Yes - also serves as a detached critique of Reality TV: the contemporary imperative of wanting - demanding - to watch oneself watching oneself watching oneself on TV ... :-)
Hi Padraig, I think there is a double movement in this image: both of vulgarising spiritual experience and of spiritualising vulgar experience. In this sense the image is both extremely banal and extremely profound and indeed it is both these things at exactly the same time. Thus it perfectly illustrates the buddhist idea of the coexistence of opposites into one being.
The silent contemplation of anything, even if it is the self, is a sign of transcendence, and yet it is also vanity of the highest order to imagine there is such a thing as transendence.
Excellent, Rod. Of course it isn't just a Buddhist idea :-). The notion of parallax is also relevant: apparently irreconcilable opposites actually different sides of the same Mobian band etc.
And another notion: "Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is wearing around the object. It can only do this where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience." — Theodor Adorno, "Subject and Object"
3 comments:
Hi Rod,
Yes - also serves as a detached critique of Reality TV: the contemporary imperative of wanting - demanding - to watch oneself watching oneself watching oneself on TV ... :-)
Hi Padraig,
I think there is a double movement in this image: both of vulgarising spiritual experience and of spiritualising vulgar experience. In this sense the image is both extremely banal and extremely profound and indeed it is both these things at exactly the same time. Thus it perfectly illustrates the buddhist idea of the coexistence of opposites into one being.
The silent contemplation of anything, even if it is the self, is a sign of transcendence, and yet it is also vanity of the highest order to imagine there is such a thing as transendence.
Excellent, Rod. Of course it isn't just a Buddhist idea :-). The notion of parallax is also relevant: apparently irreconcilable opposites actually different sides of the same Mobian band etc.
And another notion:
"Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is wearing around the object. It can only do this where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience." — Theodor Adorno, "Subject and Object"
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