CLEVE GRAY
364
who committed suicide in 1940 when the Nazis invaded France.
Walter Benjamin referred to the physical presence of the work of
art as the
aura.
In his prophetic 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," he suggested that
"changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be
comprehended as decay of the aura." He defined aura as a cer–
tain physical and psychic distance between the viewer and the
object. He related the decay of the aura to "the desire of contem–
porary masses to bring things closer spatially and humanly,
which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the
uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction." He
added, "Every day the urge grows stronger, to get hold of an ob–
ject at very close range by means of its likeness, its reproduc–
tion." And then, Benjamin continued, "The reproduction as of–
fered by picture magazines and newsreels differs from the image
seen by the unarmed eye." He meant by "the unarmed eye" the
eye which looks directly and only at the original object; I must
also interject that in 1936 picture magazines and newsreels were
the chief
~eans
of mechanical reproduction seen by the public;
today we have means far superior to those of his time. To return
to Benjamin's words, "Uniqueness and permanence," he said,
"are as closely linked to the [unarmed eye] as are transitoriness
and reproducibility in the [reproduction]. To pry an object from
its shell, to destroy its aura is the mark of a perception whose
sense of the universal quality of things has increased to such a
degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of
reproduction."
Benjamin was aware that a work of art has a quality of
uniqueness that is absent from the reproduction. But I must insist
further on the essential character of this uniqueness which is
seen in the workings of the artist's hand. It's the hand which is
responsible for the aura, it's the hand, the sensitivity' of its touch,
the action of which can reveal so much about the artist's percep–
tions which are missing from the reproduction. I mean, for ex–
ample, the movement of the brush, the character of the gesture,
the quality and sensuousness of touch-premeditated or instinc–
tual-the
matiere
of the paint, what we might call the surface or the
paint quality, the freshness, the texture, the translucency or
transparency, not to speak of the accuracy of the color or its in–
tensity or tonal value. Most obviously absent, of course, is the
