The Telescoping of the Past Through the Present
Antoine Wiertz and Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of (Art)History
Jack Post
Abstract
The rather unknown and repudiated 19th century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) plays a prominent role in Walter Benjamin’s later work, such as the Arcades Project (Benjamin’s “primal history” of the nineteenth century) and the Artwork essay. Wiertz foresaw, argues Benjamin, that the introduction of new technological reproduction media like photography would change the ‘entire character of art’. Wiertz is, together with Baudelaire, one of the few artists who had a distinct view on the relation between art and technology and between art and photography in particular. However why would Benjamin depict Wiertz as a prophetical figure, as a precursor of film and the political use of photo-montage? Benjamin meant with the word precursor not simply a person or phenomenon that announces the coming of another. Wiertz’ work is for Benjamin one of those ‘disreputable’ forms of art that in moments of crisis point at new modes of perception and imaging. His work constitutes not just a stage in a linear development of emerging nineteenth century mass culture or the pre-history of cinema. In Benjamin’s philosophy of history the relation of the present to the past is not of a purely temporal order but also ‘figural’ [Bildlich]. Historical knowledge consists of (fugitive) images, or more precisely, of dialectical images in which past and present form a special constellation. Benjamin shows that insignificant nineteenth century phenomena such as Wiertz only gain significance at the very precise historical moment in which they contract a dialectical relation with the present. It were Dada artists like John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde and Georg Grosz who recognised themselves in the figure of Wiertz and brought Wiertz’ revolutionary potential to explosion in their revolutionary montage-practices. Dada ‘saved’ the neglected and discredited figure of Wiertz because they touched him with their actuality and it is according to Benjamin the task of the historian to decipher these ‘prophecies’.
Résumé
Aujourd’hui presque oublié ou répudié, le peintre belge Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) joue un rôle de premier plan dans les écrits tardifs de Walter Benjamin, comme le projet des Arcades (son histoire par citations du 19e siècle) ou le célèbre article sur l’œuvre d’art. Selon Benjamin, Wiertz avait été un des
premiers à comprendre que l’introduction de nouveaux médias de reproduction comme la photographie allait changer la nature même de l’œuvre d’art. En cela, son rôle est aussi important que celui de Baudelaire. Mais quelles étaient les raisons qui allaient conduire Benjamin à voir en Wiertz un prophète, un précurseur du cinéma et de l’usage politique du photo-montage ? La prophétie, en l’occurrence, ne renvoie pas au fait que Wiertz précédait tel ou tel autre artiste ou mouvement mais que son travail est une de ces formes dépréciées qui en temps de crise révèle de nouvelles formes de voir et de représenter. En
cela, Wiertz fait plus que simplement servir de transition entre la culture de masse naissante du 19e siècle
et le cinéma, par exemple, dans une vision linéaire de l’histoire. La philosophie de l’histoire de Benjamin, le rapport entre passé et présent n’est pas seulement chronologique, mais aussi figural (bildlich). La connaissance historique est faite d’images (fugitives) ou plus exactement d’images dialectiques qui réarticulent le rapport entre passé et présent. Benjamin montre que des pratiques apparemment futiles comme celles de Wiertz n’acquièrent leur sens qu’au moment précis où elles établissent un rapport dialectique avec le présent. C’est ce qui arrive au moment historique de Dada, quand des artistes comme Georg Grosz, Wieland Herzfelde ou John Heartfield se sont reconnus en Wiertz et ont démontré le potentiel révolutionnaire de son travail dans leurs propres montages. Dada a sauvé Wiertz du mépris et de l’oubli à travers sa propre actualité et la tâche de l’historien selon Benjamin consiste à déchiffrer ce type de prophéties.
Keywords
Walter Benjamin, 19th century, (art) history, Antoine Wiertz, popular culture, photography, montage, film, technology, Dada.
Introduction
Die Geschichte der Kunst ist eine Geschichte von Prophetien. Sie kann nur aus dem Standpunkt der unmittelbaren, aktualen Gegenwart geschrieben werden; denn jede Zeit besitzt die ihr eigene neue aber unvererbbare Möglichtkeit, die Prophetien zu deuten, die die Kunst von vergangnen Epochen gerade auf sie enthielt.
Walter Benjamin (GS 1.3 1046)
In the research notes for his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin states that the rather unknown and repudiated nineteenth century Belgian painter Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) “had a conception of painting which seemed already wholly determined by film” (GS 7.2, p 677). Why should Benjamin use such an anachronism? The first public film screening took place in 1895, 30 years after Wiertz’ death in the Grand Café (Paris). In several other rather crucial passages from the 1930’s, related to the Artwork essay and the Arcades Project Benjamin depicts Wiertz as a prophetical figure who foresaw the use of photographic montage for political agitation by artists like John Heartfield and George Großz (SW Vol. 2, 6). Why depict Wiertz as a precursor of political montage? In the following I argue that Benjamin reads the concept of anachronism in his philosophy of art and history against the grain to depict [darstellen] Wiertz as “an anachronism in the better sense of the word” (GS Bd 5.2 1102). Benjamin portrays Wiertz’ work as one of those ‘disreputable’ forms of art
that predicts new modes of perception and imaging in moments of crisis. New forms of perception which would assist humanity in adapting the senses to the modern world of technology and more in particular to the mass reception of art and commercial entertainment. Adaptation, according to Miriam Hansen (Cinema and Experience 138-146), is not a “behaviorist adaptation of human perceptions and reactions to the regime of the apparatus” (139) but a looking to reactivate “the abilities of the body as a medium in the service of imagining new forms of experience” (140). The destruction of the traditional forms of art creates a ‘play-room’ [Spielraum] for new revolutionary organisations of interplay between art and technology. Wiertz is in that sense a crucial figure in Benjamin’s work because his work (together with that of Baudelaire) was exemplary for the nineteenth century dispute between art and technology, and more particularly between art and photography.
1. Wiertz: nineteenth century painter and showman
Wiertz dreamt of becoming a modern Rubens or Raphael, strolled the streets of Brussels as “a reduced copy of the bronze statue of Rubens, in front of the cathedral at Antwerp” (D.E.C. 639). Wiertz has always been a highly controversial figure. Baudelaire characterised Wiertz as “that infamous poseur (…), a favorite of the English cockneys (…) Charlatan, Idiot. Thief (…), the philosopher-painter and littérateur (…) his stupidity is as massive as his giants” (AP 555-6 [S7,2]). Contemporaries rejected his grotesque and baroque work, not only because of its size, style and the bizarre topics but also because of the way Wiertz tend to exhibit and expose his work. They compared his exhibition practices with those of cheap traveling shows, fairs, wax museums or the panorama. Wiertz’ attitude was indeed very ambiguous. On the one hand he wanted to be a painter of stature, a Rubens or Raphael and on the other hand he made every effort to entertain his public as a nineteenth century showman. His newly built studio was used to both execute his enormous paintings and to show and present them to the public. The modern steel and glass construction of the sky-light in the main exhibition hall, built to shed an even-tempered light in his studio, was used to create theatrical lighting effects as nineteenth century visitors report. Wiertz turned his smaller paintings with screens and draperies literally into little peep-shows which he called cabinets (see Clement 84 and Sikes). Wiertz even asked his public for an entrance fee and for special occasions, such as the unveiling of a new painting, he organised special public events. L’enfant brûlé (1849) was shown to the public for a small fee. The painting represents the story of a mother who on a winter day had to leave her child at home because she had to go out working. When she came home her house was on fire and she found the almost carbonised body of her child in the burning remains. Beneath the painting Wiertz hung a notice with the following lamentation: ‘If only there were nurseries.’ Wiertz promised to donate the proceeds of the exhibition to the poor mother. He also addressed and manipulated his visitors in other modes. When entering the small entrance-hall of the museum the visitor is greeted by a painted janitor and while leaving the big exhibition hall a fearsome painted hunter points a rifle at the beholder.1
Wiertz’ predilection to startle and surprise comes to the fore in his exhibition practices but maybe 1. Photos of Wiertz’ paintings and his museum can be found on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/Category:Antoine_Wiertz?uselang=en-gb
even more in the astonishing choice of his subject matter. His paintings deal with shocking and sensational topics, such as the dead of cholera (L’Inhumation précipitée, 1854), victims of fire (L’enfant brûlé 1849), orphanages (Les Orphelins, 1863), decapitation (Pensées et Visions d’une tête coupée, 1859), suicide (Le Suicide, 1854) and cannibalism (Faim, Folie, Crime, 1833). Wiertz extracted his topics directly from the ‘faits divers’ in contemporary yellow press. Even the few admirers of Wiertz’ enormous allegorical paintings qualified the subjects of his smaller paintings as eccentric, vulgar and perverse (Montégut 977-978). One observer even remarked that these paintings were “so eccentric that no sane painter would desire the reputation of painting them” (N.N. 945). It was Not only his contemporaries who had difficulties in assessing his work. Rosenblum and Janson present Wiertz’ work in their seminal work on nineteenth Century Art as passionate, megalomaniac, and eccentric and as a (bad) example of nineteenth Romanticism. They condemn the colossal allegorical paintings as ‘gargantuan spectacles’ of ‘show-stopping’ dimensions (1984 171) and dismiss his (smaller) paintings as “a grotesque private world of gory, near demented fantasy (premature burial, infanticide, cannibalism, guillotined heads, suicide, human torches)” (165- 66).
2. Wiertz: Precursor of film
Wiertz was a prolific polemist who wrote lengthy pamphlets about the state of the fine arts, the rapid modernisation of society, and art and photography. Besides some pseudo-scientific and hagiographic publications very little has been published about Wiertz and ironically the most comprehensive catalogue of his work is written by himself, in the third person. On the occasion of the First World Exhibition of Photography in 1855 Wiertz wrote an article on the future of art and photography in which he attributes, according to Benjamin, photography the task of the philosophical enlightenment of painting:
Only a few years ago, there was born to us a machine that has since become the glory of our age, and that day after day amazes the mind and startles the eye? This machine, a century hence, will be the brush, the palette, the colors, the craft, the practice, the patience, the glance, the touch, the paste, the glaze, the trick, the relief, the finish, the rendering. A century hence, there will be no more bricklayers of painting; there will be only architects – painters in the full sense of the word. And are we really to imagine that the daguerreotype has murdered art? No, it kills the work of patience, but it does homage to the work of thought. When the daguerreotype, this titan child, will have attained the age of maturity, when all its power and potential will have been unfolded, then the genius of art will suddenly seize it by the collar and exclaim: ‘Mine! You’re mine now! We are going to work together.’ (Wiertz, 1869, 309 quoted in: Benjamin On Some Motifs 671 and AP 859, see for another English translation Harrison and Wood 654- 655)
In this article Wiertz predicted, according to Benjamin, in “grandiose mechanical-materialistic divinations” (AP 859) that the dispute between art and photography would have very profound aesthetic, social and political consequences. In other words, Wiertz foresaw that the introduction of new technological reproduction media like photography would change the ‘entire character of art’. Wiertz is therefore, together with Baudelaire, one of the few artists who had, according to Benjamin, a distinct view on the relation between art and technology and between art and photography in particular (see also Scharf). As Benjamin shows in his Artwork essay, the rise of popular nineteenth century media with its
panoramas, dioramas, wax works and illustrated newspapers led to a qualitative transformation of the nature of the artwork itself and a different kind of participation of the masses (Work of Art 116, 119). The nineteenth century debate between art and photography is as such a symptom of a much wider historical confrontation between art and technology (AP 675 [Y2a,6]). Indeed, The First World Exposition of Photography in 1855 made clear what would be the real social role of photography. The writer and populariser of science Louis Figuier observes in La Photographie au salon de 1859 that photography at the First World Exposition of Photography in 1855 could gain no entry into the sanctuary of the hall on the Avenue Montaigne and had to seek asylum in the immense bazaar of assorted industrial products that filled the Palais de l’Industrie (Figuier quoted in AP (Y6a,4) 684). The rise of photography is in other words inextricably linked with the commercialisation of painting, photography and the growing ‘use’ of the images through all sorts of channels like commercial drawings, advertising, or popular and scientific illustrations. The traditional forms of painting and engravings were, according to Benjamin, in the long run not able to establish a direct contact with the masses (GS Bd 3 697). Painting, which has always been viewed by a single person or by a small group of persons, was not suited for simultaneous collective reception. The simultaneous viewing of paintings in, for instance, nineteenth century panoramas or dioramas was one of the first symptoms of a profound crisis in painting. All efforts to present paintings in panorama’s, galleries or salons failed because they gave the masses ”no means of organizing and regulating their response” (Work of Art 116). Massive reception of images and texts only became possible with the new technological media, such as the illustrated press, photography and later on radio, cinema and television. Mass distribution of the technological media is not as in the case of the traditional media of painting or literature imposed from the outside but directly on the technology and practices of the media themselves. Film for instance enabled not only mass distribution, it actually imposed it (123).
Wiertz predicted the decline of oil painting because it would soon be replaced by the simpler and easier means of photography. Modern paintings should no longer be exposed in church or court, nor should they be displayed in a museum, the ‘necropolis’ of collected artworks of the past (Oeuvres 525). Wiertz dreamt of exhibiting his works amidst of the turmoil of modern life, for the gathering and moving masses in transient places of modern society, such as railway stations, law courts, universities, lobbies and city halls. He sought relentlessly after new forms and content which better suited the needs of the modern public. He predicted the rebirth of the technique of the fresco painting in public spaces and even developed a new paint, the ‘peinture mate’ which would able him to paint ‘a fresco’ on enormous canvasses and walls. To prove that his ‘peinture mate’ was weatherproof, he exposed one of his paintings outdoors to wind and rain for two years. His gigantic paintings looked like the nineteenth century panorama paintings, according to Benjamin the first (and last) attempt to make a mass perception of painting possible with the means of the traditional painting techniques.
Wiertz’ work is a remarkable example of those highly developed art forms in periods of crisis which Benjamin contends stand at the intersection of three lines of development (Work of Art 131, n 31). The first of these lines is technology. Before film even existed, artistic technology was already working towards particular art forms. The little flip books or the Kinetoscope, a coin-operated peep box, showed moving images of comic sketches or a boxing match. The artistic devices Wiertz deployed, the huge canvasses, the peepshows and the public frescos, prelude the advent of the popular mass media
of, for instance, film and television. The second line of development is formed by the traditional art forms which at certain stages in their development laboriously strive for effects which only new art forms effortlessly achieve. Here Benjamin points at the Dadaist performances which aimed to provoke audiences in a way that only a few years later Chaplin did more naturally. The aesthetic practices Wiertz deployed to entertain and to startle his public became mainstream in modern mass media. The third line of development is constituted by the apparently insignificant social changes which foster changes in reception of which often new art forms benefit. The mass public of cinema was already prefigured in the public of the Kaiserpanorama in which the individual spectators peeked through stereoscopes at single images which only briefly appeared in view and then automatically gave way to others. Just like the political montage and film are prefigured in Wiertz’ artistic practices.
3. Wiertz: Art and technology
Wiertz’ public was in other words not looking for the beauty, refinement or concentration of high art but rather for entertainment, spectacle, and sensation which was amply provided by the nineteenth century mass media (see also the work of Aumont, Crary and Schwartz). As Clara Erskine Clement stated in 1880 (quoting Grimm): “One does not visit the Atelier Wiertz as one goes to the Sixtine Chapel or the Stanze of the Vatican. One goes rather in the spirit in which the variety theatre or the circus is visited” (59). Wiertz’ use of his atelier, his experiments with cabinets and devices, the format of his paintings, the sensational subjects of his work all testify to the manifest crisis in painting and nineteenth century art. In other words, Benjamin’s note that Wiertz had a conception of painting which seemed already wholly determined by film, must be understood within this context. The participation of the public in Wiertz’ atelier bears more likeness to what Wirth Sikes in the Harpers New Monthly Magazine characterised as play and toying than with the traditional appreciation of ‘high art’. Sikes writes that he has no problems at all with Wiertz’ sensationalism, playfulness, or love for startling and surprise, on the contrary, “if Wiertz chose his recreations in toying with his art, instead of the ordinary amusements of men, I see certainly no reason to carp at this, since we are the gainers” (Sikes 830). The ‘we’ are obviously the readers of the illustrated Harpers New Monthly Magazine together with the consumers of the nineteenth century mass media. Wiertz’ work was clearly not accepted as ‘high art’ and rather denounced as pure trickery and deception (D.E.C. 641). After paying his fifty centimes entry fee, the Dutch writer and lithographer Alexander VerHeull entered Wiertz’ studio in 1859. He describes that above the cabinet with the painting La Liseuse de roman (1849), Wiertz had written in chalk ‘Délassements pittoresques’ (pictorial entertainments). On Verheull’s question why he placed screens before his paintings, Wiertz answered shrugging his shoulders: “Ah! c’est pour amuser le public” (Ah! It’s just to entertain the public). Verhuell continues: “And Wiertz has right, he knows his public” (4). The traditional art lover sought for concentration in the artwork which itself was considered an object of devotion. On the other hand, the masses were not looking for concentration but for distraction and entertainment (Work of Art 119). The Dutch critic Scheurleer accused Wiertz in 1878 of lowering himself to the level of a fair and treating high art as a plaything (105). Scheurleer characterised the Wiertz museum condescendingly as wax work and his paintings as cool photographed waxworks which resembled the ‘faits divers’ in the newspapers rather than real art (123-124). Benjamin relates the well-known concepts of concentration
in front of a traditional work of art and distraction in the consumption of entertainment in his Artwork essay to two other important concepts namely that of cult value and exhibition value. To elucidate the interrelatedness of these concepts Benjamin introduces in the second version of his Artwork essay another distinction, that between first and second technology.
The first technology exists just like the cult value of art only in fusion with ritual and magical practices and is pre-mechanical. The first technology involves the human body directly in matters of life and death. The effects of the second technology involve humans as little as possible, like a remote-controlled aircraft which needs no human crew (107). The historical conflict between the first and second technologies disrupted abruptly the period of the first technology characteristic symbiotic relation between play [Spiel] and earnestness [Ernst]. This disruption opposed play on the one hand to the seriousness and earnestness of the human sacrifice and on the other hand to the traditional aesthetic concept of beautiful semblance [Schöner Schein]. Benjamin characterises the process in which the aesthetics of the beautiful semblance gradually makes place for the aesthetics of play, or the ‘cult value’ for the exhibition value’, as the ‘withering of semblance’ or the ‘decay of aura.’ This process created “a huge gain in the room-for-play [Spielraum]” (127; GS Bd 7 369). In other words, the concept of play [Spiel] Benjamin introduced in the second version of his Artwork essay should not be read as a simple metaphor, since the imbrication of play with technology became characteristic for the modern entertainment industry since the mid nineteenth century. As Miriam Bratu Hansen states “play became an object of mass production and consumption, as sports and other recreational forms grew into technologically mediated spectacles (not unlike war)” (Cinema and Experience 189). The economic crises and the devastations of the technological warfare of the First World War show that man was not yet able to master this ‘room-for-play’ created by the second technologies. Benjamin concludes therefore that the reception of the technology in the nineteenth century was ‘bungled’ (Eduard Fuchs 266) and that the hopes that new technologies would liberate man from drudgery of life (“the unfolding of work into play” (AP 361)) turned out to be vain.
Within this process of the ‘decay of the aura’ Benjamin assigns art the primary social function of rehearsing the interplay between humanity and technology. Modern art would help to reverse the catastrophic consequences of an already failed reception of technology. Modern technological media such as illustrated magazines, film, radio and television should “train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (Work of Art 107-108). In cinema, the art the most allied with the second technology, the element of beautiful semblance is entirely displaced by the element of play. In film, the ‘play form’ of the second technology par excellence, is the ‘scope-for-play’ namely the widest. This is why Benjamin attributes (utopically) film the historical task “to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (117, 127-8). Film achieves this aim by representing the environment of modern man in totally new ways:
film is the prism in which the spaces of the immediate environment – the spaces in which people live, pursue their avocations, and enjoy their leisure – are laid open before their eyes in a comprehensible, meaningful, and passionate way. In themselves these offices, furnished rooms, saloons, big-city streets, stations, and factories are ugly, incomprehensible and hopelessly sad. Or,
rather they were and seemed to be, until the advent of film. The cinema then exploded this entire prison-world with its dynamite of its fractions of a second, so that now we can take extended journeys of adventure through their widely scattered ruins. (Reply to Oskar 17)
Film is able to represent people and their environment in entirely new and unfamiliar ways because it combines the authenticity of the photographic image with the power of ‘montage.’ The concept of authenticity refers to the ‘indexical’ relation of photography with reality and more in particular to the ability of the camera – “with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object” – to reveal the material physiognomic aspects of the world (Little History 512). Montage, defined as the editing of different photographic fragments of reality, creates a new synthetic reality of a second degree, that is room for ‘play’ with the scattered fragments of reality to reconfigure reality for a mimetic appropriation (Work of Art 117). Film is however not the only form of new synthetic realities in which the ever growing predominance of the aesthetic dimensions of play became manifest. Benjamin discerns play elements in futurism, atonal music, poésie pure and the detective novel (GS Bd 1.3 1048), but also in more ‘vernacular arts’ “ranging from early techniques of the observer (magic lantern shows, dioramas) right down to the electronic television of our own day” (Moonlit Nights 108).
4. Wiertz: Precursor of montage
Wiertz’ prophecy that painting and photography would one day fuse came, according to Benjamin, only partially true because the ‘genius of art’ Wiertz refers to was not an artistic but a political genius. In other words, the collaboration between the ‘genius of art’ and photography did not take place in works of art but in individual political artists who belong to the generation of John Heartfield (1891- 1968) and Georg Grosz (1893 - 1959) (Letter from Paris 242). Artists who forced by the politics of their time were transformed from painters into ‘political activists.’ The works of Dada artists were among the first manifestations of modern art in which the traditional ‘beautiful semblance’ made room for the modern category of ‘play’:
from an alluring visual composition or an enchanting fabric of sound, the Dadaists turned their artwork into a missile. It jolted the viewer, taking on a tactile [taktisch] quality. It thereby fostered the demand for film, since the distracting element in film is also primarily tactile, being based on the successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator. (Some Motifs 118-119)
According to Manfredo Tafuri the ‘art’ of Dada is unimaginable without the shock experience of the modern cities (98). With their clownish parades, performances, cabarets and Dada ‘soirées,’ the Dadaists blended themselves into the anarchic universe of in the city. The chaos and shocks of new metropolitan universe return in their works as for instance in Heartfield’s collage Life and Activity in Universal City at 12:15 in the Afternoon (1920), which was presented at the Erste Internationale Dada Messe (June 30th - August 25th 1920).2 In the catalogue to the exhibition, Wieland Herzfelde states that this
2. A reproduction of the Catalogue of the Erste Internationale Dada Messe (Berlin 1920) can be found on the excellent site of the Iowa Dada Archive: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/Dada_Messe/index.htm
collage describes the life and activity in Universal City with the means of film. ‘With the means of film’ obviously refers to the montage techniques Heartfield used to construct Life and Activity in Universal City. The collage is made up of texts snippets, headlines, and fragments of photos cut out from illustrated magazines and newspapers, pasted on a large sheet of paper (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Erste Internationale Dada Messe, 1920, unknown photographer
On the walls of the exhibition rooms of the Erste Internationale Dada Messe hung large placards with statements and declarations, such as ‘Art is Dead’, ‘Dada is political’ or ‘Take Dada seriously.’ One of the posters shows a photograph of the shouting John Heartfield next to the following quote of Antoine Wiertz: “One day photography will suppress and supplant the entire art of painting” (Herzfelde 100) (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2: Erste Internationale Dada Messe, 1920; photo: Robert Sennecke
The same quote appears as the first epigraph above Wieland Herzfelde’s introductory text of the exhibition catalogue. A close reading of the texts of Wiertz and Herzfelde shows their congeniality. Herzfelde refers in his text explicitly to Wiertz’ prophecy. The third epigraph above the introduction, written by Herzfelde himself, states that Dada did not proclaim the death of art but of a certain form of art:
Sun, moon, and stars abide – although we no longer worship them. If immortal art exists, it cannot die because the cult of art gets destroyed. (100)
Dada strived to replace the lyrical ‘cult of art’ by another conception of art as states the first paragraph of Herzfelde’s introduction to the catalogue which clearly echoes Wiertz’ prophetical text on photography:
Painting once had the explicit aim of providing people with a view of things — landscapes, animals, buildings and so forth - that they could not come to know with their own eyes. Today this task has been taken over by photography and film, which accomplish it incomparably better and
more completely than painters of any era. (100)
The Dadaists criticised, just like Wiertz, the artistic rendering of reality as it is. Wiertz welcomed the new photographic technology exactly because it would free the painter of the ‘material part’ of art (the rendering of the world). Photography will not kill art, “it only kills the work of patience and pays homage to the work of thought” (Photography 655). Oil painting, wrote Wiertz already in 1847, will within 100 years be dethroned and replaced by a more simpler and easier means, “which will be governed by the intelligence, and obeys instantaneously the inspiration of the genius, like a magic wand of a fairy” (Oeuvres 308).
The Dadaists found in the obscure painter Wiertz an ally in their struggle against the ‘cult of art’ and the “colossal quantities of time, love, and effort [which] were directed towards the painting of a body, a flower, a hat, a heavy shadow, and so forth” (Herzfelde 101). Like Wiertz 50 years earlier, the Dadaists neither wanted to compete with photographic apparatus nor did they want to make of photography an art by breathing “a soul into the apparatus” (101). No, argues Herzfelde, the Dadaists considered themselves to be the vanguard of dilettantism:
we need merely take scissors and cut out all that we require from painting and photographic representations of these things; when something on a smaller scale is involved, we do not need representations at all but take instead the objects themselves, for example, pocketknives, ashtrays, books, etc., all things that, in the museums of old art, have been painted very beautifully indeed, but have been, nonetheless, merely painted. (101)
He pleaded for a montage of reality because painting did not die when it lost its original aim, it sought for new objectives. The Dadaists criticised recent art forms, such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, or Futurism because they tried to emancipate themselves from reality. The aim of the new art of Dada is according to them to be found in the actual and the factual. The Dadaists
acknowledge as their sole program the obligation to make what is happening here and now — temporally as well as spatially — the content of their pictures, which is why they do not consider A Thousand and One Nights or ‘View of Indochina’ but rather the illustrated newspaper and the editorials of the press as the source of their production. (102)
Like Wiertz, the Dadaists extracted the subjects of their paintings from the ‘faits divers’ of the newspapers and like Wiertz, they affronted their public with their exhibitions and manifestations. Notwithstanding Wiertz’ prophecies about the future of art and photography contained some truth, he failed according to Benjamin, to grasp the lessons inherent in the actual and the factual so important for the Dadaists (Little History 527). The Dadaists had the revolutionary strength to test art for its authenticity. They mounted train tickets, playing cards and cigaret butts on their ‘paintings’, they showed the public that “the tiniest authentic fragment of daily life says more than painting (…) Just as the bloody fingerprint of a murderer on the page of a book says more than the text” (Author 774). Much of this revolutionary content, states Benjamin, has gone into (photo)montage.
mode of perception linked to a ‘will for authenticity.’ The artistic technique of (political) montage emerged at the end of the first World War, when it became clear that “reality could not be mastered anymore” (GS Bd 4.2 1043). Montage, with the cinematographic montage as its culmination point, was the only solution left to let reality speak for itself. Like Wiertz before them, the Dadaists refused to ‘breath life’ into the photographic apparatus, that is to see photography as an art, exactly because it was linked to the actual and factual. The photographic rendering of the world as it is, or even worse creative photography, was for the Dadaists unacceptable. The only prerequisite of their art was that
the means of presentation are anti-illusionistic and proceed from the requirement to further the disfiguration of the contemporary world, which already finds itself in a state of disintegration, or metamorphosis. (Herzfelde 102)
They pleaded for the actual and the factual in photography and against the use of photography as art, or even worse, photography as advertisement. In his Little History of Photography Benjamin states that the development of photography during the nineteenth century became more and more determined by the economic needs of the emerging entertainment industries. Photography became ‘creative’, capitulated to fashion and turned into “a sort of arty journalism” (Little History 526). The revolutionary potentialities of photography were paralysed by the sheer increase of the consumption technologies and the entertainment industry (GS Bd 4.2 1043). The counterpart of the free association of advertisement and fashion was for Benjamin the precise construction of the montage. Only photomontage was in his eyes able to wrench photography from the wear and tear caused by fashion. The social impact of this ‘act of unmasking’ is however only effective when it is combined with inscriptions [Beschriftung]. Without inscriptions namely “all photographic construction must remain arrested in the approximate” (Little History 527). The illustrated magazines and advertising discovered early on that images without captions unsettled the viewer and started to ‘put up signposts’ for the reader (Work of Art 108). However, the function of these captions is totally different from the titles in painting because they are the first sign of what Benjamin calls the ‘literarization of all conditions of life’ (Author 774). In his later work Benjamin connects this concept of ‘the literarization of all conditions of life’ with that of ‘the politicization of life’ (GS Bd 1.3 1039). Inscriptions namely arrest the free-floating associations because they function as “the fuse guiding the critical spark to the image mass” (Letter from Paris 241). To create a revolutionary content Heartfield always combined his photo-montages with captions and inscriptions (Heartfield 181). The inscriptions constitute the most important part of his photo-montages because they give photography its revolutionary use value back. Without the inscriptions Heartfield’s work is ‘harmless.’ The shock effects that the combination of photo-montage and inscriptions create are comparable with those of the montage-effects in film. As such they are, according to Benjamin, symptoms of the ever growing importance of the tactile reception in the arts, in photography and cinema but also in new developments in music such as the Jazz and Dance Music.
Because Wiertz rejected the ‘artistic’ use of photography and accompanied his artwork extensively with explanatory texts, his work can be seen as a precursor of montage and ‘the literarization of life.’ Wiertz wrote texts to accompany his works. He attached written texts all over the walls of his atelier, filled with aphorisms, maxims, with his philosophical, artistic and social ideas. He was not only severely attacked
because of his use of texts, he was also criticised for the fact that his complex allegorical representations needed extensive (written) explanations to be understood. He was scolded as a ‘philosopher-painter’, Baudelaire called Wiertz a ‘litterateur’ (AP 555-6 [S7,2]). The Dutch critic Scheurleer criticised Wiertz’ work from an aesthetic point of view as too ‘programmatic’: Wiertz’ paintings were just food for thought, “illustrated maxims” (163-166). Scheurleer was not the only one who disapproved of Wiertz’ practice to convey abstract philosophical and ethical ideas with help paintings because that would eventually lead to a degeneration of art. These practices were for Benjamin conversely the reason to depict Wiertz as a precursor of the political use of (photo)montage. Firstly because of the social inspiration of his work, Benjamin even asserts that “ultimate aims” of socialism (were) hardly ever so clear as in the case of Wiertz (AP 585 [0°,16]). Secondly and more importantly, because Wiertz foresaw the political use of montage: Benjamin characterised Wiertz as a “precursor of montage (realism plus tendentiousness)” (902).
5. Wiertz: An anachronism ‘in the better sense of the word’
What exactly does Benjamin mean with the word precursor when he states that Wiertz is a precursor of film and montage? A precursor is for Benjamin not simply a person or phenomenon that announces the coming of another. Wiertz’ work constitutes in other words not just a stage in a linear development of the pre-history of mass culture or cinema. It is for Benjamin not sufficient to place Wiertz historically within the development of the nineteenth century mass culture. In Benjamin’s philosophy of history namely is the relation between the present and the past ‘figural’ [Bildlich]. Historical knowledge consists of images, more precisely, of dialectical images. Dialectical images are not images in which the past casts its light on what is present, or what is present casts its light on what is past, dialectical images are constellations of the past with the present (462 [N2a,3]). Benjamin characterises the dialectical images as a ‘dialectics at a standstill’ because in these images the constellation of past and present is frozen into an image. The fact that Benjamin talks about images does not mean that these images are visual or even mental representations of present and past, they only exist in language.
Benjamin characterises his Arcades Project – his “primal history” of the nineteenth century – as a form of literary montage: “I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the refuse. I will not describe but put on display” (860 [O°,36], see also 460 [N1a,8]). One of these nineteenth century decay phenomena he puts on display is Antoine Wiertz. In his Arcades Project he distinguishes two directions. One direction goes from the past into the present and shows certain nineteenth century phenomena as precursors: Wiertz’ work as part of the development of the emerging nineteenth century mass culture. The other direction goes from the present into the past and lets the revolutionary potential of these ‘precursors’ explode in the present (862 [0° 5g]). The work of the refused, ‘ungainly painter of ideas’ Wiertz revolutionised the work of the Dadaists and Wiertz’ prophecies about the social function of photography came true (or are exploded) in the photo-montages of Dada. Benjamin shows how insignificant nineteenth century phenomena such as Wiertz only gain significance at a very precise historical moment in which they contract a dialectical relation with the present. In his essay on the art historian and collector Edward Fuch he states that the historical science doesn’t fashion its object out of mere facticities but “out of the numbered group of
threads representing the woof of a past fed into the warp of the present” (Eduard Fuchs 269). It would be a mistake, adds Benjamin, to equate the woof with causal connections because threads, which can become lost for long periods of time, can abruptly and unobtrusively be picked up by the actual course of events. In other words, historical images have a historical index which makes them only legible in a particular time: “For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image” (Concept of History 391). Dada could recognise itself in the figure of Wiertz because it was only in their time that Wiertz attained legibility. The historian should have a clear ‘presence of mind’ to be able to grasp these ephemeral historical images, because the “true image of the past flits by” (390). History should therefore not to be understood as a homogeneous, continuous exposition of history but as a series of disparate images that suddenly emerge.
The dialectically presented historical phenomenon is as a polarised image, a force field of its fore-history and after-history (AP 470 [N7a,1], 471 [N7a, 8]). The actual presence of Wiertz determines that his fore-history resides in painting and his after-history in photography and film, the fore-history of Dada resides in Wiertz and its after-history in film. The concept of precursor is thus not linked to a conception of a history as a continuum of a homogeneous and linear time but as heterogeneity, as fragments, as the breaking up of history and the subsequent construction of dialectical images. Dada ‘saved’ the neglected and discredited figure of Wiertz because they touched Wiertz with their actuality and Dada recognised itself in Wiertz.
The writing of history is therefore simultaneously a destructive as well as a constructive activity. It is destructive because it blasts “a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history (…) a specific life out of the era, a specific work out of the lifework” (Concept of History 396). It is constructive because past and present merge into very specific temporal constellations, that is in the sudden emerging dialectical images. Benjamin characterises this peculiar temporal construction of the present with the past as the ‘now-time’ [Jetztzeit] or the ‘now of recognizability’ (405) because the dialectical images are only legible when time “takes a stand [einsteht] and comes to a standstill” (396). The fact that Benjamin wrote his Artwork essay and Arcades Project from the perspective of his own actual present or ‘now-time’ (GS Bd 5.2), implies that the aspects of the art of the nineteenth century he reflects on, are only recognisable in his ‘now’ and not later (1148). In a letter to Max Horkheimer he explains this very peculiar form of history writing as follows:
If the topic of this book is the destiny of the art in the nineteenth century, this fate can only tell us something because it contains the ticking of a clock of which the striking has just penetrated our ears. I meant to say, it is for us that the clock of the fate of art strikes, and I have captured its signature in a series of tentative reflections which bear the title: The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility (1149)
Each present time possesses its own not to be inherited potentialities to read the prophecies of the arts of bygone eras and it is the task of the (art) historian to decipher these prophecies. Moreover, the ‘now of recognisability’ in which the historical objects become legible is always of a political nature:
just as deeper rock strata emerge only where the rock is fissured, the deep formation of ‘political tendency’ likewise reveals itself only in the fissures of art history (and works of art). The technical
revolutions are the fracture points of artistic development; it is here that the different political tendencies may be said to come to the surface. In every new technical revolution the political tendency is transformed, as if by its own volition, from a concealed element of art into a manifest one. (Reply to Oskar 17)
Both Wiertz and Dada can be considered as fractures within art history that only become legible when they have matured by certain technological inventions or by certain social transformations. When Benjamin speaks about artworks of the past, he does not necessarily speak about the great works of art, nor about the works we traditionally consider to be art, but rather the ‘refuse and decay-phenomena’ in history. New art forms arise in times of crisis always in ‘disreputable forms,’ “because they strain after effects which are only to be achieved by the changed technical standards of later art forms” (Work of Art 118). Wiertz work is a typical example of those ‘disreputable forms,’ just like other marginal phenomena and emblems of nineteenth century, the “precursors, in some degree mirages, of the great syntheses that follow” (AP 672, [Yl,4] and 857 [O° 3]). Benjamin looked for new synthetic realities in panoramas, wax museums, advertising, but also in photo-montage and film. The history of art is in Benjamin’s opinion a history of prophecies which only can be told from the perspective of the immediate and actual present of the history writer. He liked to elucidate this with a phrase of André Breton: “the artwork has value only insofar as it is alive to reverberations of the future” (Work of Art 131, note 31). Benjamin described his Artwork essay as a self-built telescope through which he peered at the mirages of the nineteenth century (GS Bd 5.2 1151): the expressive character of the earliest industrial products, department stores, advertisements and that strange figure of Antoine Wiertz. Through this telescope, Wiertz appeared to him in the flash of a dialectical image, as a precursor of film and the political use of photo-montage.
Conclusion
Benjamin wrote his Artwork essay and Arcade project in the period before the Second World War, a period with film as the most advanced technological medium. Should we conclude from our point of view that with the rise of fascism, the atrocities of Second World War and the recent overwhelming development of (media)technology and commercial entertainment, film failed to establish an equilibrium between humans and technology? Or that film contrarily perversely succeeded in “training human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus” (Work of Art 107-108)? Or that Benjamin’s reflections have lost their actuality and are, in Norbert Bolz’ words, nothing more than “beautiful ruins in the philosophical landscape” (quoted in Hansen Benjamin and Cinema 343)?
Technology and technological media have become omnipresent and have pervaded the most intimate practices of our daily lives: the public space of film has gradually been taken over by the mobile privatisation of the television (Williams), photographic and print media are being ‘replaced’ by digital technologies, face to face communication is more and more mediated by mobile devices, music and video have become ubiquitously accessible. The categories of play, experience and amusement have become crucial to understand our modern culture, and modern art is incomprehensible and inconceivable without the notion of play. Games are everywhere, as major television genres, as an industry of computer games, as simulation games on the workplace and as learning methodologies in our schools. The fact that we are still in the midst of technological (media) revolutions should warn us not to shelve Benjamin’s
oeuvre in the dusty corners of libraries and archives. As Miriam Hansen states, we should re-actualise his learnings and “resume Benjamin’s concern for the conditions of apperception, sensorial affect, and cognition, experience and memory — in short, for a new political ecology of the senses” (Room for Play 394).
Hansen’s research, in which she thoroughly reread among others the work of Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, was a ‘work-in-progress,’ a (re)constructing of such a ‘political ecology of the senses.’ Actualising Benjamin’s work means according to her, going further than the mere reconstruction of the complexity and extremity of Benjamin’s reflections. We should “discern similar antinomies in today’s media culture — that culture which, whether we like it or not, is the framing of any cultural practice today” (Benjamin and Cinema 343). Another example of reactualisation of Benjamin’s reflections is the work of the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in which Benjamin’s and Aby Warburg’s conceptions of (art) history writing occupy a prominent place. Not only scholars, filmmakers like Godard or the couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet re-actualise Benjamin’s philosophy of history. Godard’s seminal video essay Histoire(s) du cinéma (France/Switzerland, 1988–1998) is a political montage of the historical archive of cinema. Godard’s maelstrom of images, sound and texts creates series of ‘dialectical images’ which capture and save the flashing and transient historical images of what hitherto has remained invisible. Straub and Huillet’s films are sober, meticulous and almost formal arrangements of mise-en-scène, images, (direct) sound, music and spoken (historical) words of writers as Hölderlin, Kafka, Vittorini, Pavese or Marx. Their work is a political montage in which different temporalities create constellations of the past with the present to give voice to the invisible and tragic history of man. Straub and Huillet strived to give the old and forgotten things their place back and characterised their work once with a quotation of Benjamin, as a ‘tiger’s leap’ [Tigersprung] in the past.
To re-actualise Benjamin’s reflections, we should conceptualise historical time differently than in terms of a continuity between past and present, and not concieve the past as a ‘period of decline’ and the future as ‘progress.’ Benjamin urges us to look for places where the tradition breaks off, places such as Antoine Wiertz and Dada, places that make the past present (Parapilomena 401). Concluding we can state that indeed Benjamin used an anachronism when he states that Wiertz had a ‘conception of painting which seemed already wholly determined by film’ and that he ‘foresaw the use of photographic montage for political agitation.’ However, as Benjamin wrote in a letter to his friend Th.W Adorno, when we extort the past from the now it becomes “an anachronism in the better sense of the word” (GS Bd 5.2 1102). This anachronism should be called ‘better’ because instead of galvanising the past, it anticipates a more human future (Parapilomena 401).
List of Works Cited
Aumont, Jacques. “The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze.” The Image in Dispute. Art and Photography in the Age of Photography. Ed. Dudley Andrew. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. 231-58. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 3, Kritiken Und Rezensionen. eds. Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Print.
and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Print.
———. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1.3, Abhandlungen. eds. Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Print.
———. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 5.2, Das Passagen-Werk. ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Print.
———. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7.1, Nachträge. eds. Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Print.
———. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7.2, Nachträge. eds. Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. Print.
———. “Little History of Photography.” Trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 1999. 507-30. Print. ———. “Moonlit Nights on the Rue La Boétie.” Trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings
et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 1999. 107-9. Print.
———. “Reply to Oskar a. H. Schmitz.” Trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 1999. 16-19. Print. ———. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap
Press, 1999. Print.
———. “The Author as Producer. Address At the Institute for the Study of Fascism, Paris, April 27, 1934.” Trans. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 2. 1927-1934. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 1999. 768-82. Print.
———. “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian.” Trans. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2002. 260-302. Print. ———. “Letter From Paris (2): Painting and Photography.” Trans. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock
et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2002. 236-48. Print.
———. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Trans. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2002. 313-55. Print.
———. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century <Exposé of 1935>.” Trans. Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin. The Arcades Project. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2002. 1- 26. Print. ———. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Trans.
Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock et al. Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2002. 101- 133. Print.
———. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940. Trans. Manfred R. Jacobson, and Evelyn M. Jacobson.eds. Gershom Gerhard Scholem, and Theodor W Adorno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Print.
———. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2003. 381- 400. Print.
———. “Paralipomena to ‘on the Concept of History’.” Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Ed. Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [etc.]: Belknap Press, 2003. 401-11. Print.
2.2 (1880): 58-63. Print.
Crary, Jonathan. “Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Grey Room 9 (2002): 7-25. Print.
Cudworth, C. L. “Berlioz and Wiertz: A Comparison and a Contrast.” Revue belge de Musicologie / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Muziekwetenschap 6.4 (1952): 275-82. Print.
D.E.C. “An Eccentric Artist.” The Galaxy 5.5 (1868): 638-41. Print.
Figuier, Louis. La Photographie Au Salon De 1859. Paris: Hachette, 1860. Print.
Hansen, Miriam. Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Print.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 306-43. Print.
———. “Room-for-play: Benjamin’s Gamble With Cinema.” October 109 (2004): 3-45. Print.
Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood. Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Print.
Heartfield, John. “Zur Wirkung Der Fotomontage (1961).” Der Schnitt Entlang Der Zeit. Selbstzeugnisse, Erinnerungen, Interpretationen. Eine Dokumentation. Ed. John Heartfield. Fundus-Bücher ; 70/71/72. Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1981. 608 p. Print.
Herzfelde, Wieland. “Introduction to the First International Dada Fair.” October 105 (2003): 93-105. Print.
Montégut, Émile. “Impressions De Voyage Et D’Art. I. Gapard De Cryer, Jean Steen, Le Musée Wiertz.” Revue des deux mondes 77 (1868): 932-55. Print.
N.N. “Topics of the Time: Literary Eccentricity.” Scribner’s Monthly. An Illustrated Magazine for the People 22.6 (1881): 944-46. Print.
Rosenblum, Robert, and H.W. Janson. nineteenth Century Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984. Print.
Scharf, Aaron. Art and Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1983. Print.
Scheurleer, D.F. Twee Titanen Der Negentiende Eeuw. Hector Berlioz En Antoine Wiertz. Haarlem: De Graaff, 1878. Print.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities. Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-siècle Paris. Berkeley [etc.]: University of California Press, 1998. Print.
Sikes, Wirth. “Antoine Wiertz.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 46.276 (1873): 823-30. Print.
Tafuri, Manfredo. The Sphere and the Labyrinth. Avant-Gardes and Architecture From Piranesi to the 1970s. Cambridge, MA [etc.]: The MIT Press, 1990. Print.
VerHuell, Alexander Willem Maurits Carel. De Schilder Wiertz. S.l: s.n., 1857. Print. Wiertz, Antoine. Oeuvres Littéraires. Bruxelles: Parent et Fils, 1869. Print.
———. “Photography.” Art in Theory 1900-1990. An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Eds. Charles Harrison, and Paul Wood. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 654-55. Print.
Dr. Jack Post is senior lecturer at the Maastricht University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Department of Literature and Arts where he is director of the BA media culture program.
His research interests include semiotics, science and technology studies, film, digital typography and new media. His current research focusses on the digitalisation of typography and kinetic typography in particular.