View allAll Photos Tagged existentialism
Reference to the philosophy of existentialism and absurdism.
Existence precedes essence.
The Absurd is the conflict between the human tendency to seek meaning in life and the human inability to find any.
Wire, plaster and clay.
31cmx29.5x47cm
Americans in Paris
An American couple at Café Les Deux Magots
Camus, Sartre and Hemingway used to frequent this cafe! Now it's a little hard to imagine an artist feeling comfortable enough to create in such a calculated atmosphere... nevertheless, I went in honour of Camus, my favourite writer.
St.Germain-des-Pres, Paris
deuxmagots_20071201_05xsmc
"Animals learn death first at the moment of death; man approaches death with the knowledge it is closer every hour, and this creates a feeling of uncertainty over his life, even for him who forgets in the business of life that annihilation is awaiting him. It is for this reason chiefly that we have philosophy and religion."
"With the exception of man, no being wonders at his own existence."
-Schopenhauer
Pergaminu - Graxa, piche, verniz e lápis dermatográfico sobre páginas de livro de anatomia do sec.XIX. ... Ao fundo xilogravura sobre tecido de algodão.
Existentialism and White Castle.
I'm sure there are more vile places than White Castle. But not many. Even the seagul won't go near it.
Latex, Styrofoam, Mod-rock, Scrim, Plaster. November 2015
Doll used as a prop within my video final piece, in relation to the photograph of the syrian refugee boy washed onto the beach to relate current day issues to existentialism, my face representing the uneasy coexistence of mind and body.
I am very interested in zodiac signs and I believe that they guide us in the universe. Thinking about existentialism I decided to draw several zodiac signs including mine. Then I put the drawing of the observatory that I did with watercolors. I used the observatory to represent the aim of my research on astrology. Later on, I digitally put my drawing of a pregnant woman in order to reflect the idea that everyone is born with different zodiac signs. We come to the world without having a chance to make decisions about our life. So, everything we have when we are born are our presents in this universe. As a result, our zodiac signs are our gifts. We need every type of person in our lives. Similarly, each zodiac sign has a purpose in our lives. So besides the genders, colors and nations I think astrology is one of the most important research to describe every human being.
The two images presented—one of a skeletal bride, the other of a cloaked figure by the sea—at first appear to come from vastly different cultural and historical contexts. Yet their shared bodily posture, an outstretched arm holding drapery, reveals a curious semiotic bridge between them. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ (1915-1980) semiotic framework, this article will explore how these images communicate death, ritual, and the uncanny through both denotation (the literal) and connotation (the symbolic), while also considering the cultural resonance of their shared gesture.
The first image by the mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (1942-) “Novia Muerte”/ “Bride Death” (1986), depicts a figure dressed in a wedding gown, complete with veil and bouquet standing against a rough stone wall. The bridal gown is long and pale, with delicate floral decorations. Draped across the arm and extending outward is a sheer veil, which falls almost to the ground. However, the face is replaced with a skull, signaling death rather than marriage. The skeletal visage contrasts sharply with the softness of the gown, producing a macabre parody of a wedding portrait. The denotative level is straightforward: a skeletal bride posed against a stone wall. Connotatively, the image subverts the traditional cultural symbol of the bride, who usually embodies purity, fertility, and new beginnings. Here, instead, the signifiers of matrimony are invaded by death, suggesting decay beneath the veil of social ritual.
The second image, drawn from Ingmar Bergman’s (1918-2007) The Seventh Seal (1957), shows the personification of Death himself, cloaked in black and standing against a dramatic seaside landscape. A lone figure standing on a rocky shoreline beneath a clouded sky. The figure is cloaked entirely in black, with a hood framing a pale face. One arm extends outward, spreading the cloak wide so that it forms a dark, wing-like shape against the dramatic seascape. The figure is solemn, silent, and imposing, its presence emphasized by the stark landscape around it. The image is iconic, immediately recognizable as a cinematic personification of Death.
At the denotative level, both images present costumed figures in theatrical settings. Yet at the connotative level, each carries a dense symbolic charge. Denotatively, it is an actor in costume, but connotatively it represents the inevitability of mortality, cosmic confrontation, and the silence of the afterlife. Where the skeletal bride fuses love and death in grotesque juxtaposition, Bergman’s Death embodies solemn inevitability.
What unites these images most strikingly is the shared posture: both figures extend the left arm outward, holding the drapery of their garment. Semiologically, this gesture carries multiple layers of meaning. On the denotative level, it is a practical display of fabric, a way of extending one’s presence visually. On the connotative level, however, the gesture recalls ritualistic unveiling and theatrical revelation. In both cases, the figure becomes larger than life, extending its symbolic power across space.
In the case of the skeletal bride, the gesture mocks the ceremonial display of a wedding gown, what should be a proud unveiling of beauty becomes instead a grotesque exposure of mortality. In Bergman’s Death, the gesture resembles a priestly or monarchic display of authority, stretching the cloak as if to encompass the world, reminding the viewer of the totalizing reach of death.
Despite their different cultural origins, the festive, macabre traditions of death in the mexican popular culture versus the stark existentialism of mid-20th-century Scandinavian cinema, the same bodily gesture operates as a semiotic constant, a signifier of revelation, power, and inevitability.
For Barthes, myth operates when cultural signs are emptied of their original meaning and filled with new ideological content. In these images, myth is at work in two distinct but convergent ways. The bride-as-skeleton invokes the myth of the "fatal union" between love and death, a theme as old as the danse macabre of medieval Europe but here reframed through local cultural practices that embrace death with irony and parody. The Bergman image, meanwhile, constructs a myth of Death as a universal adversary, solemn, philosophical, and inescapable.
The posture itself becomes mythic when considered across contexts. It is not just a gesture of fabric display, it is the myth of unveiling, a ritual act that reveals the truth behind appearances. In the skeletal bride, what is revealed is the futility of earthly rituals in the face of decay. In Bergman’s Death, what is revealed is mortality itself, stretched wide as an eternal horizon.
That two such different traditions converge in a shared bodily posture suggests a deeper semiotic archetype at play. Gestures of unveiling and cloaking seem to transcend culture, serving as visual shorthand for the revelation of truths otherwise hidden. Both images embody a theatricality that stages death not as absence but as presence—an active, looming force that demands recognition.
Thus, while one image belongs to the carnivalesque inversion of ritual (the skeletal bride mocking marriage), and the other to the solemn existential meditation of European cinema (Bergman’s cloaked Death), their convergence in posture points to a universal semiotic code: death, across cultures, is always both concealed and revealed, hidden in ritual yet unveiled in gesture.
Through a Barthesian reading, these images show us that semiotics is not confined within cultural boundaries but operates across them, shaping myth through shared gestures and archetypes. The skeletal bride and Bergman’s Death, though worlds apart in origin, both stretch out their garments to unveil mortality. One mocks, the other solemnly proclaims, yet both remind us of the same truth: death is always present, always theatrical, and always waiting to be revealed.
•Graciela Iturbide “Novia Muerte”, Chalma, Mexico, 1986.
•Ingmar Bergman “The Seventh Seal”, 1957
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Kevin poses with my book in order to mock me last Thanksgiving. Found this while looking through old photos. :-)
-View larger @ www.MaCherieArielle.com -
*COPYRIGHTED. Use without permission is illegal
© 2011 Arielle Somberg
Public swimming beach at Walden Pond State Park. If walking around to Thoreau's homesite, it disappears behind you away from view as you walk
Deze foto van Paulien Oltheten hoort bij het artikel van Rob Wijnberg over de frase 'Ik werk, dus ik ben' van 29 juli in nrc.next en op www.dusikben.nl: weblogs.hollanddoc.nl/dusikben/2009/07/29/wie-ik-ben-nou-...
Het artikel heeft de titel 'Wie ik ben? Nou, ik zit in vastgoed'.
4th of April until 27nd of June 2009 at BuroDijkstra ArtGallery.
Installation Persuasion - Idea, attitude, or action By Edwin Stolk
Also visit me at:
http://www.edwinstolk.nl/