Mona Lisa Images for a Modern World - 4 Mona
Lisa Kitsch as Symbolic form
[Note: No less interesting than the varied uses of the Mona Lisa image is the fact that collections of monalisiana are fairly common. Several individuals have indicated to this author that they know people who have amassed large numbers of objects bearing the Mona Lisa image and its derivatives. The purposes of collecting monalisiana are varied. One collector calls his collection "Mona Lisa abuses," ostensibly looking at the objects as exploitations of the famous image and as disrespectful to quality Art. Another collection developed as a group activity to enliven a visual resources collection attached to an art history department. A third evolved from an attempt to use the image as a means of providing focus to questions concerning the relationship between original and copy, between copyrighted originals and derivative copies. A fourth (this author's), small as it is, began and continues to grow as joke gifts provided by friends and family.] This idea is continued on a label in a collection of Liquor Miniatures purchased at a duty-free shop in France where Mona holds center place among five worthy women, all subjects of paintings in the Louvre collection. Here, distilled for the purchaser, is the quintessential spirit of the Louvre made manifest, potable and portable in the form of five miniature alcoholic cordials. According to the often unacknowledged belief in sympathetic magic that underlies today's consumerism, consumption of these distilled deities creates a bond between the object and consumer: In a word: "You can become what you drink." It is unlikely that the designer of the
Liquor Miniature package was thinking much of medieval
sculpture, but any student of the period, when
contemplating this parade of essences placed before him,
will have a difficult time not envisioning the countless
arrays of the kings and queens of France or Apostles
flanking the numerous portals of great gothic cathedrals
-- perhaps in a manner not unlike Leopold Bloom's reverie
on the triangular emblem on his bottle of Bass Ale. Here,
for better or worse are our own era's five Wise Virgins
(also a common gothic architectural theme), who, like
their predecessors, have come to the celebration with
vessels full. [Note: The wise and foolish virgins is a subject from Matthew 25:1-13. It tells of ten virgins invited to attend a wedding, five came with their lamps full and five with their lamps empty. When the latter, having left to fill their lamps with oil, returned, they found themselves locked out of the ceremony. The story was used as a parable to warn people to be ready for the Second Coming and was commonly depicted in Last Judgment scenes of French and German Gothic churches. The wise virgins sometimes appear in representations of the Triumph of Chastity. See further: James Hall. Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art. (Icon Editions) Harper & Row, New York, 1974.] [Note: Refer to the Birthday card bearing five female stars of the history of art: Mona Lisa, a Picasso female, Woman from Grant Woods double portrait, Boticelli's Venus and Whistler's Mother. (Text) (Image).] Quite frequently, the image of La Gioconda (to call her by the name most often used in Europe), as adapted today, serves catalytic functions, facilitating an infusion of the prestige, power and presence normally attached to high art into the domains of low art. When the Mona Lisa is used on mass-produced articles, for the purchaser the image forges connections between the disparate intellectual and social classes to which the words "high" and "low" are generally applied. By this process, the art of the past may be understood to have been acquired by the present and may be viewed as adopted, "owned," and taken over by a culture-needy but aesthetically or intellectually unprepared and otherwise disinterested public. For this to happen, Mona's relatively austere, refined personality must be "humanized" to allow it to convey and endorse today's banal realities. At the same time, the Mona Lisa must be made to shed evidence of the mythologies that came to adhere to it thorough its history, especially as applied by romantic critics of the 19th century. While it could still carry its fame as an idealized image, and even as a vision of idealized femininity, its identity as a portrait, its significance as a "femme fatale," and the foreboding sinister implications that had been read into it by romantic critics had to be abandoned or submerged. [See note.] Similarly, no mention of its autobiographical content and no allusion to its purported homoerotic significance could be allowed to endure. The Mona Lisa had to be transformed into an emblem or icon of itself. To accomplish this, its traditional aesthetic content had to be eviscerated. This transformation could occur as a radical refiguration of the image, or by new meanings created by the force of the contexts in which its likeness appears. [Note: See, A. Richard Turner, Inventing Leonardo, p. 48.] [Note: While the popular arts based on the Mona Lisa tend to shed or ignore the adhesions of critical theory and interpretation, the same cannot be said for what happens to the Mona Lisa in the hands of contemporary artists, where the critical history and subjective interpretations of the past often serve as the springboard for new Mona Lisas. The author intends to add a chapter on the Mona Lisa as a theme among fine artists.] Top | Go to Next Section | Go to List of Images | Go to Images
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