ARS GRATIA ARTIS?

...Only then does the nonsense begin to make sense in his films...

...difference between the art trade and the arms trade is that, whereas the art dealers make a big public fuss when things get into the wrong hands, the arms salesmen have to keep quiet for political reasons...

...Whether the Polish church is so traditional-bound as we tend to think of it, and hence impervious to theological research of a rigorous kind, I do not know...

...Soon after Stroszek's arrival, the parallel between the Germany he has left behind and the America to which he has come is implied by an incident he witnesses...

...Those films are a peculiar combination of an impulse both to comprehend all of life and at the same time to respect its incomprehensibility...

...One cannot help feeling that, despite the dangers, forgers like Mr...

...is a different sort of thing, a different activity, from what the past meant by art...

...But in general, the only thing you can do safely is make records at home for your own use...

...In almost all of Herzog's films to date, in fact, the characters behave, like figures of myth, by the laws of the imagination alone...

...The incident raises the question of where a legitimate pastime ends and forgery begins...

...It's the straightforward story of a petty criminal (Bruno S.) and his prostitute girlfriend Eva (Eva Mattes...

...One BRIAN wlcra~ is Commonweal's regular correspondent in Great Britain...

...Has anyone investigated the possibility of sending seminarians or other students to Poland for a year's study...

...Keating has done, in his little bit of the field, is show how absurd it is...

...But at Commonweal: 623 the same time, the masses can go on looking at coffeetable art books, and take their own portraits: the owners of the Palmers being, of course, the very same sort of people who make the camera films, and publish the books...

...But the coming of the forger has upset all these calculations...

...A few concessions are allowed, under strictly controlled conditions: for example, broadcasts for schools can be recorded and used in school during the term in which the broadcast was given---but not otherwise...

...They suggest everything while specifying little...

...A good number of books and booklets communicate the newer approaches in the study of the Bible, an important basis of the conciliar renewal in theology --here one can read reprints of West German works as well as high-level local work by well-known exegetes such as Heinz Schiirmann and Wolfgang Trilling...

...Early in the century, the Dadaists had to go to extreme, outrageously scandalous lengths to destroy the "aura" that surrounded high art...

...Walter Benjamin was the first person to discuss this kind of problem intelligently...

...A much broader, solider base of Catholic population and institutions exists there, even a Catholic university in Lublin, Younger Germans who speak Polish are not unwelcome...

...For example, every so often the BBC will remind people, through its house journal the Radio Times, that it is illegal to record most BBC broadcasts without permission...

...The absurdity of this situation is obvious...

...Academic critics can give lectures on Dadaism~that is safely past, packed away into "history"---and meanwhile Samuel Palmer can go on making money for his owners by being turned into money--as long as Mr...

...Yet it is also evident that modern techniques for reproducing works of art have already undermined that sense to a considerable degree: and that these same techniques have revolutionized our very concepts of what art is...

...Of course, if people want to do this, they should be expected to-pay for the labor of artists, engineers, etc...

...It is a highly praiseworthy effort, but one which only underscores the difficulties that face the theological laborer in East Germany...

...Keating are providing a useful service, in punching a few holes in the unacceptable mask of capitalism...

...but I doubt that there is a theologian in the West who has read enough of its output to be able to make a judgment on it...

...And as long as the prestige of painting (as distinct from photography) could be kept up, by various kinds of argument, some sound and some merely snobbish, things would be all right...

...But what ifDsay~the Japanese got into the business of forging Rembrandts in a big way, with their usual efficiency: where would the art-market be then...

...Nowadays, every photographer, every record~ng studio, every film maker is doing it all the time, r~ithout any fuss at all...

...Rather than the explanation of a particular situation, his films are revelations of the general...

...Postconciliar developments in the official church, P~pulorum Progressio, Humanae Vitae and so forth, have also been provided with editions in translation, but little in the way of published commentary, except for Werner Becker's aids for the ecumenical dialogue...

...The consumer of "art" can now become his own producer, the unique masterpiece becomes a piece of household furniture in a million sitting-rooms, the carefully considered and solitary works of the writer are superseded by the instantaneous response to events of the documenary producer and the TV interviewer...

...What Mr...

...For the factuwhether we like it or notDis that the coming of what Walter Benjamin called "the age of mechanical reproduction" has already changed our feelings and attitudes radically, and there is nothing we can do about this...

...Holding up a tiny, wrinkled baby the doctor asks philosophically 30 September 1977:624...

...They do this by providing more and more opportunities for the great unwashed to come into contact with that world...

...our understanding of the past...

...Thus does rural Wisconsin become, like the institution in Even Dwarfs, the microcosm of a nation--an East and West Germany in miniature...

...With that avenue now cut off, there is a considerable interest developing to strengthen ties (not only or primarily on the level of theological research) with the church of Poland...

...At heart it is still predominantly an attempt to mystify and mythologize all life...

...So to try to pass off a "Samuel Palmer" which in fact has none of this "aura" is a kind of cheating: and no doubt ultimately, if the forgery industry goes much further than it has so far, it could undermine our whole sense of tradition, our feeling for the past as past...

...Would the government block contributions of books or money for the purchase of foreign publications...

...I suppose people started it because they thought art-works were a secure way of making money grow...

...What sense does it make to prevent people from legally making copies, on their own cassette recorders, of gramophone records, when the very corporations which make the records also make the recorders...

...Similarly, in the TV era, the BBC gets huge handclaps for such programs as the series which wasusimply but tendentiously--entitled "civilization," in which Sir Kenneth Clark, a notably patrician art-historian, took viewers on a guided tour of the European art-world...

...They behave only in accordance with the laws of Herzog's own imagination, which is an all-consuming, singular and very private one...

...Gift subscriptions of theological journals are certainly possible...

...As long as the media are controlled by large corporations, whether state-subsidized or not, they will have to see to it that two conflicting interests are kept well apart...

...In the world of the hi-fi stores, the record shops, the domestic film-camera and the amateur photographic industry, art can become spontaneous...

...One is their interest in keeping the capitalist market in "the arts" alive, not so much by stimulating new ideas in it as by preserving its archaeological side...

...In a way, this theological roundup was a sort of anticipation of more recent Western attempts at international theological publication in periodical form (Concilium, Communio...

...ARS GRATIA ARTIS...

...Channels opened by way of Poland would have an indirect effect beyond its borders, not least in aid of the Catholic minority in East Germany...

...Keating's imitations are indistinguishable from the real thing, nobody has been cheated because they have had the same experience as if they had seen the real things, is to ignore the fact of the "aura" that hangs about originals...

...The result is films that are like parables...

...Of course, in this case it is for the purpose of keeping the isolated churches of Eastern Europe in touch with outside developments...

...One way of describing Mr~ Keating is to say that he is a forger: a kind of criminal...

...As is suggested by the use of the actors' names for the characters they play--Bruno S. is the vagrant and ex-mental patient whom Herzog featured in The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1975)~Herzog intends his film to seem, ambiguously, a document as well as a fable...

...Keating's products have not stayed with the people they were originally sold to, and some dealers and collectors have been caught...

...As in past films, so here, Herzog attempts almost physically to comprehend as much of human civilization as possible...

...When she attempts to live with him, the two thugs who have been acting as her pimps begin to terrorize them both...

...Quite characteristically, such efforts were given their own "channels," either exclusively, or as part of a "serious" end of the spectrum...

...At the same time, it makes it virtually impossible for anyone to borrow the original tapes the BBC holds...

...Naturally, like any big money-making commodity--in this respect forged paintings are much like battle tanks or armalite rifles--Mr...

...Who can blame him...

...Tom Keating, who--so I gather from what I read--has been doing some very good imitations of Samuel Palmer paintings and selling them to his friends...

...In Germany Stroszek goes to a doctor who once treated him and now consoles him in his new troubles with a tour of the hospital nursery...

...To escape this persecution, they decide to join Stroszek's aged friend, Herr Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz), who is immigrating to America to live with a cousin in rural Wisconsin...

...The isolation of many Christians in Eastern European countries seems bound to grow more acute as time goes by...

...Keating is kept at bay...

...The colony of dwarfs in Even Dwarfs Started Small or the African desert in Fata Morgana are microcosms of all creation...

...Many people in Britain can nowadays borrow a Titian or a Van Gogh from their public library, and hang it on their walls for a couple weeks...

...TH~ FAILURE OF LANGUAGE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN O O ý84 In the last issue I was suggesting that Werner Herzog should be thought of as a kind of seer, perhaps even something of a mystic...

...He does this by seeing in Stroszek's immigration a continuity between European and American cultures...

...It's an attempt once again to comprehend the incomprehensible...

...From his cellmate in the opening scenes to the pimps who terrorize him, half the people Stroszek knows in Germany wear Western hats and cowboy clothes like the Wisconsinites (indeed, like Stroszek himeslf, after he has been in America a time...

...BRIAN WICKER Where legitimate pastime ends and forgery begins In the last few months, the art market has been put in a terrible tizz because of the activities of a Mr...

...The generation of seminary professors, writers and editors now active in East Germany was for the most part still able to get their doctoral training in the theological faculties of West German universities...

...The only way Herzog can embrace life fully enough is to deal with it in a symbolic and anagogical way instead of a literal one...

...One of the absurdities that is generated by all this is the contemporary copyright law...

...After a visit to East Germany even a theologian ignorant of Polish begins to see in Poland the most promising avenue for printed and personal scholarly exchange between Catholics of the First and Second Worlds...

...On the other hand, an art which is in principle reproducible at will (and what art today is not...

...But even private recording or reproduction is often illegal...

...But the thing that one ought to be focusing attention on is the much more serious question of the effects of reproductions of art-works on the whole concept of art and our access to it...

...Since St...

...in the studios where the records were made...

...This is hardly the place to disross these large questions at length: but a few observations on one aspect of it may be in order...

...But a carefully organized division of responsibilities, between these two worlds, has the effect of deflecting the challenge to old conceptions of art and defusing its revolutionary possibilities...

...Thus in Britain, during the "Lord Reith era" of the BBC, during and after the war, enormous strides were taken in enlarging the audiences for "good music," especially on radio...

...indeed he has existed for a long time...

...In other words, you mustn't do anything to disturb the smooth workings of the art market...

...Never, he says, to people who didn't know what they were buying...

...To say that, as long as Mr...

...The "fetishism of commodities" has today grown to such an extent that it is virtually an epidemic of elephantiasis...

...Benno has to provide for the entire range of Catholic publishing: diocesan, liturgical, devotional, popular, catechetical and pastoral, as well as theological in the strict sense, it is perhaps worthy of note how the problem of keeping abreast has been confronted...

...On the one hand, the original work always has what he called an "aura" about it that came from its unique past: its traceable history and connection with the man and the age it came from gave it an indefinable radiance which is an intrinsic part of its aesthetic value...

...Another is to say that he has simply upset the vulnerable and delicate mechanism of the capitalist art-maker...

...By contrast, Herzog's newest film, Stroszek, seems the most naturalistic he has made...

...Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, things happen which, if given their full rein, would undermine the whole aesthetic on which that conception of "art" and "civilization" is built...

...Since 1958 the house has put out a sizable annual volume, a collection of articles from inside and outside East Germany by mainstream theologians (including some felt to be too "critical" by Herbst's superiors...

...For example, if Mr...

...Yet at the same time, Stroszek is only a document in the same peculiar sense that Fata Morgana is...

...The industry for making photographic reproductions had to be controlled, of course, by copyright laws and the like: but that wasn't too difficult, since you could always tell the difference by a close look...

...The combination of prestigevalue and scarcity-value (after all, the number of works by any one master is necessarily finite) is a powerful weapon in the hands of the millionaire...

...Keating had taken less trouble, and just gone in for photographing the paintings, he would not have got himself, or anyone else, into much trouble: a breach of copyright, or the rules of some gallery or Other perhaps, but not forgery--that is, passing round a copy that looks so like the original that a mistake could be made...

...and doubtless, if things got bad enough, we might have an army of snoopers round to check up on it...

...Yet everyone knows that today, photographic reproductions are barely distinguishable from the original, at 30 September 1977:622 least from the distance that paintings are normally looked at...

...Professional critics helped too, by insisting that only people who had access to the originals could fully appreciate what artists had done...

...Even before Stroszek leaves Germany the parallel with America and the impossibility of escaping his problems there seems inevitable...

...But instead of devising a system to make this possible, perhaps on the lines of the arrangements we now have in Britain whereby authors get their due rakeoff from their books each time they are borrowed from public libraries, all our society does is maintain a facade of laws against reproductions while, with the other hand, encouraging people to break it by buying the apparatus to do it with...

...I suppose he was to be expected...

...Two farmers engaged in a legal battle over a strip of land ride on their enormous diesel tractors armed with rifles and stare provokingly at each other across the disputed ground...