Below is an article comprised of randomly contributed images by three different artists:
As ubiquitous as pouting in the bathroom while taking selfies with your iPhone, feeding your favourite poster of a drug taking, rule breaking, pop star a questionable spoon of pinkish gloop is apparently our future.
In our technological environment of an ever increasing saturation of imagery, Guy Debord may in fact have been right after all. No longer living with authenticity, culture is entirely subsumed into the mediated image and a muddled divergence from reality. The blurring boundaries of truth and fiction have never been so opaque.
In our technological environment of an ever increasing saturation of imagery, Guy Debord may in fact have been right after all. No longer living with authenticity, culture is entirely subsumed into the mediated image and a muddled divergence from reality. The blurring boundaries of truth and fiction have never been so opaque.
For Eleanor Heartney, the Postmodern is entirely subsumed in this notion of mediation image and a removal from reality. In her 2001 book published by Tate, Heartney outlines three examples that signify the postmodern in culture. Firstly, the 1991 Gulf War[1] was portrayed in the media not by images from the ground as was historically used to portray war, but was delivered through footage of surveillance equipment recorded by the air forces themselves from the air. Secondly, a community in Florida known as Celebration was the brainchild of, and funded by, the Disney Corporation[2]. This small American town has been entirely constructed to conform to a kitsch, nostalgic version of a mythological perfect location. This is a place to “Live. Work. Play”, according to their breezy, utopian website. Finally, and perhaps most bleakly, Heartney describes the Lascaux cave in France as another perfect example of Postmodernism. These caves contain exquisite paintings of hunting scenes from the Palaeolithic era. They are however no longer accessible to the public. “What is available” Heartney articulates “are re-creations of the caves and their paintings in a nearby quarry [which] has done nothing to dim their appeal to the thousands of yearly viewers.” [3] It is not just that these cultural phenomenon are a removal from reality, we are told, it is that this absence or void is not even seen. For the author, “Each affirms the notion that we live within the sway of a mythology conjured for us by the mass media, movies and advertisements.”[4] We are so departed from reality we no longer even see this as a departure.
Canadian artist Robert Anthony O’Halloran works precisely in this moment of the Postmodern. O’Halloran‘s faux found sculptures are an astute contemporary meditation on the complete dissolution of not just a reality, but also our perception of this very loss. The artist, acutely aware of this slippage between the real and the spectacle, remakes and subtly reinserts discarded objects back into the streets for society to once again step over and ignore. He questions fundamental issues concerning the value of art and where it is placed within the hierarchy of objects of value. Further to this, it is his ironic observations on what is it culture determines as real and what the criteria for this determination are. Whimsically and precisely, O’Halloran observes society’s paradoxical fascination with and obliviousness to ‘truth’ versus ‘fiction’.
In her transgenic, hyper realist sculptures, artist Patricia Piccinini illuminates this phenomenon of society’s blindness to the now unseen void between reality and fiction. She creates remarkable hybridised, basterdised creature beings. This troubled beast, titled Young Family, lies exposed, feeding her brood of child piglets. She stares off into the distance looking both oddly human and unmistakably experimental, like some scientific research gone fundamentally wrong. This pig/human evokes our pity with her pathetic vulnerability, lying naked and visible. We at once empathise with her plight of helplessness and need to protect her brood, while also being disgusted by our inability to name what it is she is. She has pink skin and human limbs but her floppy ears and snout nose are unmistakably bovine. Is she the bastard child creation of some closeted act of bestiality and procreation or perhaps more bleakly, the result of some weird Frankenstein experiment in the quest for the perfect genes. Piccinini explores the erosion of species boundaries which leaped out of the realm of science fiction and into our everyday psyche the day Dolly the sheep met her match in Scotland in 1997. The rupture this human pig hybrid creates inside our mind is difficult to decipher. Perhaps it rests inside the notion of the unheimlich - the familiar and unfamiliar strangely combined - what Freud coined the uncanny. This is precisely where the slippage of reality rests. We can empathise with partial characteristics of the creation but are also repulsed by the things we cannot identify as our own.
The GFP Bunny by artist Eduardo Kac has burst through the realm of representation of genetic hybrids and maneuvered into very real existence. The bunny, known as Alba, is “a living albino rabbit with jellyfish DNA so it will grow green under light”[5] as Eleanor Heartney states in her 2008 book Art & Today. The bunny “has no functional purpose, she is merely the product of the artist’s imagination.”[6] This raises fundamental questions on what should we genetically alter, for what purpose do we preform it and how this alteration is represented or concealed, as the case may be. To all intents and purposes, Alba looks completely generic under normal conditions; it is not until she is subject to ultra violet light that we see how essentially different she really is. Alba all too easily could be subsumed into reality as a ‘natural’ and ‘true’, she is neither. She is just like the idyllic Florida town of Celebration, slightly peculiar, but we can’t quite articulate how.
The GFP Bunny by artist Eduardo Kac has burst through the realm of representation of genetic hybrids and maneuvered into very real existence. The bunny, known as Alba, is “a living albino rabbit with jellyfish DNA so it will grow green under light”[5] as Eleanor Heartney states in her 2008 book Art & Today. The bunny “has no functional purpose, she is merely the product of the artist’s imagination.”[6] This raises fundamental questions on what should we genetically alter, for what purpose do we preform it and how this alteration is represented or concealed, as the case may be. To all intents and purposes, Alba looks completely generic under normal conditions; it is not until she is subject to ultra violet light that we see how essentially different she really is. Alba all too easily could be subsumed into reality as a ‘natural’ and ‘true’, she is neither. She is just like the idyllic Florida town of Celebration, slightly peculiar, but we can’t quite articulate how.
Justin Bieber’s feeder is finding reality and comfort in the inanimate; so much so, she nurtures him with her suspicious goo. We are stepping into a strange new world it seems. No longer concerned with notions of originality or authenticity, what concerns us now are conditions of experience and juxtapositions. Value is bestowed upon rubbish that has been carefully crafted and expertly reinserted into the world to be ignored, masterfully critiquing our divergence new from reality. A creature can, quite tangibly and literally, be birthed as equal parts human and beast.
It is not just a removal from the real that is alarming; it is, as Heartney puts it, the removal from even realising there is a void where something else more pure used to be. The once stable, given modes of existing and experiencing the world are given over to a future with an ever increasing breakdown of what is real and what is, ever so slightly, not.
It is not just a removal from the real that is alarming; it is, as Heartney puts it, the removal from even realising there is a void where something else more pure used to be. The once stable, given modes of existing and experiencing the world are given over to a future with an ever increasing breakdown of what is real and what is, ever so slightly, not.
[1] Jean Baudrillard published a book titled The Gulf War did not take place in 1991 in French. Baudrillard claimed this war never really happened for many reasons. One of his arguments including, as Heartney argues here, this war was a virtual war, where there were no real enemies and no real warriors, only the CNN audience, namely us.
[2] Jean Baudrillard, in his revered 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, he defines Disneyland as camouflaging the fact “real” America is indeed Disneyland itself. He states, that “in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real...” For Baudrillard then, Disneyland does not confine societies childish behaviour, infantile actions are in fact the essence of the US.
[3] Eleanor Heartney, Postmodernism (Tate Publishing; 2001, London) p7
[4] Ibid. p.7
[5] Eleanor Heartney, Art & Today (Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2008) p.101
[6] Ibid. p.101
Emma
[2] Jean Baudrillard, in his revered 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, he defines Disneyland as camouflaging the fact “real” America is indeed Disneyland itself. He states, that “in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real...” For Baudrillard then, Disneyland does not confine societies childish behaviour, infantile actions are in fact the essence of the US.
[3] Eleanor Heartney, Postmodernism (Tate Publishing; 2001, London) p7
[4] Ibid. p.7
[5] Eleanor Heartney, Art & Today (Phaidon Press Ltd, London, 2008) p.101
[6] Ibid. p.101
Emma