Simulacrum and Meaning in Five Blue Stills (GOCA assignment)

 

 

Is it a parking garage, or a parking garage stall? Or is it an image of a parking garage? What if I manipulate the photo and turned it blue?

There is a multitude of buttons. The are ordinary, and all the same, they mean something, and nothing. Are they like a dream, Margritte?

  It is both organic randomness and organized as it contrasts with the repetitive linear groves. Is it ugly, or beautiful, and does it matter?

The intimidating shadows and lines are severe; or is that JUST my perception?

A barrier to let me out... or to keep me in?

One of the GOCA exhibits was a series of photographs that depicted a young girl’s life with some sort of leg handicap. I stood and looked at the photos. Suddenly and bluntly, the exhibit changed right before my eyes. I was no longer looking at the photos of a young girl. I was looking at the artist’s daughter and her chronicle of handicap and recovery. What I saw changed because I was lucky enough to transition from an art exhibit to performance art. This happened as walked alongside the linear display, and I heard Matt Chmielarczyk’s comment on the story behind the photographs of his daughter. The instability of art –how it can change and how it has a relationship with the seer, as demonstrated by my experience correlates to ideas explored in John Berger’s, Ways of Seeing.

Published in 1972, Ways of seeing, encompasses postmodernist ideas in the assertion and argument that, “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe” (Berger 8). He examines the idea that images are never true representations of reality, but are, rather, true representations of of a fleeting snippet (among an infinite amount of snippets) of reality, within the axes of space, time and our relationship with the things we see. Berger asserts that, “the notion of time passing was inseparable from the experience of the visual” (18). What we see is not reality, and that is true whether we see things as they occur or as they are, whether we see an image, or a replication of that image. What we see is visible light, just a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, being absorbed or reflected by pigment. That truth alone tells us that we only see a small portion of reality.  But rather than asserting that things and simulacrum are without meaning, Berger asserts that it has meaning independent of present day ideas about, “what-is-reality”, “We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves”(Berger 9).

So, what was the art exhibit? Was it the photos? Was it the photos in a white-walled room, with beautiful hardwood floors? Was it the photos accompanied by the artist’s commentary that I coincidentally overheard? As Berger would assert, it was all of this, individually, and collectively. It was my experience.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. 1972. Print.