Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Caricature: "Fake" Replica
In last week's lecture, we discussed about the Simulacrum. In lecture, we learned that the Simulacrum is a fake replica, replacing a real thing, and the "fake" Moraco in Disney World was given as an example.I wanted to discuss more about the Simulacrum and wanted to look for other examples. In my dictionary, Simulacrum is defined as: "something that looks like somebody/something else or that is made to look like somebody/something else"
Therefore, I came up with a caricature as the perfect example for Simulacrum because the caricature is "fake" replica of one individual's face. It is not a real face, but the sketch is filled with one individual's detailed facial features, replacing a real face.
Wikipedia defines Caricature as:"either a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness, or in literature, a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others"
When an artist start to sketch a caricature of one person, a random observer might find it quite difficult to identify and match the sketch with the actual face. The sketch might look pretty similar and resemble to anybody. However, as a caricaturist start to exggerate the face features and emphasize more details then the actual face, the observers find much easier to catch those details and they are able to identify the subject, although the caricature has much less resemblance to the actual face of the subject.
Take a look at the caricature I attached above. We right away know it is Einstein. It is not the actual photograph of Einstein, but with the exggerated details of his face, we can immediately guess it is Einstein.
# posted by So-Yon Jeong @ 7:59 PM 
