Representation 2

1. Representation 2

2. René Magritte: The Treachery of Images (1928-9)

3. René Magritte: Two Mysteries (1966)

4. 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’

5. Re-presentations: we think that the model (‘reality’) precedes, pre-exists the representation

6. Representations and schemata • Do we represent what we see?

7. Magritte: The Uses of Speech

8. Magritte: The Interpretation of Dreams

9. Alain: „Egyptian life class”, 1955

10. Relief of the divine birth of Hatshepsut

11. Gentile da Fabriano: Adoration of the Magi (1322-3)

12. Rubens: Adoration of the Magi (1633)

13. 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”

14. Magritte: The Human Condition

15. Andy Warhol: Marilyn (green) 1960s

16. Andy Warhol: Marilyn (pink) 1960s

17. 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

18. Claude glass - Thomas Gainsborough

19. Tintern Abbey through a Claude glass

20. 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’

21. Tintern Abbey

22. 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

23. 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’?

24. 19th-century cartoon about the microscope

25. the dark side of the moon

26. Mrs. Röntgen’s hand

28. embryo scan

29. M. C. Escher: Relativity

30. M. C. Escher: Waterfall

31. 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

32. thehyperreal • HYPERREAL: ‘the generation by models of of a real without origin in reality’ (Jean Baudrillard) • images that are not representations • generated by formulas, algorithms

33. 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)

34. Barbie dolls

35. 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)

36. 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

37. Sindi (Cindy) Jackson: Living Doll

38. Valeria Lukyanova

39. human Barbie

40. 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’

41. SIMULACRUM e.g. Somehuman Barbies: thing modelled on an image that has no original

42. Tasaday tribe (Philippines)

43. 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)

44. William Wallace monument

45. Braveheart

46. Paul Foelsche: Lialloon (1879, New Guinea) anthropo-metry

47. Anthropometry, „Bertillonage” Alphonse Bertillon, Prefect of Paris Police (late 19th century)

48. ‘Lialloon’ • The photo constructs ‘us’ as its makers and beholders • us= civilised, modern Europeans • possessing the ‘scientific gaze’

49. 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’

50. 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