Le Grand Objet
—[The Sublime Object]—
2012-2014
Large Format Photography | HD Videography | Oil on Canvas with embedded HD Screen | Installation | Performance
le grand objet
After Jean Dominique Ingre’s 1814 oil painting, Le Grande Odalisque, 35″ x 64″, commissioned by Napoleon’s sister, Queen Caroline Murat of Naples
Ingre’s Odalisque helped establish the genre of Orientalism, where the eroticized Otherness of the subject’s identity parallels its role as the visual opiate of the female nude.
Odalisque – [Turkis: Odalık] – A slave girl, concubine, attendant or chambermaid to a concubine of an Ottoman sultan; an object possessed by a male figure of power.
“Man is nothing without the objects that express his being… but the object to which a subject essentially and necessarily relates himself is nothing but the subject’s own objective being.”
—Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity -1841
“Object is, in fact, a question-begging word. It implies a subject.”
—Samuel Alexander, Time, Space, and Deity – 1921
” ‘Object‘ is a pseudo-concept. To say “X is an Object” is to say nothing… Objects can only be mentioned in connexion with some definite property.”
—Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus -1922
“In fact, almost everything that humans express in natural language concerns Objects and their relationships.”
—Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach – 1994
