Week 10 - Meaning, Identity, Embodiment

This week’s reading is an analysis of French art philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s use of phenomenology in art history by Amelia Jones. The essay begins with a painting that portrays a woman’s genitals as the primary subject matter. The painting was created by Gustave Courbet in 1866 and entitled The Origin of the World. It shocked the world because it only shows the woman’s thighs, torso, part of a breast, and hairy genital. It is different than any other high art female nude painting created during that period and even now. The title gives away what the artist was thinking when he created the painting. However, the painting was commissioned by Turkish diplomat Kahil Bey. The painting stirred up a slew of questions among art critics. Such as, how does an interpreter engage with visual images? What kind of bodies does a viewer experience when hovering over the subject? Who produced the visual image and what does the visual image mean? 
 Amelia Jones asserts that the subject, its author, and its interpreter are identified by its interpreter. She uses Maxime du Camp’s 1881 interpretation to support her argument. Du Camp stated that the producer forgot to represent the feet, the legs, thighs, stomach, hips, arms, shoulders, neck, and head and that when one looks at the painting that they have a stupefied reaction. He must have not thought much of the painting by his interpretation because he also believed that the artist, Gustave Courbet sold out for a few coins to degrade his craft. Not only that, du Camp imagined an orgasm taking place when viewing the painting. By Du Camp’s reaction, he implicates what he is thinking (meaning who he is) by this type of interpretation. Courbet may have never meant anything sexual by the painting, but because du Camp interpreted the work as something sexual and negative this relationship between him the interpreter, the maker (Courbet), and the subject (nude female genitals) are intertwined. As such, there is a reciprocal relationship with the identity of the interpreter. 
 In the essay, Jones takes a feminist approach to evaluate Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological observation.  Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher that studied the relationship between viewing subject and object. Jones states that Merleau-Ponty’s work is not sensitive to differences of those relating to gender and sexuality. Our experience with visual images informs who we are, we don’t just experience things through observation but with our bodies. Phenomenology, body art, and minimalism are strongly linked during this period. Minimalism was a reaction to abstract expressionism. The idea is that art should have its own reality and not be a reflection of something.  Body art is the idea of using a human body as a medium to apply paint onto a canvas as a performance for the viewer, that there is a relationship between the body and art.
The Gun Rack Performance

     The art piece that I have chosen is called The Gun Rack Performance by Liu Bolin. Liu Bolin allowed his body to be painted the same as the wall, camouflaged with the artillery and background disappearing into the wall. Bolin is a Chinese modern artist known for disappearing into his pieces. This is a wonderful example of performance body art. According to Bolin, he creates these types of pieces because the Chinese government closed the Suojia Village art campus leaving him with no employment, and no income, and no social status. He began this series so that he can allow his viewer to see China as he knows it, where artists are being neglected as human beings. My interpretation when I first view the piece is that this artist made himself a component of the painting. I find it beautiful and it seems to tell me that he may have had an experience with gun violence and so he is disappearing into this sea of violence. Although my interpretation of what I am viewing may have not been what the artist intended when creating the piece, my interpretation is telling others what is going in my mind. Violence, human oppression, and even the possibility of human ending because he disappears leaving an indication of human form. 

Sources
Amelia Jones, "Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: The Uses of Merleau-Ponty's  Phenomenology in Art History," in Art and Thought, 2003

Bootiful, O. S., Shovava, Day, T. is A., Comma, & Colorsheets, V. (2016, June 16). Liu Bolin camouflages himself into a rack of guns. My Modern Met. Retrieved October 30, 2021, from https://mymodernmet.com/liu-bolin-gun-rack/.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photography - Forgetting and Remembering

Image
       Carol and Susan - Friends Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians by JEB - 1978      Jan Zita Grover, ‘Framing the Questions: Positive Imaging and Scarcity in Lesbian Photographs’ (1991) is an article that focuses on the portrayal in photographs and questions whether what is being represented is reality or the maker’s perception. Grover begins with an experience that she had with a friend that she helped put an exhibition together. The exhibition was in support of the local government and highlighted Nicaraguan people in their communities. Grover tells how her friend rejected photographs made by Nicaraguans and Cubans in favor of photographs made by North Americans and Europeans. Mainly because the photos by the Nicaraguan and Cubans showed laughing children and smiling peasants and the friend did not want to show something so sentimental. Grover explains that by denying the photos of the Nicaraguans and Cubans, her friend was denying their aspiration...
Read more

Language Epistemology Identity

Image
  Indigenous Methodology is an essay by Margaret Kovach. Kovach evaluates tribal epistemology and compares the indigenous methods of obtaining knowledge to traditional western methods. Kovach centers her research around the Plains Cree tribe located in the northernmost area of the North American plains (North Canada).   Unlike western academic research methods, indigenous knowledge cannot be standardized because it is highly dependent on the relationship to person and place. Indigenous methods of obtaining knowledge share characteristics and qualities and are in the constructs of a paradigm. Some of these qualities and characteristics include ceremonial practices, dreams, rituals, and prayers, which are very holistic and metaphysical. These methods and concepts of indigenous’ knowledge are foreign to western practices of research. The idea of metaphysical, extraordinary, and energy-based knowledge and calling it the fact is hard to swallow for me as well. I thought about ...
Read more

Week 7 - The Oppositional Gaze

Image
This week’s reading gave me a different perspective on how black females are represented on film and what they feel when they are watching a film in a world that is dominated by white males. The essay is written by Bell Hooks, she begins talking about the terror she felt when she was a child and told not to stare. Historically, white slave owners punished black people for looking. They were denied their rights to gaze and to look. Hooks goes on to talk about the conflict she felt inside when her mother told her to look at her when she is talking to her and how she was afraid to look. There is much power in looking. I can attest to that statement. When I was a child growing up in a small rural town in Georgia, I remember other children getting really mad at me for staring at them. The town I grew up in was predominately black so it would always be another black classmate I was looking at. But I was not looking at them because of race. I did not care about skin color. I looked becau...
Read more