However, that is not why that collage bubbled to my consciousness. It was triggered by the use of the phrase "collage thinking" in the chronologically previous post. As I was thinking of the collage, I remembered she had compiled it as a specific story by using captions. Together the images, captions, and objects attached created a jigsaw puzzle one had to put together within the mind to find the intended story. But one would never know the intended story unless she walked one through the story as she did me. But even then, I can't say that was the only story she intended.
But I recalled what I'd read about captions in Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." He wrote,
[In 1900] With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time, picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at photos in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.
This is not applicable to Bayleenda's collage as it was not a reproduction of an image or photo in a magazine; it was (and is) a physical collage she created and, as far as I know, has no representation online, in print, or in any other way. If it does exist online, perchance, then the reproduction online is baked with meanings not evident in the work of art itself while perceived as in its physical presence in proximity to a person.
Distance (which is discussed by Benjamin but not in this particular way) is forever altered by reproduction as the distance is between the viewer and the reproduction rather than the viewer and the original physical piece. But photography differs entirely because it is itself removed from the place and time it is representing through image. This provides insight into the arising of abstract art, abstract expression, as non-representational, as the thing itself rather than the thing the work represents. By being itself, the so-called abstraction (as well as collage and many other artistic expressions), which is more concrete than a portrait or a landscape painting as they represent something that is not there while being a thing that is there, can be considered without a direct relation to something else (other than, invisibly, the author of the work).
One thing perhaps overlooked in relation to Rauschenberg's White Paintings is that he forever associated himself as a creator of whiteness. When one encounters a white wall or white surface, let alone a painting, Rauschenberg's perception is evoked by anyone familiar with Rauschenberg's work. I have to concentrate to unsee Rauschenberg's influence on my perception of a blank white wall. I rarely hang or display art on walls or adorn the walls with anything because I prefer the white blankness. I so successfully purged an intuitive association between whiteness and Rauschenberg that I can see whiteness with one fewer association attached to it. By dissociating whiteness from as many interpretive meanings as possible, whiteness becomes more of what it is as I perceive it sensorially.
I can attach or detach interpretations consciously, but the deeper structural work of dissociation takes time. The process is the dissolution of the content within the ideas linked as well as the content existing between the links within the association itself. The experience is biological, physiological, emotional, and ... inexplicable and, thus, mysterious or mystical, but only to the extent that I can't explain the totality of each of my experiences let alone the immeasurable connections between all of them. Whenever I encounter a previously unencountered idea, I have to do the work of determining whether it is worthy of incorporating it into my "worldview" which is sort of an "ego-connective" web of content placing "self" within a particular location associated to all else as "me."
The fewer connections, the more streamlined everything is. Most ideas or content that I've encountered in life have been devoid of nutrients useful for adequate meaning-making. Too many bad ideas, broken ideas, lies, distortions, misrepresentations, misintepretations, and so on, too much detritus was caught in a web built for understanding the world, trapping me in relation to ideas I never wanted to become important, but the repeated formulas of content "wire the brain" in such a way that well-worn neural pathways had developed for three-act stories and the like. All the tricks of narrative, played over and over, like repetitive motion injuries within the brain, possibly existing in the real world as X number of hours watching romantic comedies is equal to the same number of hours of repeatedly stomping my left foot on the ground. What sort of damage do stories like that do to the psyche, to the appearance of others, of the world?
The importance here of Rauschenberg, though, as he continues to develop as an interest, is related to Benjamin's interpretations of reproduction and reproducibility. Rauschenberg did not always paint or repaint his triptych or other iterations of his White Paintings, yet the painters of these pieces being displayed at a particular exhibition were not credited for painting them. The captioned credits belonged to Rauschenberg. This ownership and attribution of what was not reproduced by Rauschenberg belongs to Rauschenberg. The painters are laborers in this sense, not creators, not artists. They are mechanics, assembly-line workers.
Warhol later incorporated these ideas (whether influenced by Rauschenberg or the art movements of the time, I don't know) through the Factory, inviting others to reproduce his works (through his name-as-brand) as prints and whatnot as creditable to and owned by Warhol in exchange for "15 minutes of fame" for the laborers with the potential opportunity to become an artist-owner as well, eventually. Being paid in currency was not done. Providing the platforms for celebrity of his laborers was Warhol's transactional "payment" for services rendered. Noncontractual and Nontaxable exchange.
In this sense, reproducibility allows the originator of an idea to never actually create a time-and-place original. The idea itself is what is owned; intellectual property, as it were. By creating an association to a type of art, Warhol is credited with much that he never even directed. Subsequent Pop Art from pop artists is associatively attributable to him. Thus, even works that have an original time and place are occurring after the idea first reproduced by Warhol. All Pop Art with his distinctive styles of presentation has an ancestry traced back to him. This is control; this is imposition; this is domination.
Bayleenda sometimes leaves artworks of hers as gifts left in public, sometimes wrapped or presented as presents with maybe a card saying "For You" as well as other messages. She claims no authorship or ownership of those works. They are left absent possessive intentions other than as an invitation for the possession of them by whoever encounters them.
The relationship is not exclusively with the object, but authorship remains a mystery even though there is clearly evidence of authorship of some kind. This mystery adds to the value of the gift as it could have come from almost anyone who had been in the vicinity. Or, it could have been left by the third person who had temporarily taken possession of it as a found object.
In your mind's eye, have you visualized a particular gift, a particular presentation? I have. Even though I have seen some of Bayleenda's left art, I still picture a box about 8x8x8 in dimension, a two-inch wide Christmas metallic-green bow criss-crossing each side of the box tied over a metallic-red Christmas wrapping paper, sitting at the peak rounding of a canal bridge on a sidewalk in Amsterdam, a cloudy day, a slight drizzle, the water beading on the wrapping paper and the tied bow. I never picture anyone picking it up or even encountering it. Not purposefully. It's just what happens at times as a visualization within my mind.
What does any of that mean? For me? I don't know. I haven't applied a meaning. I can't even think of a meaning to apply, certainly not the imposition of one that isn't related to whatever feelings I have in relation to leaving artworks in public (without credited authorship) intended as gifts. I'm not applying a comparative judgment, such as "I like art as gift more than art as transaction." I'm not allowing the prior genesis of particularity to occur through the process of assessment and interpretation making preferential or moral or other judgments possible.
What we associate to ideas of interest to us creates a meaning for seemingly disparate objects of thought. We develop our relationship to what we cared about for just a moment in the beginning to something that contains a vast interdependent association with all other interests, part of a larger normative value framework as well as an ongoing metaphysical project of understanding and ordering the universe of interrelatedness. But ordering only through association so that coherent and meaningful interaction is possible at any moment with whatever is encountered.
Narrowing the lens to that of the moral or aesthetic or psychological limits the perception of what is evident that is present. Taking into account the greater interconnected variables related to an event provides a potency of understanding that allows security and other forms of satisfaction to arise without willing them into existence through concerted and directed effort (which is exhausting over time). To remain fresh, young, vibrant, strong, resilient, flexible, adaptable, honest, transparent, trusting, courageous, generous, appreciative, humble, and caring one must allow oneself to spread out rather than constrict and contract through a possessive attitude.
To "own" is to be trapped by what is owned. It's an attachment rather than an association. It pulls the center out of balance with great gravity, creating an internal asymmetry that harmfully impacts physical, emotional, psychological, thinking, social, and other interrelated subjects of personal health. Holding oneself together with many different attachments pulling in all directions is exhausting and unsustainable. Allowance of expansion without the constrictive pressure to hold everything together provides a healthy way to continue becoming whatever one becomes as they change, knowing that there is no such thing as a full culmination of being in a singular time and place. Neither is an individual lifetime or the evolutionary lifetime of a species or the evolutionary lifetime of all life.
There could always be more and there could always be less. But better and worse need not apply for recognition and acknowledgment. "This is what I'm doing" is sufficient. "Please stop that out of consideration for my well-being" can be offered in response. Reasons why need not apply. The attitude of "I don't need to do this; I can stop for that person's sake and do something else in my quest for moment-to-moment fulfillment" may be chosen.
These are possibilities. Opportunities. Possessing and Hoarding prevent us from expanding our capacity for fulfillment. They lead to the inevitability of the same moments being lived obsessively, the perceived height of possibility reached through attachment being an anchor mooring one in place over time. The same experiences of possessiveness and the fear of loss continuous until what is held tightly is lost to death, theft, confiscation, or any other snatching of what was owned through attachment. Warhol, for example, is Pop Art, the Factory, Studio 54, and the like, always associated with them. No one, perhaps no one, imagines Andy Warhol or Robert Rauschenberg as country peasants in France in the 14th century. Infected with the plague. Dying all alone, existing bloated along a river, spreading cholera, diseasing the nearby population.
Is that bad, those circumstances, imagining Warhol in that environment? Or is it an opportunity for new meanings? Does it create what was previously unimaginable? Are such wonderings leavings as gifts or impositions on the mind of readers? I intend this writing as neither. I intend it only as it is even though it contains so much more than my specific intentions, however broad and deep those intentions may be.
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