HOW CAN CREATIVE PRACTICE BE RELEVANT POLITICALLY
Walter Benjamin was born in Germany in 1892. He was Jewish and while fleeing the Nazis, committed suicide in 1940, before the Second World War. Although he wrote extensively much of his work was never finished. During his lifetime only two of his books were published. ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ is an essay that was written in 1936.
Benjamin presents the argument that because of Mechanical Reproduction, especially photography and cinema, art has lost its aura. He talks about art as being an object of ritual or cult value. A value gained by context, time and space. On the other hand mechanically reproduced work has no such value.
Benjamin appears to sit on the fence when presenting this argument and this is what I found most frustrating about this reading. Benjamin was a Marxist. Marx believed in a classless and stateless society, in bringing power to the people. Benjamin is heralding the photography and film as the new art of the people. At the same time he also appears to be mourning the loss of the aura of art, the loss of distance providing a unique experience. “The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to contemplation “(Benjamin 62).
Benjamin appears to be ambivalent towards the consequences of the new technologies for propaganda purposes; the function of art is reversed. “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice-politics’” (Benjamin 53). Photographs are constantly used in the political arena, a famous image is Huyn Cong Ut’s photo of the Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack. “Since the Vietnam War, governments have gone to considerable lengths to make such images, and the reactions they may provoke, difficult to come by”, (1).
The work is endlessly reproducible therefore “to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense” (Benjamin 53).

Benjamin, ‘The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ reprinted in Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner ed.s, Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001
1. Campbell, “Horrific Blindness: images of death in contemporary media”, Jounal for Cultural research, Vol.8, No.1, Routledge, 2004