Post 3

In images we represent ourselves as life long portraits or as the main character of our own story and we try to share our story with others. Theirs an old saying that states “a picture is worth a thousand words” and in truth, in today’s society it is worth millions of words. We represent ourselves as artwork that life has created and we flourish with each passing day. In John Bergers book WAYS OF SEEING he wrote “An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time”. In images we see ourselves as artwork when we recreate our appearance and it stays in the same time and place forever. In several of those images we can see many different emotions like happiness, sadness, love, frightened, pain and angry.

Art and media teach us that an image does not need to be a nice picture, but a picture that tells a story, that looks painful, stressful, depressing, and mysterious. Art and media is showing us that self images do not have to be a portrait of awe, but a portrait that can get a person to stop, look, and think about the image. In Guy Deboards book The Society of The Spectacle he wrote“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving”.

We create images that are no longer there and create memories of what use to exist. We keep those fragments alive with technology and create more to keep fragments of our memories alive. An artist that performs her art is Marina Abramovic also known as the Grandmother of performance art and she performs acts that can place a person under a lot of pressure or stress. In the end she is an artist of pain and she trains herself to cope with pain in order to achieve her goals. Her art is the type of art that brings the performer and the audience to explore each others relationship. It is also to show the audience possibilities of the mind and the limits of the body. She created images to the audience that they will always remember because they witnessed her image/performance.

One performance that comes to mind is The Artist is Present, is where Marina sits at one end of a table and another person would sit at the other end and they would just stare at each other for a certain period of time. Marina would never move from her spot for any reason, not even when the persons time was up, she would remain where she is and stay seated for an entire day. Art can be a performance of the limitations of the body and the mind. In a self image we learn about identity and culture because we follow in the foot steps of those who have been performing self image years before us.

People that had themselves painted in huge portraits so someone years from now can find them and learn that they were important throughout history. Now in today’s society anyone can create a self portrait thanks to technology and share them into a network of thousands of other self portraits that can live eons from now.

Sophie Calle is an artist that likes to play games and one that she is very good at is playing detective. Now Calle is an artist that is distinguished by her lack of arbitrary and use of constraints. Her work is to pick a random person and exploit there vulnerability and studies there intimacy and their identity. Her photographic artwork also includes text of her own writing. Now with ORLAN she is best known for her work with plastic surgery and body artist. She rediscovers how the body can be poetic, in which carnal art and body art are fundamentally stages. Real body are merged in a ceaseless flow of emotional body, social body, imaginary body, lived body, mystic body diffuse body, and hybrid body.

We create our own self images and it communicates to others by showing them what we perform in our self images. How we perform with family, how we perform with friends, and basically how we perform with life. We are opened to millions of opportunities that can help us create different self images in many different forms and the audience decides what they see when they look at our self image. We create or claim an identity like Joanne Finkelstein wrote in her book The Art of Self Invention. She wrote “Claiming an identity is an ordinary occurrence. The passport, bank account, credit card, tax history and driver’s license all confirm who we are. With these credentials we are able to purchase goods and services, travel and enjoy civil rights. Having an identity is a tangible asset”. We create this identity in order to confirm who we are.

At the bottom I have Marina Abramovic Performing the Artist is present. Second ORLANS Kissing Both and a picture of my old wrestling team to compare. A photo of Sophie Calle's person following art and two photos of my own comparing to her art work.

Berger, John, Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis. Ways of Seeing. London, England: British Broadcasting Corportion, 1973. Print.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone, 1994. Print.

Finkelstein, Joanne. The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print.