Hanging (Out) with the Masters

At first glance, it is easy to think that not practically is feeling in Mark Kostabis hiatus with the master. We get to concurrently view whole kit and boodle of art from various art movements as they send away motionlessly from their taut strings. Everything is nonchalant and serene against the sky blue background, the flagellum of gravity underneath disappears, and up to now the anonymous human figure trussed to a noose by the neck has surrendered. Whatever was divinatory to happen in the painting has already happened. No action is caught. This is the state in which we find things because we have unfortunately arrived late.This app atomic number 18nt lack of motion is what makes seeing with the master so busy. By kidnapping an assortment of wagers of arts, miniaturizing and bind them in postal service to become manage able-bodied spectacles (classic paintings within a present-day painting), Mark Kostabi has converged, or to a greater extent appropriately eroded, time and space. on that point is no nostalgia for the kidnapped paintings at all that a matter-of-factness. Very postmodern. interpreted out of their contexts and arranged in a whole new landscape, the lasts of arts in expression the painting call attention to themselves. Each unrivalled and only(a) of them competes for our attention.Even if we recognize only mavin of the paintings/mobiles/cartoon character suspension with the Masters blatantly references, we calm get the feeling a kidnapping has happened. Something has been break and celebrated at the akin time. The verb hang takes on two meanings Hang a picture, Hang a psyche. As if decoration and decoration atomic number 18 the very(prenominal) thing. And Mark Kostabi is unapologetic. DEAD MAN PERFORMING In the affectionateness of it all, thither is the faceless, sexless operative with the paintbrush pointing d sufferwards, the hanged human,all red (red-faced, red-bellied, and red-handed) from an unseen gentle source. It is as if he/she has failed a mission.In the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin splits us that Mankinds self-alienation has reached such a stagecoach that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic cheer of the first order (681). After exhausting any possible average and instance of art, from Campbells soup cans to elephant dung, we only have to phone number to ourselves next, explore and defy the thresholds of our own body and mind, as if they are the next border to turn into art. True enough, the hanged artist in Hanging with the Masters is enwrapped in his/her own slaying art. He/she is both a subject and object.If in modernism the subject is a rational, individualistic, responsible, unified self, in postmodernism, that subject is dead (Chernus, Fredric Jamesons Interpretation of Postmodernism, tally. 7). What replaces is an identity that must be conceived as an intersection of conflicting subject positions (Coll ins 337). Kostabis hanged artist is incomplete male nor female. We cant tell if he/she is just performing dead. We are not sure if his/her execution was forced or self-willed. If this were punishment, we arrogatet k instantaneouslyadays what the sin was. We arent even sure if he/she really is a painter, or just someone with a replete(p) grip on the paintbrush.Like a true postmodern subject, eachthing about the hanged artist is open to speculation. One thing we are sure of though is that presently he/she has laid claim to being a work of art. And who doesnt want to be a work of art, a shiny spectacle, in our YouTube generation? MEETING HALFWAY Hanging with the Masters instantly inherits timelessness just because it gathers samples of classic whole shebang of arts all in one place. Whats more is that these works of arts are tied in place. As if we are looking at a museum wall and the bag is A Very Short History of Art.Hanging with the Masters cleverly showcases ethnical artif acts of the onetime(prenominal) (a nude, a cartoon character, a Warhol-style portrait, a mobile, an op-art painting), and at the same time it gives a commentary on those heathenish artifacts. According to Jim Collins, the past is not just accessed besides hijacked, given an entirely unalike cultural significance than the antecedent text had when it first appeared (333). In postmodernism, such highly self-conscious forms of appropriation and rearticulation have been used by postmodern painters, photographers and performance artists (335).But because they have been hijacked, the works of art have lost their aura and prime(a) of presence, terms which Walter Benjamin uses to describe the authority of the original work of art that is not yet reproduced or recopied (667). For Benjamin, this diminishing aura of the work of art every time it is reproduced or finds itself in a different context (Edvard Munchs screaming man in a mousepad, for representative) is okay because it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway (667). Also, according to Benjamin, it is utterly natural and okay for cultural artifacts to lack their original intentions and change into something else.His example is that of an ancient statue of Venus. For the Greeks, it was an object of veneration, tho for spate in the spunk Ages, it became an ominous idol (669). Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura (Benjamin 669). What we see now in Kostabis painting are works of art that are classic examples of the art movements they are part of. They are works of arts that are exclusively tied to a genre, tied in place in the paintings unseen ceiling, just like the hanged artist. If in that location is whatever aura left, it is only a memory of that aura as we try to identify each work of art.Yet, ironically enough, Hanging with the Masterss style itself is tied to the surrealist art movement. The painting itself cannot escape the same bonds whi ch have taken the other paintings as captives. But of course, this is okay. Everything in postmodernism is okay, and things are not judged based on whether they are good or bad, but only whether they work for us. According to Chernus a cultural artifact is now just a random collection of signs momentarily existing side by side, ready to change at any moment into another(prenominal) random collection. So it cannot point beyond itself to any meaning.It cannot represent any reality outside itself. It cannot even raise the question of its relationship to any reality outside itself. It refers only to itself it is its own referent. Since the signs are not supposed to relate to anything beyond themselves, it makes no sense to ask what they mean. So the caper of meaning simply disappears. (Chernus, par. 19). THE MEANINGLESSNESS OF IT ALL The meaninglessness of postmodernism can be depressing but thats what is possibility right now. The millions of YouTube video clips uploaded every day dont have to make sense at all, but we enjoy watching them all the same.The more stupid and the more disgusting, the better. YouTube has given us a platform where we can be our own celebrities, our own artists, our own works or arts, where we can be viewed by millions other simultaneously. And we all wish wed get lots of hits every day. Just like the hanged paintings in Hanging with the Masters, we try to be fearful so we can be worthy of being looked at. Underneath it all, just like the paintings, we are all just competing for each others attention. Maybe we can call each YouTube clip a cultural artifact in its own right. They, after all, tell a narrative.They tell us a little something about the person who uploaded it. They tell us that at one point in time, somewhere in the world, this person took the trouble of recording a clip of himself/herself, never mind the subterranean motive. Sure, for a cultural artifact, it may be fleeting, and it is not even tangible, but as each foo tage weaves into the next one and a medley of voices lead and we are overwhelmed by the sheer number of people out there in the world, a whole community our parents parents never knew existed back then, we lose the urge to explain things or make sense of them.We simply turn on our curiosity and enjoy the fact that all these are happening right here right now. As Chernus has said above, there is no reliable meaning anymore and there is no point in finding the relationships of things. It is quite possible then that Hanging with the Masters is really, at the end of the day, meaningless. That, really, it is just a collection of images randomly picked. If the audience recognizes one or two paintings embedded in Hanging with the Masters, then theyre lucky and good for them.That will add a new degree to whatever meaning they decide to put into it. If not, then the painting is still nice, and deep, and mysterious, still very marketable. Which is the fate of cultural artifacts in late capi talist economy to become commodities in an everything-is-for-sale world (Chernus, par. 7). It is okay to not find or force any connections among the images trapped inside Kostabis painting, or even reunite them with other images outside the realm of the painting.For Chernus, the postmodern way is to subscribe the images living side by side in an ever-changing kaleidoscope (Chernus, par 26). In this postmodern world where diversity is very much welcome, Hanging with the Masters, as a present-day cultural artifact, makes a strong bidding about harmony. In the end, its not just about works of art with clashing differences in style and opinion and meanings being able to coexist peacefully in a single canvas. Substitute people for works of art in the sentence and you get the bigger picture.