Article:
A Mimetic Psyche

Author(s): David, Ray

Abstract

Apollo come dance with me explores, through my exegesis and art practice, the expression of chaos and order as a creative paradigm in Ancient Greek Attic (tragic) theatre, Ancient Greek Attic (black-figure) vase painting as well as my painting art practice. The project is comprised of three suites of paint-ings and an exegesis that examines the mimetic, metaphoric and metamor-phic expression inherent in these three forms of art practice. The exegesis details the methods, methodology, philosophy and psychology of their visual expression. The point of engagement with tragic theatre’s chaos-and-order crea-tive paradigm in my art practice is through my utilisation of portraits of my-self and my family members to represent characters from the Theban plays by Sophocles. In so doing, my contemporary art practice depicts the individ-ual and society in terms of tragic theatre’s exploration of human experience: the social, psychological and cognitive relationships of the characters with each other and with the external world. I use the technique of superimposition in my art practice to explore assemblage, layering, multiplicity, duality and dichotomies as vehicles of artistic enquiry. The process of creating multiplicity and difference in turn generates metamorphosis and precipitates an engagement with forces of chaos and order in my paintings. Philosophically, superimposition is used to employ a rhizomatic system of consideration and construction, as described by the philosopher Deleuze and psychoanalyst Guattari. This rhizomatic pro-cess enables me to transform a visual representation of Hegel’s dialectic phil-osophical system of enquiry into a philosophical expression of affirmation through multiplicity and chance—akin to Nietzsche’s notion of the same. The utilisation and representation of a chaos-and-order creative para-digm in my painting art practice is facilitated by the pre-eminent, and most enduring form of visual expression—that of figuration. My art practice en-gages, in the broadest sense, with the creative forces utilised in artistic cogni-tion and the cosmos and in a more specific sense with form and space, as well as line and colour. In so doing, the project details my understanding of the physics and psychology of change, chance and metamorphoses as forces of creation.

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David, Ray: A Mimetic Psyche. In: IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft, Jg. 8 (2012), Nr. 1, S. 24-37. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16561.
@ARTICLE{David2012,
 author = {David, Ray},
 title = {A Mimetic Psyche},
 year = 2012,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/16561}",
 volume = 8,
 address = {Köln},
 journal = {IMAGE. Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Bildwissenschaft},
 number = 1,
 pages = {24--37},
}
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The item has been published with the following license: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz