew as the technology grew. Even into the digital age photography and printing are some of the most high fidelity and efficient ways or reproducing and distributing an image. During the Renaissance, people saw very little art or imagery in their daily lives. They would see paintings located in churches; indeed a great altarpiece or fresco was considered an asset to the church as something to draw people in. Now we see static and moving images almost all the time in our daily lives and have a much different relationship with them, ownership and creativity have been democratised. Has their changing use and means of (re)production changed our attitude to images, or was the mystical aura of originality false to begin with?

In 1935 Walter Benjamin took a dramatic view of reproduction and predicted the decay of ‘the aura’ the concept of the authentic original artwork understood in relation to it’s physical context. Yet we are still undeniably fixated on originals and have yet to come to terms with the implications of digital reproduction for art.

The Aura and the mystification of originality

When we have such a mass of images set before us, where nothing can stand alone but must be taken in context and a product logo gets more reproductions than a Michelangelo we have to evaluate how to divide out attention. Some superstitions about the innate value of art objects persist, perhaps because of reproduction or perhaps despite it. Once we are aware of reproductions the totemic value of the original is transmuted. No longer is a painting only a painting in its own right. It is an original of copies.

The value of the original has been mystified. What it says, what the artist wanted to get across is displaced by the simple attribute of its authenticity.

In his book “Ways Of Seeing” John Birger explains “The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependant on their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. It is the final empty claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the art object is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing must be made mysteriously so.” [3]

The earliest art was most often associated with the cult, it existed to serve religious purposes. The art object‘s worth benefited from the reflected glow of religion. When Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” the cultural cachet of high art (compared to the mass culture of mechanical reproduction) and the totemic value of originality had replaced the cult. In both cases, art is reliant on external relationships to give it value and purpose. Supply and demand comes into it when we inevitably measure value in money. A print of a limited run is worth more than a mass-manufactured version regardless of physical qualities which might as well be equal.

We isolate authenticity, originality, as a quality we should be able to sense, like colour or depth.

In the digital age the aura need not automatically wither as Walter Benjamin predicted. Perhaps it will simply come from another source, rather than originality. As I mention above, originality has already replaced the cult.

The artist and contemporary of Walter Benjamin, Marcel Duchamp raised the point that this fixation on originality as a virtue is unique to art, specifically visual art. It is not present in the other arts, such as music and poetry. For example, any number of manuscripts can be produced and no one worries about the music itself being harmed, as long as the manuscripts accurately convey information, one is as good as the next. Duchamp saw the aura as a bourgeois myth and embraced the depersonalised process or making art to bypass what he called the “patte” the artist’s personal touch. Originality, uniqueness, authenticity are assumed to be inherent in the hands-on creative struggle of the artist. This assumption is not easily reconciled with the effortless industrial reproduction of the same work for the masses. Duchamp played with this idea in his readymades, found - usually mass-produced - items presented as the artist’s work. Of course the “patte” can be said to exist in the selection of the items. Likewise his series of portable museums Boîte-en-valise (The box in a valise) 1942-54 were created in multiple, various series with slight variations that ultimately numbered 300. The reproductions and replicas of his work displayed in them were created in runs of 300. They seem to reject uniqueness and originality on the one hand, yet he used a hands on and labour-intensive method - collotype printing with colouring applied by hand through stencils. Like Andy Warhol’s screen prints, the repetition without being absolutely identical draws attention to the repetitive nature of the artwork itself.

Andy Warhol not only made repetition, copies, a motif, he also engaged in superficial naiveté with mass produced images and culture. The potentially perpetual reproduction of images in his work and the constant deferral of originality. It draws attention to both the reproduction of art works and the repetition in the outside world of the actual objects signified in his works I.e. banknotes or pictures of Elvis Presley. In any series of Warhol’s silk-screen prints, all of one source image there are slight variations, due to the process used to make them. Seen as a whole, an average image emerges. Not only is there an ‘original’ object out there in the world of which the prints are simulacrum, there is a virtual image emerging from the artwork itself.

Digitalisation is distinct from just making copies

Where does an image exist? For example, when I create a ‘digital painting’ on my computer it is saved as an information file detailing colour space definition, component sub-sampling registration and pixel aspect ratio definition. This abstract information is presented as a picture by certain software but when not accessed this way it remains an image in potential, waiting to be accessed and recreated with perfect fidelity, literally meta-physical. I can pass this file onto other people, to be viewed on their screens, or made into physical printouts (with a loss of fidelity) compress the file and lose information but keep the picture recognisable. In the age of digital reproduction and creation an image can exist completely spontaneously and in it’s own right, it is the print, the physical copy which comes second.

Is there is a ‘pure’ Platonic form of any image? A photograph of a painting, showing the brush strokes on the surface is a kind of self reference, a meta-picture, a photograph of an object.

In my practice, I like the digital rendering of my paintings more than the three-dimensional originals as they have the advantage of portability and will never decay. I am only concerned with the picture plane, not the canvas surface. This is at odds with art’s historical formalism and the emphasis on the art object. It’s been a long time since mass-printing and photography first raised the issue of reproduction yet we still haven’t really addressed these significant issues. Walter Benjamin’s aura of the original still holds strong in auction houses and galleries and the practices of most contemporary artists.

Personally, I often find I am under-whelmed when I see a painting in a gallery, having already seen it as a high resolution photograph online or in books. I cannot sense this mystical aura of authenticity. Yes, it’s bigger and clearer but I’ve been led to believe the original object will have some magical intangible power. However in practical terms the copy functions in some circumstances as well as the original. Imperfect gallery lighting is almost inevitable. I am constantly frustrated by the surface reflections when trying to look at paintings in galleries, or when hanging my own work. As previously mentioned, the immediate environment an artwork is placed in always taints or influences how it is perceived. I have to conclude that originality doesn’t always beat reproduction hands down.

Plato, in a world without concepts of high-fidelity digital reproduction, said that the artistic representation exists three steps removed from true reality. There’s artwork, the physical realm the artist experiences and tries to convey and the metaphysical, perfect truth, the ‘form’ that is the source of all things in the physical realm. Like any one particular cat draws on the form of ‘catness’ a painting of a cat draws on the one particular cat. An empirical philosophy might not always be relevant to understand an artwork but we still understand there’s a reality behind a depiction, that a picture, even an abstract one, can be a representation of some original concept or object. I think these relationships are key to how we think about art. We think there must be an original behind the copies. Digitalisation defies this.

In Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard tracks the evolution of the way we have used images as simulacra. The first order, associated with the pre-modern period, where the image serves as a direct representation of it’s subject. The second order, associated with the Industrial Revolution, where distinctions between image and reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-produced copies. The item's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the original version. At the same time, the simulacrum begins to be seen as greatly inferior to it’s originating work of art. It is in this time that Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” The third order, associated with the postmodern age, where the simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction between reality and representation breaks down. If the Aura of the original has been truly broken down, only the simulacra exists!

As well as being an original art object and an originator of limitless copies an artwork such as the Mona Lisa has become a symbol representing Fine Art in general. Ironically, art is still symbolic of authenticity, high culture and affluence and other virtues even when it is used to represent these concepts in a mass media publication. For example, the Venus di Milo’s image appears on the advertising media for a plastic surgeon in the back of a cheap magazine. Thanks to everything being subsumed into the signs and symbols of Baudrillard’s Simulacra – a web of associations and relationships I don’t simply know what the image represents, I know what it represents to me on many levels and in different situations. Therefore I can infer from how it is has been used what it will mean to others in my culture. The web as a concept - a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet - is integral to the digital age and a good analogy of Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra. The interconnection of everything and the means of distribution, it equalises every image and created the hyperreal realm for them to exist in.

“People in a highly connected yet deeply fragmented society can no longer rely on a central canon for guidance. They are forced into the modern existential blackness….The industrial icon of a grand central or hidden “I am” becomes hollow. Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal”

- Kevin Kelly [4]

If I somehow paint two perfectly identical paintings the aura of originality is destroyed. Is one a copy of the other? Is one more significant than the other? No. Some things are readily digitally copied, some are not. I don’t think this means they cannot be converted to digital information, it’s just not always as practical or useful with our current technology. For example, I could conceivably take every physical measurement of a sculpture and use that information to make a copy of it but it’s nowhere near as simple as scanning a photograph and rendering it as digital information. However, I would argue that the digitalisation of any artwork is theoretically possible. This would destroy the hegemony of the original. If an artwork can be stored as information and a perfect fidelity copy made on demand – where does the artwork now exist? In any particular copy or just in potentia, waiting to be invoked? This isn’t a fantastical line of enquiry as technology continues to advance.

The law has to try to keep up with changing means of production and distribution, as it is called upon to protect artworks appearing in new forms. A masterpiece can be faked but it isn’t very easy to fake a physical object, less so to pass it off as an original. And the only reason its veracity will be debated is to find out if it is the valuable original or a worthless copy. Things become much more complex in the age of digital reproduction. Faking for profit is less widespread a problem than intellectual copyright infringement, the dilution of brand and distribution of images. When photography can show a painting in an amount of detail that emphasises the physical surface over the picture plane or remove all incidental reflection and find the perfect viewing angle, I argue that the photograph or the meta-physical copy has surpassed the original. At least in terms of visuality, if not investment.

Postmodern artists who utilise images collected from potentially any context or era, who bricolage from our visual history like magpies - such as Alicia Paz have accepted the “sense of the universal equality of things” Walter Benjamin understood as the result of reproduction. Or the third order of simulacra as Baudrillard saw it. When we are so bombarded with images divorced from their original contexts, carrying with them no backstory, each has to be taken at face value. It might be loaded with meaning in it’s original context but how can we hope to know the context of every image we see? Especially as many throwaway images, commercial logos and bad snapshots for example, have little or no meaning or context.

Mexico-born and London based artist Alicia Paz’s paintings are all fundamentally paintings about painting. In the 1990s she produced paintings composed of existing artworks such as faithfully reproduced eighteenth century portraits or porcelain figurines and added kitsch contemporary characters and figures and daubs of paint. Frequently, the figures in her collage-like paintings are painting themselves, creating their own environment. While there are recurring motifs in her work such as dolls, toys and cartoons and the sense that they have been chosen deliberately, if only in accordance with her own taste, she also manages to uphold the Postmodern tenet that the distinction between "high" and "low" images is no longer recognised. Nothing is particularly loaded or valued more or less than the elements it is juxtaposed with.

While words remain as portable and reproducible as they have been since Gutenberg invented movable type – even more so with the democratic user-generated content of the internet – we have chosen to embrace images all the more. The era of the book has come to an end and visual media has become our primary output. Both as a culture and as individuals. We choose to take photographs and videos and we choose to consume them. Kevin Kelly put this development succinctly in a 2008 article in The New York Times “Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the centre of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen....from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.” [5]

Decontextualistation, Recontextualilisation.

“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art….The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” – Walter Benjamin, 1935. [6]

Where would art be today if photography hadn’t enabled artworks to be reproduced in books? The study of art, and art itself would have certainly advanced much slower without photography allowing us to share images of artworks. In my practice today, I find reproductions of other artists’ works in books and on the internet invaluable. Not only this, but it is a facilitator of a new semantics of images and their associations, shades of meaning and previous uses within our culture. A kind of meta-language, pictures themselves being a way of packaging and communicating information beyond that which they intrinsically convey. Only mass reproduction and distribution allows this to emerge.

A sculpture can be photographed from any one of three hundred and sixty five degrees and none of them can usefully reproduce an art form which is by definition three dimensional! Yet there are books about sculpture full of photographs.It would be obtuse to say they are useless yet photography has now been accepted as an art form. If or when does a photographic illustration of a sculpture becomes a photograph in it’s own right? Of course it is both at once, but we tend to think an aura can only belong to one object. Only if the sculpture ceased to exist and had never existed could the photograph come into it’s own as an art image (paradoxes aside). Also there is the problem of isolating details, now that we can reproduce an art object we can edit it, by focusing in on details or enlarging it. It’s not just a matter of resetting the object’s context. With reproduction and distribution of an image, information can be lost and gained, a new abstract image might be created, not an illustration at all; a re-emphasis of its own juxtaposed elements. Or the detail might be presented out of context in isolation, perverting the meaning of the whole.

We emphasise the importance of seeing art ‘in person’. Its ability to better and move the viewer, the gallery is revered much like a church. While reproductions enable much greater distribution of art we are still told to see the originals. This makes sense in most cases for physical art such as paintings. However, Galleries still try to exhibit non-physical works, such as Net.Art (internet based art movement, though not always using the internet as subject matter). Having a computer set up in the gallery for visitors to see a web-based piece of artwork is common, even if it doesn’t make much sense. This sort of art bypasses the gallery in that it works just as well anywhere else there is a computer screen to view it on. Art that can exist independently of the gallery context forfeits the cache and grounding a gallery gives. Whereas, instead of being defined negatively, such Net.Art is simply embracing the arena and medium of the internet this might be seen as an enactment of the problem set up by Walter Benjamin, that reproduction will divorce art from tradition, in this case that means art can be viewed on the internet- a place outside the fine art tradition and without the context and interpretation a gallery would provide.

The French Revolution led to the opening of the Louvre as a museum (it was previously a private royal collection). Before all this the most highly prized art was in the private collections of monarchs. Not only was it difficult for the majority of people to access art, people had different ideas then of how art should be seen and why it was made – it was for a few, not a mass audience. So, being able to see lots of artwork side by side was a dramatic new development and began a massive shift in how art was thought about. Originality and the power of the object is attributed by André Malreaux in his 1965 book “Museum without Walls” to the advent of galleries and museums in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. There is simple logic adopted: If it’s selected for a gallery it must be good, and generally only originals are seen as worth collecting. Not only was there an emphasis on originality, the artwork’s qualities took significant precedence over its subject or content simply because this is what stood out when so many works could be seen together. For example, the evolution of techniques over time and differences between contemporary artists. Galleries tended to collect more paintings than other work available at the time, such as frescoes and sculptures. This is because of the practical appeal of portable works. Mobile work was more popular with galleries and had an advantage. Even now painting has an effectively dominant status in fine art while photography with its ‘mass’ connotations is less respected.

Malreaux’s book concentrates on the de-contextualisation of artworks since the advent of photography. While a statue carved as part of a temple has power on its own, viewed in a photo or a museum it is false to assume a photo simply conveys an artwork to us without adding or changing meaning or impact. History and geography are completely condensed and we see all things as contemporary. No one exhibition or book has sway over our cultural understanding, the breadth of our art experience. Reproduction allows us to experience practically everything as we wish to. For example, I can google for Byzantine mosaics and Celtic carvings and ‘clip art’ and compare them all together. We have a telescoped historical art consciousness. As Malreaux points out, the reproduction of an artist’s complete works in a catalogue makes their whole career take on a whole new meaning when their works can be seen as one unit. Any sense of a work existing in isolation is a contrivance, a suspension of belief. Even when viewed in isolation, an image is part of a context beyond it’s control, the cultural history we all buy into. Even the Art-illiterate are now image-literate. Art has not fully become detached from tradition, however, we have to expand this to include a more fluid flow of cultural information. An image can be placed into a new context in advertising, art books, on a TV screen in a living room. When used in a magazine article, it can be hijacked, just an illustration second to the writer’s views. While the traffic of information works both ways in theory, cache seems only to be passed down from fine art to its simulacra.

Malreaux also attributes the trend toward a more and more intellectualised approach to art to the museum context. Outside the gallery an artwork can exist in relative isolation and operate in a direct relationship with its audience. In the gallery, the artwork is tainted by its relationship to the other works it is grouped with, we automatically wonder what their relationship is. Curating can become contrived. Especially when the mystique of the aura persists.

The philosophy “L’art pour l’art” originated in the 19^th century. It is interesting that art was being freed by mechanical reproduction at this time. Mass produced imagery made images ever more a feature of the lives of the masses, graphic design and illustration bloomed. There was a shift from the second order of simulacra the third. Yes, technology means the individual image can be adulterated and used out of context. But I don’t think this threatens art. Walter Benjamin speculated that art would be isolated from tradition by reproduction. Instead it exists in a much more subtle and complex semantic environment. As I already mentioned a detail can be isolated and taken out of context or placed into a new context. In a way, this is quite natural – like the way we use sight. We never look just at one thing at once it is always in relation to the things surrounding it in our field of vision.

It is important to make a distinction between the intended meaning of an individual art work and the weight of tradition, the web of meanings behind it. As an artist, I have to be aware of the mass cultural awareness, art no longer exists in a strata of art history. It participates in the wider culture and once created, there’s no certainty how it will be seen, used or adulterated. Everything is subsumed into the cultural language. Of course, I am assuming all art can be fully understood spontaneously. Some might argue that context is important. Malreaux gives the example of the eighteenth century’s dislike of Gothic Art. It didn’t fit with their neo-classical ideas of what art ought to be so they found it difficult to appreciate it. Now of course, Gothic Art, like everything else has been rehabilitated and we tend to see all art as able to stand alone and be recognised for it’s own merits or meaning. In fact, all forms of art are now seen as potentially valid and worthy. Not only because we see them in terms of the culture they were created in, we also have a permissive attitude to art. Interestingly, this may be fall-out from the ‘mystifying’ aura, it might also be attributable to the confusion the mass of available images produces in us. As there is so much to evaluate and perhaps thinking we do not have the tools to do so, we refuse to differentiate at all.

As I mentioned before, historically more paintings were collected than other forms of work such as frescoes, simply because they were portable. So before any intellectualised worthiness of a picture, portability, ease of distribution is a positive quality, a strength in its own right. Galleries were the first big development which changed the way we think about art, followed by reproduction which has now become digital. When everything can be reproduced physical portability becomes irrelevant. Reproduction gives everyone a copy of the Mona Lisa, in a sense it’s a new form of portability. There is a strong sense of confusion, high art still has cachet yet it is increasingly accessible and subsumed into mass culture. It is difficult to retain the notion that pre-Renaissance art was created on totally different terms to the ones we now evaluate it by. We tend to lump all art together in this telescoped historical art consciousness.

Conclusion

The fundamental function of an image or art object is to convey information, whether it’s indexical, abstract, art or a logo, even if it in not always as simple as the relationship between the sign and the signified. It is reasonable to say that an image is the most economical and ideal form of communication. Especially now as technology enables their reproduction with greater and greater ease, while this is also the case for all forms of communication, such as speech and text it is most dramatic when applied to visual media. As I mentioned earlier, much of art’s historical value came from its rarity and elitist inaccessibility. Where Walter Benjamin predicted that familiarity would breed contempt, that images and art would be devalued, I see familiarity in the casual attitude technology has encouraged toward images, but the very fact we reproduce images so much and have assimilated them so much into our lives (as compared to when we lived with the first order of Baudrillard’s simulacra) I see as affirmation of our valuing images, if not in the same terms. A reproduction cannot be relied on to convey the same information unless it is identical to the original. In the past, we came to terms with the presence of technology that allowed reproductions but as the reproductions were very seldom fully viable - that is they were not perfect copies. Digitally created works can be infinitely and losslessly copied, while we cannot copy everything accurately, technology is has advanced to the point that we are able to reproduce artworks in such high fidelity that they are often for practical purposes, as good as their originals. As Baudrillard argued, we have also passed into a phase of understanding where images exist independently of originals yet within a loose system of signs and symbols - all is simulacra so we no longer have to worry about the sanctity of originality. But originality helped us to evaluate and value art objects over non-art objects, now everything is equal and the aura is on uncertain terms we might grasp at new criteria. I suspect that copyright and the art market will perpetuate the cult of originality for a long time yet, as it would be too much of a wrench to have to change, yet like we have seen with the music industry, when the outmoded business models and means of distribution failed to change, they were simply bypassed.

Even if not every artwork can exist digitally we have reached a point of technological development where this concept is almost viable and must be engaged with.
Bibliography

[1] Paul Valery, Aesthetics, The Conquest of Ubiquity p.226.translated by Ralph Manheim. As quoted in, Walter Benjamin, Illumination Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (p.219)

[2] Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility Kenneth Hamma http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html

[3] ways of seeing by john birger

[4] Kevin Kelly

[5] Kevin kelly

[6] walter benjamin

http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue3/ganis.htm