“In principle a work of art has always been reproducible,” Walter Benjamin writes in one of the most influential texts of twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Drawing inspiration from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductivity,”' this panel reconsiders the ever-timely question of art and technical reproduction from the perspective of our age of contemporary hyper-reproducibility. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from analog to digital formatting, from print to digital publication, from cinema to omnipresent streaming devices. When digital processing enables new manipulations of sensory experience, when images are defined not by indexicality but by hyper-reproducibility, how do we account for the evolving relationalities between reality and artificiality, origin and copy, repetition and rupture? Using the present as our inspiration to reexamine earlier forms of technical reproduction, this session explores how the technical basis of artistic reproduction shapes the formal aspects of artworks as well as their reception and interpretation.
As the transdisciplinary field of media studies continues to grow, recent studies on technical reproduction have reassessed the intellectual history of technical reproduction. Kaja Silverman’s three-volume new history of photography shifts perspective from how we reproduce the world through artistic representation to how the world reveals itself through pictorial means; Tamara Todd’s reinterpretation of the technological conditions of possibility for mass culture as affording aesthetic and emancipatory possibilities; Rey Chow, against the grain, ruminates on the continuities between modernist aesthetics and the intellectual tropes of “entanglement” that were born in the hypermediated present.
Bringing a cast of interdisciplinary scholars, this special session will expand on these works by considering the technical basis of artistic reproduction across various mediums, including music, visual art, and literature.
Our session begins with Ethan Plaue’s inquiry into late nineteenth-century Spiritualism’s use of early photographic reproducibility to explore the idea that a non-perceptual mediums. Spiritualist writers in the United States developed significant theoretical speculations on electric, magnetic, and other atmospheric mediums that, although not perceptible, could carry messages from the material plane to the spiritual one. Plaue argues that Spiritualist writers relied on the common metaphors of Indigenous disappearance used to justify the acquisition and occupation of the American continent to conceptualize the non-perceptual but nonetheless active agency of these pervading mediums.
The panel then turns to the mid-twentieth-century with Jennifer H. Forsberg’s analysis of Andy Warhol as a foundational case study for the aesthetics of poverty. Forsberg situates Warhol’s highly-reproducible Brillo Box (1964) alongside early-modernist provocateurs like Marcel Duchamp and Gertrude Stein to sketch the effects of mass-cultural participation in an often-elite art world. This participation provides visual and tangible evidence of the class ideologies of an industrialized, modern world, making visible the aesthetics of poverty, or the cultural styles narratives rooted in working-class or under-class class codes that are commodified through revaluation, exploitation, and appropriation.
Morten Hansen’s analysis of sonic technologies in 1980s Hip Hop and Dancehall takes our panel from the visual arts to sound production. Tracing the parallel developments in the music scene in New York and Kingston, this paper explores how the networks of migration and trade, as well as the new analog and digital means of sonic reproduction from cassette tapes to programmable keyboards and drum machines, sustained a network of resonances in which the local and the transnational became productively entangled. Hansen’s paper focuses on artists such as Shinehead and Mantronix and the ways in which genre and media as well as the hyperlocal and the global blend into one another.
Finally, Milo Murphy Hicks concludes the panel with their paper on contemporary alternatives to the creative writing programs that encourage a standard, reproducible method for making literary art. Hicks considers the controversial figure of Gordon Lish, the prolific editor and teacher who helped manufacture the so-called short story renaissance in the 1970s and 80s. Drawing extensively on Lish and his students’ archives, this paper explores his unorthodox editorial and pedagogical practices to theorize reproducibility in the creative writing workshop. Hicks contends that Lish’s simultaneous rejection and embrace of the traditional workshop model illuminates the reproductive logic necessary for literary production in the program era.
Rather than a simple celebration of rupture, contingency, and contamination, this session proposes to examine the persisting hierarchies of technical reproduction in an era when global mobility conditions the media economy and when becoming means becoming reproducible at a previously unimaginable scale and speed.
Timetable
Presider: 8-min introduction, including reading bios
Speakers: 12-min each (total: 48 minutes)
Discussion: 19-min
Total: 75 min