How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann
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to record players in order to reveal colored patterns. As these discs rotate in an organic rhythm, these patterns appear to lose their shape and then regain it. The discs use a temporal rhythm, a beat, to create a shape and simultaneously negate it, which breaks up the formal coherence and constancy of the artwork from the inside out. Krauss sees a connection between this temporal pulse and the influence of the new phenomenon of mass culture: “It is,” she writes, “through the lowest and most vulgar cultural forms that the visual is daily invaded by the pulsatile: the blinking lights of neon signs; the ‘flip books’ through which the visual inert is propelled into the suggestive obscene; the strobe effects of pinball machines and video games—and all of this undergirded by the insistent beat of rock music surging through car stereos or leaking voicelessly through portable headsets.”24
In outlining her concept of a “pulsating” visuality, Krauss also refers to Coleman’s Box as an artwork, which because of its rhythmically composed structure is never entirely manifest or present.25 The visual flash of Box elevates time to a structuring principle and simultaneously makes it appear to stand still for an instant, breaking up the coherence of the form and connecting it to the productive force of the visitor-body. However, there is an aspect of the artwork that Krauss does not consider. In Box the rhythm introduces a concrete historical reference. In what Krauss describes as “a kind of pulsating On/Off, On/Off, On/Off,” a past event and historical moment flashes up. As such, the temporal rhythm in Box constitutes a time axis that mediates between present time and historical event, quite literally in the sense of a mediator through whom the historical can be experienced both in the present and as the present. There are two levels of time that play a role in Box, those of experienced time and historical time, which are united by the rhythmic principle of this artwork and mediated in the spectator’s bodily and aesthetic experience. This particular aesthetic structure makes the historical appear in a unique way: history is not represented but rather evoked in and as a present experience. Box produces an image of the historical, which takes place in a space beyond all pictorial representation. One way to discuss this particular notion of history and experience is through Benjamin’s thoughts on the philosophy of history, which were relevant to the art discourse critical of Modernism in the 1970s and seem to bear a particularly intimate relation to this artwork.
History and Experience
For Benjamin, too, the afterimage plays a role in his theory of experience and history. Drawing on the writings of Henri Bergson, the afterimage is a philosophical term describing the turn towards something that is already a thing of the past and can only enter the philosophical consciousness as a complementary entity or as an image contrasting with the present. 26 The afterimage projects a memory, or as Bergson might say: it is memory. In that moment we see memory as present. For Bergson this idea was of central importance, because he thought—and this is the concept that Benjamin refers to—that every form of experience, of experienced time can only exist because a present perception combines it with a memory, interlocking the present and past.
As part of a longer passage that reflects on history and historiography, Benjamin writes in his history of Paris in the 19th century, The Arcades Project (1927–1940), “Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time.”27 For Benjamin it is in the idea of a compression of time—both within and outside the human body—when the mutual bracing of past and present becomes concrete, which embodies his vision of a history that continues to be operative in the present and a present that refers to history. This construction is based on Benjamin’s idea of a materialist historiography. The materialist conceives of time not as governed by the law of progress, but to construe and construct from jetztzeit a discontinuous compression and materialization of history. Essentially, Benjamin turns against a historicist concept of history and takes up the critique Friedrich Nietzsche had presented 40 years earlier, an idea which recurred in the philosophical debates of the 1920s. In historicism, history is construed as a constant chain of cause and effect that proceeds more or less without interruption, and like Newtonian mechanics is based on a conception of time as both continuous and linear. In this argument both humans and things are subject to objective processes, and this is what Benjamin criticizes in On the Concept of History, which he wrote in 1940, shortly before his death: “The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.”28
Benjamin’s concept of history presumes the destruction of the historical continuum. He counters the mechanical, Newtonian notion of time with a “dialectical relationship in leaps and bounds” between the past and the present. The prevailing principle is that of interruption, fragmentation and repetition. Only when physical time is abrogated does historical time appear—in the sudden flickering of an image. For Benjamin, this is the mystery of time being rendered present, opening itself to history, thereby suspending all linearity. The flash or shock become images for this sublation of linear time. These formal principles translate modern forms of experience into the realm of the aesthetic. According to Benjamin, in modern urban life, a continuum of traditional experiences is replaced by isolated experiences, and, as he described it in an essay written a year earlier, “On some Motifs in Baudelaire,” “this may be due to a change in the structure of [ … ] experience.”29 This loss of continuity becomes the starting point for Benjamin’s deliberations on the philosophy of history. Benjamin’s main focus is on finding a productive side to this rupture and grasping it not as a deficit but as a constitutive element in a new conception of memory and experience. The shock or experience of shock are concepts that Benjamin developed in his study of Charles Baudelaire and considered dialectically as designating both a loss and a gain in experience. On the one hand, the shock stands for the “energies threatening the living organism” that, if the consciousness’s defenses fail or do not materialize for some reason, penetrate the psychological apparatus. In this sense, it constitutes the loss of continuity and the dissolution of coherence.
By contrast to these threatening shock energies, however, the shock as an aesthetic figure can also trigger insights. As regards its effect, threatening and yet triggering experience, the image of the shock possesses a dialectic characteristic in Benjamin’s thinking. It is threatening, a massive stimulus that has to be repelled; yet, as a stimulus that breaches defenses and penetrates into the deep levels of the psychological apparatus, it also generates experience. A process is brought to a standstill and fixed for a moment, enabling it to appear in a new, independent way. Baudelaire captured the breakdown of the shock defense not in a boxing match, but in a duel, which can also be read as a symbol for the process of artistic creation.30 In this struggle against the symbolic order, the writer fights himself, “‘stabs away with his pencil, his pen, his brush; [ … ] thus he is combative, even when alone, and parries his own blows.’”31
The specific quality of Benjamin’s concept of history is to have linked it to a lived dimension of experience just as, conversely, he extracts the concept of experience from its rationalist reduction in the philosophy of his day, and gives it a historical dimension. In the essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin writes on the philosophical debate over the concept of experience and makes special mention of Bergson’s research:
Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the “true” experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Their point of departure, understandably enough, was not man’s life in society. [ … ] Towering above this literature is Bergson’s early monumental work, Matière et mémoire. More than the others, it preserves links with empirical research. It is oriented toward biology. The title suggests that it regards the structure of memory as decisive for the philosophical pattern of experience.