Archive for the ‘metapainting’ tag
Halfway: A Meta-Painting by Tofu St. John
Halfway by Tofu St. John is a meta-painting because it is a painting about painting. The picture is a self-portrait of the painter doing what a painter does. However, the figure is not holding an artist’s brush, as you might expect, but a decorator’s roller. Painting a wall with a solid color – in this case sky blue — is not usually considered artistic, so this piece creates a tension between painting as art and painting as decoration.
The artist (or decorator) in the picture, with one hand casually tucked into his pocket, has covered up about half of a white stucco wall from the bottom up, reminding us of the title of the piece: Halfway. The work also marks the halfway point in Tofu’s project, whose aim is to produce one 4″ by 4″ painting everyday in 2011. Many of the pictures in the series refer to historical events that happened on that day, current events, personal events, or holidays; in this case, the work was painted on July 2nd, the 183rd day, the middle of the year.
The Mirror in the Text, Part II: Mise en Abyme
In 1893, André Gide coined the literary term mise en abyme (pronounced “meez en a-beem,” which means literally “into the abyss”):
In a work of art, I rather like to find thus transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself. Nothing sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately. Thus, in paintings by Memling or Quentin Metzys, a small dark convex mirror reflects, in its turn, the interior of the room in which the action of the painting takes place. Thus, in a slightly different way, in Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Finally, in literature, there is the scene in which a play is acted in Hamlet; this also happens in many other plays. In Wilhelm Meister, there are the puppet shows and the festivities in the castle. In Fall of the House of Usher, there is the piece that is read to Roderick, etc. None of these examples is absolutely accurate. What would be more accurate, and what would explain better what I’d wanted to do in my Cabiers, in Narcisse and La Tentative, would be a comparison with the device from heraldry that involves putting a second representation of the original shield ‘en abyme’ within it (quoted in Dällenbach 7).
The Lack of Blank Spaces: Cage’s 4’33″ and Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings”
Well, that didn’t work. I intended to leave this post blank — thirty empty lines followed by the “more” function (“Read the rest of the entry”), then two hundred and sixty three blank lines, another “more,” and one hundred sixty lines, each line representing a second of silence in John Cage’s famous song “4’33,” three movements of no music totaling four minutes and thirty three seconds, composed for any instrument or combination of instruments. However, WordPress will not allow any blank lines. Although cyberspace is relatively cheap and there is an apparently limitless supply of it, the program edits out the empty spaces. On WordPress, I can write anything I want, except nothing. So, I will have to break the silence Cage created.
The Conventions of Unconventionality: An Overview of Metafiction
An overview of major themes I found while studying metafiction for the Metaclass, a self-study course for a masters of literature at San Francisco State University. This summary will also serve as a guide to the posts I have written over the last four months (with notes about a few others I intend to write). It is not meant to be a comprehensive list of meta conventions, but an addition to the the list found under Meta-Meta and Metafiction. (Nor is this intended to be a summary of themes I developed about writing and teaching, the metaclass aspect. Those themes may be found in Putting It All Together: Collaborative and Integrated Reading and Writing.)
Las Meninas: A Meta-Painting
Las Meninas is a meta-painting, a painting about paintings. (Thanks to Alejo Sauras for pointing this out to me!) I decided to post Velasquez’s masterpiece with a quick explanation of what makes it meta, but as I have been studying the (digitally reproduced) oil painting and writing about it, I have noticed more and more self-references and so my explanation keeps expanding. At this point I count at least 23 meta aspects. Take a look at the painting yourself and see if you can identify them:
