I’ve reappropriated an artwork a few weeks ago, wrote about it, and then waited for today to publish it.
Phones have more power than bows and arrows
Attraction is seen as desire personified and preserved in the form of a winged infant who fires arrows. Initially I wanted to depict Cupid holding a phone, but found this image of the painting, Venus and Cupid painted by Charles-André Van Loo, Also known as Carle Van Loo (1705-1765) on the internet. I found it more amusing because the goddess of love (Cupid’s mother) is in the painting as well. It’s not a mystery where Freud gets his ideas from, because the Greek counterpart is Eros. Sternberg later expanded this to the triangular theory love (like most models 20th century psychology), which is the outlines of the different types of love (but I think it’s a more clinical version of the Greek concepts of love; they had a more holistic view).
The P word
On a deeper level, the theories are both adaptations of the culture that surrounds them at the time, because Sternberg’s theory is from 1985. It’s roughly a decade after the term, postmodernism was used.
The digital work I’ve ‘recreated’ is postmodern because:
- It’s an appropriation (of a Rococo painting)
- a recycling of past styles and themes in a modern-day context
- I’m born in the 90s, between millenials and gen Z
The problem with the work is that it can’t be printed. (Legally I can’t print it because of copyright, but there’s another reason); some integrity of the work is lost because its origin is digital. A way to get around this is to use a digital device to show it. I’ve previously printed a digital image and it didn’t translate as well on paper – which I’ve shown alongside the TV installation at my BA degree show. (I wonder what Daniel Buren would write if it was The Function of the Studio, but included digital realms where the works were created too).
Breaking the smoke and mirrors, then putting the pieces back from memory
Reflecting on the mirrors, I’m starting to understand why I had to keep repeating the tentacles and the mirrors, so I can forestall writing / talking about real problems in front of others. I’ve kind of created a simulacrum: where the artworks from MA Fine Art doesn’t have substance, so there’s no enduring personal connection with it (usually when I create works, the meanings of the works grow with me with time, but it just didn’t happen with the mirrors; a material which is ironically seen as superficial). Plato wrote about Socrates’ speech about time being the best way to test most things in The Symposium.
‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.’ – Jean Baudrillard
Maybe I was trying to manifest the subconscious, but like myths and religion, it remains unfalsifiable.
