Reading 9: How can creative practice be relevant politically?

Art has become increasingly relational. Artists use social exchanges as material for artistic investigation. The relational analysis of human interaction has significance in evaluating the value of community and the integrity of human relationships. In a world saturated with technological independence and cyber communication the physical interactions of people within an actual space is undervalued and increasingly rarified. This brings into questions of authenticity and authorship in regards to the Fine Art.

I have dealt with issues of authenticity and community in my own work by enlisting community sponsorship to realize my exhibition, ‘To Authenticate’. Members of my authentic community, i.e. friends, colleagues, family, lecturers, were all invited to Sponsor-A-Plinth. Sponsors financial support was then used to produce eleven plinths on which to present final original drawings of black and white photographs. Each sponsor received an authenticity certificate; their name engraved on a plaque and placed on a plinth; and the invitation to an exclusive one-night preview of ‘To Authenticate’ at NKB Gallery, Mt Eden. The purpose of involving my ‘authentic community’ was in direct retaliation to an article by Elizabeth Currid, entitled “The Economics of a Good Party: Social Mechanisms and the Legitimization of Art/Culture”. The function of the overall work was didactic, utilizing authentic imagery to create time and space for the viewer to enlist their own subjective perception in order to assess truth, quality, and the ‘value’ of an original artifact.

Reading 8: Images and Ownership

Issues of authenticity in art have been prevalent throughout history. Fundamental concepts introduced by Benjamin in his essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, have been analyzed and reinterpreted by scholars ever since. Benjamin claims that the authenticity of a work is informed by its unique existence in history. The Oxford Dictionary defines authentic as ‘reliable; genuine’, its root word coming from the Greek authentes meaning ‘one who does a thing himself’ (1). Benjamin terms the elusive quality inherent in an authentic work of art as its “aura”. The Oxford Dictionary definition of the word ‘aura’ is simply, ‘a subtle quality associated with person or thing' (2). Benjamin distinguishes between historical aura and natural aura. Historical aura is based on the description above whereby a unique object is located in a unique time and place and carries with it a particular history. He associates natural aura with distance and likens it to experiencing the view of a mountain range on a warm summer day (3). The key concept here is the experience of the actual mountain range. He explains the antithesis of this concept as ‘the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly' (4). In other words, the increasingly insatiable desire of the masses to ‘own’ by reducing and containing images of an original phenomenon. An early attempt to possess an experience of natural phenomenon can be seen in the advent of the Claude Glass, referring to the effect of the Claude Glass to re-contextualize a natural vista Geoff Park recounts, ‘condensed and framed, in the moment of capture, its miniaturized picture was a private possession’ (5).


1 - D. Mackenzie (compiled by), The Oxford School Dictionary (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1958), 23.
2 - Mackenzie, 22.
3 - W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Source: Arendt, H (ed), (translated by Harry Zohn). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 219.
4 - Benjamin, 219.
5 - Geoff Park, “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua, (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp. 113-127), 116.