They say, art no longer produces beauty, she produces meaning. I say, one cannot paint a picture or make an image of a woman and not deal with the concept of beauty. Marlene Dumas
Assignment 5fp001 Contemporary photographic practice, The Venus project 2010/11
For this assignment I wanted to learn more about beauty in art, it is now I have found that it is a much bigger subject than I ever thought possible, not in a naive approach as being aware that there was a bigger picture and many writings, works, plays and music all dedicated to the explanation and love dedicated to the devotion of beauty but, like Duchamp said in a famous television interview that the word art had been defused and misused so much that the word art its self was now meaningless.
If you go to Google, search for beauty, click on images you will get well over ninety percent female form, so I can be seen that this only applies to woman... but it is not true, we just use another word for the male, hansom, Adonis or even chiselled. The word is another for attractive, pretty or anything that gives a pleasing mental or physical response. Roland Barthes theory about the studium and puncturem makes a reference to this emotional response when his idea fails to work when he looks for a photograph of his deceased mother, this emotional response could be defined in a plutonic love and upset in finding the images from her childhood, choosing images of her when he never knew her. This plutonic love is what I went looking for, the idea of love without desire.
The Botticelli Venus
Originally I was looking for the idea of plutonic love that the artist felt for his model, so much so that he wanted to be buried at her feet when he died. It was said that Botticelli loved her so much that he immortalised her as a goddess made human on earth, his was a love without desire of the flesh, like a mother for her offspring. This in turn put me into a story in Greek mythology, the temptation of Paris. The three goddesses argued over which one of them the most beautiful; Liverier was the goddess of wisdom, Juno the queen of the gods and Venus the goddess of love. The winner would receive the apple of discord and would be declared the most beautiful. This contest, the gods decided should be judged by a mortal, Paris. All the goddesses started trying to tempt him to give them the apple. Venus being sneaky promised Paris the heart of Helen of troy knowing she had a beauty that no man could resist. So Paris gave her the apple, this is where the Venus de Milo is said to be the point where she is awarded the apple, her arms having been broken off over time. I found this to be interpreted with the Botticelli Venus showing that a human is more beautiful than any god, where he painted his Venus being born the shell behind her representing the vagina, midwifes ready with towels to wrap the child, and the fanfare of the gods on the right. A representation of his love and her place in his world, so it started to show me that perhaps he felt differently to what has been written. This started to appear that it was not what I was looking for. So I looked into work showing the temptation of Paris.
Venus in silhouette
While this investigation was continuing some friends asked me do to some pictures for them, both for fun, face book and as part of a professional portfolio, as these were female I used the opportunity to look for the female. This work took me from the temptation to the Venus herself. In an attempt to find the plutonic I decided to try and remove the female from the picture. To do this I turned to sculpture and psychoanalysis. Having a style in the abstract it was decided to go with the idea that goes with many conceptualism or semiotic work. For example, the title is a key to giving a spectator something to either look at, or look for. The idea was to remove any human from the image, this way removing the ability to desire other than the notion of fetish from the spectator. Showing a shape in silhouette and giving the form the title Venus, I sent the image in to an open submission to the white Tree gallery in Wolverhampton. The reply came back figure in silhouette; I had succeeded in implying what the image was in the title.
Womanhood Moving this forward as the work had already changed direction from the proposal I wanted to stay with the idea of the Venus, so I started looking at the modern Venus by going back to sculptures beginning... the willendorf Venus. This was a statue of fertility and motherhood going back to twenty five thousand B.C. in turn put me to a modern version, Alison Lapper pregnant by Mark Quinn, and work by Rineke Dijkstra whose work looked at both motherhood and fertility. Using a single taken image of a plant in the same style of the work and two from the previous idea of Venus I took the three pictures giving the three idea of womanhood, these being a child, adult and elder. This is where this project is at this time.
They say, art no longer produces beauty, she produces meaning. I say, one cannot paint a picture or make an image of a woman and not deal with the concept of beauty. Marlene Dumas
Assignment 5fp001 Contemporary photographic practice, The Venus project 2010/11
For this assignment I wanted to learn more about beauty in art, it is now I have found that it is a much bigger subject than I ever thought possible, not in a naive approach as being aware that there was a bigger picture and many writings, works, plays and music all dedicated to the explanation and love dedicated to the devotion of beauty but, like Duchamp said in a famous television interview that the word art had been defused and misused so much that the word art its self was now meaningless.
If you go to Google, search for beauty, click on images you will get well over ninety percent female form, so I can be seen that this only applies to woman... but it is not true, we just use another word for the male, hansom, Adonis or even chiselled. The word is another for attractive, pretty or anything that gives a pleasing mental or physical response. Roland Barthes theory about the studium and puncturem makes a reference to this emotional response when his idea fails to work when he looks for a photograph of his deceased mother, this emotional response could be defined in a plutonic love and upset in finding the images from her childhood, choosing images of her when he never knew her. This plutonic love is what I went looking for, the idea of love without desire.
The Botticelli Venus
Originally I was looking for the idea of plutonic love that the artist felt for his model, so much so that he wanted to be buried at her feet when he died. It was said that Botticelli loved her so much that he immortalised her as a goddess made human on earth, his was a love without desire of the flesh, like a mother for her offspring. This in turn put me into a story in Greek mythology, the temptation of Paris. The three goddesses argued over which one of them the most beautiful; Liverier was the goddess of wisdom, Juno the queen of the gods and Venus the goddess of love. The winner would receive the apple of discord and would be declared the most beautiful. This contest, the gods decided should be judged by a mortal, Paris. All the goddesses started trying to tempt him to give them the apple. Venus being sneaky promised Paris the heart of Helen of troy knowing she had a beauty that no man could resist. So Paris gave her the apple, this is where the Venus de Milo is said to be the point where she is awarded the apple, her arms having been broken off over time. I found this to be interpreted with the Botticelli Venus showing that a human is more beautiful than any god, where he painted his Venus being born the shell behind her representing the vagina, midwifes ready with towels to wrap the child, and the fanfare of the gods on the right. A representation of his love and her place in his world, so it started to show me that perhaps he felt differently to what has been written. This started to appear that it was not what I was looking for. So I looked into work showing the temptation of Paris.
Venus in silhouette
While this investigation was continuing some friends asked me do to some pictures for them, both for fun, face book and as part of a professional portfolio, as these were female I used the opportunity to look for the female. This work took me from the temptation to the Venus herself. In an attempt to find the plutonic I decided to try and remove the female from the picture. To do this I turned to sculpture and psychoanalysis. Having a style in the abstract it was decided to go with the idea that goes with many conceptualism or semiotic work. For example, the title is a key to giving a spectator something to either look at, or look for. The idea was to remove any human from the image, this way removing the ability to desire other than the notion of fetish from the spectator. Showing a shape in silhouette and giving the form the title Venus, I sent the image in to an open submission to the white Tree gallery in Wolverhampton. The reply came back figure in silhouette; I had succeeded in implying what the image was in the title.
Womanhood Moving this forward as the work had already changed direction from the proposal I wanted to stay with the idea of the Venus, so I started looking at the modern Venus by going back to sculptures beginning... the willendorf Venus. This was a statue of fertility and motherhood going back to twenty five thousand B.C. in turn put me to a modern version, Alison Lapper pregnant by Mark Quinn, and work by Rineke Dijkstra whose work looked at both motherhood and fertility. Using a single taken image of a plant in the same style of the work and two from the previous idea of Venus I took the three pictures giving the three idea of womanhood, these being a child, adult and elder. This is where this project is at this time.