Hear the Story in the Electronic Age

I’m trying something new with this post as I have come across two interesting resources and would like to incorporate them both in my discussion. The first is an old interview with Jean Baudrillard that I have re-discovered during my investigations into youth and new media. The interview was aired on France’s La Sept in 1988 and is titled “The Work of Art in the Electronic Age.” I read a translation of the interview in a book of Baudrillard interviews called Baudrillard Live. The second is a video project produced by ten Torontonians between the ages of 16 and 25. The video, Hear the Story, was funded through the City of Toronto’s “Community Safety Plan” in 2005. It focuses on the lives of 3 participants and is intended to spark discussion about diversity, inclusion and community safety for young people of colour in Toronto. I would like to take Baudrillard’s discussion and analysis of contemporary art in a media-saturated world and apply it to Hear the Story. The incorporation of these two works has no particular rationale other than my discovery of them at approximately the same time, and so their cross-analysis may seem a little forced. Nonetheless, it will hopefully open up new ways of looking at youth video projects.

I know very little of Baudrillard’s work, in fact, I think this brief interview is all I have read. I found it a few years ago when working on a video project of my own—I was researching "art histories" for the medium of video. Although it is over 20 years old, his discussions of how our current culture is saturated with media (with “screens”) is ever the more relevant today. Baudrillard references both Marshall McLulan and Walter Benjamin is his discussion. From McLulan he takes the idea of “the medium is the message” to its logical end—that is there is no longer a message, no longer a content to communication beyond the proliferation of images and screens. He believes that “events, politics, history, from the moment where they only exist as broadcasts by the media and proliferate...their own reality disappears. In the extreme case the event could just as well not have taken place” (p. 146). The medium is all that is left of communication. From Benjamin, Baudrillard references the idea of an “aura” around a work of art, and how this aura is no longer possible. Benjamin thought of an aura as some kind of sensible by-product of a work’s authenticity and singularity. The fact that the painter’s hand could be seen in a painting, that a painting was a singular creation by an artist, gave it a kind of mystical charm. With the advent of photography and “mechanical reproduction” of artwork, according to Benjamin, this aura of authenticity was lost (although, to him, this was not necessarily a bad thing). Baudrillard seems to have a less transcendent view of the aura, however. He describes the singularity of art as stemming from its ability to make us stop, to make us contemplate. Now, with the advent of video, television (and soon after the internet), this contemplation, this stopping, is impossible. All human production and consumption is now subservient to the proliferation of superficial forms of media. He does not seem to share, however, in Benjamin's view that this lack of "aura" could have a positive, democratizing impact on cultural objects and cultural production.

So how can we look at Hear the Story within the framework of Baudrillard’s critique of new media? I must admit that I am somewhat reluctant to do so, as I feel like Baudrillard presents a very cynical portrait of art in the postmodern world, and I don’t want to spend this post tearing apart a sincere attempt by youth to create dialogue about very real issues in their lives. Hopefully, instead, the video work will serve to undermine Baudrillard’s cynicism in some respects.

To begin with, the very first scene of Hear the Story does have a very arresting, very contemplative nature to it. Their is a definite vibe of guerrilla cinema as the cameraperson captures an angle of a news broadcast that was not intended by the broadcasters. This shot undermines the polished nature of a typical news clip about troubled youth simply by offering a physically different perspective. The shot ends on a young black face as the reporter’s diatribe fades off into the background. This stopped me, this felt like a very anti-Baudrillardian moment. A real human being popped out from the screen and made himself visible in contrast to the simulacra of the reporter.

There are other moments in Hear the Story that seem to step outside of what Baudrillard calls the “circuit” of mass media. Steve’s story, in particular, has an arresting quality to it. The director of this segment narrator begins by discussing the images of racialized youth in popular culture, and how a lack of positive, or at the very least complex, depictions of people of colour do not exist in the media. Even BET is implicated in this stereotyping of young black males. However, the filmmaking, as well as Steve’s eccentric character, offer us something else—another image of an “at-risk” black youth. I sincerely believe that this is a break in the circuit, that these youth wanted to offer up another image, a singular and “authentic” image, and they were successful.

There is some level on which I do support Baudrillard’s cynicism, however. Although I do believe that this video offers some brief, sincere and contemplative moments, its place among all the other images and screens in our culture is extremely subjugated. Who will see this work? Are the dozens of employers refusing to call Ingrid for an interview ever going to be exposed to these richer images of youth? Is John N.’s call for action in the finale going to fall on deaf ears? It is particularly disturbing that the video, which exposes the economic exclusion of racialized youth in Toronto, is funded in part by Ontario Works. It is hard to imagine that these youth stories, back in 2005, led to any radical policy changes in the OW program. Is this video, for them, simply another screen? Does the reality of these stories disappear behind the medium, the project, the “youth activity”? Will policy bureaucrats stop and contemplate?

REFERENCES
-Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Art History Archive. Retrieved Oct. 3, 2009 from http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/modern/The-Work-of-Art-in-the-Age-of-Mechanical-Reproduction.html
-Duke A., et al. (2005). Hear the Story (video). Toronto: Youth Documentary Training Project. Retrieved Sept. 30, 2009 from http://www.toronto.ca/community_safety/video/20060912hearthestory.wmv
-Gane, M. (1993). Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews. Taylor & Francis. Retrieved Oct. 3, 2009, from http://lib.myilibrary.com.myaccess.library. utoronto.ca/Browse/open.asp?ID=4603&loc=iii
-"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (2009, September 27). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:43, Oct. 3, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction&oldid=316567490