Was ist aura?

This series of artefacts is part of a portfolio output that examines the viewer’s experience of an ‘original’ authentic artefact. In 2019, I received funding from Arts Council England for research and development of a project that led to multiple outputs examining Walter Benjamin’s legacy. The project enabled a visit to the Walter Benjamin archive at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the building of a relationship with the archive and academic staff to gain special access to specific artefacts in order to draw them. For some time, I had been in dialogue with the archive staff, who had been sending me digital images from the collection to draw from. I discuss the experience and encounter with the archive in a blogpost here: https://blogs.shu.ac.uk/c3riimpact/penny-mccarthy-researcher-blog-visiting-walter-benjamin-archive/?doing_wp_cron=1595507905.3556380271911621093750. The visit moved the work on considerably, since previously I was drawing from the same material from the digital archive and the experience of viewing the actual artefact significantly changed the work. Benjamin’s note is on a sheet of paper from a café waiter’s pad imprinted with the logo for Acqua S.Pellegrino replete with an image of a bottle. Here the idea of aura is elaborated in a way that exemplifies the theory that Benjamin was exploring. As the delicate nature of the fragments makes them archivally unstable and therefore not available for public viewing, having secured permission to view Benjamin’s original, I produced a close copy of both sides of the artefact. I then published printed paper facsimiles of Benjamin’s significant texts to be held in the archive. This work is made available to visitors as a series of paper replicas, enabling scholars and visitors to access the work in a form that emulates the original, so that it can be retained and studied intimately. As Benjamin’s biographer Esther Leslie says: ‘There may be something useful and heartening about being able to lay some sort of claim to a small reflection of a less touchable, less accessible original.’ This project has also set in train a new phase of work involving depositing copies of this reproduced drawing in public locations where Benjamin used to write. Other aspects of work from this series were included in the Strange Weave of Time of Space exhibitions and earlier events including Project for an Exhibition at Bloc Art Space. My conversations with Jeanine, the curator of the exhibition, were useful in that they started to suggest shifting the mode of presentation of the work - I made a new double sided painting to show the back of the original artefact as well as the front and, but this raised issues of how you could effectively show this in exhibition. I also made a version which was mechanically reproduced as a multiple and available to viewers to take away, as appropriate to Benjamin's thinking in the famous 'Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' essay which discusses how postcards and reproductions have diminished the aura of the original but enabled a more active relationship with the work. A version of the drawing was printed up as a replica of the waiter's pad which Benjamin originally wrote on and visitors could tear off a sheet to take away with them.