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Urban mass media culture. The experience
of an individual living anonymously within
a concentration of individuals living together
but remaining anonymous to each other.
An individual perceives the anonymous others
as they meet in the street face to face and
conceives of them as they meet indirectly
through mass media or through the signs and
symbols of popular culture. I am interested
particularly in the space between the perception
and conception; between the actual and the
symbolic; the difference between immediate
and vicarious experience of the others.
How can we know the people that we don't
know?
How does one put together one's experience
of the others through the media with one's
experience face to face with other individuals?
Can clear ideas be delivered through the
illusions implicit in vicarious experience?
What is the relationship between symbol and
illusion?
How do symbols work on the psyche?
What is the relationship between symbol and
archetype?
How are our actions toward other people affected
by what we hear about them?
How are the actions of one culture affected
by what that culture is informed about another?
These are all questions of human relationship.
These are questions my painting probes.
The Street -
For me the street constitutes the most dynamic
element of our social environment. It is
intrinsic to the individual's concept of
the masses of anonymous others and it exemplifies
the flux in social order. The street has
been a recurrent theme in my painting. When
the street paintings are hung with the media
paintings they represent the known as contrasted
with the imagined.
The Media People - see "Court Card Culture"
As a culture we share the daily bombardment
of countless images through the mass media.
We are presented the faces of millions of
people whom we do not know but can identify
with as types. Most flow through the eye
without sticking in the mind. But some do
stick and we are moved by them. One might
postulate that as the residual faces and
types accumulate we form our impressions
and opinions of the society that we know
is there but do not know personally.
Personalities represented in media pictures
have been transformed-, mediafied by the
processes of photo reproduction, massive
duplication and distribution. The transformation
begins with the self consciousness of the
model being photographed for the media. Portrayed
to a mass of anonymous people they become
archetype, symbol. I am interested in emphasizing
this in my painting of media people. The
faces I have chosen are not famous yet all
have had their media moment. I want them
to read as symbols within systems of symbols.
Minetic desire
It's been convincingly argued that all social
relations arise from mimetic desire, our
desire to imitate others and be imitated
by others.
I think what I'm trying to get at with these paintings
is a connection between our need to imitate
each other as well as the reciprocal desire
to be imitated, and the creation of archetypes,
symbols, myths, then models that define our
culture.
I guess the hypothesis would
be: our drive
to mimic and to be mimicked gives
rise to
fad, fashion and cultural trends
and thus to
the origin of our cultural archetypes,
symbols,
myths etc.
The images of faces have been selected twice,
first by the media, then by me, both selections
made from a position of anonymity, the faces
depicted have become archetypes, possibly
models if we desire to imitate them. That
is, in the absence of any personal connection
between us, they become, to the viewer, representative
of some cross section of the society within
which we live. By pushing the faces around
in paint I move them from archetype toward
symbol and, with a little suggestion of narrative,
toward myth. |
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