Portfolio 12: Kitsch and the Avant-Garde

Prompt:  What is the avant-garde?  What are the politics of the avant-garde according to Clement Greenburg?  How does Greenberg describe the relationship of the avant-garde to bourgeois culture?  To mass society and culture?  How does Greenberg describe the relationship between the avant-garde and kitsch?  

In his essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg describes the avant garde as an extremely self conscious, form-preoccupied style of art which came into being some time in the mid nineteenth century.  It was born, according to Greenberg, out of a certain cultural necessity, wherein the erosion of certainty and objective truth in the nineteenth century gave way to an "Alexandrianism" in culture, which is a stagnation of culture in which certain controversial issues are consciously avoided, and all new creative activity defers to the 'old masters.'  The avant-garde is brave where Alexandrianism is timid, active where Alexandrianism is static.  It moves culture forward precisely with its historically conscious outlook which seeks to imitate processes of art and its old masters, rather than reproduce and imitate the forms themselves.  Greenberg calls this highly self conscious sense of aesthetics "the imitation of imitating."  In painting, the avant garde is preoccupied with the "arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc. to the exclusion of whatever is not implicated in these factors" (9).  In poetry, the emphasis is on "the effort to create poetry the 'moments' themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry" (9).  

     Greenberg sees the avant garde as having a slightly confused relationship with politics.  Originally, the avant garde was so preoccupied with questions of form and the relative values of aesthetics, that it did not have a political program--its program was decidedly apolitical.  It soon found it necessary, however, to borrow from revolutionary politics the courage needed to defy social convention and to position itself critically against social (and artistic) establishment.  Yet, it is interesting to note that the birth of the avant garde in or around the 1860s in France also coincided with what has been called "the great divide" when high and low cultures began to diverge.  Thus, that which would rather divorce itself from class and the social/political world is in fact inextricably bound to the bourgeoisie by what Greenberg calls "an umbilical cord or gold" (11).  In the end, neither the revolutionary facet, nor the anti-social, apolitical facet of the avant garde is tenable.  Greenberg notes that academicism (which results in Alexandrianism) and commercialism (which results in kitsch) "are appearing in the strangest places" (11).

     This encroaching stagnation is particularly frightening for Greenburg because he sees the avant garde as really the only living culture we have.  We can see here an intersection with Benjamin, where the superstructure (culture, technology, etc.) begins to develop assymetrically with the base (the mode of production).  If the base does not socialize in time, then the avant garde will be assimilated into the very economic and power structures which produce kitsch.

     Because the avant garde is active, form-obsessed, historically conscious and (somewhat) revolutionary, it is the cultural opposite of kitsch.  Kitsch, however, develops roughly a half-century after the appearance of the avant garde, as a result of the industrial revolution ('the machine age').  Kitsch depends on the avant garde because the former defines itself against and alongside the latter.  It is not sensitive to history, but it is sensitive to the avant garde itself, and to public taste.  In an attempt to become as universally acceptable as possible, it constantly changes with public taste yet can never express what the avant garde cannot.  

      Greenberg thinks of kitsch as something of a disease or tumor on the side of the avant garde, imitating its effects on viewers, without developing the form.  Thus, it takes a shortcut; a viewer can experience similar effects looking at a kitsch painting, but a Picasso painting is intelligible only by those who have the resources and leisure to become educated.  As a result of this simplicity in expression and reception, kitsch has become the official culture of fascist governments, populist governments, and virtually all powers who rule by demagogy.  In democratic countries, however, kitsch is the universal culture as well, if not the official.  

       

Portfolio 11: The Aura in the Machine Age

Prompt: Summarize Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" (1939).  Can we reintroduce aura to an object that has been mechanically reproduced?  What are the possibilities for creating "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction?

     Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" has two main theses:  The first, is that technological reproducibility withers the "aura" of the art object, reducing the authority of the art object to condition response on its own terms.  Secondly, this change in the way we view and understand art favors a mass to an individual response, which, as the masses become increasingly proletarized, results in the politicization of art.  Benjamin figures this politicization against the fascist attitude towards art which attempts to aestheticize the political.  This can only result in war.  

     The aura of an art work is its "here and nowness," which is related to the historical function of the art object as religious or cult object.  The art object creates a certain distance--not a literal distance, but the "unique apparition of a distance" (255)--between itself and a viewer.  This is what helps to establish the authority an art object has: by demanding distance, the art object asserts its uniqueness, its otherness--a process which ironically limits a viewer's experience of the object by denying a full identification with the object.  The objects "aura" is thus more important than any physical attribute it has.  For some object, Benjamin notes, it is "more important for these figures to be present than to be seen" (257).  

     The technological reproducibility Benjamin discusses is mostly on the order of photography and film.  Reproduction allows a destruction of cult value, a withering of aura and a negation of uniqueness.  With the probing, scientific eye of the camera, the photograph allows the masses to close the distance between the object and their selves.  It"extracts sameness even from what is unique" (256).  Benjamin likens this process to the intrusiveness of the surgeon.  As Roland Barthes would later do, Benjamin points to the increasing relevance of the press photograph.  The existence of the caption seems to symbolize the image's loss of cult value; the caption conditions--in fact instructs--our reception of the image as if to relieve us of the unsettling feeling of not knowing how to respond.  

     The political significance of all this lies in the growing relevance of the mass response.  Technological reproduction allows all art to be experience as a mass because it sees with a single eye, from a single perspective.  Unlike the theater, where the actor's expression appears different for each viewer depending on where he sits or what he cares to notice, the photograph displays the facts of an object's physical appearance in stark objectivity.  Because of this, and the erosion of the art object's aura, the mass can apprehend these images with a unity that is not only newly possible, but newly necessary.  The mass begins to take control over the mode of artistic perception.

     As to the question of reintroducing aura into a reproduced object, the task seems to me, in the light of Benjamin, a wholly regressive enterprise.  What is the benefit of reintroducing aura into the art object?  Benjamin says that the modes of expression are opening up, allowing the proletariat to express itself in ways previously allowed only to men of letters and education.  Thus, he says, "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character" (262).  Perhaps anxiety about the loss (death?) of the author or artist would encourage one to force aura into the reproducible.  Though I think such an act is more obviously egotistical the more and more the aura withers.

     To choose a pseudo-literary example, the increasing relevance of blogs and citizen reportage through the internet has destabilized the apparent authority of the journalist.  We could say even that the cult value of the journalist and his works has withered.  Making the news journalist give aura to his works when the very newspaper they appear in has lost its authority, it's monopoly on "the news" as a referent?  MSNBC and CNN have for some time featured a "blogosphere" section of their daily news shows where "experts" actually display a computer screen, which the studio camera focuses in on.  Thus old media filters the new media in an attempt to subsume a new news source under the category of "news" itself.  Though, to my eyes, they only point towards their actual demise, their actual lack of authority.  Watching a television screen of a computer screen can only remind the viewer just how much easier it is to bypass the television and access the blog itself.  

     On the other hand, it seems that we've come along way since Benjamin and that there are many arts which are intended to be reproducible, wherein reproducibility is part of the art.  Photography itself is a respected art, and photographic exhibitions are shown in the same museums as paintings and sculptures.  However, it is hard to say how exactly the aura of an art photograph differs from a painting, but I am certain that it does.  The photographs by Ansel Adams, for instance, command a certain authority as object, a certain uniqueness partially because of the detail and effort put into the actual printing of the object.  However, this effect is gained by denying the reproducibility of the photograph--a denial which itself withers with the advances in print technology which now allow for faithful reproductions.  

     It seems that the aura itself is somewhat dated, and people tend to go on making art anyway.  I am personally enamored with radio podcasts like This American Life, or the many independently produced podcasts available at the Public Radio Exchange where I have contributed content myself.  Many of these podcasts are less on the order of journalism and more geared towards a developed sense of the relationships between storytelling and aural experience--something that I think is, or is related to art.  Yet, in their podcast form, they deny any claim to "hereness" or "nowness."  They can be listened to in any place and at any time.  

     My examples are sparse and only partially illustrative of an argument, but I think I can conclude that it seems that these days, whatever "aura" art has is not as related to "here and nowness" as it once was.  Perhaps it is possible to reinscribe a refigured "cult value" onto an object without demanding a distance that is impossible.  Any art that does this I think first has to firmly establish its relationship with the masses, whether that relationship is an open or closed one.