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Benjamin’s Aura, Levine’s Homage and Richter’s Effect

Randall K. Van Schepen

Discussions of Walter Benjamin’s legacy have long been haunted by the twin specters
of his seemingly incongruous interests…technology and memory, history and
contemporaneity, fragment and coherence, political theory and theology, accumulation
and collecting, Marxism and Messianic Judaism. The coexistence of these impulses in
Benjamin’s work is one explanation for why his work is championed by such varied
supporters. A body of criticism has grown up around each of these polar forces, with
Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem firing the opening salvos in the resulting battle.
If the themes were not so interwoven, one would be tempted to suggest that there are two
Benjamins. In what follows I will argue that because the reception of Benjamin has been
so skewed in favor of his role as a technological modernist, the extension of his ideas to
contemporary artists often resulted in a misunderstanding of their work. After discussing
some of the features of Benjamin’s aura, I will address the reception of Sherrie Levine
and Gerhard Richter in light of contemporary applications of Benjamin’s theory of
reproduction/aura.

Aura

There is no denying that Benjamin’s theory of aura quite evidently attends to the
revolutionary space opened up by its proposed decay. In perhaps Benjamin’s most
moralistic pronouncement on the aura’s decay, he declares that, “mechanical
reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitic dependence on ritual.” In this
way, the “new function” of images, which is only incidentally aesthetic, becomes
“politics” (Benjamin 1936b: 224-25). But it is equally clear that Benjamin was
nevertheless drawn to the way in which aura demonstrates Erfahrung. Hints of this
lingering auratic relationship remain in essays such as Benjamin’s ‘Edward Fuchs:
Collector and Historian’ (1937), ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939) and ‘The
Storyteller’ (1936). These essays discover the auratic at the point of disappearance: the
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death of the collector, the death of lyric poetry, and the death of oral narrative. So, too,
artistic aura only becomes recognizable under the signs of its demise.

Benjamin defines aura as related to uniqueness and to tradition: “a peculiar web of

space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” The
work’s location in space and its particular relation to the past, are “inseparable from its
being imbedded in the fabric of tradition” (Benjamin 1931: 20 and 1936b: 222). The
experience of aura arises from weight (tradition), distance (spatially/temporally),
hierarchy (the subservience of the viewer), institutions (housed in historical collections),
and mystery (its autonomous nature). One can discover a constellation of auratic
encounters throughout Benjamin’s texts, often without reference to aura by name.
Benjamin politically denounces aura in the ‘Work of Art’ essay, but elsewhere he seems
to mourn its loss or to actively pursue its effects. In fact, in his ‘Short History of
Photography’, Benjamin suggests that the aura cyclically disappears and reappears
through history. In addition to the ritual work of original art, in Benjamin’s other essays
aura is found in two loci: the fragment, and the collection.

As Richard Wolin notes, Benjamin analyzed fragments to avoid the illusion of

perfectibility inherent in classicism, to undermine the Enlightenment myth of
perfectibility through historical progress, and to mitigate against the Jewish proscription
against graven images (Wolin 1994: 59). In each case, the incomplete and contingent
fragment gives a glimpse of redemptive potential. In addition to allowing a glimpse of
trans-historical redemptive hope, the fragment could remain true to the complexity of
modern life. In his ‘Short History of Photography’, Benjamin discovers hints of
Messianic hope in the auratic fragments of Erfahrung/experience that are etched into the
image through the duration of the subject’s experience. Here, Benjamin suggests that a
fugitive trace of authenticity, of unfiltered subjectivity, of the subject living in and
through the experience of being photographed, can still be discovered in the plate
photograph, which is itself an original.1 Benjamin searches for that fragment in
photography, “something that cannot be silenced […] a magical value […] tiny sparks of
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chance, of the here and now, with which reality has […] seared the character in the
picture” (Benjamin 1972: 7).

Likewise, in the form of the collection and in the figure of the collector Benjamin
evokes the aura to theorize their redemptive possibilities. Benjamin says of collected
objects, it is “not that they come alive in [the collector]; it is he who lives in them.” The
collector searches for auratic fragments that represent the wholeness of Erfahrung. These
objects release a “springtide of memories.” In an example of Proustian memoire
involuntaire, Benjamin is enthralled by the aura of his book collection: “one has only to
watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he
seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired” (Benjamin
1931: 60-61). In qualities that echo those of photography, the book’s ironic status as a
“unique copy,” its provenance, and the life represented within its pages give the collector
a subjectively auratic experience. John Parker notes that Benjamin sees the collector as
the redeemer of fragments, which would otherwise be “crushed by the weight of so much
historical accumulation” (Parker 1997). The collector sees through the object to its past
and dreams of “a world which was not only far–off in distance and in time, but which
was also a better one […] in which things were free from the bondage of being useful”
(Benjamin 1999: 207).

Reception

In light of the more nuanced theorizations of the aura that bracket his 1936 ‘Work of
Art’ essay, it comes as a disappointment to find Benjamin’s more trenchant critique of
aura isolated and used as the primary representation of his position vis-à-vis
reproduction. The ‘Work of Art’ essay’s more narrow account of the loss of aura, as well
as its critique of the creation of false aura in film, have been among its most frequently
employed ideas since its English publication in Illuminations. The dominance of the
definition of aura in the ‘Work of Art’ essay over other uses of the term in the ‘Short
History of Photography’ and other essays is in large part to its easy accessibility in this
anthology. In addition, the essay’s clear political preference for the progressive potential
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of image reproduction technologies made it seem tailor-made for the 1960s and 1970s
photographic-based conceptualism of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbra Kruger, and
Richard Prince. Photographic conceptualism employed mundane subjects and the use of
captions to undermine the romantic legacy of Abstract Expressionism. And using a
Benjaminian framework, Rosalind Krauss called these works “theoretical” rather than
material objects (Krauss 1999: 291).

It is no mistake that the essay critics most frequently employ to analyze art is among
his most materialist analyses, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
(1936). Stridently political, the ‘Work of Art’ essay was a frequently used critical tool to
analyze appropriationist art of the 1980s and 1990s. It is my argument that, despite the
‘Work of Art’ essay’s Brechtian political intentions and relatively undialectical theory of
reproducibility, Benjamin’s more mystical sensitivity is evidently an important
counterpart to his progressive championing of technology. It is especially present in his
idea of the aura, which is ascribed a counter-revolutionary role in 1936.

Benjamin maintains that a glimpse of authentic experience (Erfahrung) can pierce

through the veil of our present material conditions. Benjamin’s notion of aura, developed
in the ‘Work of Art’ essay and elsewhere, glimpses a redeemed, authentic moment. As
Talal Assad suggests, even though Benjamin celebrates the disappearance of the
hierarchical system on which aura depends, he also seems to recognize in its demise an
“undermining of historicity” (Assad 2002).

Postmodern Application

The ‘Work of Art’ essay’s stridently materialist analyses of culture and its relatively
jargon-free style made it a favorite theoretical source for postmodern critics trying to get
a handle on the contemporary relationship between photography and traditional artistic
media. Rosalind Krauss, for example, obviously predicates her understanding of the
nature of artistic media since the 1960s on Benjamin’s theory of reproduction in her
‘Reinventing the Medium’:
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The perfect instance of a multiple-without-an-original, the photograph – in its

structural status as copy – marked the site of so many ontological cave-ins. The
burgeoning of the copy not only facilitated the quotation of the original but
splintered the supposed unity of the original “itself” into nothing but a series of
quotations. And, in the place of what was formerly an author, the operator of
these quotes, in being redefined as pasticheur, was repositioned on the other side
of the copybook to join, schizophrenically, the mass of its readers (Krauss 1999:
290).

Situated in relation to the advent of postmodernism and pastiche, Krauss posits the copy’s
role in making all works into a collage of quotations; but, even more importantly, she
suggests that the producer of the work joins its reader in perceiving the splintering of the
original. Krauss further suggests that the significance of the ‘Work of Art’ essay comes
from the manner in which Benjamin takes his discussion of the decay of aura happening
within photography in his 1931 ‘A Short History of Photography’ and extends this decay
“throughout all culture” in the 1936 “Work of Art” essay. Krauss and other October
authors thereby treated Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay as a valuable comprehensive
materialist theory of culture that could be unproblematically lifted from the 1930s and
transferred to the postmodern situation.

Adorno critiqued the fact that Benjamin’s 1936 theory of the decay of aura depended
on an undialectical articulation of materialist changes in cultural production. Despite
early protests about its undialectical character by Adorno, what appealed to postmodern
critics was the binary nature of Benjamin’s 1936 definitions, of traditional artistic media
as counter-revolutionary and auratic and of technological reproduction as progressively
political.2 Krauss, Craig Owens, Benjamin Buchloh, and others used his 1936
formulation in order to argue against 1980s painting in favor of politically-minded
photographically based conceptualism. In order to propose Benjamin’s 1936 theory of
technology as appropriate for postmodernism, many of these critics had to ignore his
more dialectically conflicted and nuanced notions of aura. But even in the ‘Work of Art’
essay, Benjamin admits that the positive, revolutionary potentials of reproductive
technologies came at a loss. Benjamin displays a decidedly ambivalent attitude about the
“withering away of aura,” even as he trumpets this loss as a political gain.3 In Sherrie
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Levine and Gerhard Richter, Benjamin’s theory faces two particularly “hard cases,”
presenting issues which bring applications of Benjamin’s reproducibility theory to its
breaking point.

Michael Mandiberg, Untitled (AfterSherriLevine.com/2.jpg), digital image, accessed via

http://www.aftersherrielevine.com/images2.html, August 23, 2007.

It is the light of the narrower Benjaminian interpretation that Sherrie Levine’s work
came to be known. Levine’s notorious early works are images from modern photographic
masters re-photographed. Levine’s works after Walker Evans (Levine’s After Walker
Evans, 4 [1987] can be seen at: http://www.aftersherrielevine.com/), Alexander
Rodchenko and even Edward Weston, artists whose political and artistic principles were
forged in times contemporaneous to Benjamin’s, seem most evocative. In what follows I
will discuss Levine’s engagement with Evans as particularly interesting in light of
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Benjamin. By appropriating the Evans images, Levine transforms his heart-on-his-sleeve

liberal politics into a postmodernist intervention into the politics of representation.

That Levine’s photographic works are understood as operating according to

Benjaminian principles is indicated by Howard Singerman, Levine’s most astute critic:
“photography after Benjamin [is the] model for Levine’s practice” (Singerman 2002:
105). By choosing subjects from before Benjamin, Levine points to how present
technologies transform our interpretation of past art. Critics such as Benjamin Buchloh,
Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss and Abigail Solomon-Godeau understood Levine’s
work as participating in a materialist “dismantling of reified, idealist conceptions
enshrined in modernist aesthetics—issues devolving on presence, subjectivity, and
aura”(Solomon-Godeau 1990: 61).4 These critics asserted that Levine’s photographs
participated in destroying the most sacred concepts of traditionalist critical discourse such
as authorial intention, expression, uniqueness and originality. Krauss, for one, argued that
Levine’s work set in motion “a discourse of reproductions without originals” (Krauss
1985: 168).5 As such, Levine’s work, perhaps more directly than any other, came to be
seen as a logical extension of Duchampian conceptualism into the postmodern ”death of
the author” thesis. Her defiant use of reproduction undermined the authority of the author
in favor of the reader of the work.

Yet, Howard Singerman, in his first review of Levine’s work, moves up to the edge
of another potential response to Levine’s work and then turns back:

I want to acknowledge this, to stress [Levine’s photograph’s] materiality and even

to suggest, although I am not clear on quite how far to press it, that the experience
of the materiality of things carries in it an affective time that exceeds the
structuring of space – a sense of time as such, of the sort that might be suggested
by Benjamin’s linking of experience and the potter’s hands … (Singerman 1994:
104).

Singerman roots his experience of this “sense of time as such” in the work’s “materiality”
but also acknowledges that there is something in excess of that materiality that sanctions
his affective responses. One might question whether any such trace of human presence or
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any significant material response to Levine’s slickly photographic work is possible.

Singerman pulls back from his description of this romanticized encounter, one that
explicitly draws on Benjamin’s auratic metaphor, largely, one suspects, from a restraint
imposed by his critical frame but also perhaps as a result of the limited evidence of
Levine’s hand. Richard Shiff (1992) suggests that touch is essential to Benjamin’s aura,
that the auratic object is one we wish to handle or which gives evidence of being handled.
In the phrase Singerman quotes from, as a story “bears the marks of the storyteller…[so]
the earthen vessel bears the marks of the potter’s hand” (Benjamin 1939: 159). Benjamin
potter metaphor points to how one finds fugitive signs of human presence as recoverable
traces in the fading tradition of storytelling (Benjamin 1936a: 92). But Singerman’s
choice of this particular Benjaminian auratic metaphor for Levine instead highlights the
lack of handmade-ness in her work.

Despite the lack of material richness that might subjectivize experience or extend
one’s encounter, there is nevertheless a quality of Levine’s work that seems to suspend
time – the doppelganger-effect that evokes the uncanny through the slippage between the
different versions of the image. The difficulty of “seeing a Levine” comes from being
unable to distinguish her work from Evans’ and then further from the degree to which we
can say that we still encounter Evans’ original subject. Distance, in other words, might
point to another characteristic of Benjamin’s aura invoked by Levine’s work. Despite
Shiff’s compelling argument for the centrality of touch for aura, Benjamin also notes that
the aura’s mystique comes from our inability to touch its source […] from the desire that
distance enhances. In his descriptions of “distance, however close at hand,” of prying
open the aura’s “shell,” or of the book collector peering through the glass, Benjamin
notes the almost erotic enticement of this unfulfilled desire. Instead of searching for the
source of his auratic response to Levine’s work in its materiality, Singerman could have
noted how Levine’s work provides an experience of distance, no matter how close the
image is. Our difficulty is a difficulty of siting her work in order to sight her interventions
even as she cites others; or, as Singerman puts it, ““Levine looks in both Evans’s place
and ours, and in so doing she establishes a disjunction between the camera’s look and our
own” (Singerman 1994: 104).
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Recently Levine expressed a desire that her work be seen independently from its
original interpretive frame of “oppositional postmodernism” (Levine 1985: 141-44). In an
astute observation, Levine suggests that her photographic work facilitates looking
through layers. Such an understanding gets beyond seeing them as critiques of originality
to their phenomenological effect. Looking at Levine, at Evans, and at Allie Mae
Burroughs within the Levine suggests a similarity to Benjamin’s seeing through an object
“to a distant past” in its aura. Perhaps the biggest difference between Levine and
Benjamin on this point is that the object Benjamin sees through is most often a souvenir
of the past, layered with experience and patina, carrying with it physical evidence of the
authenticity of its encounters. Levine’s work is severed from this continuity and instead
represents a rupture between her moment and Evans’. The experience is thereby one of
shock. But to say that Levine’s work is entirely disjunctive would be to say nothing of the
continued effect of being faced with Allie Mae or Floyd Burroughs. As much as an
undermining of authorial intention, one might suggest that Levine’s practice
demonstrates the perseverance of its subjects through the image’s many reproductive
iterations.

The application of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay to Levine’s photographs was a

way for a group of disenchanted leftist critics to ignore Evans’ populist subjects and to
transform his old-fashioned liberal protests into a postmodern strategy of textual play.
One might say that the 1936 Benjamin and the 1936 Evans come face to face in the 1981
Levine. Levine’s faithfulness to the originals also replays their modernist attempts at
truly authentic representation. If our present cynicism precludes any such modernist
hopes, then Levine’s maintenance of this dream in the Evans images serves to
demonstrate our increasing distance from it.

One’s internal dialogue about viewing Levine’s Evans works might sound something
like this: “I know that I am not looking at the Walker Evans that appears to be in front of
me. I am looking at a Levine. At the same time, I am also not looking at Allie Mae
Burroughs, but at Evans’ image of her. And yet, virtually every artistic choice has been
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made by Evans and Allie Mae did (presumably) look like this.” Every representational
photograph is a delamination like this, of conceptual and perceptual knowledge. Levine’s
works heighten this delamination by making a point of severing the original photograph
from its indexical source; but where the signs of this original separation are made a part
of the original work’s effect in its framing and photographic choices, Levine’s
photographic intervention is not perceptually discernable from its source, the Evans.
Levine’s doubling of Evans is uncanny. Freud notes that the uncanny double functions as
an “insurance against the destruction of the ego” but also as a “harbinger of death” (Freud
1953: 219-252).

Levine’s describes her works as “ghosts of ghosts.” Ghosts are, of course, elements of
the past that continue to appear, but without a corporeal existence. Levine’s photographs
speak to us without a body but through a chain of traces (Siegel 1985: 142). Levine’s
goal has become to make work “that has as much aura as its reference” (LeWallen 1993:
60). But it is clear that Levine is trying to do so on the basis of incorporeal distance alone,
trying to discover an eruption of the real arising from a fragmentary instance of
difference, from the tension produced between two virtually indistinguishable auratic
originals.

In setting the goal of creating aura from a succession of reproductions Levine has
presented herself with an intractable, perhaps impossible, problem. But that she makes
this attempt at all speaks to the continued relevance of the aura for her work and to the
bankruptcy of understanding her original copies as one-sidedly anti-auratic. As a
commentary on Levine's re-investment in aura via the reproduction, artist Michael
Mandiberg recently launched a website (http://www.aftersherrielevine.com/) with high
quality scans of the Levine catalog of her photographs of Evans' originals. The
illustration accompanying this essay is a digital copy of one of Mandiberg's scans. By
making copies of the Levine images available via the Internet Mandiberg suggests that
Levine's re-investment in the limited edition photograph, despite the fact that her limited
edition is a reproduction, misreads Benjamin's desire to see the image set free from ritual
control. Perhaps Mandiberg's point is made by the fact that, even though Levine promptly
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and generously provided images rights for this essay, she needed to defer to the
Metropolitan Museum's decision as to the Evans image rights. But Levine's deferral to
the authority of the original image and to the museum are ways in which Levine's works
provide a challenge to Benjaminian paradigm, commonly understood.

Gerhard Richter, Courbet, 1986. Oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm © Gerhard Richter
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Gerhard Richter, Lesende, 1994. Oil on canvas, 72 x 102 cm © Gerhard Richter

Levine’s work is perhaps the most direct, face-to-face, photographic confrontation

with the Benjaminian effects of reproduction. Gerhard Richter’s work, however, more
consistently deals with the post-Benjaminian relationship between reproduced imagery
and painting. Richter’s simultaneous stylistic diversity has become a textbook example of
postmodern decenteredness. According to his friend Benjamin Buchloh, Richter
rehearses the various tropes of artistic production, from abstraction to representation to
photographs, in order to undermine modernism’s reigning orthodoxies.

And yet, at odds with the dominant modes of postmodern photographic

conceptualism, Richter identifies himself as a painter, a suspect identity for particular
critics of contemporary art. In what Krauss calls our “post-medium” age, painting is said
to be “a possibility we can barely remember… [and] … drawing seems obviously best
left to computers” (Krauss 1997: 59). But Richter is able to avoid the critical approbation
of Krauss’s circle because his is a presumably self-critical practice. Despite the fact that
Richter produces highly crafted works, Buchloh, for example, denies that Richter’s art
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can be understood as a “nostalgic claim to reconstruct the fiction of an authentic identity

centered in the body or the aura of the artisanal artifact” (Buchloh 1999).

And yet, Richter frequently resists the characterization of his work as ironic or
critical. In a brief selection from perhaps the most famous interview exchange between a
critic and artist in the last thirty years, Buchloh spars with Richter in 1988 on the viability
of painting, indicating the gulf between their positions:

Buchloh: “[Your abstract paintings are] not a negation of content, not painting-as-
fact, not an ironic parody of present day expressionism?”
Richter: “No.”
Buchloh: “Not a perversion of gestural abstraction? Not irony?”
Richter: “Certainly not! What kind of questions are these? How can my pictures
be devoid of content, and what is this content that the Abstract Expressionists are
supposed to have had as distinct from me?” (Richter 1995: 154).

Where Buchloh wishes to read Richter’s work as a negation of pictorial convention,

Richter still hopes to “achieve” and to “express” something through painting. But
Richter’s faith in painting is not blind. He acknowledges the dominance, even the
supremacy, of the photographic field over painting.

In what follows I would like to address how Richter’s use of photographic imagery in
painting provides a profound challenge to Benjamin’s 1936 theory of reproduction.
Richter’s photopaintings, oil paintings derived from banal photographic sources that
employ a characteristic blurring effect, are particularly interesting in relation to
Benjamin’s theory of reproduction. Richter’s work reveals the ability of painting to
acknowledge the Benjaminian field of reproductive imagery without admitting it as a
limiting activity. In fact, Richter’s explicit use of photography extends painting’s field of
influence, proving its continued relevance.
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Gerhard Richter, 18. Oktober 1977: Jungenbildnis, 1988. Oil on canvas, 72 x 62 cm

© Gerhard Richter

One of the primary critiques of Richter’s blurred paintings, especially when they
employ politically charged imagery, is that they serve romantically to obfuscate the
original image’s truthful details. Richter’s fog of paint denies access to the objective
details of the original photographed scene that might seep into the present. Richter’s most
controversial and powerful series of paintings on the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof
terrorist group, 18.Oktober.1977 was the recipient of such approbation. Such an objection
assigns a function for the photographer similar to that of Benjamin in 1931, that he is a
descendant “of the augurs and haruspices” who must “uncover guilt and name the guilty”
(Benjamin 1975: 25).
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If the revolutionary role of the photographer is as a witness to the tragedies of history,

then Richter’s obfuscation of the image’s truth-telling capability is politically suspect.
One critic, politically sympathetic to the leftist goals of the Baader-Meinhof group,
critiques Richter’s series on just these grounds: “Revelation is needed, not mourning or
the over-painting of that which remains…Art…should reveal not conceal” (Heyme 1989:
15). Are Richter’s professed distaste for the group’s politics and his blurring of particular
photographic details merely a conservative response to leftist political events? According
to this interpretation of Richter’s blur, might it be an analogue to what Adorno calls the
culture industry’s “decaying aura as foggy mist”?6 Richter’s work witnesses to its time,
but not, apparently, in the manner that Buchloh or leftist critics would prefer.

True, Richter’s translation of photographic imagery into paint comes with a loss of
specific historical information but it does so with an aesthetic gain not recoverable in the
original clarity of the photograph. Richter says that his occlusion of specifics in his
photopaintings reveals, “that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the
same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality” (Richter 1995: 64)
Richter realizes that the politically loaded nature of works such as those on the Baader-
Meinhof group, fosters a desire for visual supremacy. Clear details allow one to move
quickly from image to ideological conclusion. But Richter’s softening of the image slows
and complicates our perception to the point of delaying such a reflexive ideological
response.

Here one might note that the experience of Richter’s photopaintings and Levine’s
photographs is one of distance from an unavailable source. But where the degree of
translation is clearly manifest in Richter, Levine actively suppresses the visual
acknowledgement of this process, shifting it to the work’s title. Ironically, compared to
Levine’s photographs, Richter’s paintings’ greater physical and sensual effect does not
guarantee a greater perceptibility. Despite a palpable materiality, Richter’s
photopaintings seem to hover in an indeterminate space just beyond the viewer’s reach,
whereas Levine’s easy readability is given no material body. Photographs act like mirrors
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by not calling attention to their surface but to something beyond their planar surface. This
immateriality is the default nature of the image in print photography. But paintings must
struggle to achieve a comparable level of physical self-denial. Modernist criticism was an
attempt to account for how a purely visual experience dialectically turned materiality into
visuality. Rather than emphasizing the transformation of an immaterial photographic
image into a sensually embodied form, Richter’s blurring draws out of the photograph its
auratic potential.

Despite their traditional materials and subject matter, Richter’s photopaintings

nevertheless more effectively point to their photographic source than more technically
based modes of expression such as Warhol’s silkscreens or appropriationism. Richter’s
mimicking of the photograph’s focus points to the inaccessibility of the original
photographic subject. Richter emphasizes the haunting and spectral appearance of the
image more than the sensual presence of paint. Richter’s effect directly addresses the
problem between photography and art Benjamin notices in 1931.

In his ‘Short History of Photography’, Benjamin suggests that the discussion about
the relation between photography and art had already hardened into a debate about “the
aesthetics of photography as an art,” rather than the more troubling possibility “of art as
photography” (Benjamin 1972:22). Richter’s photopaintings seem to aim for precisely
this issue. Richter’s use of the photograph is not “as a means to painting,” but in order to
“use painting as a means to photography” – to steal the power of photographs for painting
(Richter 1995: 73).7 Rather than pillage photography for its subjects of frame, Richter
incorporates its “means.” Richter’s blur is the method he uses to explore these
photographic means. Here Richter’s approach is quite distinct from that of photorealists
such as Richard Estes or Audrey Flack. The photorealist strives to emulate the
photograph’s technical mastery of detail, especially the effects of reflection or refraction.
Rather than transposing the dazzling clarity of the photograph into paint, Richter
frustrates our immediate and facile desire to identify image and photograph through his
opaque painted surfaces. The photorealist feeds our desire for visual omnipotence where
Richter’s image is enveloped in a mist that encourages a reflexive state of perceptual
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ambiguity. Richter’s photopaintings pull our perception somewhere beyond (“into”) the
surface of the painting but have it fall short of completely accessing the image. The
photopaintings are not sharp enough to reveal what Roland Barthes called the punctum of
the photograph, that detail, usually in a portrait, where a fugitive instance of the real is
recoverable. Benjamin too saw this anecdotal detail, or chance fragment, as a vision of
redemptive hope seared into the picture. Despite their differences, both Barthes and
Benjamin found the continued presence of the past in the photograph’s chance effect, in a
fragment, an idiosyncratic detail, a random spark.

But Richter’s photopaintings take the opposite tact by obscuring the very auratic
detail that awaits our discovery. Instead, Richter relocates this experience of authenticity,
of immediacy and of cross-temporal connection in the space suspended between
perceptual apprehension and memory that is evoked by the blurred image’s ambiguous
state. The experience of perception is one of duration instead of instantaneousness. If the
subject seems live in paint the beholder seems to live through their experience of the
subject. Unlike Levine’s recontextualized but “untransformed” images, Richter’s images
seem to exist in a state of constant transformation.

As with Benjamin’s meditation on a photograph of Kafka, or in Barthes’ gazing at the

photograph of his recently deceased mother, the poignancy of Richter’s effect is felt most
vividly when the subjects of his photopaintings come to a tragic end. Whether the
murdered prostitute Helga Matura, or the student nurse victims of murderer Richard
Speck, or the student portrait of terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, Richter’s doomed subjects bear
our retrospective looks as we prophetically read into them their fate. In contrast to
Benjamin’s revolutionary photographer, a modern prophet, our experience of the fated
victims in Richter’s works is one of pathos and identification tinged with a photographic
melancholy. Our retrospective prophecy as to the subject’s future makes us omnipotent in
knowledge of their ill fate but impotent to change it. The veil that Richter pulls across the
image seductively allures us into a realization of our failure to grasp a reliable image of
the past.
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Gerhard Richter, Atlas pages 472-75. Collaged photographs © Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter, Mao, 1968. Callotype, composition and sheet, 84 x 59 cm

© Gerhard Richter
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“If anything characterizes the relations between art and photography

today, it is the unresolved tension introduced between them by the
photography of works of art” (Benjamin 1972: 23).

In this statement, which sounds as if it could have come from the mouth of Richter,
Benjamin points to the manner in which the appreciation of art (art history) is not only
now dependent on reproductions, but also how they are, in a real sense, at odds with one
another. The freely circulating photograph and the static and hierarchical original work
have a built-in antagonistic relationship. Benjamin’s statement politically critiques the
continued ritualization of art and heralds the progressive potential of reproductivity. But
one could also apply his question about what happens with “the photography of works of
art” to a more recent development in Richter’s work that is another way in which his
work represents a challenge to Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay … his making
photographic multiples of his photopaintings.

Richter has re-photographed photographs for most of his career, usually incorporating
them into his Atlas in a standardized format, but occasionally, as with his Mao
photograph (1968), as independent works themselves. Only recently, however, has
Richter begun to produce photographic multiples of his photopaintings. These
photographs remove the photopainting’s painterly and material character, giving the
images a smoothly seamless uniformity accentuated by Richter’s pushing the image even
further out of focus than in the paintings. Benjamin notes in the ‘Work of Art’ essay how,
“to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed
for reproducibility” (Benjamin 1936b: 224). Certain panels from Atlas use this effect.
Richter’s photopainting blur (which had always contained an allusion to movement,
either of the artist’s hand dragging the brush to obscure the image or of the subject in the
image) is transformed in these photographs into an out-of-focus character so drastic as to
only hint at the nature of the subject. Yet, the perceptual effect, as in the photopaintings,
is striking, perhaps even more so. One finds oneself plumbing the depths of the space in
which the image exists without ever grasping the image itself. Following Richter’s
photopaintings, the photographs temporally extend the modernist unity of aesthetic
 20

experience by slowing perception. Ironically, Richter’s photopaintings are more vividly

three-dimensional-looking than sharply defined images are.

The use of the “out-of-focus” is not new to the history of painting or photography.
Photographers have long understood the evocative potential of the out-of-focus, even to
the point of making it a kitsch effect. Gertrude Kasebier’s Romantic photographs are
among the first examples of this practice. But if Kasebier and Pictorialist photographers
used soft-focus lenses to achieve the look of painting, Richter employs a deep out-of-
focus effect to achieve the effect of photography in paint or to extend the experience of
photography itself in his photographic multiples. Richter’s image technologies, painterly
and photographic, auraticize the image in experience. Richter’s resuscitation of painting
through this effect seems designed to prove that photography as well as original auratic
paintings can “reflect back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill.”
Benjamin says that photographs satiate our desire by providing “food for the hungry,” but
that painting facilitates an unattainable desire (Benjamin 1939: 187). Richter’s
photopaintings and his photographic multiples of paintings, however, both elicit this state
of constant longing.

Conclusion

“Benjamin…has either been enthroned as the patron saint of a new

functional art or condemned to scholastic irrelevance as an arch-
defender of the realm of pure spirit” (Wolin 1994: 159).

This assessment of Benjamin’s reception by Richard Wolin astutely notes its

polarized nature. It should come as no surprise, then, that we find throughout Benjamin’s
theory of photography a comparable tension between his belief in the functionalist
progressive potential of reproduction, which he powerfully expresses in his 1936 ‘Work
of Art’ essay, and his interest in the spirit of the aura, which is woven through that essay
and elsewhere. Three years after the ‘Work of Art’ essay, Benjamin adjusted his
definition of aura to allow for its greater subjective determination, saying that aura is
 21

a response common to human relationships, to the relationship between the

inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is
being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object means to
invest it with the ability to look at us in return (Benjamin 1939: 188).

In other words, Benjamin himself comes to acknowledge that the experience of the aura
is not limited to the historical moment preceding the image’s technological
reproducibility; nor can aura be limited to traditionally hieratic and ritualistic works of
art; rather, the experience of the aura is quintessentially human—the experience of
ascribing subjective dimensions to objects of perception. Benjamin’s binary formulation
of the status of aura in 1936 thereby gives way to a more expansive view of the role of
the auratic in human experience. In fact, in a not-often noted irony, Benjamin himself
bases his theory of the difference between the auratic, unique photographic plate and the
non-auratic easily captured paper print on his analysis of 100 re-printed photographs in a
book of reproductions published in 1930 (Benjamin 1972: note 1).

Richter and Levine, each in their own way and with varying degrees of success,
engage with the seamless field of reproductive technology in order to discover something
shyly withheld by photography. When Gianni Vattimo suggests that one must “unmask”
Benjamin’s “unmasking,” he catches both the power of Benjamin’s aspiration to reveal
the workings of ideology in image production while nevertheless noting how the
limitations within Benjamin’s work also need to be uncovered. The kind of
demystification that critics demand of Richter and Levine’s work, a demand derived from
a narrow and anti-auratic reading of Benjamin, results in what Mario Perniola calls a
“leveling [of] art [to its] most insignificant reality, reducing it to an instrument of
recreation and edifying spectacle” (Perniola 1995: 48).8 In a search for sites of resistance
to a culture obsessed with functionalism and the instrumental use of art, the experience of
the aura is an unexpected ally.
 22

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor (1936) ‘Letter from Adorno to Benjamin, March 18, 1936.’ New Left
Review. No. 81, p. 67; accessed at http://www.newleftreview.net/?page=article&view=14
on October 31, 2006.

______________ (1991) ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered.’ The Culture Industry:

Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge; accessed via
http://alum.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/culture_reconsidered.txt on December 2, 2005.

______________ (1990) ‘The Curves of the Needle.’ Trans. Thomas Y. Levin. October.
Vol. 55, Winter, pp. 48-55.

Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

_________ (2002) ‘Interview.’ AsiaSource. 2002; accessed

http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/asad.cfm on December 2, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter (1931) ‘Unpacking My Library’. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt.

New York: Schocken Books, pp. 59-67.

_____________ (1936a) ‘The Storyteller’. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New

York: Schocken Books, pp. 83-109.

_____________ (1936b) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt New York, Schocken Books, pp. 217-251.

_____________ (1939) ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah

Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, pp. 155-200.

_____________ (1972, Spring) ‘A Short History of Photography’. Screen. Vol. 13, No.
1, pp. 5-26.

_____________ (1999) Selected Walter Benjamin: Writings Volume 2, Harvard

University Press.

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. (1982, September) ‘Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and

Montage in Contemporary Art’. Artforum. Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 43-56.

____________________ (1999, Spring) ‘Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive’.

October. Issue 88, p. 117-48; accessed via EBSCO http://0-
web.ebscohost.com.helin.uri.edu/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=114&sid=ba9d78f3-6b6f-
4dd9-b733-6e1a3345d796%40sessionmgr103 on January 10, 2005.

Crimp, Douglas (1983) ‘Appropriating Appropriation’. Image Scavengers. University of

Pennsylvania: Institute of Contemporary Art.
 23

Freud, Sigmund. (1953) ‘The Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17. Ed. & Trans. James Strachey. London:
Hogarth, pp. 219-252.

Frydryczak, Beata (2003) ‘Walter Benjamin’s Idea of Collecting as a Postmodern Way of

Participation in Culture’. Información Filosófica. Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 180-187.

Heyme, Hansgünther (1989, April) ‘Trauerarbeit der - Kunst muss sich klarer geben’.
Art: Das Kunstmagazin. Vol. 4, p. 15.

Krauss, Rosalind (1985) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.
Cambridge: MIT Press.

_____________ (1997, Summer) ‘“... And Then Turn Away?” An Essay on James
Coleman’. October. Issue 81, pp. 5-35; accessed via EBSCO http://0-
web.ebscohost.com.helin.uri.edu/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=114&sid=50b22d03-c36f-
49c1-9edb-4435d549ffc3%40sessionmgr104 on October 31, 2006.

_____________ (1999, Winter) ‘Reinventing the Medium’. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 25, No.
1, pp. 289-305.

Levine, Sherrie (1987) ‘Five Comments’. Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings

by Contemporary Artists. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary
Art, pp. 92-93.

Lewallen, Constance (1993, Winter) ‘Sherrie Levine’. Journal of Contemporary Art. Vol.
6 No. 2, pp. 59-83.

Parker, John (1997, March) ‘The Dialectics of Allegoresis: Historical Materialism in

Benjamin's Illuminations’. Other Voices. Vol. 1, No. 1; accessed at
http://www.othervoices.org/parkerj/benj.html on May 15, 2006.

Perniola, Mario (1995) Enigmas: the Egyptian moment in society and art. New York:
Verso.

Richter, Gerhard (1995) Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Ed. Hans-
Ulrich Obrist. London: Thames and Hudson.

Shiff, Richard (1992) ‘Handling Shocks: On the Representation of Experience in Walter

Benjamin’s Analogies’. Oxford Art Journal. Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 88-103.

Siegel, Jeanne (1985, Summer) ‘After Sherrie Levine’. Arts Magazine. Vol. 59, No. 10,
pp. 141-4.
 24

Singerman, Howard (1994, Winter) ‘Seeing Sherrie Levine’. October. Vol. 67, pp. 79-
107.
________________ (2002, Summer) ‘Sherrie Levine’s Art History’. October. Vol. 101,
pp. 96-121.
________________ (2004, Autumn) ‘Sherrie Levine: On Painting’. RES. Vol. 46, pp.
202-220.

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail (1990) ‘Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the

Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics.’ The Critical Eye. Ed., Carol Squires. Seattle: Bay Press.

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 25

Notes

1
In plate photography, the subject was trained to “live through” their experience of being
photographed rather than being caught by a snapshot. This “livedness” caused the images
to “resemble well-drawn or painted portraits” and to “have a more penetrating and lasting
effect on the spectator” than print photography (Orlik in Benjamin 1972: p. 17). Adorno,
following Benjamin’s “Short History” formulation, says, “history drove out of
photographs the shy relation to the speechless subject that still reigned in daguerreotypes,
replacing it with photographic sovereignty” (Adorno, 1990: p. 49).
2
In a series of exchanges translated and printed in New Left Review in September-
October 1973, Adorno, summarizes a more extensive critique of Benjamin’s theory of
aura and reproduction by saying, “You underestimate the technicality of autonomous art
and over-estimate that of dependent art; this, in plain terms, would be my main objection”
(Adorno 1936).
3
Wolin notes, however, that even in the most materialist years of his criticism, Benjamin
nevertheless still admitted to the continuing influence of the Kabbala and Messianic
Judiasm on his work (Wolin 1994: 248-250).
4
This is not to deny, of course, the clear relationship of her photographic works to other
more linguistic critical frameworks, such as Baudrillard’s simulacrum and especially the
‘Death of the Author’ theses of Foucault and Barthes—this Levine rephrased as “the birth
of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter” (Levine 1987: 92-93).
5
For Buchloh, Levine’s photographs were institutional frames, setting not Evans or
Weston on display, but the entire apparatus of capitalist commodification of art (Buchloh
1982: 56). For Krauss, Levine’s photos after Edward Weston’s nudes demonstrated a
critique of originality, a “discourse of reproductions without originals” in which there can
be no original photograph and there can be no original nude (Krauss 1985: 168).
Solomon-Godeau was interested in the way that Levine and Richard Prince challenged
the “pieties and proprieties with which art photography had carved a space for itself
precisely as a modernist form” (Solomon-Godeau 1990: 61). Solomon-Godeau’s article,
‘Living with Contradictions,’ is largely about trying to address the problems posed with
Levine’s new interpretations of her work beginning in the mid-1980s, which depart from
earlier critical accounts, as well as the fact that photographic appropriative aesthetics
began to be increasingly used by markedly conservative elements within postmodernism.
6
The full quote from Adorno is, “Adopting Benjamin's designation of the traditional
work of art by the concept of aura, the presence of that which is not present, the culture
industry is defined by the fact that it does not strictly counterpose another principle to
that of aura, but rather by the fact that it conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By
this means the culture industry betrays its own ideological abuses” (Adorno 1991).
7
The complete quote from Richter is, “I’m not trying to imitate a photograph; I’m trying
to make one. And if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper
 26

exposed to light, then I am practicing photography by other means; I’m not producing
paintings that remind you of a photograph but producing photographs. And, seen in this
way, those of my paintings that have no photographic source (the abstracts, etc.) are also
photographs” (Richter 1995: 73).