Allegories
Dec. 20th, 2006 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akaihyoWhere have all of the shared allegories gone? The language of symbolism seems to have almost vanished from our culture (but which I mean American culture, I cannot comment on anyone else’s, as I am not part of that culture). While we still have icons and symbols, the rich visual language of the allegory seems to have vanished.
I mention this because behind the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, where I walk almost every day on my way to work, are a set of sculptures that seem to be trying to tell me something. But I have no idea, no idea at all, what they are trying to say to me. I have no spiritual ear for their symbolic voice. They do not connect with me at all. That just seems like a terrible shame.
Up until fairly recently -when? 1950s?- there was a language of symbols and images were a deep part of our culture. It does survive in a truncated form today -with Uncle Sam standing in for the US or Britannia for the UK, for example- but what is a Victorian artist telling us when he surrounds his subject with roses? And the particular color of the roses will be important, as will if they are in bloom or not, but we have lost that language.
What can we do to resurrect the iconography of the allegory? To return the graceful allusion to our skies? To again speak in poetic similes and historic metaphors? I suspect using them in my LJ is hardly enough though it may be a good start.
An introduction of the concept of the Allegory can be found on Wikipedia (where I also learned about Synecdoches, Metonymy and the conceptual opposite of an allegory, the Catachresis today.)
I mention this because behind the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, where I walk almost every day on my way to work, are a set of sculptures that seem to be trying to tell me something. But I have no idea, no idea at all, what they are trying to say to me. I have no spiritual ear for their symbolic voice. They do not connect with me at all. That just seems like a terrible shame.
Up until fairly recently -when? 1950s?- there was a language of symbols and images were a deep part of our culture. It does survive in a truncated form today -with Uncle Sam standing in for the US or Britannia for the UK, for example- but what is a Victorian artist telling us when he surrounds his subject with roses? And the particular color of the roses will be important, as will if they are in bloom or not, but we have lost that language.
What can we do to resurrect the iconography of the allegory? To return the graceful allusion to our skies? To again speak in poetic similes and historic metaphors? I suspect using them in my LJ is hardly enough though it may be a good start.
An introduction of the concept of the Allegory can be found on Wikipedia (where I also learned about Synecdoches, Metonymy and the conceptual opposite of an allegory, the Catachresis today.)