The Prophecy of Benjamin
In 1939, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled “The Work of Art” that sparked a long and vigorous debate, especially with Adorno. They had their differences in viewing art work. Adorno, on the one hand, believed in the genius of the artist and high modernism that is far beyond the reach of the masses. In Adorno's interpretation, the masses is no better than floating carcass and no more than a pawn in the calculation of capital. On the other hand, reproducing art work using mechanical means is an effort that will provide the opportunity for capitalists to treat the masses as mere objects. The reason is that in mass production, the producer always has free rein over what products that will be manufactured. Producer always calculates the potential of profit, with the consequence that even when the product or art work is not worthy, it will be mass-produced anyway if the producer calculates that it can provide enough financial return. On the other hand, Benjamin held a different view. His logic goes like this: if a work is mass-produced, then the masses will be able to obtain works of art. In Benjamin's writings we see subtle beginnings of the idea that art work is part of the social class system that was taken up by Bourdieu. The ownership of the art work is part of the system of social class distinction. Later, long after Benjamin, Bourdieu stated that the value of art is unlike what philosophers have thought it to be, especially Kant, who held that an art object contains the artistic value within itself and cannot be influenced by space and time. However, this proposition is challenged by Bourdieu, who said that the value of art objects are social construction and that the value does not exist in itself but formed by the dominant class. In several of his writings, Bourdieu stated this idea with strong emphasis. He said that art is actually an arena of class struggle but the struggle itself is not apparent because it is veiled by the doctrine of artistic value.
Digital Imaging: Painting with the Computer
Starting from the debate above, many questions and problems appears. At least there are several points of departure which are noted down in writings to spell a few ideas about reproductive art. One of the idea takes it up from Benjamin's statement that art works since the beginning always has reproductive character and are always “quotation”. He said that the works of a master will always be “quoted” by his students. Since works of art are always reproduction, Benjamin did not call his essay as “The Work of Art in The Age of Reproduction”, but he emphasized his point by adding the word “mechanical”, that is: “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. The title itself emphasizes the idea of the age of mechanical reproduction as an affirmation to the idea that works of art are basically reproductive. However, by adding the word “mechanical”, I think Benjamin tried to give a sort of context to his writing. During Benjamin's lifetime, one outstanding mechanical invention reached its peak of development, that is the printing technology in the midst of bubbling turbulence of industrial growth. The hub-bub of technology in those times has provided the impetus for Benjamin to write down in his essay that paintings will be challenged by photography, that theater will be challenged by movies. The same anxiety about the challenge posed by photography appeared among the painters. Even Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), who studied under Baron Antoine Jean Gros, declared that “from now on, painting is dead!” Delaroche's statement was a cue that the photographic technology will soon be spread far and wide and enable people to achieve identical mimesis, and surpass even the wildest dreams of artists in those days.
Alas, Benjamin's prophecy of the upcoming challenge for paintings by photography has receded. Its ebbing away is not caused by the superiority of paintings over photography but because photography flirts with digital technology. This combination results in the capability of producing photographs that are far better, or even totally different from the original shot taken by the photographer. This difference is only made possible by the advanced computer processing.
At present, the frequent use of computer is becoming a daily necessity for most of us. Paintings is not immune from this development. The advanced technology and fast stride in the development of computer software for painting simulation has been quite impressive. Several software that are commonly used for this purpose is Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter. These two software are commonly used by computer graphic (CG) artists to produce graphical images, complete with textures and brush strokes that are hardly distinguishable from real paintings.
Several notable CG artists whose works are quite representative of this genre is Linda Bergkvist (Sweden), Melani Delon (France) and several others. These two artists are among the more sophisticated among their fellows, at least according to this prominent site for CG artist, CGtalk.com. Melani won the award as best artists in France for CG category. While Matt Dixon, one of the CG artist who is quite skillful in making textures and computer images, produced work that looks like oil painting. When we browse the CG site or Linda's official website, we will be presented tips and tricks or more commonly known as tutorial.
By looking at one of the tricks that was presented by Linda Berkvist, we could see that CG tricks is quite complicated and involve many steps. The execution of the steps is as long and complex as painting on canvas with oil, especially in terms of toning colors. If the oil technique involve putting layers over layers of color where one waits for a layer to dry before superimposing another, the same thing is also done by CG artists, the difference being that they do not have to wait for any oil paint to dry, thanks to the graphical art software, then set the opacity or transparency variable, to fit the desired tone. Anne Morgan Spalter from Brown University, in her book Computer in Visual Art, made a prediction about the future of virtual painting. What was predicted by Walter Benjamin has been fulfilled, however in a way that is even beyond the prediction, though not everything that Benjamin predicted has happened. Take the case, for instance, of his prediction about the distribution that will break the boundaries of property asunder, which in a sense is a kind of obliteration of social class distinction. The hope of unlimited distribution is based on the power of mechanical technology (read: also including digital technology). However much less sophisticated methods are available to maintain the distinction. Public distributions of video art and other digital works is usually degraded and if the work is made to contract, then the winner of the contract will be provided with the same work in higher quality. In this way, what Benjamin has predicted is partially fulfilled, but not in a way that can assuage commodification and class distinction.
Painting in Digital Age
The world landscape that is being crowded by digital images not only builds a bustling arena for digital graphics or painting with computers. However, in a certain sense, the advances in computer technology can also be said to bring contribution to the good-old brush-and-canvas painting. It appears that the advances in computer technology is actually aimed at mimicking the ordinary methods of painting perfectly, however this perfection does not cause artists to switch entirely to computer in paintings. The softwares actually enrich the artists' tool in painting on the canvas. Many artists now show the impact of their encounter with the computer. We can see many artists are now using effects such as blurred, twisted, inverted color, etc., which was first introduced by the computer. This is quite clear from the work of many artists. This is a sign that the tendency to paint on canvas is not so dead as what have been predicted. (Syarifuddin)
