Monday, December 7

The flexible subject

I've been thinking again about the translation of the immaterial gesture as a means of identification, or sometimes as a shortcut of representing a whole of an identity (noting not much difference between the identifying gestures of representations of Catholic saints and the corporate logo as identifying the nature of a brand.) An example of this in the art world is the recent Francis Alÿs piece, Fabiola. Although referencing mechanical reproduction, each piece in the Fabiola project is made by hand (not the artist's, but a variant group of individuals of different skill levels.) "...Alÿs's collection produced copies of copies based on a 19th-century French/British, image/text hybrid, a fictionalization of an early Christian woman from Rome."

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