F Schwartz

The Eye of the Expert: Walter Benjamin and the avant garde

In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ of 1935/36, Walter Benjamin considers the effects of new conditions of production and commerce on the response to visual stimuli and on the structure of works of art, contrasting reception characterized by ‘aura’ with that characterized by ‘distraction’, the gaze of the (bourgeois) art lover with that of the working ‘expert’. This essay represents Benjamin’s theory of a new and positive form of mass spectatorship; in it he seeks to rise to the challenge of conservative critiques of culture, finding revolutionary potential and cognitive value in seemingly debased modes of apperception. By focusing on the notion of the ‘expert’, this article seeks to plot new coordinates by which to map the complex conceptual work involved in Benjamin’s influential theses. The ‘expert’ was a key figure in the radical retheorization of cultural values in Weimar Germany, one implicated in the crisis of the traditional intelligentsia as well as in the processes of professionalization that affected fields from the arts to the sciences. Benjamin and those close to him in the Constructivist avant garde felt the pressures of new conditions of intellectual work, and traces of this can be found in the essay. There is also evidence of another process affecting the nature of thought in modernity: as objects of knowledge came to be approached within the parameters of narrowly defined professional concerns, both the origins and uses of the knowledge produced inevitably tended to fall into the blind spots of professional vision. By studying his contact with and borrowings from bodies of professional expertise, this article will question the extent of Benjamin’s awareness of changing conditions of knowledge in the twentieth century.

Architecture and crime: Adolf Loos and the culture of the "Case"

Adolf Loos, author of the modernist polemic “Ornament and Crime,” was involved in two widely publicized criminal trials during his career. An investigation of his encounters with criminality suggests that his experiences with the press and the courts had implications for both his architectural practice and theory. The publicity surrounding scandals and criminal cases in early twentieth-century Vienna provided opportunities for the debate of matters of general importance at a time when few others existed. It is illuminating to view Looss architecture, scandals, and controversies in light of the changing nature of public discourse.

Review of Renew Marxist Art History

tions and practices. For a study that considers aspects of photography’s materiality, the size and quality of some of the illustrations in the book are rather disappointing. A number of the images fall within the narrow outer margins of the text boxes, thereby depriving the reader of an opportunity to fully engage with these rarely published visuals. For example, a low-resolution black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Daoud Corm (fig. 21) appears larger than higher-resolution images by photographer Garabed Krikorian (for example, fig. 39), a central figure in the book. Some of the images are pixelated and have reproduced poorly (such as fig. 62), leading one to question the need for their inclusion if high-quality versions were not available. Additionally, while the highly nuanced and complex framework that the author sets up is commendable and original, it could be argued that the dedication to constructing this theoretical apparatus detracted from the analysis of the photographs themselves (in both their materiality and circulation). The book could also have benefited from a theoretical consideration of other contemporaneous visual practices, specifically, painting, which continued to be popular during this period and, in fact, served as an extension of photographic practice. The designation al-musawwirun, or “the imagemakers,” often referred to pre-twentiethcentury artists who could have been painters or photographers (a point also noted by the author). In fact, many almusawwirun were trained in both fields, and they made no clear distinctions between the two professions. The idea that the photographic practice in general, and the tradition of portraiture in particular, “emerged as the first global visual cultural phenomenon” (p. 12) or exists independently of other artistic traditions is thus easily problematized. The author, in chapter 2, discusses portrait paintings by artists like the Syrian Daoud Corm. However, he describes such works as images that were based on photographs, which implies that they are not necessarily substantial works in or of themselves. Similarly, in Sheehi’s discussion of Ottoman imperial portraiture in chapter 1, he makes no allusion to similar long-held traditions among court painters (who produced portraits well into the nineteenth century). Although The Arab Imago does not set out to explore painting, an argument could be made that during the nineteenth century painting and photography were often inextricably linked. Islamic art historian David Roxburgh, for instance, has maintained that in the context of Qajar Iran, painting was engaged “in a practice of remediation” with the emergence of local photographic traditions. It would have been interesting to consider whether similar developments could be seen in the context of Ottoman and Arab photography. Nevertheless, The Arab Imagomakes a significant contribution to the social history of photography in the Ottoman center and periphery, through an analysis of broad transformations from the uneven imperial Tanzimat to the ideologically motivated nahdah. Sheehi helps the reader understand the people both behind and in front of the camera’s lens by fleshing out the complex social codes informing the most banal of portraits and their production. To illustrate, Sheehi opens almost every chapter with a description of an anecdote, photograph, or individual from which he expands to an exploration of an alternative reading of photographs or their producers. He then proceeds to connect it to his theoretical vision of photography’s history in the Ottoman provinces. The Arab Imago paves the way to a much-needed social history of Ottoman Arab photography, one that has long been shrouded behind a textual, discursive study of Arab modernity.

Peter Weiss: Art and the Historiography of Resistance

The Aesthetics of Resistance, the magnum opus of the German-Swedish writer Peter Weiss, concerns nine years in the life of a fictional character moving between Germany, Spain, France and Sweden immediately before, during and after the Second World War. Thematically, however, the book is organised around extended meditations on historical works of visual art. This essay will consider the relation between these meditations and the narrative of the novel, seeing the novel as an ambitious attempt to generate historical knowledge of and through pictures. It will also look at the relation between Weisss project and other forms of art historiography informed by the New Left in Germany, in particular the younger generation of art historians to emerge in the wake of the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s.