Is Kim Kardashian a Simulacrum? Kanye West's Galatea?

Is She Real?

This is worth reading as  you are looking at a modern Pygmalion story. Kanye told her she must change her look and since "I really trust him. He was right." Here is the link to Pygmalion if you don't know the myth where the great sculptor announced he was through with women and began to make the most beautiful woman in the world out of Ivory. ( Oh all those elephants dead.)He falls in love with his creation, Venus breathes life into her, they marry and have a child.  KK is really a walking talking Simulacrum. A copy of a copy with no original. She is beautiful and the Vogue photo shoot is wonderful. But is she REAL? She says she is planning to take the bar and become a criminal lawyer to help those of her race who are overlooked and sentenced unfairly. We will see I guess. 

So Kanye "sculpted Kardashian's Look and you see it now above.

Those of her race? Which one. She thinks Black but is she Black? 

In case you don't know Fanon, he was a Black psychoanalyst from Martinique who wrote a number of books you should read for your own knowledge.

And here's Pygmalion with his very own Simulacrum Galatea.

https://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/myth-of-pygmalion-and-galatea/ 

The Inspiration for My Fair Lady

Interesting how mythology plays out in real life eh?

DIANE BURKO: THE PAINTER OF HER GENERATION

SLIDE SHOW

POLITICS OF SNOW

What determines an artist who makes works of art revered through the ages of time?

Success in their own time? 

One landmark is a CUT in Art History such as Picasso made more than once. Is it this? 

Leonardo took on great themes of mythology, of portrait painting, of landscape.

Michangelo's great theme was Christianity in the Sistine Chapel.

IMO the great theme now is the DEATH of Planet Earth as we know it, this hospitable place for our species and all those contemporaneous with us that took hundreds of millions of years to prepare.

What other artist has spent her life detailing this catastrophe we have made?

And why has she not been recognized as such? A prophet in her own country aphorism?

Well she has been traveling, teaching drawing/painting for 30 years, raising a family and working non stop in her studio, not schmoozing and PR ing with the rich and famous. Not a lifestyle to attract big time buyers around the world.

I first met Diane Burko quietly in the cafeteria at the University of Pennsylvania. I was doing research in psychology on Piaget's Conservation Concepts and she was beginning her MFA in preparation for teaching. There was nothing about her to suggest she had visions of greatness in her field. She was getting her credentials for teaching. And that's all I remember of her.

I would come across her work hanging in homes (John McCoubrey for one) and these early paintings were birds's eye views of landscapes. A green country farm, Philadelphia from the sky or up high somewhere. The kind of thing you see on google these days of places you know.

I would hear about her but never in terms of her being the next great thing. Her early large paintings of glaciers were elegant, austere, untouchable,  indifferent to us, our eyes looking at these objects. The brush strokes did not play erotically on the canvas, did not convey sensuousness. These fierce bitterly cold and indifferent glaciers were monstrously indifferent as Herzog would say, and Burko responded in kind. Her brushstrokes followed Nietsche's advice "Be more so than the subject, be WORSE!"

Then in the early 1990's Burko would get a grant to live and paint in Monet's Giverny. Here she painted the same scenes Monet painted and her brush was inspired by his, her strokes flowed and dripped and she became a different painter.  It was then I came to know her better through a mutual friend. And then I left Philadelphia. 

When I thought of her I began to think of her as a witness of Climate Change in the world. All her paintings became paintings of a lost world to me in my mind. Her life's work a chronicle of grief which she seemed not to acknowledge in any of her interviews online or in person. 

An example of Lacan and Zizek comes to mind for her. The unknown knowns that rule our lives, our destinies. I can think of nothing else that explains all the years she did this, flying in helicopters, airplanes, touring all these inaccessible unloving places. 

By 2006 the awareness of Climate Change, then labeled Global Warming, went more mainstream. Burko's paintings were then sought out to promote what scientists had been saying in their dry obtuse way with numbers and graphs. The paintings were irresistible for making their point and Burko responded with her great generosity of spirit. 

She no longer has to take her own photos because science has recorded these changes for her in their scientific photos. Places that she visited with exhilaration and desire, camera in hand, leaning out the opened door of a plane to get the shot she wanted, were now available to her as change by change took place. As Baudrillard would say what was conceived in the Symbolic Order as passion, living, sacred, death, love, seduction, challenge was entering the Order of Production. Science, measurement, survival, fascination, control began to take over and Burko began to paint the changes in those places of long ago that would never be the same again.

Here is where we get into the CUT in art history, the age old problem of representation. 

The more recent paintings of the glaciers, the mountains of ice encrusted snow over stone have melted, so what are we seeing. We are seeing representations of NOW? No longer the same as THEN. 

Burko has expressed her early abstract leanings as opposed to the landscape by jumping out of the dichotomy, the binary box art history had long confined them in, and soaring up high to Heaven, taking the object with a God's Eye perspective. Philip Guston also merged the figure/abstract concept he had struggled with. Art is eliminating contradictions, ideology, false dichotomies.

Now we can see a figure as abstract. We can google the Earth and its lands, sea, and air which now appear as abstract paintings. The artists gave us these images first in some way knowing what to reveal to us.

Where is the original? Is it the glacier now? Or is the one now the simulacrum. Maybe the simulacrum is the one Burko photographed and painted years and years ago? Is the original one 100 years ago? 1000000 ago? It is impossible to know. 

Each one in time is a simulacrum.

There cannot be anything to be called representational for it will become different in time. There will never be an original, only copies of copies.

The illusion of an original is an illusion.

There is no such thing.It has just been made up.Time will change anything

but maybe so slow you cannot notice.

Am I the same as the young woman who met Burko in 1966? Am I the simulacrum now? Or was I the simulacrum then?

I have no identity.Only multiple selves.

There is no linear time. No beginning. No end.

I am always someone different. I just change too slowly for myself to notice.

Now the glacier has changed in my lifetime so I can see the changes.

Glaciers used to change slowly so in one life their changes were not seen.

Now they change faster and faster so we can see. 
Will they speed up like a movie?

Now Burko photographs and paints volcanoes. The melting molten rivers of fire run down and around the volcano, twisting and flowing, burning all in its path then turning to hard, charcoal stony rock petrified lava gone cold. Stopped.

And here is the resonance with Houellebecq's Lanzarote.

Lanzarote - tourist attraction now

Once a cheap tourist destination until Houellebecq made it famous, these islands had endured volcanic explosions for over 100 years. The EFFECT on the people is detailed by Houellebecq in the Afterward of the novel. They are cautious, unfriendly, suspicious people.

So Burko has just destroyed representational art.

That is a fact. Did she intend to do it?
She has said her GOD'S EYE perspective on landscape is so she can keep abstraction.

Why do just idiots review her work, ask her stupid questions?

Does Burko cry at night for these lost glaciers and icy mountains?

I do. I cry at night. Someone ask her in an interview.

Does she love them? Petit still loved the World Trade Center Towers he walked across.

Gordon Levitt as Philippe Petit

The glaciers, mountains and the World Trade Center Towers
are Strange Attractors

These buildings are seductive.  And seduction is coupled with challenge. Always. Just like mountains, like Everest. They are objects beckoning the subject. They were Strange Attractors from Baudrillardian theory. Just as particles in a particle accelerator with opposite charges seek each other, play with each other, and when they collide....pouf!

These objects, these Strange Attractors, have been luring and seducing Burko all her life. They have wanted her to know, to speak for their voicelessness.

There is no original. Both are simulacra

LINK for multi images of Burko

Reviews - I include them so you can see that they can't see.
http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c106334bd750a949d05ac8

  http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c108444bd7507e4ad05ac8

http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c0ebbd4ad7508c19c6b548

Simulacra and Simulation: Babette Babich-Deleuze and Guattari

BABETTE BABICH - AESTHETICS

What Deleuze and Guattari offer, particularly in A Thousand Plateaus, is a logic capable of grasping Baudrillard’s failing world of representation as an effective illusion the demise of which opens a glimmer of possibility. Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope—of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making.”

— Brian Massumi, Canadian social theorist, Ph.D in French Literature from Yale University, Realer Than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) (pdf)

(Source: amiquote)

Read the rest here at  Miaokuancha's blog

The Oscars Have become a Simulacrum - Cloning - The Inscription of the Body

This is in no way meant to denigrate fine performances from the past. But we are no longer there anymore. No one wants to go back to wearing corsets. Why do you want to look at women who do on a screen? Just producing a reality that is gone for the purpose of selling and consuming nostalgia.

Who can take them seriously now. They give them for stuttering, ballet dancing, walking on your knees to be short (Jose Ferrer in Toulouse-Lautrec), being deaf (Jane Wyman), being deaf (Matlin who is), singing (Reese Witherspoon, drunk (Ray Milland), a boxer, all sorts of highly specialized skills that professional people have in their chosen professions but that actors and actresses (I like the sound  of the word  actress), have to laboriously learn and acquire for a role to be realistic. Gaining weight, losing weight, all sorts of deformities and disabilities, extreme sports, etc. Oh and let me add all the CGI and special effects.

These are all literal acquisitions to create the illusion of reality. Since when does the production of reality require illusion? When it has disappeared, that's when. Inception, Social Network, Hanna, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are four wondrous films requiring only superb acting rather than tricks. Rob Pattinson's girlfans (all ages), want to see him do tricks to do character parts in the future. Aren't there any fat actors, skinny ones, dancers, singers, blind and deaf ones?

Why?

Obviously they haven't understood any of Cronenberg, nor Cosmopolis. Cronenberg has repeatedly addressed this theme of technology interfacing with the body. Have you watched his films? All their dreams and wishes for Rob in the future are, without exception, for roles that are completely retro, the production of reality taking place in linear, historical time. If you understand Cosmopolis why would you want that for him?

Here's an exceptionally informed poster at robsessed saying just what I just ranted against.

nikola6 replied to themselves

P.S.

Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd and Alice 

In Wonderland. Do you suppose his fans had shit fits over how 

he buried his beauty for those roles? Or were they in awe?



Nicole Kidman was unrecognizable in The Hours and won the 

Oscar for her efforts. And yes, Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid 

Of Virginia Woolfe? She aged herself 20 years and got fat to 

play the 50ish Martha (Bette Davis wanted the role). How 'bout 

Ralph Fiennes burnt beyond recognition in The English Patient?


I could sit here and type out examples all night. Personally, I 

can't wait for Rob to shave his head or put on the weight when 

the role calls for it. I want him to knock those critics on their 

asses. And they're especially rough on "pretty boys". Pretty boys 

almost always have to ugly themselves up in order to gain a little 

respect. Critics didn't start to take Tom Cruise seriously till he 

gained the weight and shaved his hair to play Ron Kovic in Born 

On The Forth Of July. When did George Clooney win his Oscar? 

When he gained 40 lbs.

Rob's fans best prepare themselves. Or...sit his "character" roles 

out. Which is what I would call...a fair weather fan.

This is Hollywood's preferred method of CLONING! Get it! 

Taylor Lautner is a recent example. This is really about the destruction of beauty. The destruction of illusion. Who in the fuck wants to watch that! Look at DeNiro now for crissakes! Is that what you want for Rob?  And Elizabeth Taylor deliberately destroying her beauty and then going under the knife to try to get it back. Madness. Oh and Matt Damon's body after Bourne.

The Inscription of the Body:

Modern society is perverse, not because it has tried to repress sex and succeeded only  in producing deformed expressions of the sexual instinct, but because of the type of power it has brought to bear on the body. Far from limiting sexuality, it has extended its various forms, penetrating it with its power..... those identified with certain places (the home, the school, the prison - (my addition:Hollywood producers and actors) - all correspond to precise procedures of power. They are extracted from people's bodies, from the infinite possibilities of their pleasures, and frozen into a particular rigid stance (read Taylor Lautner). (Michel Foucault The Will to Truth-Alan Sheridan p. 175-6)

As Foucault demonstrated at length in "Surveiller et Punir" it is these micro-mechanisms of power that, since the late 18th century, have played an increasing part in the management of people's lives through direct action on their bodies: they operate not through a code of law, but through a technology of normalization, not by punishment, but by control, at levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its machinery.... We must free ourselves from this image of power as law and sovereignty, says Foucault, if we are to understand how power actually operates  in our technologically advanced societies. Foucault has two aims in this proposed series of studies: to show that sex - an area where, above all others, power seems to function in terms of prohibition - is not, in fact, subjected to power in this way and, second, to formulate an alternative theory of power, 'another grid for deciphering history'. 'We must at the same time conceive of sex without the law and power without the king.'(Sheridan MFTWTT 183)

.... Power is ubiquitous, not because it is able to assemble everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced at every moment, at every point, or rather in every relation of one point with another. (Sheridan MFTWTT 184)

 Power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere...One should probably be a nominalist in this matter:  power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor a possession. It is the name we give to a complex situation in a particular society. (Foucault's History of Sexuality 93)

This inscription of the body penetrates the organs, the muscles, tendons, cellular structure, skin, blood flow, heart rate,  in fact, the entire body outside and in.

To demand that an actor gain weight, lose weight, etc is to exert a certain kind of power over the body by capitalistic entities is to inscribe the body, to change it often permanently and this is demanded now if one is to inhabit the skin of the character.  It is clear none of these people have seen Grotowski or Yoshi Oida become fat, thin, starving, old, a child, crippled,  weeping, laughing hysterically, sexual, repulsive with thousands of faces at each moment and all before their eyes while they are just standing there in front of you. This recent emphasis on the literal is mind boggling. Wanting Rob as Eric Packer to work out until his chest is excessively barreled is sheer stupidity. Yoshi Oida could stand there before you and create the illusion of a huge barreled chest in minutes. What is this obsession with working out?

And why are Rob's fans so in thrall to this absurd and controlling ignorance of the suits?

The Hollywood suits hate Robert Pattinson.  Rob has adulated Cronenberg in public at the Golden Globes. They hate Cronenberg who pokes fun at them. Rob did not come up through the ranks. He did not serve his time. He did not proceed by slow progression (linear time ghosting) to achieve stardom. He does not espouse all that they hold dear. Instead he reads, for crissakes. Books! Can you imagine that! He talks about them, he talks about auteurs like Godard who sticks his finger at commercial films. Even his own that succeed he sees something wrong with them. Robert Pattinson is here because of one seventeen year old girl who said, "It has to be Rob." "She threatened me," says Catherine Hardwicke.