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PDF FormatThis is felt most powerfully when the symbol takes the form of a photograph. Photography has immense potential to be political art, meaning art that belongs to the realm of life rather than outside of it; and this sets it apart from the older, ritually derived forms of art. But as Walter Benjamin pointed out, photography can fill this role only when it cuts itself off from theology, from the aura which emanated from the previous forms as a function of their cultic character. Benjamin’s analysis is worth quoting at length:
Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter….An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.24
But political art, art that belongs simply to immanent life, without reference to the transcendent, is not so easily attained. This “cult value,” with its basis in ritual, does not simply disappear without a fight:
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: The human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of pictures. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.25
Here, with the technologically glamorized image of Snow White, we have the aura of Absolute in the face of the killer. Laor and his associates, therefore, completely miss the point. Blind to the revolutionary, political, life-affirming power of photography, they lapse into a jejune conservatism, despite or because of themselves, in which they do not look for the crime, only the beautiful face of death.
Snow White is the opposite of breaking a taboo. In the end, the best the work’s defenders come up with is the aestheticization of death—the Romantic culture of the beautiful death. And this we have known for a long time is but a formula for fascism. As Benjamin points out, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves…. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life…. [Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.”26
Aesthetics uses theology: We are given a kind of aesthetic theology, which uses the residue of icons, the residue of symbols, to suggest some sort of transcendence, as a defense against the death of God. Here, the artists take the ultimate violent gesture, aestheticize it, identify with it, producing the effect or feeling that one has a calling, something transcendentally higher than oneself, resulting in the illusion that one is overcoming death. But there is no overcoming; there is only death.
It is only against this backdrop that we can properly evaluate the ambassador as a reader, and assess the worth of his gesture. The ambassador’s gesture was an act against nihilism. As befits his station, he insists on the irreducibility of the political, in contrast to the theological nihilism of radical Islam and the cultural nihilism of the Swedish museum. The ambassador’s gesture is therefore one of refusing such naisseries. It is an act of maturity.
In the face of such dehumanizing nihilism, the ambassador’s was a performance that called on the children of Europe to desist from their sentimental games and act their age. But it was also a call for wakefulness, an attempt to arouse a sleepy Europe dreaming pleasant aestheticized dreams, to the reality of a nascent fascism.
His gesture, we might say, was in lieu of a kiss.
Daniel A. Doneson is Literary Editor of AZURE.
Notes
1. The text is taken from the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities; head curator and creative director: Thomas Nordanstad. Commissioned by the Stockholm International Forum.
2. Ha’aretz English Edition, January 19, 2004.
3. Ha’aretz English Edition,January 19, 2004.
4. “Israel Backs Art Attack,” cbsnews.com, January 18, 2004, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/18/world/main593870.shtml.
5. “Ambassador Wrecks Suicide Bomber Exhibit in Sweden,” FreeRepublic.com, January 17, 2004, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1059906/posts.
6. “Sweden Objects to Israeli Diplomat’s Action over Artwork,” cnn.com, January 17, 2004, www.cnn.com/2004/world/europe/01/17/sweden.israel/.
7. “Israel May Boycott Genocide Meeting over Artwork,” abc NewsOnline, January 20, 2004, www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1028349.htm.
8. Yossi Melman, “Swedish Envoy: Artwork Exhibited in Stockholm ‘In Bad Taste’ (Palestinian Terrorist as Snow White),” FreeRepublic.com, January 18, 2004, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1060249/posts.
9. “Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden Destroys Artwork in Stockholm Museum,” WomenforPalestine.com, January 17, 2004, www.womenforpalestine.com/020403v2/newsflash_israel17012004.htm.
10. Lest there be any doubt, the Swedish Policy Coordination Minister Paer Nuder, the minister in charge of the gathering, felt compelled to declare that there was “no doubt about the fact that the Swedish government distances itself from suicide bombers.” “Israel May Boycott Genocide Meeting over Artwork.”
11. Melman, “Swedish Envoy.”
12. Greg Myre, “Israel Envoy Defends His Attack on ‘Suicide Bomber’ Art Exhibit,” IHTOnline, January 19, 2004, www.iht.com/articles/125522.html.
13. Melman, “Swedish Envoy.”
14. Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 159-160.
15. Yitzhak Laor, “This Isn’t Sweden,” Ha’aretz English Edition, January 19, 2004.
16. See Neri Livneh, “On the State of the Political Artist,” Ha’aretz Weekend Magazine, February 13, 2004, pp. 50-58, on the hilarity of Israeli artists pontificating on “political art.”
17. Laor, “This Isn’t Sweden.”
18. Aestheticization is a way of redeeming death, a manner of conferring eternal presence on the picture. Nothing can be worse, artistically speaking. It is crucial to stress what is happening with the image here: It is loaded with iconic value, and that is why there is nothing human about it. We might ask, what could be a human depiction, given the reality of the dissected bodies? The problem is that this work is, even in the very way in which the picture is presented, as the picture of a saint, as the question of sainthood, secular sainthood to be sure, an icon without religion. Snow White recoils from any human encounter. It behooves the viewer to ask, how does this work transform the religious character of the work and the iconic transformation of the picture?
19. Guy Dubord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995).
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 37.
21. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings (Penguin: England, 1974), p. 486.
22. Thus Holderlin writes in his “Hyperion”: “Poetry… is the beginning and end of this science (philosophy). Like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, she springs from the poetry of an infinite divine being.” Friedrich Holderlin, Complete Works: Large Stuttgarte Works, ed. Friedrich Beissuer (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961), GSA III, 81. Here is Novalis in his “Vorarbeiten” 31, in Historical Critical Works (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), HKA II, 533: “Poetry is as it were the key to philosophy, its purpose and meaning.” Schelling declares in his “System des transcendentalen Idealismus”: “Art is the model of science, and where there is art there science should follow”; as well as: “Art is the single true and eternal organon and document of philosophy.” Complete Works, ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-1861), III 623, 627.
23. See Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” pp. 159-160.
24. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 223-224.
25. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 225-226.
26. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 242-243.
