New Alphabet ~ Commentary F | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Fauna Skins |
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This page depicts the letter “F” as Fauna a word for animal, assembled from paintings of animals, with a poem about animal and physical traits, an echo of primitive human ancestry. Bocklin's Faun is reechoed and personified in Vaslav Nijinsky's dance L'apres-midi D'un Faune,1912. The work was derived from a poem by Stephane Mallarmé and set to music by Debussy as fleeting impressions. This dance was known as the most striking of all of Nijinsky’s ballets using a new visual language. Odd shapes, asymmetrical poses, and awkward, pigeon-toed steps were joined in an effort to be totally centered on raw emotion in dance and music. Sometimes his dance was compared to paintings on Greek urns, or Egyptian hieroglyphics with it's stiff and angular gestures. In 199 9 his diaries were published. With his dance and writing Nijinsky embodied the feeling and instinctual nature and perhaps the extinction of a certain quality in human culture at the end of the modern period.
The apparent postmodern disinterest in the enlightenment and modern quests for knowledge is actually the urge for the empirical, reconstituted as the desire for tactical sensation in a burgeoning pleasure/leisure culture. The empirical yet disassociated proof of paternity via a DNA test is an example. The dismissal of enlightenment’s project is redirected or remediated as postulated by several theorists. The hyper-desire of the unfixed self for sensation is accompanied by the concomitant desire for the loss of physicality in an increasing abstraction of being. |
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© Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Contact: Jeanie S. Dean. Updated: 01/19/04 |