WEEK 03: Wednesday 01 November 2006
Poststructuralism and semiotic analysis

Required reading
Cavallaro pt1 chap2-rhetoric

Additional material

chapter Rhetorical tropes of the online edition of Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners (S4B) to skim+ read selections:

Rhetorical tropes http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem07.html

tropes and schemes ( easy definitions)

in-class screening

John Berger: Ways of Seeing -episode 4: Language of Advertising
except from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (episode 4, shown in class) , put out by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1972.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jsa3/hum355/readings/berger.htm

John Berger: Ways of Seeing (the book)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ways-Seeing-John-Berger/dp/0140135154

art work

Rodney Graham: Renaissance Man, works 1400-1977 , currently at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, Zurich.

Images of the exhibition are on my photoblog or on the gallery’s website where you can also find the press release.
Richard Prince: “COWBOYS, MOUNTAINS AND SUNSETS”

http://www.art-agenda.com/displayshow.php?file=message_1161808009.txt

Richard Prince’s work had a major impact on the concept of ‘appropriation art’. His artistic strategy of appropriating foreign pictorial worlds can be understood as the initial spark for a generation of artists that – in the early 1980s – made the artistic discourse regarding the questions of authorship and originality of the artwork the subject of their work.

Prince started appropriating these images of what he termed “social science fiction”. With the camera, the “electronic scissors” (Prince), he selected areas without text and brought these (re-)photographs into the context of art. This simple act had great implications: Were these images originals? Were they even more authentic than the original? Who and where was the author? Where is the artistic invention, where is the artistic genius? The boundaries between reality and fiction, between ‘high’ and ‘low art’, between the mass-marketable iconography of advertisement and the original work of art are becoming blurred.

By appropriating these found worlds of images and presenting these photographs in series Prince exposes the myths of middle-class America while simultaneously showing the beholder how these myths are coded.

from the exhibition’s press release


http://www.richardprinceart.com/