Egon Schiele Self Portrait as St. Sebastian 1914

Appropriation of Egon Schiele’s Self Portrait as St. Sebastian 2020

Paying Attention

Trying to simultaneously disconnect from the art piece while trying to recreate it was difficult. It was hard to keep my attention on abstractions–the lines, shapes, and marks that make up the drawing–rather than the complete picture in front of me.

HCM #1:

Though centuries apart, the vectors of attention in these photos are the same objects, that being the Sovereign Scepter and the Orb. I suppose this goes to show how despite the progress that the United Kingdom has made, there is still a remnant of royal authority that the nation clings to.

Despite the royal authority remaining, there is a clear distinction in how the portraits are displaying their subjects. The first portrait, with Queen Elizabeth I, she is really the only thing in the photo, save the Crown Jewels. She is set against a black background with her front facing the audience. Her outfit is symmetrical, and the Scepter and Orb frame her left and right. She is the monarchy and the monarchy is her. There is no room for the outside world to seep into her portrait.

This contrasts with the later portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, taken in the 20th century. It represents a country with centuries of progress behind it at this point, whose relationship with the monarchy has fundamentally changed since Elizabeth I’s reign. Her position is off center, her posture a bit more slouched, and most importantly, she does not exist in a black void–the Royal palace, grand walls and windows, is sprawled out behind her for all to see–she exists now as part of a system that has progressed past the need for her. The Parliament now wields most of the power in the country, and the Queen is more of a figurehead, there out of reverence more than anything else.

HCM #2:

Susan Sontag’s Looking at War has a way of evoking very strong reactions from Sontag’s command of imagery and language. The way she sweeps through descriptions of brutal images and scenes that war necessitates instills a sort of passive horror–the images and scenes she presents are atrocious, but the apathetic and systematic laying out of them creates a kind of trance you go into as you read them: “The reader has an excruciating photo tour of four years of ruin, slaughter and degradation: Wrecked and plundered churches and castles, obliterated villages, ravaged forests, torpedoed passenger steamers, shattered vehicles, hanged conscientious objectors, naked personnel of military brothels, soldiers in death agonies after a poison-gas attack, skeletal Armenian children.” That is all the last sentence of a paragraph. No sentence afterwards to let you process or contextualize–the horror and monotony of war just left to hang there.

Further, Sontag’s observation that who is the victim and who is the perpetrator in a photograph will inevitably affect how we relate to that photograph is interesting. It reveals more how relative our experiences with war is, and how complicated conflict can be. A photograph of a civil war in a small country to someone in America, while perhaps disheartening and macabre, will inevitably slip out of their memory as they go on their lives, disconnected from the life of the photograph; but to someone from that country, or someone with family from that country, that photograph is a door to a world that has a certain hold on their life, changing how they interact with the art form.

 

HCM #3:

Over the past week I have been observing a Granny Smith apple with a bite taken out of the side of it, having been taking notes on it each day to collect onto the website.

On the first day, after having taken a bite out of it, it is clearly a freshly new, green apple. Still ripe with fresh juice and glistening, The inside is a pale white and the skin outside a shining green.

By the second day, time and oxygen has already had its say on the purity of the apple. The inside has oxidized to a hollow brown, like you’d see peeling off the side of an old tree, and the outside is noticeably softer with its hue darkening from the green of yesterday.

There is little distinction between the third and fourth day, the only difference being that the apple on the fourth day is softer to the touch. Both days see more deterioration of the apple and the once green skin of the apple caving in on itself.

The fifth and final day saw the culmination of the oxidation over the past week. All exposed parts of the apple have converted to a muddy brown with holes dotting the previously green skin.