Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World - 3 A
Decaying Tradition On these issues,
scholarly critical opinion is nearly silent. Perhaps
commentators are so mum on these matters because the
entire subject -- the sub-cultural river of Mona Lisa
(and other) adaptations -- is viewed by the critical
establishment as beneath contempt -- not worthy of notice and excused from
[Note: Among the collections of monalisiana that have been compiled, more than one was built to document Mona Lisa abuses, but it is this writer's guess that those who collect the "abuses" do so because on some level, conscious or otherwise, they really enjoy them.] A more strident tone can be heard in a letter written to the editors of the November and December 1994 issue of Museum News, the glossy commercialized journal of the American Association of Museums (pp. 7, 28). The letterwriter, Richard V. West, Director of the Newport Art Museum, assails the quality of advertising art in that journal. He says: "...I counted the appearance -- and gross misuse -- of the Mona Lisa image no less than three times [in the last issue of Museum News]. Are we that unsophisticated as a profession?" he continues. "Would we allow an image from our collection to be so ill-treated in advertisements?" Obviously, the writer looks at Art in general as the expression of an ideal that stands for values that must be maintained by paying pietistic homage to the work of art. The use of museum works, symbolized by the Mona Lisa, to promote divergent (read: commercial) goals, in his mind must be considered a kind of blasphemy that ought to be controlled. Issues of intellectual freedom, free speech, even free commercial speech are subservient to keeping Art high on its traditional pedestal. The package of responsibilities to their objects that museums inherit with each acquisition includes the obligation to preserve the object and to protect and project its significance as an historical document -- to interpret its original context. Sometimes the tasks that museums lay out to achieve this mission, contradict the promises we make to ourselves to guarantee freedom of expression, to allow artists to learn from each other, and to permit and encourage the free flow of ideas. Is there a paradox in our purposes? How do we reconcile our promise to preserve and contextualize the past with our need to interpret the past for modern audiences?
[Note: See Robbin Murphy, "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES: Topic #3: Has Mona Lisa Lost Her Head? in Intelligent Agent, October 1996: http://www.artnetweb.com/artnetweb/views/intelligent_agent/oct96.html. DEAD LINK 4/2002] If Director West sees insult in the commercialization of Leonardo's masterpiece, Serge Bramly writing in 1995 finds injury. In the popularization of her image, he says, "reproduced ad infinitum on postcards, chocolate boxes and souvenir ashtrays, over-used by an idolatrous public, subjected to all the manipulations of journalists and advertisers, caricatured, parodied, decked out in alien trappings, the Mona Lisa has been sapped of her substance, has lost her identity. Victim of her fame, she has ceased to be a painting and become a public icon, a cliché." To this author the body of trivial variants only serves to signify that "a visual vampirism is at large," one that has taken the life blood out of the masterpiece, thereby inverting Walter Pater's panegyric on the female vampire who lasts from generation to generation. The triumph of fame, it seems, is undercut by the tragedy of celebrity. But, for Bramly, not all adulation is destructive. Even Marcel Duchamp's "defacement" does not serve to remove the Mona Lisa from her privileged location among the treasures of human creativity; but, as quoted since by numerous painters in the modern tradition, Warhol, Dali, Leger, etc., in such works her mythic place is thereby reinforced. One can infer, therefore, that for author Bramly, it is the popularization, the serving of the image to suit contemporary often temporary needs, that etches at our perception of the original.
[Note: Serge Bramly. Mona Lisa, London, Thames and Hudson, 1996. (First published, Paris, Editions Assouline, 1995.)] We can watch this
new point of focus being resolved in Umberto Eco's
entertaining and immensely popular essay "Travels in
Hyperreality." The touring author chides ersatz
American culture, pokes fun at it, while obviously
enjoying the way Americans copy, popularize, and
repurpose the great monuments of European civilization.
This can happen in an elaborate, pretentious way, as it
does at Hearst Castle where the motive behind the
decorative program is complex and the money to fund it
plentiful. We may judge this effort a "high"
art in spite of the fact that bad taste lends its pallor
to original and to copy alike, high, even though the
purpose of bringing the past into the moment of today is
as unfulfilled in its fulfillment as the goal is
unrealizable in its conception. Or, it can occur in a low
way, where the great works of the past are explained and
re-articulated for a public unprepared to understand
these works on their own terms:
[Note: Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (tr. William Weaver), San Diego, Harcourt Brace, 1990. Compare, above, advertisement for Verilux Inc. The Palace of Living Arts is now closed. The display Eco describes is now owned by the Wax Museum of San Francisco.] In the Palace of Living Arts, the work of art is not allowed to stand for itself; it must be contextualized and shown to be the be an outcome of some reasonable or expected activity. By demonstrating that the painting records a model, by implying that the background is a backdrop, the artist of the display, in effect undoes Leonardo's stylization and turns the aesthetic into something rational -- indeed, in a curious way the display denies the painting. Another exhibit in that now defunct collection represented the Venus de Milo, but instead of copying the sculpture, the artist projected in wax his idea of what the model (assuming there was a model) may have looked like as she posed. The result adds arms and natural colors, of course, but most significantly it drains the sculpture of every bit of its Hellenistic aesthetic so that the meaning of the falling drapery, and other ancient expressions are gone, thus leaving, to our eyes, just a representation of a bare-breasted woman -- the mystery that nobody knows is replaced by the mystery that everybody knows. Whatever historical and aesthetic significance the original work may have had that tied it to the context of its creation has been lost in wax. Among some critics, the discomfort with the widespread influence and cultural hegemony implied by seizing the image of the Mona Lisa is expressed as a worry over the effect of the spread of cheap, crude reproductions of the masterpiece. Part of this now traditional uneasiness is heard every time a new means of reproducing images is introduced. It accompanied the introduction of monochrome photographs as a way to record art, and was heard again when color photography became popular, and now again when digital images are about to supplant the use of the "analog" ones we currently use to convey visual information -- indeed, when the popular press wants to demonstrate the use of digitization on works of art, they invariably choose the Mona Lisa as their scapegoat. These complaints may be heard, for instance, in the voice of André Malraux, who, in his essay "Museum Without Walls," itemizes the way the photograph distorts, through isolation and other means, the effect of the original, creating a kind of "fictitious art," an art often under the sway of the artistic prowess of the photographer, himself. [Note: André Malraux, "Museum without Walls," in The Voices of Silence (tr. Stuart Gilbert), Bollingen Series XXIV, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1978 (Orig. 1953)] Walter Benjamin, in his essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" tells us that the reproduction threatens the very essence of the unique work of art -- its authenticity:
[Note: Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (tr. Harry Zohn), 1936 (an excerpt) in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1994 (Orig. 1981), p. 323.] Following this logic, a history of art based on illustrations is more likely to be a history of illustrations than a history of objects. [Note.] When confronted with the world's most frequently reproduced work of art, the Mona Lisa, historians, and all who love art, must stand up and take note, since, because of its popularity, the the image of the Mona Lisa most commonly presented to the public must be crudely reproduced and must at best distort the grandeur and overstrike the subtlety of the original -- in short (to follow Benjamin) it must corrupt the record of the artist's achievement, obfuscating his intentions and the inherited values of his times. [Note: A paraphrase of an observation made by someone whose name escapes me.] When confronted with digital media, the complaints persist: For example, at the Internationale Konferenz über die Werte der Informationsgesellschaft held September 9, 1996 at Petersberg bei Bonn, in a paper entitled, "What Future for Original Work?" J. Carter Brown, Director Emeritus of the United States' National Gallery of Art and Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, itemizes the distortions and misapprehensions introduced to works of art displayed on the screen of the computer. These, by and large, correspond to the effects wrought on the original by the act of photography, except that the tendency of the screen to imply a standard size of object and its different method of illumination are counted. More significantly, J. Carter Brown worries about the impact of accepting reproductions as real, of accepting ersatz reality as true reality, of being bombarded by over exposure to works of art so that individuals become immune to the object and close their minds to the excellences that pertain to the original and are lost in the reproduction. [Note: See http://www.iid.de/macht/beitraege/brown.html. LINK DEAD 4/2002] To this observer it seems as if critics are more comfortable expressing their hesitancy to accept the validity of a reproduction as long as the intent of that reproduction is to point back to the original and to speak about the original through its copy. If we are using the reproduction as a surrogate for the original, then clearly it is important to document and counterbalance the discrepancies between original and copy, but I'm afraid, as is so frequent in our times, too often the surrogate is presented as the authentic. As for the works that derive from the original -- the unending flow of monalisiana, for instance -- as for these, connection to the original is more tenuous; they seem less dependent on the original as a work of art and, instead, are more closely connected to the work as a typos, an emblem or a symbol of itself. Such works are not intended to evoke their sources, they do not point to the tangible object, at least they do so not more than, say, the portrait of George Washington on the one dollar bill is intended to evoke or imply the portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart upon which it is based. Rather, such "reproductions" are not reproductions at all, but each in their own manner originals (true, mechanical originals), but originals nonetheless which, while citing the Mona Lisa, are as works of art, essentially self-referentially objects unto themselves. The critics, in criticizing the afterlife of the Mona Lisa, are at once expressing their dismay at seeing a great work cheapened through familiarity, and, certainly must be reacting to the unwinding of Leonardo's fetish with the observation of reality. No longer carrying the burden of imitating palpable life, these new Mona Lisas are freed from the bonds of naturalism -- in a medieval sense -- in order to convey other themes and to speak of other concerns. The release from naturalism has been championed by critics of the arts for nearly a century; why is it so difficult to apply the lessons learned in the critique of "high" art, to the work of everyday decorative objects? This article attempts to answer some of these questions by showing that the "kitchification" or "kitchenification" of the Mona Lisa is a phenomenon that documents changes in and responds to needs of our own society. The process by which the Mona Lisa is transformed leaves in its wake conflicts between competing values. The dynamic of the interchange between proponents of these values will help us understand the issues and forces involved. In his influential and often-quoted essay on Leonardo, Walter Pater likened the image of Mona to a vampire who has experienced all experiences. In the catalogue of modern Mona variants, it would seem that she has become a protean manifestation of our society's subjective needs and has given shape to a visual dialogue between past and present. Is it possible that she has become (with some exaggeration) all things to all people. [Note: See letter to author Number 2.] Top | Go to Next Section | Go to List of Images | Go to Images
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