Representation Art

What is art one might ask? Art can be seen as expression, form and representation. Art as representation is related to mimetic theory (Stremmel 2006). Mimetic theory comes from the Greek word "mimesis," which means imitation and representation (Hall 1997).Representation of art began with early ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Plato viewed art as an ‘imitation of nature.’ Due to this, art had no knowledge and therefore had no intellectual value. According to Plato, art was a copy of a copy thus barely real at all (Hall 1997). Like Plato, Aristotle maintained that art was a mimesis of nature; however he disagreed with the nature of that mimesis (Hall 1997). Unlike Plato, Aristotle had different views on how and what art imitates. Aristotle also believed art to be beneficial to society unlike Plato. There has been an importance in visual representation in modern culture as emphasised by Hall (1997). Representation refers to the construction in any media (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts (Hall 1997). In order to interpret the representation the social, cultural and political meaning of Propped (2002), as shown in Figure 1, theories of representation will be used.
One of the representation theories include semiotics written by Ferdinand De Saussure. Under this theory, meaning is constructed by the creation and interpretation of signs (Bolt 2004). Signs are made up of signifiers such as (objects, words and arts) and the signified which is the meaning it creates. I will also use the representation theory of stereotypes established by Dyer (1993). Dyer believed that stereotypes reinforced differences. He also suggests that stereotypes are seen as natural in society (Dyer 1993). For example, there are differences between male and female stereotypes because they reinforce strong, natural differences. He stresses that stereotypes reinforced that the idea that there are