Collage , Nude Nature. 2002.
Matisse, Henri.
Painting, Blue Nude. 1907.
Quoted Text: Brossard, Nicole. “Hologram” in Picture
Theory. 1990.
Poem, “Graffiti – skin scripts bones books”. 2002.
Very rarely does nature produce a blue vegetable or animal form except for flowers. Conceptual artist, Lee Oliver’s Blue Dinner (1970), a potluck performance art event, in which guests may only bring blue food for the public feast, is a cogent display of this natural phenomenon. The blue period of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse are modernist expressions of the loss of the natural. Matisse’s Blue Nude, an ironic representation of the classical feminine object in modernity, suggests the evolving state of the destabilized human in the twentieth century.
In this page design, Matisse’s nude is over-written with graffiti and a passage by Nicole Brossard about love of the subjective feminine and embodied consciousness. Brossard’s work describes the subjectivity of self as constituted in the pragmatism of body knowledge and desire. She says:
- The nature of sentences is limitless visual information running over our bodies at the speed of light, in her body it’s a sensation not forgotten in the representation of space when the idea . . .
The graffiti text, “skin scripts bones books”, written on the Matisse painting, repeats the metaphor of book for body and skin for page.
Carolyn Guertin’s paper “Gesturing Toward the Visual: Virtual Reality, Hypertext and Embodied Feminist Criticism,” reviews two recent exhibitions by artists, Brossard and Catherine Richards, which explore embodied theory in the digital arena. Brossard’s 1995 novel Baroque at Dawn, uses virtual reality and immersive environments to discuss the limitations of writing. The character Cybil Noland is hired to write about the experience of the sea through virtual reality technology. Richard’s exhibit, Curiosity Cabinet at the End of the Millennium and Charged Hearts VR (1991) are virtual reality exhibits. The curiosity cabinet over whelms viewers with sensation and reconstitutes their stability in the second part of the installation.
Brossard's experiment suggests that while new technology provides new boundaries for the body and expression, mediation reduces the subject’s perceptive clarity. She is critical of virtual reality for being too mediated and disconnected from embodied awareness. Richards is more interested in the opportunity, technology offers to construct new selves through mediation. Guertin’s inquiry concludes, “the disorienting intersection of text and image in our contemporary world is a new language”. Brossard’s work and statements about embodiment strive to redeem the lost real from the pure artifice described by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, XI. 1935). Benjamin defines the mediated nature of reality in mass media:
The equipment-free aspect of reality here [cinema] has become the height of artifice: the sight of the immediate reality has become the (unattainable) blue flower in the land of technology