Fugitive Notes on Low Art: Memory and Brassaï
Abstract:
Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the transformation of memory-making and historical perception in the age of mechanical reproduction provide a useful launching point from which one might begin to examine the visceral ambivalence that totalized the city dweller’s response to the increasing fragmentation of modern life. The rise of street photography as the privileged mode of representation at this time gave eventual expression to a realist sensibility that would aspire to distance itself from the Surrealist context.
This paper, though consciously limited in scope for the initial purposes of this assignment, will attempt to situate Brassaï’s photographs of urban graffiti in interwar Paris as a reflection of this historical conjecture --the tension between Brassaï’s rejection of Surrealism in his work, and the Surrealist framework that helped give visibility to graffiti production as an important condition of modernity.
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“The street, which I believed could furnish my life with its
surprising detours; the street, with its cares and its glances,
was my true element: there I could test like nowhere else the
winds of possibility.”
- André Breton [1]
Breton illustrates for us the paramount activity of the Surrealist --the wandering, lingering investigation of life within the great, swarming metropolises of his time: Berlin, St. Petersburg, London, Paris. For Breton in particular, the Parisian backdrop epitomized this phantasmagorical setting --one that possessed a kind of mythological allure poeticized by Charles Baudelaire long before Breton’s time:
Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense
reservoir of electrical energy. Or one might liken him to a mirror as a vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life, and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I’, at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. [2]
The modus operandi by which Surrealists explored the city had its roots in the Baudelaire tradition, characterized by a highly conscious devotion to flânerie: the creative reconstruction of the past and the present. The flâneur strolls through the streets, motivated by leisure and curiosity, with no real goal in mind other than to enrich his own understanding of the cityscape. [3]
Drawing on Baudelaire’s poetry, Walter Benjamin adopted the flâneur in his analyses of modernity to represent the focal point around which he imposed the changing dynamic occurring between urban experience and the individual in the age of mechanical reproduction. The privileged flâneur, ambling through the streets, unencumbered by urgencies or obligations, has the luxury of time to savor the array of multitudes that surrounded him. He, above all others, is permitted the experience of soaking in any and all aspects of modern life that would otherwise be missed by his quotidian counterpart, the hurried, humdrum man of the crowd.
This singular experience of the flâneur occupies a critical place in Benjamin’s conception of modernity, not just for this quality of heightened spectrality, but because of the redemptive implications the flâneur poses with regard to a broader discourse --that of historical memory. Alan Bewell, in his influential essay titled, “Portraits at Greyfriars: Photography, History, and Memory,” locates this notion of memory in Benjamin’s work as “[...] a place through which one strolls, like a flâneur, attempting to transform the reified image thrown up by modern culture into significant historical form.” [4]
Central to Benjamin’s practice of historiography is the flâneur’s performance of memory. He alone is the conscious individual with the potential to draw attention (or “re-attention”) to, the banal objects of history lost or buried from the Foucauldian politics of cultural embedding and the passing of time. [5] The flâneur, standing in opposition to a late capitalist society --one that lulls the consumer-driven masses with meaningless distraction-- symbolizes the hope for a utopian index of historical recollection, standing triumphant against the “unstable and fugitive” [6] exhilarations of modernity.
Benjamin situates this analysis of experience using a method he referred to as historical materialism, which attributes the past with a kind of “legibility”:
For the historical index of the images not only says that belong to a
particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. [...] Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. [7]
In other words, the past has an effect on the present, but that past requires the present to achieve actualization.
Benjamin chose the lyric poetry of Baudelaire to engage with the historicity of urbanism for this very reason: it was best read in light of the situation that gave rise to the poet’s struggles with the shocks of modern life in the first place -- 19th century hypermodernity, the mechanization of World War, the reproducibility of images; all of these aspects in which “Technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.” [8]
It would require more than the necessary scope of this paper to appreciate the full character of Benjamin’s theories, but it is important to incorporate his method of historical materialism to further contextualize the shared territories of photography and memory.
II. Memory, Benjamin, and Photography
We find more insight into Benjamin’s employment of memory in his seminal text, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” an analysis that conclusively engages urbanism in modernity through the lens of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry. For Benjamin, Baudelaire’s lived experience, his Erfahrung, shines through in his lyrical poems. But unlike other historians, Benjamin assigned a kind of privileged, historical status to Baudelaire’s records because the conditions surrounding their development differentiated them from other written memories of late 19th-century/early 20th-century city life.
Baudelaire’s moment was at a historical crossroads. The mass appeal of lyric poetry was in decline due to the “increasing inability to assimilate data” in a culture that was undergoing an “increasing atrophy of experience.” [9]. He witnessed the rapid hyper-modernization of society, a time when the photograph and the camera were transforming the actual conditions of memory-making and the processes determining collective, cultural remembrance. (Considered by many to be the father of modern art criticism, Baudelaire was deeply ambivalent about modernity, and his doubts over the crude, ubiquity of photography are evident in The Painter of Modern Life). According to Baudelaire, photography showed the world too realistically, which was not a goal in the realm of art. He writes, “If photography is allowed to deputize for art in some of art’s activities, it will not be long before it has supplanted or corrupted art altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the masses, its natural ally.” [10]
Indeed, photography’s inherent obsession with realism stood opposite from Baudelaire’s view that art should be more than just an imitation of nature. He could not, however, have foreseen the way in which photography would come to destabilize these notions of mimesis and realism altogether through the work of the photographers who endeavored to capture the fragmentation of their lived experiences. Out of this milieu came Brassaï, who inherited Baudelaire’s love for the underbelly of Parisian life, and whose focused appreciation for graffiti presented it as a defensible, if not entirely credible, art form.
III. Brassaï vs. the Surrealists
One of the most celebrated selections of photographs taken by Brassaï were the reproductions of his nocturnal scenes of Paris in the Surrealist-controlled art magazine, Minotaure. His work featured in six of the first seven issues of the publication in the early 1930’s; after all, the appeal of his images to the Surrealist vision was obvious. When photographed at night, Paris in the dark provided a natural and ghostly atmosphere for dreamers and phantoms --an ideal reverie for the imagination to infiltrate one’s reality. Brassaï would shoot what were (in daylight hours) the familiar, heavily trafficked areas of the city. But when viewed at night, emptied of life, these banal places were transported to the realm of the other-worldly.
When featured in Minotaure, the photographs were meant to stand alone and were not accompanied by text. Eventually, however, Breton’s L’Amour fou would feature some of Brassaï’s photographs, and the uncommissioned association between the two works saw the beginnings of friction between Brassaï and the Surrealists.
Ian Walker, who has written extensively on the relationship between photography and Surrealism, has observed a possible point of departure arising from the view that the true Surrealist dream-image is “hard and lucid” --evoking the menacing, yet clear aesthetics of de Chirico and Magritte’s paintings. Brassaï’s photographs are likewise desolate, but they depict a “fog-bound city” having “the softness of reverie,” --a fundamental distinction made by the Surrealists themselves that essentially pitted Brassaï’s photographs as “‘mysterious’ rather than ‘marvellous.’” [11] Rather what Brassaï sought to capture above all else was objectivity. An attempt at reasserting his position against Surrealist vision occurred during a 1980 interview in which he said:
[...] the ‘surrealism’ of my images was only the real made fantasy by vision. I sought only to express reality, because nothing is more surreal. [...] My ambition was always to make visible an aspect of everyday life as if we were uncovering it for the first time. That is what separated me from the surrealists. [12]
IV. Brassaï’s Graffiti
Especially with regard to his work with graffiti, Brassaï further cemented his occupation of a paradoxical “middle ground” somewhere between documentary realism and Surrealism. His photographs of the crudely gouged figures, shapes, animals, etc. on the walls of Paris defamiliarized a banal (familiar) element of city life by framing them, elevating them as examples of primitive expression produced at the level of unconscious impulse.
Such is the work of a Surrealist, the flâneur who understands the alienation and brutality of modern life that which incites such wanton expression from the oppressed peasants of society. And yet the nature of Brassaï’s medium, and the high levels of careful deliberation spent assembling and exploring graffiti, doubly situated him as an objective ethnographer who desires to capture an ephemeral form of social reality through a purely indexical process.
Benjamin’s conception of photography as the privileged mode of representation in modernity implicated a struggle to bridge two opposing impulses: the impulse to capture an objective form of a subject through mechanical reproduction, and the impulse to impose a subjective imagination onto the same subject. But, as Andre Bazin has commented, “[Photography] ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a fact.” [13] Brassaï’s representations of early Parisian graffiti made for a critical consideration of the realism in documentary photography and its potential validation of ethnographic study.
Bibliography
1. Breton, André. The Lost Steps. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. p. 4.
2. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. London: Phaidon,
1965. pp. 9-10.
3. Wolff, Janet, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity",
Theory, Culture & Society, 2.3, 1985, pp. 38-45.
4. Bewell, Alan. “Portraits at Greyfriars: Photography, History, and Memory in Walter
Benjamin.” Clio 12.1, 1982. p. 20.
5. Eiland, Howard. “Superimposition in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.” Telos,
.138, 2007.
6. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, p. 9-10.
7. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland. Eds. Rolf Tiedemann
and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. p. 463.
8. Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” Selected Writings. Vol. 4.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
9. Ibid.
10. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, p. 88.
11. Walker, Ian. “Brassaï: Paris Night and Day.” City Gorged with Dreams. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002. pp. 151-152.
12. Brassaï, “Interview avec France Bequette.” Culture et communication, 27. 1978. p. 15
13. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Trans. Hugh Gray. Film
Quarterly, Vol. 13. No. 4., 1969. pp. 4-9.
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Author’s Note: This was originally submitted to Professor Amy Kenyon through the Visual Studies Dept. at Goldsmiths University London in 2012.