Category: PGDip

2007: PGDip in Contemporary Art History at Goldsmiths College in London

CREATIVE JOURNAL—Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—Artist/Audience

Today, not for the first time (or the last time, probably), I misunderstood Walter Benjamin’s meaning.

On our Core course we’ve just moved into an area entitled ‘Authors and Author-ity,’ for which the first reading texts are Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer1 and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author2.

In The Author as Producer, Benjamin begins by outlining the ‘correct tendency’ of works, for them to be useful for revolutionary activity, quoting Brecht: “not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the greatest extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 214).

He isolates the ‘literary tendency’, and the ‘quality’ of it as being essential to politically correct work:

. . . the tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That is to say the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straight away: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency, alone constitutes the quality of the work. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213–4)

He is here countering what seems to be a rather blinkered opinion on his audience’s part. To introduce the above quote, Benjamin speaks rhetorically for his audience “You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213).

My misunderstanding stemmed from the phrase “of necessity” in the last quote which I understood to mean “by default”, so completely changing the meaning of this section. Although if I’d thought it through with reference to what is said later, I should have realised my mistake.

So, in the main quote above, Benjamin explains the stress on the quality of a work is necessary for its effectiveness as revolutionary material. This takes the form of using the methods of bourgeois society to transform it from within into something other:

What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers of spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 216)

  1. Benjamin, W. (1934). The Author as Producer. In Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London, 1982. pp. 213–216.
  2. Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 142–148.

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LECTURE—Pierre Bourdieu and Andrea Fraser—The Ethics of Museum Display

This week seems to be Pierre Bourdieu week for me – which is good, as I’ve not read anything of his before and I’m quite liking his work, with certain reservations.

Yesterday, the lecture for the Framing Art course concerned “Museums and their Audiences”, approaching the subject from both directions, the museum’s and the audience’s.

The museum’s role was presented in terms of its movement away from what our tutor, Roberto Cavallini, described as “the exhibition of artifacts to the exhibition of things”, in other words from a passive to an active principle, away from the pure display of a multitude of similar objects to the development of interactive, thematic frameworks. For this we looked at Andrea Fraser’s text “Museums Highlight: A Gallery Talk”1, presenting an institutional critique of the museum and its processes – in this case the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

For the viewer, they now become the object in their own right, the target of sociological studies of their relationship with the institution. Here Bourdieu’s text2 discusses the relationship between education and aesthetic appreciation, that the individual’s art appreciation and their appreciation of museums depends largely on early experiences:

Each individual possesses a defined and limited capacity for apprehending the ‘information’ proposed by the work, this capacity being a function of his or her overall knowledge (itself a function of education and background) . . . (Bourdieu, p. 37)

As a result, Bourdieu claims “. . . aesthetics can only be, except in certain circumstances, a dimension of the ethics (or, better, the ethos) of class.” (Bourdieu, p. 46) and concludes:

In fact, arrows, notices, guidebooks, guides or receptionists would not really make up for a lack of education, but they would proclaim, simply by existing, the right to be uninformed, the right to be there and uninformed, and the right of uninformed people to be there . . . (Bourdieu, p. 49)

1. Fraser, A. (1991). Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk. In October 57 (Summer). pp. 104–122.
2. Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1969) Cultural Works and Cultivated Disposition. In The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their public. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 36–50.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Lab—Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. and Debord

The Lab session today extended our discussions about postmodernism with a showing of Dial H.I.S.T.O.R.Y. (2004) by Johan Grimonprez and Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film « La Société du spectacle » (1975) by Guy Debord.

Both films have a somewhat similar formal quality – they present a collection of seemingly disparate film clips with a voice-over. The Debord film (of which we only saw 5 minutes) uses commercials and sequences of a military character, overlaid with Debord himself (I believe) speaking about the critical reception of his earlier film La Société du spectacle (1973). His voice seems to be coming over a bad telephone connection, it’s very harsh and distorted. Grimonprez’ film also uses footage and voice-over, but there is a connecting narrative to the whole of a record of a number of airplane hijackings.

In my mind, both films present a number of critiques. To summarise two such critiques, you could take them as indictments of the media’s manipulation of events and their audiences, or as comments on the viewers blasé reactions to such events (or both at the same time, of course).

Looking at it from the point of view of the texts we’ve just been reading regarding allegory and postmodernity’s love of the layered text, I can see how these each take their collections of film clips to create a whole (the overall film) which sets up a negotiation with the viewer resulting in a set of possible readings. The films in themselves are more or less opaque to this process, creating their own readings at the same time as creating an alternative space for the viewers’. There is always a context which dictates certain of the possibilities of the reception, but this is just one of a potentially infinite number of readings, each one dependent on a particular viewer and conditions in which they come to the film.

Trying to pick out some relevant quotes from our recent texts about postmodernism. Andreas Huyssen in Mapping the Postmodern says:

The point is not to eliminate the productive tension between the political and the aesthetic, between history and the text, between engagement and the mission of art. The point is to heighten that tension, even to rediscover it and to bring it back into focus in the arts as well as in criticism. (Huyssen, p. 337)

Thinking about allegory, from the Craig Owens’ text, adds many dimensions to the two films. I don’t really know how Debord would view such a reading, but I doubt if he would have been happy.

Or perhaps that was one of his points – any statement is always already usurped into some other order, the order of the system or the audiences self-created orders of reception. By saying ‘always already’ I am of course implying that any reading is always implicit in any statement, which would be a very Derridean point of view?

  • Huyssen, A. (1984). Mapping the Postmodern. In Preziosi, D. ed. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. pp. 329–337.

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