A blog dedicated to art and design.

In Kate Mondloch’s chapter “Installing Time” Mondloch expresses the importance of how viewers interact with a piece of art; more importantly with media screens. She explains how there is a major shift in how a person views a screen when it is taken out of everyday context and placed in an installation piece. The way we see something outside of an art gallery effects the way we view it in a gallery. I think as viewers we must try and separate ourselves from that association that we have with mass media technologies and try to see them in a new light. We need to think more profoundly about ways we interact with media screens, both in everyday life and in contemporary art whether it be a laptop screen, smart phone screen, or even ipod screen.

In Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes asserts that the Author is dead because they are no longer a part of the deep structure in a particular text. Barthes explains that an author is not simply a “person” but a socially and historically constituted subject. His essay describes that an author does not exist before or outside of language. In other words, the writing makes an author and not vice versa. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s success lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience. As for me personally, I don’t find any enjoyment in writing where you have to read between the lines. When I read something, I read it for the information in them and nothing more. I do not feel that a piece of writing must be analyzed or have some deeper meaning. To be honest, I really don’t ever think twice about the author who wrote it. I don’t enjoy reading for pleasure enough, nor have the time, to familiarize myself with various authors and their work. Now I’m not saying that Barthes is a bad writer or this is a bad essay. I personally have a hard time taking anything away from this essay.

To summarize the article, a spectacle creates new forms of exploitation serving only the persistence and interests of power because power does not care how it rules only that it does. The spectacle rules by ideas and by creating spectators who are not simply passive viewers but are active patricians who are overwhelmed and dominated by false ideas created to perpetuate the spectacle. The spectators have created a world of their own false notions of reality enforced and perpetuated by the institutions who seek to reinforce the exploitation of the spectator. Thought their activities ideology is materialized. Today, it continues to circulate through the Internet and other academic and subcultural sites today. It describes a media and consumer society, organized around the production and consumption of images, commodities, and staged events.

As far a personal experience involving a spectacle, I’m not sure if I have experienced it or not because I’m still a little confused on what exactly it is. Based off the way I understand a spectacle, I immediately think of infomercials. It happens to me every time, I will be flipping through the channels trying to find something to watch when I can’t sleep and as soon as I pass an infomercial, I’m instantly intrigued. Even though all they are really doing is telling you the same information over and over again and showing the same demonstrations over and over again, I can’t stop watching. And even though I know many of the products don’t even do what they say, I still want to buy one for myself. It’s incredible and frightening at the same time to think that a person, thousands of miles away on a television screen, has the power and the ability to convince us that product belongs to us. It’s an eerie feeling to think about how easily we can be manipulated and be completely unaware that its happening. What is the world coming to these days?

The reading starts with Barthes wondering what is that one thing that a photograph, out of all other forms of art, possesses. While contemplating that question, he also states that a photograph is forever linked to the object of which it is taken. So, for example, a photograph of a girl is always linked to that girl while a painting of a girl might not. Barthes also talks about how a photograph can exist; how it can become more than simply a sign pointing as a real world object; how it can come to embody that object on its own. He sees photographs as dead objects. He observes that a photograph can be the object of three practices: to do, to undergo, and to look. This reading speaks from an outsider’s point of view of what a photograph can potentially be.  While this reading was much easier to grasp, it was still difficult as times to fully grasp his theory.