| Statement - Karen Knorr |
ACADEMIES
Academies parodies the discourses of noble art in the halls of academe.
Aristotle proposes a reap-praisal of the denigrated mimesis (after Plato).
Butades´ daughter invents the portrait and photo-graphy, celebrating its
indexical beginnings through the tracing of a shadow. A soul caresses the
smooth contours of Canova´s nymph. The Lyceum is Aristotle´s school where
the liberal humanities are taught. Verisimilitude was defined by Aristotle
as being the totality of what is accepted as possible according to a consensus.
In 17th century academic French discourse truth was achieved by following
the rules of an established genre ( history painting and its heroic depiction
of action was considered the privileged mode) .
Pliny the Elder in his account of Land Animals (Historia Naturalis) tells
us that in Italy (where the first fine art aca-demies were formed) there
is a belief that to see wolves is dangerous and that if a wolf looks at
a man it renders him momentarily speechless (like a statue). Lyceum is the
place of the wolves and the Apollo of Belvedere, the idealised timeless
smooth adolescent body is the true spirit of antiquity cherished by Winckelmann.
Karen
Knorr includes new work which plays out through the reference to sculpture,
painting, performance at the end of art theory through her staged photographs,
videos and installations in such institutions as the Royal Academy of Stockholm,
Uppsala University , Goldmiths College, K The Beaux Arts of Paris, the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London, the Musee d´Orsay in Paris and the Wallace
Collection in London.
Notes
on my recent developments in ACADEMIES
With the doctrine
of harmony of spheres as the anima mundi, Plato is the effective founder of
many aspects of the allegorical tradition. Allegories are ways of telling
stories through visual means as often as through the written word and the
parable. These allegorical strategies have intrigued me for some time and
are often deployed in my work as a methods of putting into scene the the myth
of the origins of art. Mixing classics such as Pliny, Aristotle, Socrates,
but with the moderns such as Fox Talbot, Daumier,Catherine Millet, I am interested
in finding another way of telling these old stories.
Apollo the Adonis of the gods has a mixed heritage. A figure of idealised
beauty he is the sun god. Yet there is a another side: There are those that
say he is of Lycian origin, etymologically through a Greek connection linked
to both wolf and Lyceum( Aristotle´s academy) One of the animals sacred to
Apollo is the wolf. Apollo is slayer of wolves in his shepard configuration
but then also becomes affiliated to the wild. He is followed by his retinue
the muses.The wolf and Apollo are part of the "foundation myths"
that found the European museum.
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Today can be no universal view since After the discovery of relativity and
the unconscious there are no secure footholds. Doubts and the eternal same
haunt us: shadows cast by the collapsed Enlightenment project undermine the
foundations of reason. Some of the precepts of reason linger yet they too
may fade. Like an anthropologist I am still participant observer here . The
actors appearing in my videos and photographs are my students, others are
professional life class models More recently monkeys and apes playfully challenge
the idealised norms of the Musee d´Orsay´s 19th century sculpture collection.
Wolves, monkeys and students intermingle in the academy interrogating the
boundaries between the observer and the observed, the human and the non human.
More recently in the set of photographs entitled "Sanctuary" animals
venture into the galleries of the Wallace Collection in London , birds become
confused and fly against the paintings of fantasied roccocco visions of nature
by Fragonard and Watteau. A wolf asks us " Where have all the sparrows
gone? Nature questions culture. After the floods and global warming what if
nature began to reclaim civilisation?
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