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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathMontage/Sampling/Morphing
 
 
 
 
 

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antiillusionistic references to the world and self, but it nevertheless builds, constructs. The artist possibly no longer regards himself as an artist—he has become an engineer, a foreman, an architect; the construction site functions on the basis of the division of labor. But its aim: the aims of the construction are a technically new, highly productive world or communism. Where montage is strategic, has an objective, of course it again falls victim to a logic of original and forgery, initial source and thief, etc., even if these do not necessarily have to refer to a logic of authorship, but rather—modernized—can also mean a form of production in film and architecture that is based on the division of labor.

 

Montage as a means of construction and concurrent destruction

In a third version of montage optimism, which one can assemble out of Walter Benjamin's more or less isolated observations about montage, [9] a further aspect is named that is perhaps more popularly associated with the art genre term ‹collage›: the dialectics of construction and destruction.

 

As an extension to the character of the montage conceived of as only anti-illusionistic or as a reinforcing illusion in the other designs, for Benjamin it is furthermore important that with each act of mounting, an act of demounting is performed; that everywhere a cut interrupts a continuum and is joined together with another one, a context, an image is also always lost—and rightly so: as a false idyll, false integrality. Montage would therefore not only put together two halves in a visible—and thus anti-illusionistic—way, but at the same time show that an old context must be destroyed for the new one.

 

Three montage terms

Thus we have three basic positions: (1) The marking of the cut in the spirit of anti-illusionistic aesthetics; (2) anti-humanistic futurism in the service of an improvement, however it is conceived, of the arts or their replacement, also entirely in the spirit of an improvement of the illusion; and finally (3) a marking of anti-illusionism plus the replacement and destruction of the old idyll, therefore actually the addition of Benjamin's Soviet-leftist and futurist-apolitical idea of

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