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• 1 2017-11-28T09:27:52-08:00 The Aesthetic of The Baroque and its Shock Value 9 plain 2017-12-08T11:37:04-08:00

  This idea of baroque images works well to promote shock value as a way of jarring the reader into realization.  In our daily life, we come to expect things to be a certain way, and when that idea is challenged it causes us to stop for just a moment and notice the simulacrum that surrounds us.  Using the example of this movement to use real mannequins to fashion clothes instead of fake ones allows onlookers to be shocked when they realize these dolls are real people.  These “representations of representations,” which use a simulation of dolls with almost human-like appearance, display a desired image of what clothes may look like on, after you purchase them, which in fact never does quite measure up, and is suddenly challenged by an injection of real when the models are suddenly other women (Sawchuk, 52).  Pieces of Herself shocks the reader by using common, everyday items and repurposing them as something to use to make yourself or your character.  By layering a baby over the cross on the church, it shocks the reader into discovering a worry many women have to contend with, and it continues to layer simple images to create an ambiguous and broad meaning.  It gives multiple understandings to what a cross or baby can mean to a woman, not just the connotations of religion and family, but also shame.  As this idea of the baroque progresses into our postmodern era, it comes to a point where “the imaginary - the unconscious modes of seeing - is thrown into confusion by technological developments and the ‘mass’ dimension of all reality” (Buci-Glucksmann, 74).  We have so much to look at and do now with the introduction of new technologies that it makes it difficult to look beyond the surface or see everything we want to see.  As our society shifts to a new era with an overwhelming amount of images and ideas being thrown into the mix it becomes “a veritable duel between a will to see everything and a will to see everything different in a different way” (Buci-Glucksmann, 75).  In this world it is impossible to see everything if not to just glimpse amongst the surface and miss the ambiguity the baroque images are concealing beneath their crystal clear surface.  Recent ads show beautiful women and men, which on first glance seem overtly elegant and lavish, but looking back it is clear in both ads women are at the feet of or being pushed down by men, this works to push forward this idea of a need for women to be submissive to men.  In Pieces of Herself, the image of the baby on the cross drew me as a reader to the questions, where is the man in this?  Why is the woman left to bear this weight all on her own?  Throughout every scene change those questions can be repeated, as every room reflects how alone women are in bearing these weights.  As a character in this hypertext, you do not find people in any other room unless it is through the interviews you hear as audio files attached to objects throughout the room. These audio files work to push the message of each item further as the reader is met with these now baroque, ambiguous objects.  

      Going through Pieces of Herself it is interesting how these baroque objects and images reflect stereotypical “historical scars of power” (Sawchuk, 53).  Through now-a-day ads and objects in the hypertext like the street sign blocking your character’s way down the street it reflects “a mark of colonization, the ‘anchoring’ of our bodies… into specific positions, and… in the line of the gaze” (Sawchuk, 53).  Women have historically been this constantly watched and corrected object in our culture, and the hypertext itself works well to “signify women as the colonized subject,” as the image of the baby over the church, or the writings of love in the bathroom becomes something less real, but relatable, it becomes something watched and judged by the reader.  It is the reader’s choice if they want to pass over these images and view them as their baroque surface or to glance deeper and look for something more.