This is a person

Whoa… so this is not a painting.  It is a photograph of a model covered in body paint, posing against a painted set to make herself seem like she is part of a painting.  Isn’t this crazy?  I wonder if this type of thing was possible in the past.  The concept of trompe-l’oeil has existed for quite awhile, but have people previously thought to cover themselves in body paint in the goal of mimicking perfectly a painting?  Do mimes kind of count?

It makes me wonder, though– how much of what we see can actually be the truth?  How much of it is actually the truth and how much of it is the truth covered by layers of paint so that it is barely discernible?  Art, in a lot of ways, has that tendency– to portray truth in ways that make it seem so false and so empty.  From the prostitutes depicted in Picasso’s Mademoiselle d’Avignon to the photographs seen in National Geographic– this is all art depicting the “truth”, yet in such contrived ways that the truth becomes distorted, decontextualized, until we ourselves must struggle with grasping this notion of truth that the artist wants to convey.

Photography may seem like a strange example due to its explicit nature– it is what it is, no?  Photography, right after its inception, became a means of documentation; thus, of course it is truthful.  Yet, there are so many ways a photograph can be manipulated, especially in this day with all this technology, to reflect things that are not actually there, to eliminate elements that are unwanted.  And if this is true– if all the messages and information we deem to be “true” becomes so unrecognizable under all the layers of paint and manipulation, what do we do to make it more noticeable?  How do we train our eyes to catch all the falsities, to scrape away the various colors and forms to display it for what it truly is?  How do we get at the truth lying beneath all of the words and the art?

*shrugs*  Maybe we just have to be more meticulous, more searching.  We can’t just glance at a photograph, a painting, or an article and take it as it is.  It’s like with this photograph.  It looks like a shot of a painting.  But in fact it’s a photograph of an event that occurred in which a real person painted and placed herself into a set in order to give the illusion that the entire performance is a painting.  And because this photograph becomes decontextualized in the mere essence of it being a photograph, we the viewer see it to be a painting.  It’s only when we look more closely, when we read the caption that we realize it for what it is.  And it’s only then that we see the truth.

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Gabby Park is a triple concentrator in Communications, French, and History of Art.