It is interesting to me that as I continue to find my own voice this semester and define my practice that this week’s lecture and reading is about mimesis, in particular, the subject of Andy Warhol, his Death and Disaster series from 1964 and the context of affect and emotions more broadly within contemporary culture. The image Warhol created of the electric chair is taken from an original I photographed at the Broad Museum in LA in January 2020. So trauma and images of an unsettling nature as I see things has been playing with my subconscious for quite some time. Currently, I have been using this image to make my own images of an electric chair, with the content being the body the self departed. So the reading, Reflective mimesis in contemporary visual culture by Elizabeth Walden looks at Warhol’s pop culture and his use of screenprints as direct mechanical mimesis and motif for pop culture at the time the work was made. Walden discusses how through the repetition of the same image the viewer was desensitised by the image and pop culture took over as the status of Warhol she says as a genius of the art world was everywhere. p.36) “that they don’t create the same sense of distance from what they depict that they once did.” The extreme emotion I feel lives on however I agree that as you view the image, like the car accident scenes you become almost blazae. The mimesis here is well illustrated, however, Foster in this chapter (p.37) views Warhol’s Nine Jackies , singles out these as being of celebrity notoriety, iconic and at a time in the United States Historically she was so well known that publicity referred to her as Jackie. My critical analysis is that no matter how Andy Warhol artistically portrayed Jackie they were both celebrities and his art would carry its own notoriety, it made difference if there was a postage stamp size of Jackie ( this could be another mimesis, stamps being used throughout America back then or even now) his art would be written about and viewed as the pinnacle. Getting back to my own images of the electric chair, mine has bodily ribs somewhat ephemeral creating a body that has departed not traumatic, not a gruesome room just a narration a personal account that fosters a departed spirit that still lives on in my imagination. I refer to Kiki Smith’s Ribs 1987 which talks about the body finding its own identity, these Ribs have their own frailty, they depict a mere fragment of our body the spirit.
https://tranauskascuratorialproject.weebly.com/kiki-smith.html. cited 20 August 2020