Morimura gay
by Hilarie M. Sheets
For Yasumasa Morimura's first full-length video, Ego Symposion, the Japanese conceptual photographer has magically assembled an all-star cast of artists from across art history who are known – as is Morimura – for their self-portraits. Seated Last Supper-style at a elongated table with Morimura, we see Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer, Diego Velázquez, Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Rembrandt van Rijn, Marcel Duchamp, and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun. Each of these artists is skillfully impersonated by Morimura in full costume and makeup and digitally plucked from his gallery of self-portraits from the last three decades, in which he seamlessly inserts his face and body into well-known Western masterpieces.
Ego Symposion, made in 2016, moves Morimura's staged photography into the cinematic realm. He enacts vignettes in the guise of each artist while narrating their interior lives and motivations in voice-over. In imagining each of the artists' impulses to make self-portraiture, Morimura reveals the critical and playful ways he has always approached the theme of self i
Join us for a lively discussion around the work of Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, with The Warhol’s Director, Eric Shiner, Milton Fine Curator of Art, Nicholas Chambers, Assistant Archivist (and Adjunct Professor of Chinese and Japanese visual identity at the University of Pittsburgh) Cindy Lisica, and Charles Exley, Assistant Professor of Japanese Literature and Film at the University of Pittsburgh.It begins at 4:00 pm and is free with museum admission.
Morimura gave a speak at Carnegie Mellon Universitybefore his Warhol exhibition opened, and its School of Art summarized his work thus:
YASUMASA MORIMURA’s fascination with the self-portrait, gay and transgendered life, art history and trendy culture aligns him closely with the work of Andy Warhol. Renowned for his reprisals of iconic images drawn from art history and the mass media, Morimura literally assumes his hold place in the historical narrative. In the process, he conflates issues of oArtist Talk: Yasumasa Morimura
World renowned international artist Yasumasa Morimura’s fascination with the self-portrait and interest in celebrity, gay and transgendered life, art history, and popular culture align him closely with the perform of Andy Warhol. Morimura has described himself as Warhol’s “conceptual son.” His work is a reprisal of iconic images drawn from the history of art and mass media. This, along with literally assuming his own place in these images and issues of originality, reproduction, gender, and race creates what he calls a “beautiful commotion.” This communicate is co-presented with by The Warhol Carnegie Mellon University, School of Art’s Fall 2013 Lecture Series and is presented in association with the exhibition Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self, on view at The Warhol October 6, 2013 – January 12, 2014. The exhibition is made possible through the generous support of The Japan Foundation.
Co-presented with Carnegie Mellon University, University of Art’s Fall 2013 Lecture Series
Additional Information
Please message that this event is NOT at The Andy Warhol Museum, but instead at Carnegie Mellon University's
Yasumasa Morimura: Theater of the Self
The Warhol presents a survey exhibition of labor by Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura.
Morimura is renowned for his photographic reprisals of iconic images from art history and popular customs in which he replaces the subjects with his own self-image. By Morimura assuming a place in these works, he reimagines historical narratives and, in the process, mixes issues of originality and reproduction, gender, and race to create what he calls a “beautiful commotion.”
Developed by The Warhol in complete collaboration with the designer, the exhibition will point on three important bodies of work: “Requiem” in which Morimura recreates iconic photographs relating to political and cultural life; the “Actors” series in which he assumes the persona of Hollywood luminaries such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor; and his “Art History” photographs in which he painstakingly restages well known European paintings.
Morimura’s fascination with the self-portrait, celebrity, gay and transgendered life, art history, and popular culture align him closely with the serve of Andy Warhol. The artist has described himself as Warhol’s “conceptual son”.
Yasumasa
Camping the Canon: Yasumasa Morimura's Queer Performative Critique of Art History
Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2013
Author's School
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Author's Department
Art History & Archaeology
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Abstract
The belated 1980s through the initial 1990s were years of critical disruption and disagree within the discipline of art history. Postmodern artists began making work that disrupted dominant ideologies about gender and race as natural and revisionist scholars questioned the standing interpretations and histories of art works within the canon by considering the political and social context of artists and their operate. This dissertation places camp (often defined as an ironic penchant for needy taste) within this historical moment and theorizes it as a strategy used by artists at this time to critique the canon of western art and to intervene in revisionist art historical scholarship. I focus on the history and theory of camp, particularly how it has been reclaimed by queer theorists and employed by such photographic artists as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman. As a case examine, I focus on the work o