| Artist: | Yasumasa Morimura |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Daughter of Art History: Velasquez | |
| Date: | 1989 | |
| Nationality: | Japanese | |
| Context: | Refiguring the Subject | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | digitized photograph | |
| Subject: photographic revisualization of Velazquez's "Infanta" (1650s) in which Morimura's own image supplants the Western subject; in reworking the Western masterpiece with an Asian male playing the part of the young princcess, Morimura addresses issues of race, gender, and nationality; unfixes identity; transculturalism; "These art works were created for the daughter whose fathr is Art History. Or, to put it another way, these art works were created by me, as the daughter, for the father." Treats himself as Other, a daughter, not a son, of Art History. Revisionist art history. Style: creates 3-d tableaux to simulate the settings of the painting, then dresses and styles himself to resemble the figures in the painting; enters the scene and photographs himself as part of the scene. Applies digital computer-scanning techniques that enable him to merge 2 or more images of himself in the same picture; image cloning. Context: late 20th c. age of global capital, information, and image downloading; questions essentialism, the "natural" categories of East (Oriental) and West (Occidental) and the "natural" categories of masculine and feminine; explores a hybrid space in between dying binaries, one that thrives on disjunctions rather than fixed states Morimura as cultural critic; cross-dressing at its most radical; shows that fixed identity is an obsolete concept; also critiques Japan's culture of Western appropriation and commodification; revisionist art history; the gender switch recalls the tradition of Kabuki theater in which male actors take on the female roles. | ||
