| Artist: | Yasumasa Morimura |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Angels Descending a Staircase | |
| Date: | 1991 | |
| Nationality: | Japanese | |
| Context: | Refiguring the Subject | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | digitized photograph | |
| Subject: Morimura himself digitized repeatedly in a computer manipulated photographic revisualization of a Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of ideal femininity--Burne-Jones's "The Golden Stairs" (1880); in reworking the Western feminine ideal with an Asian male playing the part of the young virgin, Morimura addresses issues of race, gender, and nationality; multiplies the self thereby unfixing identity in terms of a core self; transculturalism; hybrid identities. 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. | ||
