Semiotics in art - tasks
Hello. I'm posting here some of the tasks for the course in semiotics of art, autumn 2007. I'm not entirely sure what the precise tasks and obligations are, but here are some of them. I'll add more when I'll find out what I'm missing.


1. Still life with bones

Joel Peter Witkin, the artist somebody here has already mentioned, has created several skeletal collages. The most famous example would probably be this one:



Another stunningly brilliant artist who deals a lot with skeletal structures is Kris Kuksi. Some examples:





2. Still life with lobsters, dead animals and the like

Here's a somewhat gross example:



And in my humble opinion, the world's greatest marine life art was provided by Ernst Haeckel in his phenomenal book, Kunstformen der Natur. Most of the pictures are available online, for example in the following pages:

http://draves.org/pix/kdn/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kunstformen_der_Natur
http://www.mblwhoilibrary.org/haeckel/index.html
Haeckel's influence on architecture and art: http://styleskilling.com/2006/12/31/design-and-organic-forms/

3. Picture in picture

I'm not entirely sure what is meant by this assignment, so here's instead a fun clip about an artist fighting with his own creation:



4. Sentence in pictures - I'll get to this in the next post

5. Music and emotions

I played two clips in the seminar, one was "Moonchild" by M83, which was supposed to represent, simultaneously, grandeur and sadness. I was also surprised how well it represented something from outer space, although there are no lyrics to indicate that, and the video is about war and nuclear armament.

The other was supposed to be an example of what is known as "glitch music". The point in playing glitch was to demonstrate that the emotion of a piece of music does not have to reside "inside" the music, or that music does not necessarily have to refer to, or draw out from the listener a given emotion. Instead, for me at least, glitch music is irritating and annoying, due to its stuttering and jumpy nature. I'm sure that irritation is not the purpose of glitch music artists, however.

6. Mirror in picture

I was surprised that nobody has posted the most famous example of a painting represented in a painting, also doubling as the most famous image of the mirror in art, which would be Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Diego Velasquès:



Michel Foucault devoted the entire first chapter of his The Order of Things to an analysis of this particular painting.

In Dutch painting it was traditional for mirrors to play a duplicating role: they repeated the original contents of the picture, only inside an unreal, modified, contracted, concave space. One saw in them the same things as one saw in the first instance in the painting, but decomposed and re-composed according to a different law.

Instead of surrounding visible objects, this mirror cuts straight through the whole field of the representation, ignoring all it might apprehend within that field, and restores visibility to that which resides outside all view.

7. Droste effect

A great animation mix by someone called cyriak includes several animated instances of the droste effect. In general, it is built up of constant recursive repetitions, of which the droste effect is one example. The video is worth watching in full, because it is absolutely brilliant in its surreality. Examples of droste are at 1:37 (Darwin), 3:07 (weird train-man-caterpillar), 3:11 (koala bear) and 3:18 (llama?).



8. Motive of the eye

A classic example of an eye in art is the famous scene from Un Chien Andalou, at :46 in this clip.