More on Berger

This post will attempt to answer, in terms of Berger's essay, what are the effects of reproduction on artworks?

After Berger finishes with his dispute with the Hals art critic, and after he speaks of the mystification of the art object as something turned into a "holy relic," Berger reflects further on the meaning of reproduction. He writes that, in the age of reproduction "the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable that is to say it becomes information of a sort [. . .] a reproduced image will be used for many different purposes" (153).

First, let us realize that the condition of Berger's criticism is such reproduction. Berger himself is using Hals' artwork in order to make a more general point about the mystified criticism of other art critics, critics that reduce the meaning of artwork to "personal meaning" and "human condition" rather than the specific institutional and economic conditions that structure experience. And this is fact is not lost on Berger: "In this essay each image reproduced has become part of an argument which has little or nothing to do with the paintings original independent meaning" (155).

But Berger also uses the reproduced images to illustrate ways that reproduced images can change meaning. One example is the cropping of a woman's face from Botticelli's Venus and Mars (see pg 153). Berger writes, "an allegorical figure becomes a portrait of a girl" (154). In addition to the cropping mechanism (something which photoshop and even in-browser technologies like facebook now allow us to do), when a painting appears in a film the painting is deployed as "material for the filmmaker's argument" (154).  How many times have we seen scenes in films where the characters are in an art museum, where the character's reveal themselves as they ponder and discuss a piece of artwork?

Berger's main example has to do with the relationship between image and text. If we remember, one of his very first points in the essay regards the Magritte painting "The Key of Dreams" in which the text says something completely different from the picture above it.

Magritte also famously painted this piece:

The text is French and it says "This is not a pipe." As WJT Mitchell in Picture Theory has argued brilliantly, following Foucault's interpretation, this is actually a complex painting. "This" can refer to either the image of the pipe (which, is not a pipe, despite it's realistic detail indicating that we could hardly call it something else) or, indeed, the "this" could be referring to the text itself--the text is not a pipe. Glance back at "The Key of Dreams." Here we have words associated with incongruous pictures. How can a picture of a horse be "The door"? How can a clock be "the wind?"

Perhaps Magritte is playing on a Freudian dreamwork analysis, suggesting that dreams displace their meanings, such that, in someone's dream a horse may signify a "door" to somewhere--some sort of opening. Or perhaps Magritte is just trying to get us to think of the relationship between text and image and "referent" (in the pipe's case, it would be the pipe). We assume that the text is referring to the image because this is what our conventions tell us. But why do we assume such a relationship?

Ok, with the text-image relationship in mind, let's return to the picture on pg 155. This is a picture of "Wheatfield with Crows." Berger then asks us to turn the page, which now has appended the text: "This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself" (156).

All of a sudden, whereas the painting may have first evoked freedom of flight, the picture becomes about the flight of life--or something to that effect. The point is, the meaning changes as soon as text is added.

What has changed with reproduction?


Basically, Berger is saying that reproduction opens up many potential uses of images. The problem, as he sees it, is that

reproductions are still used to bolster the illusion that nothing has changed, that art, with its unique undiminished authority, justifies most other forms of authority, that art makes inequality seem noble and hierarchies seem thrilling. (156) 

That is, even through reproduction should destroy such authority, the "powers that be" are still using reproductions to mystify our relationship to art. Berger describes this beautifully:

For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power. (159, italics mine)

They no longer in themselves have power. What does this mean for us? It means that we need to pay attention how images are deployed and used in order to further certain political or cultural ends, particularly when reproductions are used to try and preserve the old authority art used to hold. If images have now become like a "language" it means that we need to realize that we write with images just as we write with language and that an image serves particular rhetorical purposes.

Kayla noted yesterday that with reproductions, artwork becomes available to the public. But Berger is telling us that there is a problem if we think that "nothing has changed except that the masses, thanks to reproductions, can now begin to appreciate art as the cultured minority once did" (160). Instead, Berger concludes:

If the new language of images were used differently, it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power. (Berger 160)

Notions about power will become very important in the Foucault piece, and, perhaps unintentionally, we must remember that we began our course with "Power"