Living in the Augenblick
I met with my art history professor on Friday afternoon about a presentation I'm giving in class on Tuesday. The presentation is on Futurism, something I studied maybe seven or eight years ago. I saw a great collection of Futurist art at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice–also about seven or eight years ago. So I'm coming to this with only the vaguest familiarity, and I'm anxious to give a good presentation and get my seminar paper off to a good start.
Futurism reared its head at a culturally ripe time in history: the Futurists aligned themselves with Mussolini's Fascism, and to some degree both epitomized and catalyzed a culture that was ready for a radical change. World War I soon followed. Futurism attempted to be determinedly anti-Romantic, dispelling the aesthetic theories that had resulted in paintings of moonlit forests and similarly mystical scenes. Futurism also aligned itself with newfangled technologies like racecars and railways. The artists were hooked on concepts of speed, velocity, destruction, audacity, and revolt.
[Boccioni's Dynamism of a Cyclist and other Futurist paintings. Don't be fooled by the apparent visual similarities to Cubism. The movements were rooted in quite different agendas.]
What's particularly fun about the Futurist Manifesto is that despite adamantly reacting to Romanticism, the language used is poetic and melodramatic [note: this is best read aloud while shaking your fists in the air]:
'Let's go!' I said. 'Friends, away! Let's go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We're about to see the Centaur's birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!…We must shake the gates of life, test the bolts and hinges. Let's go! Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn! There's nothing to match the splendour of the sun's red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial gloom!
Ah, yes, our millennial gloom. Sounds a little… Romantic to me. The Futurists' art took smaller steps away from Romanticism than their violence-loving manfiestoes might suggest, but nevertheless, it was a step toward abstract art and toward new technologies.
But the augenblick is really why I wanted to post… After Professor and I chatted about Futurism, he asked me how I was finding the class and what my other academic interests are. He's visiting from Europe and not that familiar with the U of C, so I explained about my program, my thesis, etc. I've pretty much gotten this speech down to seventy-five-words-or-less (not including the big sigh that answers the inevitable question, "so, what will you do after you get your degree?"). When I got to the part of my thesis description that goes something like, "and so I'm trying to work with Walter Benjamin's idea of the aura, but I'm finding it really difficult…," Professor's face lit up.
"Why do you find it so difficult?"
You mean aside from the fact that Benjamin is maddeningly inconsistent in his use of words like "aura"? And the fact that Very Important Pronouns have no antecedents, leaving sentences' meanings up in the air? Aside from that?
Professor confirmed that "aura" is one of Benjamin's most difficult ideas, and that its meaning does change from essay to essay. (You know, if I did that in my thesis, I would SO get called on it). In his essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility," Benjamin defines aura as "A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be." I've been attracted to this idea of space and time as "a strange tissue" (in one of Benjamin's earlier essays, it's "a strange web")–it is a web both delicate and mighty, a web that can trap you in its strings. Benjamin is attempting to describe the indescribable: the mystical element of traditional artwork that makes you stop your own movement and forces you to look at it. According to Professor, it is really something that must be felt, not described. That moment when the aura captures your attention loses meaning in the English translation. "Moment" in German is augenblick. Augen means "eye," and blick means "gaze." So the moment of an artwork capturing your attention has countless more connotations in German. I'm still trying to unravel all of them.
But what of this "unique apparation of a distance"? Professor gave me an excellent example: suppose you have an old book that you knew once belonged to somebody you deeply respected and admired. You would, of course, treat that old book with great care and caution. It would remind you of that person you admired, and you would, perhaps, think of that person everytime you flipped through the pages. It is the aura of the book that brings that which is distant–the person you deeply respected and admired–into the present moment.
Another example? A girl looking at a Michelangelo drawing, knowing that what was before her held the pencil lines of a master. Knowing that the same person who created the Crucifixion scene in front of her had also created the Sistene Chapel, David, the Rome Pieta… and that Michelangelo's hands had touched this drawing four hundred years before. This drawing that was now in front of her, and was now part of her story. The aura of the drawing brought all of that into the present augenblick.
* * *
current book: the essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics" by M.M. Bakhtin. It's kind of more interesting than it sounds.
current music: the sound of Clarabelle purrrrrrrring in my lap and the sound of Monte howwwwwling at the door. Clarabelle was allowed to walk around the house for awhile today, but they have to be separated as soon as they want to start roughhousing. Oh, and I'm listening to Luiz Bonfa in the background.
current socks: I got new crabby socks! whoever said that money couldn't buy happiness never shelled out dough for novelty socks. As soon as I slipped them on, my mood went from crabby to ecstatic.
Posted 8 May 2006
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hi Laura!
hate to be difficult, but “blick” doesn’t only mean gaze (although it can). More exactly, in this situation, a more appropriate translation would be “blink” (and it really does have the connotation of short, momentary), so you’re dealing with a moment or an instant. Augenblick would be best translated as “in the blink of an eye.”
but i like the aura idea; I had exactly the same experience when I held in my hand a sheet of music that Bach himself (or a copyist, but I prefer to think it was Bach) wrote out. It was a second violin part to the Coffee Cantata, at the national archives in Vienna. That augenblick has stayed with me. . .
and I like the socks
J