Space for Self and Food for Thought

Why do you think Loren Munk wrote Dali - Arp - Duchap?

“First, with a perspective that stands at a distance from art history and its methods, visual culture studies should take as its primary objects of critical analysis the master narratives that are presented as natural, universal, true and inevitable, and dislodge them so that alternative narratives can become visible”. - Krauss, October.

In the information age, the pared down separation between signifier and signified, the increasing prevalence of the visual over the verbal, or its substitution speaks to the immediacy of the image, but also alters our perception of the message. From black-on-white words, however fraught with political, cultural, linguistic, social and economic underpinnings, to the one-frame image, a space for wider, more individualized interpretation has been opened. In the arts and media, these possibilities first emerged with the superposition of text on image like that of Barbara Kruger, whose visuals challenged the usual reception of the verbal messages, and vice versa. As the words themselves became more and more integrated into the images, triggering mental clichés rather than proverbial phrases, the viewer could choose and adapt the information gleaned to his perceptual leanings and automatic mental associations. While details, allusions and even color schemes interpellate very specific audiences, the opportunity to read the tokens of visual culture against the grain become more available to minorities, and can even be appropriated into their niches of visual culture, furthering the interdisciplinary and social overlaps.

 

[Liberace]

 
[Marlboro Man] [... and Richard Prince]  [Brokeback Mountain] Notice that none of this is beefcake - it's all hybrid...

Guerrilla Girls dive back into the art world, reading collections against the grain to reveal the absence of women and African-American artists in museum and gallery shows, using their own interdisciplinary group of thinkers and artists and the nature of their targeted groups and forms of their rebellious and subversive output (visually and theoretically).