Representation 2
René Magritte: The Treachery of Images
(1928-9)
René Magritte: Two Mysteries (1966)
Mise an abyme
‘put in an abyss’ . Infinite regression
On your breakfast table is your packet of
cornflakes, and on your packet is a picture of the
smiling Kellogg family at breakfast, and on their
table is a picture of your packet which has a
picture of the smiling Kellogg family, and so on
(M. Ashmore)
e.g. Hamlet: the ‘mousetrap scene’
Midsummer Night’s Dream: the play of the ‘rude
machanicals’
• Re-presentations: we think that the model
(‘reality’) precedes, pre-exists the
representation
Representations and schemata
• Do we represent what we see?
Magritte: The Uses of Speech
Magritte: The
Interpretation
of Dreams
Alain: „Egyptian life class”, 1955
Relief of
the
divine
birth of
Hatshep
sut
Gentile da Fabriano: Adoration of the Magi (1322-3)
Rubens:
Adoration of the
Magi
(1633)
Power of representations
‘society of the spectacle’ (Guy Debord)
Images replace what we see
Emile Zola: “I don’t think we can claim that
we have seen something until we have not
photographed it”
Magritte:
The
Human
Condition
Andy Warhol: Marilyn (green) 1960s
Andy Warhol: Marilyn (pink) 1960s
Warhol’s pictures
•
•
•
•
•
no ‘realism’
cheap, poor quality, mass-produced image
face – soul
the body is well-known public property:
an image where the soul should be
Claude glass - Thomas Gainsborough
Tintern Abbey through a Claude glass
Claude glass
•
•
•
•
•
Named after Claude Lorrain
Small portable mirror tinted with dark foil
Recommended to 18th-century painters
picturesque effect
the very idea of ‘landscape’
Tintern
Abbey
Technologies of representation
• New technologies change our views of
representation itself and of the mind
(camera obscura; ‘photograhic memory’)
• They change what we (can) see and how
we see
Prosthetic images
• we could not see these things otherwise
• Microscope was called by Richard Hooke,
its inventor, an „artificial organ” (1665),
that ‘supplies the infirmities’ of the natural
• How can we check images of the
‘invisible’?
19th-century
cartoon about
the
microscope
the dark side of the moon
Mrs. Röntgen’s
hand
embryo scan
M. C. Escher: Relativity
• M. C.
Escher:
Waterfall
analog and digital images
• digital vs analog technologies of making
images
• Digital images stored as data
• ‘represent’ a matrix rather than an image
• Images are generated
the hyperreal
• HYPERREAL: ‘the generation by models
of of a real without origin in reality’ (Jean
Baudrillard)
• images that are not representations
• generated by formulas, algorithms
cyberspace
• “I looked into one of the video arcades. I
could see in the physical intensity of their
postures how rapt the kids were…These
kids clearly believed in the space games
projected. Everyone I know who works with
computers seems to develop a belief that
there’s some kind of actual space behind the
screen, someplace you can’t see but you
know is there.” (William Gibson:
Neuromancer)
Barbie dolls
Barbie doll
• Originally designed as a fashion doll for
adults (Mattel, 1959)
• Teaches fixed, normative gender roles to
girls (codes of femininity: defined through
the body, standards of dress and
behaviour
• ‘Barbie is a consumer. She demands
product after product, and the packaging
and advertising imply that Barbie, as well
as her owner, can be made happy only if
she wears the right clothes and owns the
right products” (Marilyn Ferris Motz)
Barbie/2
• multicultural Barbies: same body
(racial difference )
• ethnic, aerobic, fitness phases
• female body as ‘cultural plastic’
• desexualised in detail
• over-eroticised in general outlines
• impossible body
Sindi (Cindy) Jackson: Living Doll
Valeria Lukyanova
human Barbie
Technologies of the body
• You can shape your body into whatever
you want it to be
• Elastic body: transformer
• Barbie and human Barbies as ‘posthuman’
SIMULACRUM
e.g. Somehuman Barbies:
thing modelled on an image that has no
original
Tasaday tribe (Philippines)
• Disneyland
• “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact
that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’
America, which is Disneyland …
Disneyland is presented as imaginary to
make us believe that the rest is real, when
in fact all of Los Angeles and the America
surrounding it are no longer real, but of the
order of the hyperreal and of simulation.”
(Baudrillard)
William
Wallace
monument
Braveheart
Paul
Foelsche:
Lialloon
(1879,
New
Guinea)
anthropometry
Anthropometry,
„Bertillonage”
Alphonse
Bertillon, Prefect
of Paris Police
(late 19th
century)
‘Lialloon’
- The photo constructs ‘us’ as its makers
and beholders
- us= civilised, modern Europeans
- possessing the ‘scientific gaze’
What does ‘Lialloon’ represent?
- Lialloon: not an individual
- provides ‘objective knowledge’
(photography is ‘true’)
- (1) image of ‘barbarity’ for us (an ‘other’) –
Barbarity, primitivism:
- (2) ‘noble savage’ (touched up with
charcoal)
- (3) potential criminal (Foelsche: colonial
administrator)
- allegory of ‘race’
The politics of representation
• „politics” = power is involved
• Who has the right (power) to represent
something?
Who tells the story of extinct peoples?
history written by the winners
technological inequality
James Bond:
Roger Moore or Sean Connery
posters of Dr. No (1962)
Pierce Brosnan / Daniel Craig
• “He was a comely handsome fellow, perfectly
well made; with straight strong limbs, not too
large; tall and well shaped … He had a very good
countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but
seemed to have something very manly in his
face, and yet he had all the sweetness and
softness of an European in his countenance too,
especially when he smiled. His hair was long and
black, not curled like wool… The colour of his
skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet
not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as in the
Brasilians, but of a bright kind of a dun olive
colour, that had in it something very agreeable,
though not very easy to describe.” (Defoe:
Robinson Crusoe, 1719)
Robinson Crusoe and Friday
Robinson Crusoe and Friday 2
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bronislaw Malinowski among the
Trobriand Islanders (1918)
Malinowski’s diary (1918)
• “At 5 I went to Kaulaka. A pretty, finely built
girl walked ahead of me. I watched the
muscles of her back; her figure, her legs,
and the beauty of the body so hidden to
us, whites, fascinated me. Probably even
with my own wife I’ll never have the
opportunity to observe the play of back
muscles for as long as with this little
animal. At moments I was sorry I was not a
savage and could not possess this pretty
girl. At Kaulaka, looked round, noting
things to photograph.”
• „America was invented before it was
discovered” (Giuseppe Cocchiara)
• „Who controls the past controls the future.
He who controls the present controls the
past.” (Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four +
ADF’s ‘Memory War’)
Politics of representation
• Representations: political practices, sites
of conflict and resistance
• Representations can be changed, revised
• Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
(madwoman’s story in Jane Eyre)
• J. M. Coetzee: Foe (Friday and Susan
Barton)
• Michel Tournier: Friday or the Ends of the
Pacific
Friday (French film, 1981)