Serpentine Danse

The work focuses on dance and movement as the central axis of visual development. This work takes as inspiration the photographs taken by Ben F. Laposky where he portrays the images produced by oscilloscopes and, also, in the videos made by the Lumière brothers to the dancer Loïe Fuller, the work was named after the name by which the dance that Fuller developed is known.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

This work takes fragments of what Bürger proposed in his text “The avant-garde work of art.” In his text, the author writes that “an aesthetics of our time cannot ignore the transcendental modifications that avant-garde movements have caused in the art movement, nor can it ignore the fact that art has long been in a post-avant-garde phase” (Bürger, p. 113).

Although this is only a fragment of an extensive text where Bürger speaks about various topics, in what was mentioned above the author “warns” us that we cannot ignore the changes that the avant-garde made in the history of art, thus generating changes in the systems of representation. Reading the text, we can perceive the importance of these changes, so what the author writes regarding this will be mentioned below:

“In contrast to the continuous transformations of the particular means of representation coined by the development of art, the transformation of systems of representation (even when it is notably prolonged) is a transcendental historical event” (Bürger, p.122).

Leaving this aside, with no greater pretensions (in this instance) than to make a work that pays a kind of tribute to different artists (although I still don’t know if that is the correct way to name it), to make it, the work of different artists is taken as an initiative that marked in some way a kind of break in the discipline they carried out or even in the history of art per se.

On the one hand, the work of Ben Laposky where he takes photographs of the images made by oscilloscopes and which are predecessors of the generative images that were later made using various technologies. On the other hand, we take the dancer Loïe Fuller, who was a reference in dance and who developed a dance that was new for her context, and not only her, but also the work of the Lumière brothers who were in charge of portraying her through filming. Each artist offers something, a break, a novelty. The appearance of the photographic camera, later the cinematographic camera, also made a break in the art world. This appearance was a very important milestone and it put the entire notion of art that had existed until then in check. For this we can bring two authors who name it and then one cites another in his text and they are Paul Valery and Walter Benjamin.

Both authors talk about the radical change that art underwent after the appearance of photography, Benjamín names it as a modification in the artistic function, moving to the artistic techniques of its cult function. For his part, Valéry names it as a change in the old industry of Beauty. I think we could continue talking about the changes that photography and later cinema brought in the history and function of art, but I simply outline it as an introduction to the reason for the choice of some of the artists detailed above.

Literature

Bürger, P. (1987). La obra de arte vanguardista. Teoría de la vanguardia. Barcelona: Península.

Valery, P. (1918). La conquista de la ubicuidad: Sociedad para la Distribución de la Realidad Sensible a Domicilio. Piezas sobre arte.

Benjamin, W., Aguirre, J., & de Alba, D. (1973). Discursos interrumpidos (Vol. 1). Madrid: Taurus.