You can only represent / present a singular pre-existing objective entity; if there is no such pre-existing objective entity, the only thing you can do is structure and construct but not represent.
Luc ----- Original Message ---- From: ARMANDO BAEZA <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 10:13:53 PM Subject: Re: representation I feel representation of any thing, as we wish, is a choice we've always had, from day one? ab ________________________________ From: William Conger <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 4:55:20 PM Subject: Re: representation Wait a minute. I'm the fellow who says anything can look like something else. That means anything might look like a dragon, if and only if I am able to establish whatever I may choose as a sign for a dragon through some sort of communication that someone else accepts. My whole career has been centered in just that allusive and metaphorical potentiality of shapes, words, colors, etc. No sign exists until I invent it and if I choose to communicate what I invented as a sign, I need to employ various modes of language, some of them familiar, some of them maybe not. When you speak of Representation, imitating something existing in nature (it has to exist because if not it could not be imitated), then you are limited to the things that exist in nature. Dragons (except those big lizards) don't exist in nature, ergo they can't be represented. BUT they can certainly be invented because I can choose to call my pet cat a dragon and describe who my cat seems to remind me if fanciful imagery of dragons in art, etc. AND since we can say that imagery of dragons does exist -- not as nature's product but as man's fanciful depiction of both other imagery and verbal fancy -- an imitation of that can occur but that is not the same as representation of nature. Anyway, have it as you will. I certainly support the concept that things can be made in to signs of other things not present without any pre-exisiting limitations. This includes things existing in nature and things existing by human creation, like inventing a sign. But I prefer to think that representation is limited to things in nature: Lizards, not dragons. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 5:32:27 PM Subject: Re: representation -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, Jan 30, 2011 3:59 pm Subject: Re: representation One object may REMIND you (and some others) of another object, (but it may not similarly remind me), but this alleged "representing" is no more of an entity -- This object- a piece oof representational art- had better damn well remind you of another object,that's its job. It has no excuse for existing other than to represent something not present. It would be interesting to try and find the assumptions at various times about representational art. Conger doesn't feel that its province includes dragons,Titian did. Seurat thought dots could produce a reasonable facsimile, which they did, but he is still alone in using them. What's up with that,why all the smooth brush strokes? What concept of countryside helps to produce all those landscapes and how did it change? Why weren't there more pictures of cities,what about those market pictures of the Dutch and why didn't anyone else do them-I could go on. Kate Sullivan
