ABSTRACT
Postmodernism can only be understood as a specific breach with modernism, with those institutions which the preconditions are for and which shape the discourse of modernism. Walter Benjamin granted a presence or aura to only a very limited number of photographs. These were photographs of the so-called primitive phase, the period prior to photography's commercialization after the 1850's. In Benjamin's view, certain photographs had an aura, while even a painting by Rembrandt loses its aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. From the multiplication of silkscreened photographic images in the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Warhol to the industrially manufactured, repetitively structured works of minimal sculptors, everything in radical artistic practice seemed to conspire in that liquidation of traditional cultural values that Benjamin spoke of. By the mid-1970's, more serious symptom of museum's crisis appeared, the various attempts to recuperate the auratic. These attempts are manifest in two, contradictory phenomena: the resurgence of expressionist painting and the triumph of photography-as-art.
