Abstract
Materialist accounts of artistic development emphasize the ongoing revolution of media in the progress of history. Amongst the most popular accounts of modernity are Walter Benjamin’s essays on the relationship of photography to traditional art. His account of the loss of aura has been subject to countless reinterpretations since its publication. The present essay addresses the contemporary production of a number of architects and artists whose work provides an interesting challenge to the Benjaminian account of the secularization of artistic ritual. The artists Adam Fuss, Vera Lutter, Alison Rossiter, Sally Mann, and others have recently been exploring photographic methods that contradict the Benjaminian account of the history of photography. They continue to explore techniques that Benjamin placed in the auratic pre-paper-print era, such as Daguerreotypes and photograms, as well as employing other more material/chemically based effects. Such artistic choices are often considered nothing more than a nostalgic reverie trying to stem the tide of materialist history, a flawed search for a lost aura of presence. However, when these works are set against the backdrop of contemporary digitized production and of the Dusseldorf School as well as most other contemporary photographers, these “retro” works stand as a critical counterpoint to our present seamless digital imperium. The soft and hazy effects of these works, what I am calling their misticism, occludes the particularity of digital bits of information in a search to connect to the material and the sensual, something denied by information-saturated technologies. Even within a materialist approach to history, there is room to view these architectural and artistic effects as critically productive rather than merely retrograde. The present essay argues for the timely relevance of contemporary retro-photographic techniques in fostering both a critical attitude and as evidence of attempts to recover a sense of spiritual presence.
Highlights
The Digital Imperium and Mistical ArtistsMarching to an unknown future, present technologies of image production and consumption ceaselessly advance to ever greater levels of visual acuity
The present essay suggests that such hyper-real digital imagery colonizes the material reality it points to, transforming our experience of materiality into one that is increasingly abstracted from the body
When Fuss admits that these images carry “much less information” than typical photographs, he notes that the result is “much more intimacy”.24. In her analysis of “haptic cinema”, Laura Marks notes that its images “encourag[e] the viewer to engage with the image through memory”, and by working from that interior response, “haptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time, gradually discovering what is in the image rather than coming to an image already knowing what it is.”25 This quality of feeling as if our sense of sight is new and that images are being formed before our eyes comes about partially because of the material properties and processes of these images
Summary
Marching to an unknown future, present technologies of image production and consumption ceaselessly advance to ever greater levels of visual acuity. The present essay suggests that such hyper-real digital imagery colonizes the material reality it points to, transforming our experience of materiality into one that is increasingly abstracted from the body In response to this culturally dominant impulse, it suggests that certain architects and artists “mistify” images by occluding them in order to recover a more immediate and sensuous relation to the world, one that ushers in the spiritual.. ” alienating us from the world to which it refers, a process which he traces back to Walter Benjamin’s comments on print photography as “opening a field in which all intimacy yields to the illumination of detail.3 This striking incompatibility between obsessive details and intimacy is explored here in relation to a sampling of recent works of art and architecture, whose ambiguous and indistinct character seems a conscious antithetical foil for the dominant desire for greater digitized clarity. There is no avoiding the fact that the differences between digital and analogue photography, for example, are of such a magnitude that they press towards the likelihood of certain artistic choices being made, such as highly saturated color and obsessively plotted detail and resolution
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