Het schilderij De 500 Arhats van Takashi Murakami uit 2012 vormt een onderzoekscasus waarin de verschillende aspecten, die te maken hebben met de schijnbare tegenstelling tussen traditie en...Show moreHet schilderij De 500 Arhats van Takashi Murakami uit 2012 vormt een onderzoekscasus waarin de verschillende aspecten, die te maken hebben met de schijnbare tegenstelling tussen traditie en vernieuwing in de hedendaagse Japanse kunst worden geanalyseerd. Stilistische en inhoudelijke elementen in het werk duiden er op dat er een relatie bestaat tussen de hedendaagse Japanse schilderkunst en de modernistisch-traditionalistische traditie van Nihonga. Zo zijn beide stijlen op te vatten als een transcultureel fenomeen. Vanuit deze hypothese wordt uitgegaan van een gemeenschappelijke concept van hybriditeit, dat een kernbegrip is voor zowel de vroeg-moderne Japanse kunst als de hedendaagse schilderkunst van Superflat. Dit wordt niet alleen in de context van de stijl Superflat geplaatst, maar ook verbonden met de theorie van intersubculturalisatie en de iconografie van cultureel trauma.Show less
This thesis investigates through terminological and historical research violence metaphors used in photography language, such as 'the camera as the gun' and 'the photographer as the hunter.'
Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)
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This thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series...Show moreThis thesis examines what insights the photography series Blue Sky Days (2012-) by Tomas Van Houtryve provides into concepts as vision, subjectivity and representation, which means that the series functions as a case study, a common thread. The drone as imaging technology challenges the traditional relation between image and vision. The remarkable visuality of the series, the vertical perspective, distorts our sense of spatial and temporal orientation. It differs from the visuality that long dominated our vision, the paradigm of the linear perspective. I argue that drone vision is a collaborative vision by a human-drone assemblage that should be understood as an embodied vision. Blue Sky Days problematizes the effect of the vertical perspective and the necropolitical logic to which it invites. In contemporary warfare, the digital drone image is no longer treated as a passive representation, but as an active entity, being part of a process. Blue Sky Days as a series of static photographic images emphasizes ambiguity and undecidibility, which contrasts the visuality of certainty employed by synthetic vision systems. Van Houtryve uses a strategy of anthropomorphism, a strategy that raises awareness for the fact that agency is distributed by human and nonhuman forces. His series humanizes the other, encourages empathy for the people living under the drone, which contrast the current of anthropophobia in synthetic imagery. In the last chapter, I discuss the series in relation to the debates around representation that troubled documentary photography, war photojournalism and art. Now hypermediacy and immediacy seem both a strategy by the military to create a civic weaponized eye, Van Houtryve’s drone photography is an interesting alternative gesture by emphasizing the process of remediation.Show less
