Elmo, 11/15 Birkerts

Birkerts speech at the museum on Thursday night was really good! I found it to be an interesting subject matter and I actually understood everything he was talking about. He analyzed the Kertesz exhibit on reading. I thought that it was cool to hear him speak about the pictures in the exhibit since we had had the opportunity to view them a few weeks ago and spend time examining them. Birkerts talked a lot about how the camera eye proposes a field of perception; it shows you only what it wants you to see. He talked about how the artist “creates” an image which he or she wants the reader to see. This reminded me a lot of what Benjamin talked about and how the camera doesn’t allow us to see the entire picture, only what, again, the author or artist wants us to see. Birkerts also talked about how both the artist and the observer are of equal importance to the image, similar to what we have learned about Macherey. Birkerts said that the artist has a image or meaning of the picture as does the observer, but they are both different, which in turn makes them both equally important in reading the picture.

Something else, which moved in a different direction, was when Birkerts brought up the new phenomena of e-books and the kindle. He raised the question of if this takes away from the books history or authenticity. He talked a lot about how the kindle brings about loss and takes away from a books history. It privates us in a sense because we don’t actually get to see the book, and perhaps how old it is, or feel the pages; It makes everything the same. This is just like what Adorno said when he talked about how everything these days is the same. If all of our books become electronic then there really is no difference besides the actual words themselves, all the fonts are the same, there are no images, no ripped or crinkled pages to indicate oldness, and no dust to brush off the cover. I had never really thought about this before and I find it to be really interesting to think about. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed Birkerts speech on reading.