I found this video during the research process of ‘The Science of Love’, module of my project. I thought this module of my project would really draw in contextual perceptions of love, but in an alternate way of ‘science’ instead of the mainstream ’emotional’ meaning.
Cheryl L. Dickson is a high school literature teacher and explains in her article “A Psychological Perspective of Teen Romances in Young Adult Literature” Dickson finds it impossible to ignore the “bantering of teenagers in love”. Dickson works against stereotypes of love when stating”
“I question who gives them the impression that love is always fireworks and roses”.
Controversially, Dickson blames the ‘media’ as she gives examples of teen movies such as “She’s All That” and television programs like Dawson’s Creek, she states: “It’s no wonder adolescents have unrealistic views of love”. “Teens watch these programs for a number of reasons. Most viewers enjoy the fantasy world they can enter, or they enjoy seeing other teens facing situations similar to situations they encounter. A problem occurs when teens expect their lives to be like their favorite character. Just as violence on television is hypothesized to increase real-life violence, television romance can likely affect views of real-life romance”.
Dickson adds that being a literature teacher creates the hope that literature could “undo television’s mistakes and bridge the gap between real love and fantasy love”. In our modern day and age it’s understandable that teenagers are influenced daily by the ‘next best thing’. Dickson sympathises with this, and compels the reader to empathise with her:
“In my mind, the literature had to be real fiction, not the supermarket romance novels. I believed teen romance series were likely to be just as damaging as teen movies.”
She then adds that she ‘predicted‘ that quality literature would more accurately portray images of teen love than teen romance novels. However, during my comparison of two novels from the Love Series published by Bantam Books and two novels recommended by the American Libraries Association, I learned that I had made some hasty assumptions.
Dickson creates a difference between ‘teen love‘ and ‘romance‘
Teen: a person aged between 13 and 19 years, (synonyms) a young adult, adolescent
Love: a strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction for someone, (synonyms) affection, fondness, tenderness
Against
Romance: a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love, (synonyms) passion, ardour, adoration, devotion; affection, fondness, intimacy, attachment.
Here, Dickson established how romance is a ‘mysterious‘ and a delved part of love. Against the definition of love, Dickson almost suggests that love, even though associated with romance, contradicts the idea that there is much more to romance than a ‘teen love‘; for instance, know one really understands love until they experience it, yet adolescents are melded with the harsh stereotypes of love in the media, and therefore are ‘let down‘ in a way when experienced.
“The Art of Loving” is a 1956 book by psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm, which was published as part of the World Perspectives Series. Fromm presents love as a ‘skill‘ that can be taught and developed, rejecting the idea of loving as something magical and mysterious that cannot be analysed nor explained, and is therefore skeptical about popular ideas such as “falling in love” or being helpless in the face of love.
An extract from Fromm’s “The Art of Loving”.
“I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and not in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me”.
Because modern humans are alienated from each other and from nature, we seek refuge from our lonesomeness in romantic love and marriage . However, Fromm observes that real love “is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone.” It is only through developing one’s total personality to the capacity of loving one’s neighbor with “true humility, courage, faith and discipline” that one attains the capacity to experience real love. This should be considered a rare achievement . Fromm defended these opinions also in interview with Mike Wallace when he states:
“love today is a relatively rare phenomenon, that we have a great deal of sentimentality; we have a great deal of illusion about love, namely as a…as something one falls in. But the question is that one cannot fall in love, really; one has to be in love. And that means that loving becomes, and the ability to love, becomes one of the most important things in life.”
“Loving oneself is quite different from ‘arrogance, conceit or egocentrism’“. Loving oneself defines along the lines of caring about oneself and taking responsibility for oneself, respecting oneself, and knowing oneself, for example, being realistic and honest about one’s strengths and weaknesses in awe for giving constructive criticism. In order to be able to truly love another person, one needs first to love oneself in this way. Fromm calls the general idea of love in contemporary Western society égoïsme à deux: a relationship in which each person is entirely focused on the other, to the detriment of other people around them. The current belief is that a couple should be a well-assorted team, sexually and functionally, working towards a common aim. This is in contrast with Fromm’s description of true love and intimacy, which involves willful commitment directed toward a single unique individual. One cannot truly love another person if one does not love all of mankind including oneself.
According to to the creation of myths of the Abrahamic religion, Adam and Eve where the first man and first woman ever to set foot on Earth. The story created by God was for people to believe that humans would live an idealic lifestyle, and were created to endure pure paradise to its most form. However, Adam and Eve both end up falling away from that state, and live under the realistic world of suffering and injustice for their unruly consequences.
Adam and Eve adapted into an art form. Their beauty subjects to many forms of art to do with the Sublime, as the natural form is something explored deeply in this subject area.
In the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible, there are two creational narratives with two distinct perspectives: In the first, both Adam and Eve are not references by name, yet instead God created humankind in ‘Gods image” and instructed both of them to become custodians of all of his creations. In this essence we don’t receive the same purposeful affiliation with that of normal humans, as they are controlled by someone, and stripping them of their own individualities. In the second narrative, God fashions Adam from dust to which he then places him in the Garden of Eden. God commands that he is allowed to eat and devour anything in the garden, everything but The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve however, is carved from one of Adam’s ribs, to be known as Adam’s companion. As a reader of this story, you immediately come to the assumption that Eve is created from Adam purely to be demised sexually and powerfully; he is her owner. Symbolically, this has changed the way the modern reader perceives love, as this creation started the roles in relationships we see today. During my re-creational processes, I would like to consider using essences from the original stories of sin and love to suppress the religious definitions and representations of its perceptions. Further along in the story, a serpent appears and tricks Eve into delving into the Tree of Knowledge, questioning her venerability. Like all females today, the stereotype to perceive women as the ‘weaker sex’ could possibly remise from this original story. Generously, Eve seen as the ‘care-giver’ offers fruit to Adam for the result of his own happiness. This also represents the stereotypical view as women as ‘housewives’, providing for males in return for their strength and well-being. God ends up killing the serpent, and prophetically tells the woman and the man what will be the consequences of their sin of disobeying God, he then banishes ‘the man’ from the Garden of Eden
Art Interpretations of Adam and Eve
JAN BRUEGHEL D. J.
Brueghel was born in 13 September 1601, in Antwerp and is a Flemishpainter and draughtsman. Breughel’s depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden creates a myriad variety of forms and motifs with bright and intense colours, creating the ‘jewelj-like‘ effect so prized in his œuvre. This illustrates the sublimity within his work, and bringing out the idea of nature and natural creation, as religion is a big part of Breughel’ s depictions. The image of The Tree of Knowledge surrounded by nature and creatures suggests Breughel almost sets boundaries for the reader to understand, as there is narrative presented in the whole image.
I have decided to explore the ideas of all three applications to photography. I feel there can be some exploration to do with my personal study: the concept of love. Love can be appropriated, performed and conceptualised, and I wish to explore that aspect in a greater depth.
“The deliberate reworking of images and styles from earlier, well-known works of art.”
Here is an example of the ‘Girl With The Pearl Earring’, which was re-worked using an image of her grandmother. The artist states: “The painting represents youth and beauty, but youth doesn’t last forever, and just because you’re getting older, that doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful.”
Appropriation in art and art history refers to the “practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original”. Appropriation can be tracked back to the cubist collages and constructions of Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. The practice was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men’s urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in pop art.
Robert Rauschenberg, Skyway, 1964, oil and silkscreen on canvas
However, the term ‘appropriation’ seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group. Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Levine’s aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image.
Appropriation in art raises questions of originality and authenticity belonging to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Krauss in her 1985 book “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” and “Other Modernist Myths”.
Conceptualism: Alexandra Bellissimo
“The theory that universals can be said to exist, but only as concepts in the mind.”
A conceptual art piece by Alexandra Bellissimo, Los Angeles
The Conceptual Art Movement is probably the of the most radical and controversial planes in modern and contemporary art. Conceptual art is based on the notion that the “essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation”. Many examples of conceptual art (well-known works or statements) questions the notions of art itself. Some conceptual artists believe that art is created by the viewer, not by the artist or the artwork itself, for example Bellissimo (pictured above) connotes that the eye of the reader is there to manipulate the subject, in any way shape or form. Ideas and concepts are the main feature of art: aesthetics and material concerns have a secondary role in conceptual art. For example, Conceptual artists recognise that all art is essentially “conceptual“. In order to emphasize these terms, they reduce the material presence of the work to an absolute minimum, for example, a tendency that some have referred to as the dematerialisation of art, counts as one of the main characteristics of conceptual art. As many conceptual art examples show, the conceptual art movement itself emerged as a reaction against the tenets of formalism. Formalism considers that the formal qualities of a work, such as line, shape and colour, are “self-sufficient for its appreciation”, and all other considerations, such as representational, ethical or social aspects and are secondary or redundant.
Performance Photography: Tom Pope
“The action or process of performing a task or function.”
Tom Pope’s work ‘Untitled’ from the series, ‘Curious Search for Nothing’
A collection of images to show the performance side to Pope’s work.
What are the connections between Marcel Duchamp‘s gesture of painting a moustache on the iconic painting of Mona Lisa?
“L.H.O.O.Q.”
Simply, Duchamp’s gesture nominates The Mona Lisa as a male figure. Arguably, Duchamp created an iconic sort of ‘mask’ that reads instantly as male but does not even pretend to conceal the woman behind the mask. In a sense, “L.H.O.O.Q.” is an artificial hermaphrodite, an image of a woman with that most superficial and nonfunctional characteristic of maleness, a moustache. (The beard is superfluous to the effect of L.H.O.O.Q., and in one version of the piece does not appear at all.) Both, however, acts as backward- looking in that their most immediate effect was to redefine the Mona Lisa itself. At the same time, both are prophetic in the way they project major shifts in the grounds of art as a system of knowledge. Duchamp uses appropriation in order to ridicule and radicalise the history of art, in a contemporary light which changes the normal social representations of women. This also suggests women as various role reversals – women are usually depicted as the ‘weaker‘ sex, and Duchamp toys with this idea possibly to lift female and male equality
What are the connections between a photograph of a cup of tea by Martin Parr and Andy Warhol‘s paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans?
Martin Par: “Cup of Tea”Andy Warhol’s series of ‘Soup’
Martin Parr’s series is a good example of contemporary Pop Art as it depicts an everyday object. Everyday objects were often used as subject matter for Pop artists such as Andy Warhol’s ‘Campbell’s Soup Cans’ as he was able to manipulate mundane objects in his widely elaborated prints.
“Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle both significant and relevant to history and historical events and everyday life.”
Documentary photography is a form of storytelling, usually with one powerful photograph and deeper meaning which often moves people. This form of photography is used to ‘document’ events and people in everyday real life situations which in the past has been used to bring the attention of an audience to a particular subject, change their perspective and create a social change for example: a photograph taken by Nick Ut in Vietnam in 1972 of children running from a bomb explosion caused outraged protests in America and changed the outcome of the war. Views on documentary photography are controversial as some people believe that certain situations should not be documented which also brings in social and political associations such as whether or not it is deemed ethical or moral to take these pictures and publish them.
Today many people are pushing the boundaries of what can be defined as documentary photography, and if photographer should still abide by the rules and ethic codes of documentary photography. Below is an example of an article about the World Press panel discussing the rules of documentary.
Documentary photography are generally related to longer term projects with a more complex story line, whilst photojournalism concerns are more about breaking news stories.
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism which involves collecting and editing news material for a news publication or a broad cast. Photojournalism uses photographs in order to tell a story, it’s different to other types of photography such as documentary and street photography because of it’s rigid ethics which demands that the photos are honest and impartial and are only telling the story in journalistic terms. The objective of photojournalism is to have images which are a fair representation of events of situations. Illustrating news story’s with photographs began in the mid 19th century in The Times newspaper of Lord Horatio Nelson’s funeral. The first newspaper with weekly illustrations was the Illustrated London News.
