Canova’s statue of Venus, the Roman goddess of love is paired with Milton Green’s photograph portrait of Marilyn Monroe, a ‘film screen goddess’. Each gestures in a similar manner, by placing a hand over the breast while clutching a garment. Green reports that the ballerina costume sent for Marilyn, was too small. She solved the problem, by holding the dress in her poses for this famous photo shoot. The well-known portrait is a picture of vulnerability mixed with sensuality.

Marilyn’s pose is more direct compared to the Venus, who looks toward the left in a stance of feigned modesty. Marilyn casually points her right index finger toward her shoulder, a gesture, that both expresses erotic invitation and the waif’s lament “what about me”. A feminist reading of the portrait could argue that she appropriates daVinci’s pointing finger (see letter “K”) to disclose the objectification of the feminine as a sexual stereotype or that her gesture is an inverted come-here affirming the liberated erotic power of the feminine.

Marilyn’s simultaneous representation of contradictory positions, is a metaphoric icon for the indeterminate and multivalent nature of postmodern self definition, or is it postmodern definition of the self, or is it selves. Vision and cognition are an important component of this inquiry and the feminine body as object of art is codified as both a signifier of beauty and the act of vision in the spectator.

The dual images of Marilyn and Venus are replicated to construct the letter ‘V’ and these are superimposed over another layered image of an anatomical picture of a woman gesturing with her arm reaching up to hold a garment over her shoulder. The layered surfaces and images portray a contrast between the erotic and the biologic, with implications of recursive possibility. The text on the each side of the page, is composed of words beginning with the letter ‘V’. These words are aligned on the right and left in conceptual polarities of desirable/offensive, whole/empty and so on.

A photograph of a figure’s tattooed back-side, is placed below Man Ray’s Le Violin d’Ingres (1924,) in a repettition of a second a pair of recursive images with another set of multiple contexts. Ray's montage is modeled after the Jean August Ingres painting The Turkish Bath (1862) in which, a seated turbaned and nude figure playing a stringed musical instrument, is situated in the foreground. Ingres was also known for his hobby of violin playing. In Man Ray’s re-touched photograph, the model Kiki, wears a turban and her back is painted with the violin “f’ shape. Man Ray’s photo-montage is an example of surrealistic experiment with painted and defaced bodies surfaces, and titling of art works, similar to Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q (Mona Lisa with a Moustache).

Nicole Brossard’s passage from “Hologram”, at the top of the page for “V” is re-printed:

on rumor she lo(u)nges on the sand she is
naked in the representation of times
the rumor circulates that
she exists really then
woman rises
In they
EYES

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