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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rachel Wells
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This essay identifies a preoccupation with ‘space-crossed time’ within Wolfgang Weileder’s practice. It argues that Weileder’s use of photography repeatedly implies that the photograph’s auratic ‘weave of space and time’ as described by Walter Benjamin, is no longer accurate as a reflection of our experience. Unlike Benjamin, however, who in 1936 argued that the withering of aura was due to reproducibility, I connect the implication of Weileder’s projects - that conventional photography no longer conveys 'space-crossed time' - to a socio-historical context of ‘time-space compression’ (David Harvey) and the ‘acceleration of the instant’ (Paul Virilio). Harvey has diagnosed a capitalist-fuelled ‘time-space compression’ as new technologies have accelerated levels of production, exchange and consumption, encouraging globalised mass markets which overcome spatial barriers and emphasise the instantaneous and disposable. Virilio has argued that duration has succumbed to the omnipresent instant, thereby enacting an ‘assault’ on memory. I argue that contemporary photography, rather than capturing a Benjaminian ‘strange weave of space and time’ or becoming inextricable from history as in Eduardo Cadava’s analysis, is entirely connected to the acceleration process which Virilio bemoans. Our screens are infiltrated with photographs, our maps constructed out of them, our identities increasingly shrunk to fit them. Within this context, Weileder’s ‘constructive’ photography suggests that the contemporary capitalist culture of the instant image is producing a form of illiteracy in experiencing and understanding the nexus between time and space. Weileder’s installations too foreground a mapping of space and time onto each other, often emphasised through an insistent connection between duration and the life-size, rather than Virilio’s concern at the ‘infinitely big of historicity’ or the ‘infinitely small of instantaneity’. Throughout his oeuvre, Weileder constructs a contemporary conception of space-crossed time that is determinedly human-scaled, and which, in unmasking the distractions of instantaneous ‘creative’ images, offers unsentimental reference points for locating our own spatiotemporal condition.
Author(s): Wells R
Editor(s): Seyfarth, L; Wells, R; Robinson, A.
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Wolfgang Weileder: Continuum
Year: 2013
Pages: 105-141
Publisher: Kerber Verlag
Place Published: Germany
Notes: This essay will be one of four texts published within the forthcoming Hatje Cantz monograph on Wolfgang Weileder's work to date.
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9783866789166
