MARTHA'S HYPERREAL BOWLS
Where is the "real" bowl? There is a real bowl is at home, an artefact one
can touch, flip, and play with. Then,
there is the online image of the original,
an image that reflects a basic reality. Can you spot among these bowls which
image reflects the original bowl? Then, as
Baudrillard argues,
there are images that pervert a
basic reality, images that mask the absence of a basic reality, and images
that bear no relationship to any reality whatsoever.
The images in this page pervert the basic reality of the bowl and in their
seriality, they are also a simulation of Andy Warhol's
serial art, a media-reflexive gesture congealed in the endless
reproduction, dissemination, and simulacra made possible by photography
and machines. Warhol's serial art work is the "unpresentable presentation"
of infinite image repetition. These images are more beautiful (IMNSHO :)than Warhol's Campbell
Soup cans but, as simulacra they belong, like the soup cans, in the realm of the hyperreal.
Mail:
Martha E. Gimenez
University of Colorado at Boulder
Department of Sociology
Ketchum 219, Campus Box 327
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0327
