1/22/2024 0 Comments Fragment definition art historyObviously, you could see these artworks in terms of the context that Nochlin lays out in her essay: in modernism, fragmentation elicits a positive rather than a negative connotation. Entitled A Detached Hand, the exhibition focuses on artworks that use fragmentation and distortion of the body to different ends. Using Nochlin’s The Body in Pieces, curator Nicole Will seeks to explore Nochlin’s paradigm in an excellent exhibition of both modernist and contemporary artists at Magenta Plains gallery. Installation view of A Detached Hand at Magenta Plains (Courtesy of the artists and Magenta Plains) As the media continues to report through the prism of “both sides,” no objective truth is gleaned from this video or any other image. To them, it becomes evidence of an administration willing to make the hard decisions. One is left wondering why the administration would let such a damning video circulate before realizing the answer: I am interpreting this video from my leftist perspective, whereas a right wing American interprets this video as positive. For example, a recent video circulated on the Internet of Mike Pence visiting an immigration detention center in which the Vice President expresses almost no empathy towards the humans living in atrocious conditions. As a result, the image is often used to reinforce the various fractured ideologies of the population far more than it brings the larger population towards any understanding of an objective truth. Symbols rarely hold singular, unified meaning anymore, as images are dispersed en masse via digital networks subjecting them towards any number of interpretations. Nochlin does acknowledge the shifting role of the corporeal fragment in postmodernism, but with the essay published in 1994, surely she couldn’t have foreseen the abuse of images and flattening of meaning we now see in the post-digital era. An image of a headless body, like all images, could be read in a multitude of ways. Modernity, Baudrillard argued, was the “radical destruction of appearances,” whereas postmodernity was “the immense process of the destruction of the meaning.” So, that symbol, the guillotine, signifying a dismembering of an archaic order, would be just as fractured in its meaning contemporaneously. “What of that sense of social, psychological, even metaphysical fragmentation that so seems to mark modern existence – a loss of wholeness, a shattering of connection, a destruction or disintegration of permanent value that is so universally felt in the 19th Century as to be often identified with modernity itself?”īut does the corporeal fragment still evoke the revolutionary ethos of modernism in our era? Can it wield power in the post-digital landscape? We are, after all, well beyond the flattening of meaning that Baudrillard warned was occurring/would occur in Simulacra and Simulation. “What of the larger implications of the topic?” asks Nochlin. The corporeal fragment, according to Nochlin, is essential to modernism’s revolution towards the future and destruction of the prevailing orders of the past. The guillotine becomes representative of modernism’s shifting focus towards the fragment or dismemberment. In her 1994 essay The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, art historian Linda Nochlin ties the genesis of modernism to the French Revolution, framing the guillotine as a symbol of the severing of inherited dynastic power ushering in an era of radical politics, creativity, and culture. Narcissister, Mask Art Series (Profile with red braids and bowls), 2015, digital print, 24h x 18w in.
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