Carlos Miguel Gonçalves

Internacional Congress on Visual Culture, Rome, Italy

Summary analysis of the concept of Technical Reproducibility, Aura and Tactile and Optical Reception in Walter Benjamin, Stereotype in Walter Lippmann and Device in Michel Foucault followed by a concise examination of the Neoplasticist avant-garde and Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair, ending with a comparison between the first three concepts and the latter.

Conclusion
If we analyse both Rietveld's and Benjamin's points of view, we effectively come across the importance of the transformations introduced by technology as builders of new goals and realities, and quite interesting questions are raised regarding the role of the reproducibility of the work of art. Rietveld, as a fervent supporter of the democratisation of art, saw the mass manufacture and (re)production of his works as an extraordinary achievement that freed them from the past without this meaning the peripheralisation of that same aura of lightness and intense experience that we feel when we observe the Chair. The aim was to reposition the artistic exercise, not in an elitist and reclusive sphere but, on the contrary, at the level of the everyday practice of the New Man. On this level, it should be noted, the Red and Blue Chair could not offer a greater antithesis to Benjamin's conceptualisations of habit and distraction as narcotics against the destruction of the aura, an antithesis understood here as lightness versus weight, action versus prostration, vigilance versus distraction, thought versus numbness. Where habit and distraction anaesthetize, Rietveld's Chair conscientizes and conscientifies Man, awakens him, guides him, leads him to universality. Moreover, post-war man was (and, as we know, generally is) an anguished being who internalises and projects within himself anxieties that Rietveld necessarily wanted to overcome through catharsis and universality. If this were not so, the Chair would not respond in the least to the real spiritual needs it set out to fulfil. The universe of Neoplasticism, spatial, singular and redemptive, openly detaches itself from the traditional domain of the stereotypical and immobile forms of old bourgeois art. For Rietveld, too, to transform the world was to transform language, to free itself from its old commonplaces, to shake off its sclerosis and accommodation. Eliminating stereotypes was decisive because under the guise of naturalness, ideology was propagated and the unawareness of the speaking beings of their real life conditions was perpetuated. Rietveld replaced them with a visionary and seductive prototype that carried within it all the ferment of future design. Underlying this contrast is also the Neoplasticist notion of the immutability and irrefutability of its laws, taken from the world of mathematics as opposed to the pre-established codes of stereotypes, consecrated codes of "I believe in..." that effectively confer structure on the world of external stimuli without, however, having the universality of an exact law. Finally, there is room to add that the Red and Blue Chair also functions as a renounced piece of a device, emptied of its banality and indefiniteness, strategically freed of its primary function, instilled with new neoplastic meanings that, in a certain way, expanding into a network through the massification of production, intended to guide, determine and orient the gestures, drives, thoughts and behaviours of a New Man.

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