Holly Childs

What Walter Benjamin identified as ‘aura’ finds curious analogies to the ‘post-medium’ present. Tan Lin writes of how for Andy Warhol ‘Language is a means of exchanging who we are (our product) for someone we aren’t (our aura).’ Similar to a psychotheoretical split between our Symbolic and Real personae, the contemporary ‘aura’ is something like the sheer secondary quality of everyday life; the curious, removed, if symbolic fascination of what might be happening when nothing is happening: the generic publicity and ‘intermundane’ privacy of relaxation (if we can here call ‘intermundane’ the vacuous yet binding, commodified space between earthly bodies).