Saturday, April 16, 2011

Reading Cosmopolis Through Spencer Tunick's Performance Art

Mexico City


Spencer Tunick's Performance Art Piece This is huge and spectacular. See all the rest of his performances with nude/naked bodies while you are there. Very beautiful.

A slideshow that is spectacular:

And another one:


Down on left perhaps London. I don't think it is New York so tell me if you know.


And of course the last one is from the Concentration Camps just after liberation and too late for many.  The image taken with film cries out in a way the posed bodies do not, (digital?) but then the context is deathly, the bodies starved.
London?
I am wandering within McLuhan's  thought about the medium is the message. What if these images were presented differently. Some large, some very small. Would the message be different? Say the Camp bodies huge, the performance bodies small or the reverse? What about the order? If I included or you imagined the bodies in Haiti, or Afghnistan, or Tsunami, or Bosnia victims piled up, would that affect your perception of these images. If you have read the scene these refer to in Cosmopolis, does that change your perception?

De Lillo of course is self-referencing White Noise when the students are preparing for a rehearsal for an imagined catastrophe, lying down fully dressed, some in official helping roles. During War II we used to have air raid drills, hiding under our desks. The same during A bomb cold war time children rehearsed along with their teachers. A kind of higher level fire drill.
Liberation of a Camp

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