“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, December 18, 2015

Fragonard in the Anthropocene

I can't stop visualizing this image by Ultragramme that Bétonsalon have been using at the top of their page for Coworkers: Beyond Disaster (lecture tomorrow at 3!). It's got this crazy rococo Fragonard quality to it, clouds of human flesh, this erotic luxury eco-artifice. It's wonderfully confusing of the standard categories and it's right on the money as far as playing with the idea of humans as a geophysical force on a planetary scale, aka humans in God mode (and this is the title of the work: God Mode). And the way the booted ferns just sort of poke out of the flat picture plane, like they're not exactly growing out of the nipply-human-flesh-and-carbon-emissions cloud, more like they've been sewn in or are stitched to something behind the picture. It's fantastic.  Look:

Hyperobjects by Ultragramme: God Mode

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Nice! Fragonard, but also a big dollop of Correggio' Jupiter and Io.
http://lh4.ggpht.com/I5cxR4SmwT3BAIkndi2acJZUjdNlTohRgyxibW38OF1FaXHXJDZ1TC2rcu8OHw=s1200