Sept 12 Photography Class: Mimicry

photo by Chiswick Chap

Mimicry:

 1.

a. The action, practice, or art of copying or closely imitating, or (in early use) of reproducing through mime; esp. imitation of the speech or mannerisms of another in order to entertain or ridicule.

b. An act, instance, or mode of copying or imitating; a product of imitation, a copy.

 2. Biol. The close external resemblance of an animal or plant (or part of one) to another, or to an inanimate object; a similar resemblance between parts or features.

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/118659?redirectedFrom=mimicry#eid


Nature creates similarities.  One need only think of mimicry.  The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s.  His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.  Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.
--- Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty" 1933 


". . . a knowledge of photography is just as important as that of the alphabet.  The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the camera and pen alike."
- László Moholy-Nagy, 1936


"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images."
- Susan Sontag, 1973 (In Plato's Cave, On Photography)



"Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art's expression is the antithesis of 'expressing something.' Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance."

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1970





Jeff Wall

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2007/jeffwall/

Vik Muniz

http://www.vikmuniz.net/

Abex NY at MOMA

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/abexny/

Learning to Love you More:
http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/reports/16/farrell_anne.php