Archive for Surrealism and Paris Walter Benjamin on Surrealism and Photography Posted in Art History/Theory , Critical theory , Photography, Reading notes, Surrealism with tagsphotography, Surrealism, Surrealism and Paris, Walter Benjamin on September 27, 2010 by melaniemenardarts Surrealism The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia (1929) “Life only seemed worth livi ng where the t hreshold between waking and sleeping w as worn away in everyone as by the steps of multitudinous imag es flooding back and forth, language only seemed itself where, sound and image, image and sound interpenetra ted with a utomatic precision and such felicity that no chink was left for the penny-in-the-slot called “ meaning ”.” “In t he world’s structure dream loosens indivi duality like a bad t ooth. This I loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to ste p outside the domain of intoxication.” “ But the true c reative overcoming of relig ious il lumi nation certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumi nation, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration.” “ perc eive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded”, in the first iron constructions , the first factory buildi ngs, the earliest photos, the objects .that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos , the dresses of five years ago , fashionable restaurants when the vog ue has begun to ebb from them. […] No one before these visionaries and augurs perceived how destitution—not only social but architectonic, the poverty of interiors/enslaved and enslaving objects- can be suddenly transformed into revolutionary nihi lism .” “convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (rail ways are beginning to age), on Godforsaken Su nday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of t he great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred wi ndow of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, ifnot action. They bring the immens e forces of “ atmosphere” concealed in these t hing s to the point of e xplosi on.” “And no face is surrealistic in the same degree as the true face of a city. No picture by de Chiri co or Max Ernst can match the sharp elevations ofthe city’s inner strong-hol ds, which one must overrun and occupy in order to master their fate and, in their fate, in t he fate of their masses, one’s own.” “The Surrealis ts’ Paris, too, is a “ little universe”. That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things l ook no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghos tly signal s flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are t he order of the day. It is the region from which the lyric poet ry of Surrealism reports.” “ the deeply grounded composition of an individual who, from inner compulsio n, portrays less a historical evolution than a constantly renewed, primal upsu rge of e soteric poetry” “ the philosophi cal realism of the Middle Ages was the basis of poetic expe rience. This realism , however—that is, the belief in a real, separate existence of conce pts whether outside or inside things—has always very quickly crossed over from the logi cal realm of ideas t o the magical realm ofwords. And it is as magi cal experiments with words, not as artistic dabbling, that we must understand the passionate phonetic and graphical transformational g ames that have run through the whole literature of the avant-garde” Apoll inaire, L’esprit nouveau et les poetes: “ t heir synthetic works create new realities the plastic manifestations of which are just as complex as those referred to by the words standing forcollectives” about Dostoyevsky: “No one else understood, as he did, how naive is the view of the Philis tines that goodnes s, for all the manly virtue of those who practise it, is God-ins pired; whereas evil stems entirely from our spontaneity, and in it we are independent and self-sufficient beings .” I think the Surreali sts moved away from this preoccupation and it’s rather George Bataille that continued to pursue t his idea ? “ we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday […] The rea der, the t hinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, a re types of illumi nati just as much as the opium eater, t he dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug—o urselves—w hich we take in solitude.” The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) “Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins wi th cere monial obj ects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not the ir being on view . […] With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibi tion increased to such an exte nt that t he quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature. This is co mparable to the situation of the work of a rt in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In t he same way today, by the absolute emphasis on i ts exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among wh ich the one we a re conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recogniz ed as incidental. This mu ch is certain: today photography and the film are t he most serviceable exemplifications of this new function.” “The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expressi on of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographi c image, the e xhibitio n value for t he first time shows its superiori ty to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, t ook photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a c rime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishi ng evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden politi cal signi ficance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate t o them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up sig nposts for him, rig ht ones or wrong ones , no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. An d it is clear that t hey have an altogether different charact erSurrealism and Paris « Inner Worlds / Outer Space http://melan iem enardarts.wordpress.com/t ag/surrealism -and-par is/ 1 de 15 7/8/2011 14:25
