Nemo, 9/29 – Make Up

Nemo, 9/29
In class this week we went to the Cornell Museum on campus where we saw many different exhibits including: Andre Kertesz’s On Reading and Andy Warhol’s Personalite, among others. I found this class trip to be very interesting and helpful in understanding post modernism. We have read many works by different theorists but we had yet to experience and generate our own opinions on what they were talking about until this week. I found Andre Kertesz’s On Reading exhibit very fascinating and an appropriate topic for this class. Each photograph displayed people reading or a reference to reading and literature. The subjects were not all reading the same thing and they were not all in the same setting. There were books, magazines, newspapers, street signs, etc. So of the subjects were in their homes, but the majority were outside reading. Each person seemed to be in their own comfort zone where they can escape their reality and get lost in the written word. As an observer we are not able to personally know what the subjects were feeling at the time the photographs were taken but we are able to imagine. I am going to attempt to relate this to a quote by Barthes, it may or may not be a correct fit but I believe it is relevant. “It is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?” (108). We are attracted to the mystery of what is hidden behind something – in this case we as observers were engrossed in what could have been going on at the time the photographs were taking. How was the subject feeling? Why had they chosen that specific place to read? Why did Kertesz choose to photograph this specific scene? We were yearning to find out more about the circumstances that enabled the photographs to be taken.
In Andy Warhol’s exhibit Personalitie consisted of Polaroid’s that pictured both ordinary people as well as celebrities dressed and styled in the same manner as if to make it difficult to determine the subject’s significance. It seemed as if Warhol was trying to make the subjects in the photographs seem like ‘ordinary’ people or as close to ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ as possible. This exhibit could be related to the ideas expressed by Lyotard such as verisimilitude. Verisimilitude something that has the appearance of being real, in this case it is artwork. In class we said the goal of the artist is to capture as much ‘real life’ as he or she possibly can in their art. I believe that Warhol’s exhibit exemplifies this idea as perfectly as possible.