Academic Session: Leeds 2006
A Tremendous Shattering of Tradition: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Convenors:
Dr Patricia Allmer, MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University, sears@allmer.fsnet.co.uk
Dr John Sears, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, J.Sears@mmu.ac.uk
Abstract:
This session will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the publication of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, trans. Harry Zohn, 1968, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.
In 1936 the essay offered a challenge not only to Fascist appropriations of art and conventional Marxist aesthetics but also to phenomenological theorisations of art – witness its problematic reception by Adorno and others, its expressed discontent with what it sees as depoliticised modes of aesthetic engagement, and its analysis of “a world without aura”. These challenges are repeated in different ways in the essay’s influence on the turbulent intellectual scene of the late 1960s. It has contributed significantly to the development of both Marxist and postmodernist theorisations of culture, as well as to the ongoing art-historical reassessment of the artwork and its roles in contemporary media-dominated societies. Benjamin’s essay constitutes a major, if continually contested, contribution to debates about modernism and postmodernism that retain their currency in the age of digital reproduction. The session will explore the essay’s continuing significance for contemporary theories, practices and histories of art.
Speakers:
Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology Sydney, From the Technical to the Digital: Walter Benjamin and the Force of Reproducibility
Graeme Gilloch, University of Salford, ‘Theoretical Toys’: Benjamin, Baudrillard and Buzz
Richard J Lane, Malaspina University College, The Hidden and the Exposed: ‘One-Time Appearance’ in Walter Benjamin and Rachel Whiteread (a reading of sections iv to vi of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility, Second Version, trans. Jephcott & Zohn)
Colin Lang, Yale University, After Aura: Rereading Benjamin on Painting
Diane Morgan, University of Leeds, The Distractions of the Built Environment: Architecture as a Collective Work of Art
Kirk E. Pillow, Hamilton College, New York, Lens Flare in the Age of Digital Production
Nevenka Stankovic, University of British Columbia, Melodrama as an ‘Instrument of Ballistics’: Comparing Dusan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)
Randall K. VanSchepen, Roger Williams University, Benjamin’s Aura, Levine’s Homage and Richter’s Effect
Jennifer Way, University of North Texas, Works of Art Writing: Legacies of Benjamin’s Essay
Laurens S. Weingarden, Florida State University, Re-Viewing Benjamin’s Auratic/Erotic Gaze: Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner and Censored Photography
Katerina Loukopoulou, Birkbeck College, University of London, Ways of Seeing, Walter Benjimin's Artwork Essay
Katalin Timár, Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest , Models of Origninality: A Poststructuralist Critique