Post-Sacred Imagery
Text: Maria Carneiro
Photography: Caroline Hargreaves
Sometimes I am afraid of leaving my house. Sometimes I am afraid of being exposed - or when others expose themselves before me or before a crowd. I travel a lot by train and I deeply hate when people have hour-long mobile phone conversations. People do talk on the phone everywhere, about everything and they make sure they are loud enough. There is no censorship on talking on the phone as there is on smoking. The pubic spaces, like the train, the tube or the virtual space, become free spaces for life testimonials. We certainly live in an era of
In a recent trip to Austria I walked past the very famous painting: The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907-08, Belvedere (Vienna). I literally walked by. A few rooms later I realised how reproachful my behaviour was. I had just gone by an imposing picture by an artist, that besides the History of Art factor, I like and admire. I went back and my attention drifted again. There I was in front of an enormous picture; a beautiful shining picture, behind a glass, and I was disappointed. I was terrified with the idea of not wanting to look at it. I looked around and my attention was caught by: Umarmung (The Embrace), Egon Schiele, 1917, Belvedere (Vienna). Schiele, another painter from the Viennese Secession Group (a group lead by Klimt) represented painful, metamorphic bodies in such a manner that the feeling taken out of them reveals a huge body-mind content. I had never seen that painting before. I reflected upon my behaviour and realized I had seen so many reproductions of The Kiss that I did not feel any interest on looking at the real one. The real, the authentic was just - another one. I even understood that my perception had been deceived by the copies: some parts of that painting that looked like glass to me truthfully were only paint. How could I evaluate my formatted, programmed, distorted vision? In the end, is our vision and our memory completely desacralized because of all the visual culture that surrounds us? Can we truly observe and be overthrown by something that we have already seen in schoolbooks, on our friend’s interrail pictures or on pop ups on the internet? Has this visual cheap culture taken from us the true value of appreciating pieces of art, in as many forms as they can be, or is this argument bourgeois and elitist?
In the end of my trip to the Belvedere I bought a postcard of Schiele’s painting that I pinned to my bedroom wall and I got (unwillingly) The Kiss on the Gallery Guide cover. I wonder how big the challenge for the art world is, when facing the issue of authenticity and availability. Is authenticity, numerically, the key to this entire dilemma? What lies beyond a reproduction? Where does the aura lie? Do copies break the magic?
About art objects we might talk in different terms. As an example: how much does a video art piece cost? How valuable is a performance, something which happens only once and it is ephemeral? We can have a look trough the changes from Pop Art to the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, when artists used the found objects as pieces of art. Long before that has Marcel Duchamp showed the ready-mades to the world. After Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, (original destroyed), how have we perceived urinals? Have we reflected differently upon Rauschenberg’s cardboard boxes after they were hung on a museum wall? I had never seen boxes on canvases and therefore I was amazed. That feeling did not appear with Klimt’s piece hung on a wall, the same that is printed on miles of t-shirts and bag fabric all across Vienna. Is this intense preoccupation even worth it? Does it go beyond a matter of taste or study interest? I imagine that the price of a Rothko painting might oscillate between 15 or 16 million US dollars. It is virtually impossible to find a Pollock on the market. The value I would have assimilated when exposed to that Klimt has also suffered immensely with the world economic crisis but more worryingly by the overpopulated world of imagery reproduction. For what is worth, I worry.
Maria Carneiro is Portuguese and is a Performing Arts student at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. This is Maria’s second article for Generation C Magazine, you can read her first one here.