Walter Benjamin wrote in his seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens. Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech.
Benjamin, before Borges, assaulted the primacy of the original and proclaimed photography—its reproducibility essential—the century’s most salient art form, one that would in its course eliminate or supersede others. It would also rid art-making of the hand. I like the shapes of hands, watching hands pick up a fork and noting which hand is used, or scratching a head, an arm, or caressing a cheek. On a cloudy day not long ago, I pondered the many negative associations to the hand—like manual labor: being a grimy worker, with filthy nails. Hands instantly show your station in life. (Probably why there are so many nail salons in New York City.) In art, the hand became a fetish—the artist’s hand, even its griminess was artful. But the hand raised craft over idea. And it wasn’t a machine of the future, it wasn’t modern, or modernist, it didn’t break with the past. It couldn’t. It was attached to the human body, and necessarily to human development and history. The camera, Benjamin hoped, could make art democratic, because anyone’s hand could press a button. Also, everyone has eyes which operate anatomically in the same way. Yet the eye isn’t neutral, my eye is not like yours, yours not like your sister’s. Seeing is a craft too, since it can be taught. And, subjectivity prejudices how and what we see, so vision isn’t divorced from undemocratic causes. Less abstractly, the hand that ties people to their animal bodies doesn’t allow for the distance technology offers as a demonstration of progress, which, in the twentieth century, was a matter of belief in Europe and America—society was absolutely moving forward, getting better.
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