Thursday 16 January 2014

Benjamin v Gombrich

This morning Mary Loveday-Edwards, our context of practice lecturer, gave the class copies of a 1936 essay entitled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"  by Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, social critic, radio broadcaster and essayist.

Here's are links to the Wikipedia entries for:

The essay:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction

Walter Benjamin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin

Benjamin was from a wealthy Jewish family who narrowly missed escaping the Nazis.  In the early days of World War II he moved to Paris.  He planned to go to the U.S. via Spain and Portugal, but got apprehended in Spain (at the request of the Vichy government in France) and committed suicide on the night of 25th September 1940 by taking an overdose of morphine.

I'm struck by the number of artists, curators, philosophers coming from a similar background, by the way.

According to Wikipedia, Benjamin's essay was a major influence on the Frankfurt School of art and his ideas were used by John Berger in "Ways of Seeing", a book I struggled to read at the beginning of this course (see my previous post).

At Plymouth College of Art, we are using Benjamin's essay as the basis of various exercises.  The first one, today, involved "responding" to the essay without actually bothering to read it in a conventional way, by cutting out phrases from the photocopy and images from magazines and pasting them into a strip of paper folded into multiple pages.

I have to admit that I quite enjoyed doing this, largely because it enabled me to make fun of the idea.  For instance:


Mary introduced this by saying that people typically didn't read essays like this from beginning to end because that would take a lot of time and effort.

I'm quite shocked by this.  

I totally understand why it takes a lot of time and effort to read this type of stuff, but in my view it's the way that it's written that's the problem.   

If you've read some of my previous posts you'll have gathered that I've come to the view that the exclusivity of the "top" of the art world is preserved by "intellectuals" using a pretentious language I don't understand - long sentences written in riddles,  obscure references that I have to look up on the Internet and words that I have to look up in a dictionary.

I've ground my way through a couple of books of this stuff, notably John Berger's Ways of Seeing (cited previously) and Antony Gormley's book  (see my previous post).

Now it turns out nobody expects you to read this stuff from cover to cover anyhow!   

I would be quite cynical about this Context of Practice course by now if I hadn't discovered  "The Story of Art" by E.H.Gombrich (also from a wealthy Jewish family, this time in Austria, who fled to the UK.)

In this book, Gombrich maps out the whole history of art and puts all the different movements and so on into context.  

He starts off by acknowledging that a lot of commentary about art is pretty incomprehensible to the uninitiated and makes a solemn commitment to write in plain English.

Music to my ears!  And he sticks to his word!  I'm on chapter 2 at the moment and so far it's an interesting (and relatively easy) read!

Credit to Antony Gormley for this.  His book starts off with a conversation with Gombrich, in which he tells him that his "The Story of Art" inspired him to become an artist.  As a result, I bought a second-hand (30 year old) copy on Amazon for 1p.

And as you can see from my previous posts, Gormley's book was far from being a waste of time in other ways (see "Sir Antony" and "More on Sir Antony").  I begun to understand him and his work.  In my view, however, I would have got more out of it if I hadn't been forced to "decode" the language. 

UPDATE:  I think I should qualify my remarks a little now that I've read a bit more of Benjamin's essay.  It's easier to understand than some of the other stuff I've struggled with.

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