Imag In Ation example essay topic

346 / CULTURE AS NATURE Rauschtubcrg's view 'f his landscape of media was both aff " ection ate and ironic. He like cl cxcavating wll ole histories within an image histories of the media themselves. A pcrfcct cxamplc is the red patch at the bottom right corner of Retroactive I (plate 229), It is a silkscreen enlargement of'a photo by Gj on Mili, which he found in Like magazine. Mili's photograph was a care " ugly set-up parody, with the aid of a stroboscopic flash, of Duchamp's Nu le De see li'7 g a Staircase, I 9 I 2 (plate 30).

Duchamp's painting was in turn based on Marey's photos of a moving body. So the image goes back through seventy years of technological time, through allusion af " ter allusion; and a f'urther irony is that, in its Rauschenbergian form, it ends up looking precisely like the figures of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden in Masaccio's fresco for the Carmine in Florence. This in turn converts the image of John Kennedy, who was dead by then and rapidly approaching apotheosis as the centre of a mawkish cult, into a sort of vengeful got Wit] l a pointing finger, so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in I 861: 'I'he t lav Will come wllen all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom mull will haN e been w rotten in the popular press; and images of this god vill be set up in the churches, not as the imag in ation of each individual painter maV fan-N: him, but fixed, once and for all h! - pllotograpllN- On that das civil i 7. ation will have reached its peak, and there u-ill be steam-propelletl gondolas in Venice. From television, film, and photography we receive a stream of " images every day. There is no wa! - of paying equal attention to all that surplus, so we skim.

The image we r en ember is the one that most r ensembles a sign: simple, clear, repetitious. Everything the camera gives us is slightly interesting. Not fo long; just for now. The extension, on the human level, of this glut of images is celebrity, which replaces the Renaissance idea of'f: ame. Fame was the reward for manifest deeds. It stood for a social agreement about what was worth doing; hence the traditional pairing of fa' 'a and what the Renaissance called zi rtu, "prowess" or "accomplishment".

The celebrity, as Daniel Boors tin pointed out, is famous f'or being f'amous - nothing else; hence his gratuitousness a ntl tlisposabilit! -. The artist wll o understood this best and became best known for understanding it was Andy Warhol (b. I 930). In him, the culture of packaging produced its characteristic painter, and Warhol filled this role brilliantly from I 962, when he cmcrgctl, to g (, o, wllen his powers of invention appear to have fizzled out.

No serious lNT taken artist of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of Salvador Dali, hall dcvotctl so much time and skill to the cultivation of publicity. Instead of lDali's hc at, '! hill 1 claim etl to transform everything it touched, Warhol projected an ironic and affectless cool, which let everything be itself. Warhol's insight was that you do not haN e to act crazy; you can let others do that for you.