Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Christiane Paul Digital Art, Chapter 1

In  my review of the first chapter of Christiane Paul's book "Digital Art", I was struck by  a few notions of my own in relation to her writing.

 I think the first thing that came to mind was that maybe we sometimes forget that long before the inception of digital imaging, or "Photoshop" , as it is now referred,  most art could arguably have been altered in some way to represent what the artist themselves wanted the viewer to see, and not necessarily what was the original scene,  true image or object as it existed. Also, I was reminded that until now I had not really considered how vast the influence of the "Digital Age" had on such a broad scale. With photography being my main artistic concentration, it has been of little interest to me in the past to take much time in consideration of other art forms beyond their initial impact visually. 

For example, I was immediately drawn to and interested in the work of Nancy Burson titled "Beauty Composites" from 1982. In her morphing several images of older day film stars faces in comparison to the same with several more (then) modern day stars it was interesting in a few ways. First, how upon looking at the two composites side by side, one could immediately identify the time period from which  either had taken place in regards to the evolution of modern day facial features. Also, very interesting to me is the fact that while every one of the women's faces were very unique and also familiar in my mind, together neither one of the composites resembled strongly any of the faces the artist used.

Another artist, Lillian Schwartz, in her 1987 work, Mona/Leo, merged the image of the MonaLisa's face with the face of it's original artist, Leonardo DaVinci's. Instantly it was clear to me how very similar these two subjects were in appearance. Before glimpsing this work, I am quite sure I would have not made that connection.

The work of the group called KIDing , titled" I love Calpe 5", from 1999, satirizes the idea that in our modern day advertising ventures many times the true point of interest  is "blurred" out or overshadowed by the larger than life images of it's advertisers or sponsors. The expression of the sponsors identity itself then almost becomes more of the accent than the actual thing they were, in fact, supporting.

Lastly, artist Charles Cohen in his use of abstraction through erasure, takes pornographic scenes and shows us only the solid whited out images of the person(s) outline leaving much more to our imagination and thus, in my opinion, making the images more apt to be examined and pondered over than what the graphic "true" image would have provoked.

                   

   




1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your thoughts in relation to Chapter 1. I agree, it is easy to forget that image manipulation existed long before Photohsop...It is interesting the ability that programs like Photoshop give us to take manipulation to a new level.

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