Visual Communications

Intertextuality has enriched the Simpsons, creating relatable characters in whom viewers can invest themselves, and complex narratives that not only mock other texts, but are loaded with pre-established emotions and connotations that are translated to each episode. The Simpsons’ success over the past twenty-seven years can be measured by its phenomenal transmedial presence, existing in almost every media platform conceivable. In my essay, I would like to look at the purpose of intertextuality in the Simpsons, and briefly look at its role as a transmedial practice.

In 1933 Hans Bellmer completed work on his first doll, the beginning of a lifelong obsession with the prepubescent female form. As the nature of the object suggests, the doll was Bellmer's plaything , an object which he could dismantle and rearrange, disjoint and pull apart, and mutilate and dismember. The ravaged state of Bellmer's dolls provokes an urge to understand the sadism inscribed in them; to understand the aggressive and violent treatment of the female body. In my essay, I wish to explore this theme through the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalysts who introduced the theory of the Mirror Stage, which describes the moment the infant first identifies as a subject through their reflection in a mirror. Using the Mirror Stage, and related hypotheses, I aim to resolve the erratic appearance of the dolls and expose the subconscious anxieties that produced their mangled bodies.

On January 19th, 1981, Francesca Woodman committed suicide by jumping out her apartment window, leaving behind an oeuvre of over 800 photographs. She gained posthumous fame five years later when she had her first solo exhibition. Subsequent readings of her work tend to inject the tragedy of her death into her work, suggesting that each composition was an enactment of her death, and that her evanescent presence in her photographs was her desire to disappear. However, such a reading devalues the technical ingenuity of her work, and the creativeness with which she met her photographic challenges. Where some would suggest that Woodman was being consumed by her environment, that her photographs were horrific illustrations of her fear of being enveloped by her surroundings, perhaps the reality of her art is not so sinister. Woodman's subject matter was strongly influenced by the practice in which she worked, and her photographs are triumphant displays of her dissection of photographic laws, and her constant challenging of the medium itself. Her signature blur, and other idiosyncratic obscurations, can be seen as confronting photography's essential characteristic of faithfully capturing its subject. Almost always the subject of her own work, Woodman's game of hide-and-seek with the lens allows her to be always seen, but rarely known to the viewer. Her time consuming use of long exposures lead to images in which her presence seems conversely fleeting. Woodman's merging with her environment can be seen as a gleeful curiosity, a yearning to embody the inanimate, to always be hiding in plain sight. Although the surrealist and gothic influences in her art result in often disturbing and puzzling imagery, one can still feel a sense of giddiness in her work, that disappearing is not always a morbid desire.

Surely it would be ideal to build oneself a girl, to perfectly sculpt her to one’s specifications, to create an object of quintessential beauty and, hence, in the beholder’s eye, create perfection. However, this is not the case with the Dolls devised by Hans Bellmer, whose desires and obsessions took on more sinister forms. In creating his ideal girl, Bellmer created mangled, deformed atrocities which reflected his disturbed state of mind. Bellmer’s documentation of his Dolls more resemble crime scene photographs than art, with dismembered, rearranged bodies and often tortured forms, convulsing in agony in front of the lens. Bellmer’s obsession with young girls would dominate the subject matter of his art for most of his career, while the Dolls he made allowed him to explore and reinvent the female body. Bellmer’s work weaves together themes of paedophilia, fetishism and sadomasochism, and his Dolls exemplify the anxieties that produced these symptoms. In my essay I would like to discuss Bellmer’s treatment of the Doll, and what this reveals about the artist.

Following the second world war an anxiety and uncertainty pervaded American society which was reflected in the artworks being produced at the time. Known for their use of abstraction and preference for large canvases, these diversely expressive works of art came to be grouped under the term 'Abstract Expressionism' (Faerna, 1996, pg. 5). Abstract Expressionist paintings were distinctively personal, with the artist's brush strokes having an autographic function; an idiosyncratic gesture that laid bear their feelings and emotions on the canvas for viewers to witness (Foster et al, 2011, pg. 380). The result was often partial, with the raw canvas of the picture support visible through the rush of paint that was hurriedly applied. The incompleteness of their artworks signalled the philosophical impossibility of a definitive resolution (Wilken, 2011, pg. 10). Their paintings did not aim to problem solve, simply attempt to express the undefinable that words could not interpret. Clement Greenberg quickly appropriated the work of the Abstract Expressionists, referencing them in his theories of Modernist art. Referring to them as American-Type Painting, he saw the work of the Abstract Expressionists as an exploration of the purity of painting, using the characteristic qualities of their medium to be self-critical and self-sufficient (Greenberg, 1978, pg. 1/2). The Abstract Expressionist movement matured between 1947 and 1950 (Faerna, 1996, pg. 5), and the second generation of Abstract Expressionists were dismissively viewed as " slavishly imitat[ing] " their predecessors. By the mid-1950s the art market was saturated with these expressively distressed artworks, and their impact was beginning to wane. There seemed to be a tension emerging, a sense of waiting for something fresh and radical to shake up an anxiety-ridden art world that had become subdued (Crichton, 1994, pg. 37). In my essay I will discuss the early works of both Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, who both defiantly departed from Abstract Expressionism and, through a complete restructuring of the idea of painting, revolutionised the field of art and inspired changes that can still be felt today. In 1958 Jasper Johns had his first solo exhibition in the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. His precisely painted, representational paintings departed from the wildly abstract works that dominated the art scene up to that point, and the purchase of four of his paintings by the Museum of Modern Art alone signalled a change in the culture of the art world (Foster, et al, 2011, pg. 442). Johns presented a philosophy that seemed paradoxically at conflict with