Double Burden of the Image
from http://www.synesthesie.com/index.php?id=1498&table=d
At the same time as we live in a world of light, images, imaginary and virtual worlds, many of us are drawn towards the opposite pole – towards the thought of revealing the great lie, of settling accounts with all the false images that surround us, of once and for all seeing the truth. We are, quite simply, both “iconodules” and “iconoclasts” at the same time, those who both worship and attack the image. This can be seen especially in the art of the last few decades – from early 1950s British pop art, where advertising images were woven into the very substance of the art work, to the Situationists’ aggressive strategies of “détournement” (the act of “diverting” — in the sense of a “detour” — a given image via incision, retouching, trimming, collage, etc., so that its meaning is fundamentally changed), to the whole tradition emanating from the strategies of appropriation of late 1970s and early 1980s (in artists such as Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, etc.); overall in “commodity art” and all of its offshoots, we find this oscillation between losing oneself in the ecstasy of the image, in its seductive surface, in the polymorphic perversity of the world of commodities, and, on the other hand, the desire to destroy the image in a moralistic frenzy, to smash all of its false mirror images to pieces, so that we someday shall be able to see the world as it is. In this way, the iconoclastic rhetoric has found a footing in modern art, and to be an iconoclast means in general to rebel against tradition; it has an air of youthful, revolutionary zeal: to destroy images, eikon, so that only klasma, fragments, splinters, parts remain, while at the same time paving the way with this destruction for the new. The concept hovers between a destructive dimension, where the images of the past must be obliterated, and a constructive dimension, where the shattered unity of the image will give rise to a new, truer image – indeed, the true image.
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