Accessible through myriad information sources, historical fragments abound for our consideration and integration into a contemporary web of reality constructions. I appreciate the various shifts in meaning which are metamorphosed in the reconstructive processes available to me through the digital imaging medium.
The quantifying gaze which we bring to the digital photograph, that is to look at it, cannot be extended back to us. A simultaneous presence and absence exists insofar as the narrative cannot be fully comprehended between the interpreter and the object. Space time fragments, such as photographs and digital images, are also space time artifacts and space time representations encased in film, a transparent medium, and in this case of digital photography, in electromagnetic constructions contained at relative levels of existence.
One very interesting aspect to me as an artist and as a scientist of sorts, is the unseen world of the interior which, dependent upon my relative gaze to it, reveals many different stories. Tethered to the influences of modernism, I know as a painter, that the opacity of the object amplifies homogeneity and the inherent corporeal nature of that medium. Thus, I rebound between the tangible and the illusive, between matter and energy.
In 1919, Du Champ appropriated DiVinci's Mona Lisa thus starting the convention of appropriation during the modernism of the 19th Century. Cubism treated time, space and reality by fragmenting the picture plane thus offering various points of view. This shift caused the object to fragment with such fragmentation of reality revealing itself simultaneously in the arts and sciences. Such ideas were radical at that time because they had to do with the excavating and surfacing of multiple viewpoints which have consequently been translated into the postmodernist's idea of pluralism.
There is a historical shift between the two periods of modernism and postmodernism whereby history is conflated and progress is developed through a repetition or a "doubling." Repetition is an important key in appropriation, as postmodernism is a repetition of modernism, a reconfiguration of someone else's ideas rather than a presentation of originality.
The construction of the idea of the heroic male artists, with Picasso presenting himself as a mentor and Michaelangelo seeing himself as a creator, like God The Father, ended with Jackson Pollock. Inclusion of multiple voices and points of view, with the inclusion of women, blacks, gays and the civil rights movement all serve to dismantle the heroic system. By supporting fragmentation and the loss of a particular voice, based upon one text, stylistic diversity and multi-tribe cultural units can blossom. The illusion of the everyday can be integrated into the work with ordinary activities consequently becoming the heroic.
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