My sketches, in turn, were copies of the sculptures I drew, and the prints I made from them were copies of the sketches.Īnyway, I started by printing a monotype made from intaglio ink. To sum up, what I was drawing were tomb sculptures, which were copies of earlier tomb sculptures.Those earlier tomb sculptures, moreover, were copies of a transitory funeral procession. The sculptures I drew, then, were the John the Fearless figures, which were copies of the Philip the Bold figures, albeit with contemporary 15th-century flourishes and additions. John was so taken with the carvings on his father's tomb (done by no less than the workshop of the legendary Claus Sluter) that he commissioned a replica for himself. What is more, the figures I drew are the sculptures surrounding the tomb of John the Fearless, the son of Philip the Bold. The sculptures, in a sense then, are copies of the original, transitory event. The Mourners are considered the sculptural representation of the funeral processions that would have accompanied these dukes to their thrones, when nobles and other prominent court figures donned heavy black robes and processed solemnly. They were on exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art while the tombs were undergoing renovation in Dijon, and throughout the exhibit I would go down at the end of the day and sketch them. The Mourners as they appear installed on the tombs. The Mourners are alabaster figures that adorn the tombs of Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, two dukes who ruled the province of Burgundy during the 14th and 15th centuries. I began by opening my sketchbook to my Mourner drawings, which I had done as a curatorial intern in Dallas. I was thinking about the book while I was working in the studio one day, and decided to sort out my ruminations on simulacra through a trio of prints. I'm simplifying things very grossly here, but you get the idea. Truth is the realization that there is no truth, because everything's a copy of a now non-existent original. What's more, these copies conceal the fact that there is no original, if there was ever any at all. I'll have to read it a few more times to really absorb it, but basically the premise of the book is that everything we know, symbolically, physically, etc., is a copy of of a copy of a copy. It's a work of French postmodern theory (I read a translation), so it's not exactly light, beach-reading material. A few months ago, at the suggestion of a good friend of mine, I read Simulacra and Simulationby Jean Baudrillard.
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