Artistic Meaning through Translation:

Poetic Distortions and Mythologized Contradictions

Abstract

Here, I lay the groundwork for approaching the question of artistic meaning and its societal

impact — whether reinforcement or subversion of cultural narratives and structures. This

foundation is in four parts. First, I will explore the relationship of artistic meaning to linguistic

meaning and translation, which will illuminate the process of interpretation as transformative and

necessarily distortional. From there, I will consider in what sense artistic meaning is yet

maintained through translation. Lévi-Strauss’ discussion of mythology, elucidated through the

second part of this paper, will provide a model for understanding this through the linguistic

possibility of immanent transcendence. Given Lévi-Strauss’ assertion that “the purpose of myth

is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction” (229), the third section will

explore the need for this function through Julia Kristeva’s explanation of the abject in the

maintenance of meaning itself, and through Talal Asad’s related discussion of the psychical

impact of the instability of meaning on the ideological or societal level, as revealed through

experiences of horror. Finally, I will show that art is capable of functioning on the levels of both

poetry and myth: aesthetically and without possibility of accurate translation, yet also as a tool

for navigating epistemic contradictions — the destabilizing contradictions within a social

subject’s foundational understanding of meaning and identity. The myth-like aspect of artistic

meaning can thus stabilize and reassure meaning for a subject whose epistemic framework is

challenged. This paper will advance a theory of art as it reinforces and reifies a societal mythos,

as a first and necessary step toward understanding how it might, in contrast, operate to subvert

the mythos and thus structures of power.

Language and the Distortion of Meaning: Art and Translation

The process of talking about art — in any theoretical discourse, whether its emphasis is

historical, practical, political, or critical — is of course always an interpretive act. But it is often

considered initially, if not primarily, to be a descriptive act. I will argue here that talking about

art, particularly about artistic meaning, is always initially an act of translation, rather than direct

explication. Art takes place already in language, so that any act of speaking about art, even when

explicitly interpretive rather than descriptive, is already based on an implicit translation from the

visual (or whatever medium is original to the work) to the verbal. Verbal terms themselves are

translations of visual terms, and verbal associations distinct from visual ones, so that distortion of

original meaning is inherent, just as in translation between verbal languages.

Note that the phrase “original meaning” is not intended here to refer to a temporally first

meaning of the work, nor any ‘authoritative’ or intended meaning. What is referred to is meaning

as it exists and is conveyed through the original work — that is, the visual, temporal, or

experiential artwork itself, rather than through any description or interpretation (i.e. verbal

translation).

I assert that art takes place already within language, and it is as such that it is able to

communicate meaning as definitely as is verbal language. On what grounds, though, can art be

considered to be language? It may be enough to note that, according to the Oxford English

Dictionary, the term “language” has been applied in English writing to any form or system of

animal communication since the thirteen-hundreds, to human non-verbal communication, like

gestures, since the beginning of the 17th century, and to artistic media since the beginning of the

19th century. If, however, we are to equate art with language, not merely metaphorically, but to

assert that non-verbal forms of communication share in what is essential to verbal language, we

must look further than literary uses of the terms. If we are to take a structuralist approach to

understanding language (as is further explained in the next section of this paper, in the context of

myth), then linguistic meaning is not conveyed by an inherent connection between signs and

referents; it is “the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the

significant data” (Lévi-Strauss 208). Language is defined by its structure — a structure which

brings individually meaningless or arbitrary parts into relation with one another in order to

construct and convey meaning. Clearly, there are specific choices or images in artwork which

cannot be said to be arbitrary; if a landscape includes a tree, it is not purely by convention but

related to the experience (whether specific or generalized and imagined) of a tree existing in the

outdoors. Simultaneously, however, each and every artistic choice is inextricably tied to

convention. Colors’ associations with certain ideas or emotions vary across eras and cultures, as

do associations of any representational figure.

Sots art proves a helpful example. This movement began in 1970s Soviet Russia in

resistance to the government’s imposition of Socialist Realism as mandated artistic style. It is

often compared to American pop art, and is indeed stylistically similar, but interpretation by

American art critics of these works has generally been extremely distant from interpretation in

the context of these works’ creation, based on distinct ideological contexts and histories of

resistance. For example, American interpretations of Kosolapov’s “Lenin — Coca Cola” [fig. 1]

generally assume that the work critiques the ubiquity of advertisement and of mass-production in

the U.S, satirizing this by comparing it to the ideological reverence held for communist leaders,

generally understood as dictatorial or fascist. In Russia, however, the critique is read differently,

not of American capitalist consumerism, but of Soviet leadership. Sots art’s intended critique of

ideological culture in the Soviet Union, when brought into a context of consumerism-critiquing

Pop art, translates into a critique of material culture. Two political paradigms, each seeing itself

as in direct opposition to the other, frame identical symbolism in entirely opposite ways, so that

in each context the work is understood as critiquing its current cultural context. Visual signs must

be recognized, then, not as intrinsically representative of some definite idea, but as arbitrary,

conventional, and culturally specific. Artistic meaning is thus no more directly represented by its

medium than is linguistic meaning; both use structure and convention to convey meaning, which

does, actually and in truth, change based on context (if we remember to locate “original”

meaning not in intention or authority but in the artwork itself, so that any meaning conveyed

directly to a viewer by work, rather than through a secondary source, can be considered true,

real, and original).

Furthermore, these conventions are inescapable in the experience, reception, and

interpretation of artworks. Even if a color, shape, or form in a painting were random, chosen

blindly by the artist, its presence in the artwork would be experienced by any viewer in relation

to that viewer’s conscious and unconscious associations with it. Considering the viewer to be a

socially constructed subject, as in the tradition of Lacan and Foucault, those associations

themselves, even if closely tied to individual experiences, can never take place outside of

language or established systems of knowledge; the individual can understand coherent meaning

in the world only once entering into systems of language, as a subject. Incoherent meaning, or

perhaps experiences of artwork on the intimate level of the Lacanian “Real,” may be said to take

place outside of language. Symbolic meaning, however, cannot be separated from language.

Thus, since artistic meaning cannot be actualized without subjects to create, convey, or interpret

it, artistic meaning must be said to take place already within language.

We have established in two ways, then, that art is a form of language — by comparison to

a structuralist understanding of language as well as through a generalized understanding of the

subject as socially constructed. Whether it is its own form or language or a sub-form, whether

each media or each artist or each movement should be said to be their own language, and,

essentially, whether it is multiple languages or only one, is irrelevant to this paper. What is

important is art’s location within language, not the best method for sub-dividing languages.

Given all of this, artistic description must in the first instance be an act of translation, where

verbal terms are translations of visual terms, etcetera. Visual associations may be translated, if

recognized explicitly, but some or most will inevitably be missing from any descriptive writing

(as they vary between viewers/readers based on context, experience, and knowledge). Verbal

associations will overlap with but be unique from visual ones. In acting as intermediary between

a work and its reader and thus creating distance between them, translation always obscures

original meaning; description of artwork in verbal terms, then, must always distort some form of

artistic meaning.

Nonetheless, there is an extent to which meaning is maintained through description of

artworks, and to which verbal interpretation has value and relevance for art. To further

understand art’s place within language and the functioning of artistic meaning, we must then

uncover what kind of meaning is distorted by and what is maintained through the act of

translation.

Where Meaning is Maintained through Translation: Myth

In his essay “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), Claude Lévi-Strauss examines the way that

myths operate within cultures. He draws the conclusion that myth, while a part of language,

operates within its own particular system of logic, and that, while the content of myths change

over time and vary across cultures, they always maintain a particular structure. Hence, he notices

something that will prove invaluable to our investigation of artistic meaning through translation:

“poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions;

whereas the mythical value of myth is preserved even through the worst translation” (210). If art

is language, it does, surely, function in some sense as poetry does — containing meaning tied to

its medium, to the materiality of the language of its expression — where serious distortions

happen through the process of its translation. In what sense, though, might art operate as myth

does, “preserved even through the worst translation” ? A thorough look at Lévi-Strauss’

discussion will illuminate the nature of mythical meaning, and whether something of art, too, is

necessarily maintained through its translation.

Although it is extremely common to claim that societies create myths simply in order to

“provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise understand—

astronomical, meteorological, and the like,” Lévi-Strauss wisely asks: “why should these

societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with

empirical explanations?” (207). Given that every human society uses empirical explanations,

interpretations of myth as explanation of physical phenomena fail in that myths are unnecessarily

complicated for such a function. Furthermore, this assumes that societies that hold myths do so

out of ignorance and empirical impotence. This explanation seems, then, to be patronizing to say

the least, and certainly works to perpetuate perceptions of certain cultures as ‘primitive,’ despite

the existence of myth (alongside ‘empirical explanations’) in all known human societies.

Psychological and sociological interpretations, which assume that the events or social

relations in myths simply reflect real social relations in the cultures that hold them, do not prove

much more effective. With this approach, “the interpretation becomes too easy” (Lévi-Strauss

207). With such a simplistic explanation for myth, meaning becomes too easily found and almost

any can be defended. Whatever is present can be claimed to “reflect the social structure and

social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be as readily claimed that...

[the given representation is] an outlet for repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever

dialectic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found” (Lévi-Strauss 207-8).

To understand how myth really operates and what purpose it serves requires an

exploration of its uniqueness from other language. Lévi-Strauss approaches this first by

acknowledging that, despite the seeming arbitrariness and lack of logic within them, we must

explain “the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar” (208). He relates this problem

to one faced by ancient linguists and philosophers, who attempted to explain language by

relating its meaning to the sounds themselves. This problem was overcome, he explains, once it

was understood that “it is the combinations of sounds,” — that is, their structure — “not the

sounds themselves, which provides the significant data” (208). A structuralist approach, then,

proves essential to understanding meaning itself, at least as it is conveyed through language (and

we have reason to doubt that it can exist outside of language). Lévi-Strauss reminds us that

“myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is a part of human speech” (209). If a

rigorous study of language requires a “principle of the arbitrary character of linguistic signs,”

then we must acknowledge that principle in the study of myth as well. Lévi-Strauss explains

briefly two aspects of language defined by Saussure, which are also very clearly aspects of myth-

as-language, but he goes on to show what element myth possesses beyond these two. This

reveals an enlightening way to understand myth itself and the general mysticism with which it is

endowed, and it also leads him to his final conclusion regarding myth’s social function. From

there, we can determine whether art operates similarly.

Language is described by structuralist linguists as having two essential aspects, which

differ in that they have different “time referents.” The first is langue, which is the conceptual,

immaterial aspect of language. Since concepts are not enacted in (physical) space-time, they

exist only outside of time, in the realm of the eternal, or in what Lévi-Strauss refers to as

“reversible” or synchronic time. Language’s second essential aspect is parole; roughly translated

as ‘lyric,’ this is the actual, spoken aspect through which langue’s meaning is expressed, and

which exists in linear, diachronic, “non-reversible” time (Lévi-Strauss 209). This distinction is

one between the physical and the conceptual; spoken language is physical, while the concepts

tied to it are immaterial and thus outside of time, even if historically specific.

Myth has these two elements — the (synchronic) structure and the (diachronic) actual,

individual components, which exist temporally and materially. In myth, however, these elements

are themselves eternal. “Myth uses a third referent which combines the properties of the first

two. On the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But

what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless: it

explains the present and the past as well as the future... It is that double structure, altogether

historical and ahistorical, which explains how myth, while pertaining to a realm of parole and

calling for an explanation as such, as well as to that of langue in which it is expressed, can also

be an absolute entity on a third level which, though it remains linguistic by nature, is

nevertheless distinct from the other two” (Lévi-Strauss 209-10). Myth accomplishes this time-

referent synthesis by taking individual components that are in truth embodiments of structural

contradictions, and bringing them into a narrative relation with each other. By interacting

through diachronic relationships, these elements are reconcilable, even when their eternal aspects

remain contradictions and incapable of coexistence.

For example, Lévi-Strauss looks in great detail at the myth of Oedipus, accounting, as he

can, for its many variants and incarnations, including that of Freud (since, he argues, myth

remains the same throughout translation as long as it is felt as such). Each of the essential

elements of the myth, which he terms mythemes, are found to be categorizable into four concepts

[fig. 3]: overrating of blood relations, underrating of blood relations, killing monsters, and

difficulties in walking or standing (from the names of Oedipus and his father and grandfather

meaning, respectively, “swollen foot,” “left-sided,” and “lame”). The dragon that is killed by

Cadmos, an event from the third concept above, is “a chthonian being which has to be killed in

order that mankind be born from the Earth” (Lévi-Strauss 215). This is in reference to the

“autochthonous origin of man” — the belief that humans originated underground and came up

from the Earth. The slaying of chthonic monsters, then, can be labeled as a “denial of the

autochthonous origin of man.” Given this, the fourth category of mytheme becomes clear. Lévi-

Strauss explains that “in mythology it is a universal characteristic of men born from the Earth

that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either cannot walk or they walk

clumsily” (215). In contrast to the denial of autochthonous origins, then, the difficulty walking

found in Oedipus’ family names can be read as “the persistence of the autochthonous origin of

man” (216). The epistemic contradiction thus brought up is that between the societal belief in

human origin being the Earth and the empirical knowledge of human birth coming from two

parents; that is, a contradiction between being born from one or born from two (216). If arranged

not linearly but in terms of structure, these irreconcilable beliefs are navigated through the

Oedipus myth. Not only are they each embodied at different times in the same myth, but they are

mediated by analogous but more easily reconcilable terms: the overrating and underrating of

blood relations. The affirmation or denial of one’s origins shifts into an affirmation or denial of

one’s family — certainly a difficult problem, but not an epistemic one. Ultimately, as a result of

this shift, social life is felt to have a similar structure to cosmology, allowing the former to

validate, rather than contradict, the latter.

Hence Lévi-Strauss’ important conclusion that “the purpose of myth is to provide a

logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it

happens, the contradiction is real)” (229). For Lévi-Strauss, myth does not represent any

collective dream; it is never a fantasy invented to fill in the gaps of empirical explanations, nor is

it a collection of social attitudes and beliefs embodied by archetypal characters. It is, in fact, a

representation of social structures, a reflection of their internal inconsistencies, and a tool for

navigating and mediating these contradictions. Spelled out in narrative, the contradiction finds

parallels that mediate the problems it poses. What, though, are these contradictions that exist on

the societal level and which are so threatening that they cannot be directly confronted or

accepted but must be navigated through narrative fantasy, and what is it that they endanger?

Identity and Meaning Dissolve: Contradictions

In her 1982 essay, “Approaching Abjection,” Julia Kristeva explores the relationship of borders

to systems, identity, and the very sense of self. Whereas subject and object are understood as

opposites, each defined in terms of the other, Kristeva introduces a third term, which is beyond

these two: the abject. She repetitiously returns to the experience of abjection — “one of those

violent, dark revolts of being” — to explain the term, which describes “a threat... ejected beyond

the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable... It cannot be assimilated.” While the abject

is something outside of the subject or the “I,” however, it is not the object, which is always

opposed to the subject, but something altogether different. It is “not me. Not that. But not

nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness,

about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence

and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me” (Kristeva 2). The abject is

what cannot be neatly categorized as subject or as object, and which reveals to the subject the

very boundaries and limits of these terms, their constructedness, their contingency, their

impermanence. Yet it is not the idea of death or its symbols that cause abjection, but death itself.

Wounded bodies and corpses provide the clearest example of this. “A wound with blood and pus,

or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death.” On the contrary, it shows it;

“refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live... There, I am at the

border of my condition as living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that

border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and

my entire body falls beyond the limit — cadere, cadaver” (3). If the abject is felt in relation to

something that must be ejected, continuously, from the self and the self’s body, in order for that

self to live at all, then abjection becomes an extremely intimate experience. And when the failure

of identity itself is brought into such close proximity, such intimate relation to the self, then the

subject will “spasm,” will feel “the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from

defilement” (2). What is abject is not merely what is outside the self, which can be rejected and

distanced; it is the negation of this very possibility of self-affirmation through borders. It is the

dissolution of borders themselves. And “how can I be without border?” (4). Kristeva reveals

something outside of the classic dualist relation of subject and object, and so exposes the subject

to its contingency as such. “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection,” she

explains, “but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions,

rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” With this understanding of the self and

identity as having a precariousness that is unthinkable to the subject, we begin to understand the

societal need for a navigation of “contradiction” that Lévi-Strauss locates in myths. If there is no

real border between the subject and the object, or if it is contingent, then I begin to lose my sense

of self in its entirety, slipping into the out-there that I reject from my identity and my

consciousness. The very basis on which I understand myself as a being and act accordingly (or

act at all) is challenged by the abject. This is a contradiction that threatens identity and individual

being itself. What is more, the abject’s exposure of identity-border contingency expands beyond

the identity of the subject and into all borders. With that, meaning itself begins to break down,

and it is impossible to go on acting or feeling as a subject until this contradiction, the

precariousness and impossibility of meaning, can be avoided or hidden again. What myth does,

then, in overcoming a contradiction, is actually hiding the abject. It avoids the experience of

abjection and its resulting debilitation. The alternatives to this aversion are a complete

breakdown of meaning, which is perhaps akin to death, or, which constitutes the only real

possibility, an immediate, dramatic, and transformational shift in one’s framework of meaning.

This begins to explain the need for myth as it operates in Lévi-Strauss’ conception, but it

lacks something crucial. Myths are not individual stories, made to account for individualized

structures of meaning. They are essentially social, and so the social character of contradiction

must be explored as it is elucidated on the individual level by Kristeva. In the chapter “Horror at

Suicide Terrorism” of his book, On Suicide Bombing, Talal Asad investigates the meaning and

social function of horror. He describes how “taboo,” which consists of these societal

prohibitions, “is linked to a range of practices by which attempts are made to protect valued

identities, beliefs, and forms of life” (Asad, 77). If taboo maintains not only “beliefs,” but also

“identities... and forms of life,” it lies at the basis of the construction of epistemological

structures in general.

Asad’s essay focuses on this type of moment in particular: the transgression of identity-

forming boundaries. He begins by searching for the cause of “horror,” and concludes that it is

produced by the appearance of “contradiction” within the subject’s framework of thought, which

thereafter “has to be continually worked through without ever being resolved” (Asad, 88-89).

This contradiction is revealed by the blurring of distinction between subject and object, and

between all identity-boundaries. He does this through a theoretical investigation of the horror

that is experienced by Westerners with regard to suicide bombing in a way that horror is not felt

toward bombing initiated by the United States or other kinds of violence that destroy life on a

wider scale than a single suicide bombing. Asad points to the essential character of justice as

conceptualized in the West (i.e. as it emerged from the Judeo-Christian tradition); for justice to

be enacted, the perpetrator of a crime must eventually face a punishment. “Revenge,” however,

“always justifies itself as fighting back, which is why it requires that crime and punishment be

separated in time” (Asad 90). In the case of suicide bombing, the perpetrator is also his own

victim, making crime and punishment dissolve into one, and there is no possibility for the

closure of justice. In this moment, Judeo-Christian concepts of crime, punishment, and justice

lose their stability, and so a foundational aspect of meaning and morality disappears. “The horror

that these acts may produce is the result of their deliberate transgression of boundaries that

separate the human from the inhuman, the creature from the Creator. Horror is the total loss of

practical and mental control” (Asad, 77-78). The dissolution of this boundary causes the subject’s

episteme, their framework of meaning, to lose its ground. For the subject, the world thus

becomes momentarily incomprehensible and identity unintelligible. This is the “total loss of

practical and mental control” Asad describes, and this horror will be experienced until

boundaries are restored. Asad’s “horror,” then, parallels Kristeva’s “abjection,” but the two

remain distinct. Whereas abjection refers to what is experienced on the ontological level of the

self, and so pertains to individual identity, Asad places horror in the context of socially

constructed meaning. Although these two aspects of identity may be experienced in much the

same way and are as integral to any individual, the cultural specificity of horror explains much

about the construction of meaning and the potential effects of translation. Asad reveals to us

something of the psychical impact of instability of meaning on the ideological and societal level.

We have, then, a justification for the existence of something that would alleviate the impact of

this instability, not for an individual, but for an entire society. We have a justification for myth —

as something that helps us to reconcile contradictions and inconsistencies that are, in truth,

irreconcilable.

“The Gamut of Linguistic Expressions” : Art as Myth and Poetry

While poetry and myth may overlap (as myth has often been told through poetry), they are

distinct. In fact, Lévi-Strauss illustrates that they are, in a sense, opposites. Myth, as we’ve seen,

is defined by the presence of a third time referent, the synchronic-diachronic synthesis; “its

substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it

tells” (210). As its opposite, then, poetry is poetry only insofar as it can be defined as such

through “its style, its original music... its syntax,” hence Lévi-Strauss’ claim that “poetry is a

kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions” (210). Where,

then, does art lie; with one or the other of these two terms, or somewhere between them on what

Lévi-Strauss calls “the gamut of linguistic expressions” (210)? Both art and myth are maintained

as intuitively separate from and seemingly transcendent of everyday language because of the

linguistic aspect Lévi-Strauss finds to be unique and essential to myth — that is, the combined

synchronic-diachronic time referent. That art shares this distinction is clear in the purported

timelessness of much culturally significant artwork, as well as the propensity of political leaders

(both in power and in subversive movements) to identify values with a particular image or

artistic subject or style. It is also seen in the mythic character taken on by the stories of

individual “Great Artists,” which so often repeat the same essential pattern: a young boy from

unlikely circumstances has immense — and always innate — talent, is ‘discovered’ and

‘nurtured,’ and, through a mystical ‘inspiration’ in his artwork, touches on something of the

divine in human experience or existence. 1

Since art clearly also exists in terms of style, of the originality of its method of

expression, and of the other terms that Lévi-Strauss applies to poetry, it seems that art actually

occupies both ends of the linguistic expression spectrum. While there may be some aspects of it

which are heavily distorted through translation, we should consider art to also contain elements

which survive translation, and which operate as myth does: to negotiate an epistemic

contradiction. In locating both myth and poetry in artistic meaning, we have elucidated these

concepts while challenging the spectrum and opposition in which Lévi-Strauss placed them. The

implications of myth and poetry functioning simultaneously and in spite of one another, or

perhaps even in tandem, should be further explored.

Conclusion

As we have seen, art takes place already within language, so that any description is

already a translation from the artwork’s original medium into verbal language. This interpretive

process must be understood as transformative and necessarily distortional. Another kind of

meaning, however, is maintained through such translation, as Lévi-Strauss elucidates through an

exploration of myth. This kind of meaning is structural and tied to frameworks of meaning —

frameworks that necessarily contain inconsistencies, either internally or in relation to lived

experience. These contradictions — helpfully understood as a form of the abject that exists on

For a more in-depth discussion of this Modernist narrative, see Linda Nochlin’s influential essay, “Why 1

Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971).

the level of a society or culture and is specific to its epistemic framework — are navigated and

ultimately hidden through myth. Such is possible only because of mythical meaning’s basis in

the structural, rather than the stylistic or aesthetic. The structural aspect of an artwork, then, is

what is maintained through its translation into verbal ‘description,’ and so we see that art, despite

consistently being understood as purely or primarily aesthetic, also operates as myth does. It has,

then, the capability of navigating epistemic contradictions, and so of maintaining societal

structures of meaning, and thus of power.

Acknowledging the capability of art to enact cultural mythos should be the first step in

interrogating its relation to social structures more generally; future questions for investigation

include how art might also use the mythical structure of meaning, not to conceal or navigate, but

to reveal: to expose and confront these contradictions, or to uncover new conceptualizations and

possibilities. Queer, feminist, and anti-racist art, particularly at their intersections with

postmodernism, present a fertile ground for such investigation.

Figure 1. Alexander Kosolapov - Lenin Coca Cola - Oil on Canvas - 1980

Figure 2. Alexander Kosolapov - Lenin Coca Cola - NYC Times Square - 1982

Figure 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss - Structural study of the Oedipus myth. Temporally readable left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Structurally readable in columns.

References

Asad, Talal. "Horror at Suicide Terrorism." In On Suicide Bombing, 65-121. New York: Columbia UP, 2007.

Kristeva, Julia. "Approaching Abjection." Oxford Literary Review 5.1-2 (1982): 125-49.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "The Structural Study of Myth." Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic, 1963. 206-31.

Further Reading

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999.

Barthes, Roland. "Death of the Author." Aspen 5-6 (1967).

Burke, Kenneth. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles. "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" Desert Islands and Other Texts. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2004. 170-92.

Foucault, Michel. "The Prose of the World." The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. 17-44.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: The Will to Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1998.

Jones, Amelia. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.

Kristeva, Julia, and Philippe Petit. Revolt, She Said. Trans. Brian O'Keeffe. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2002.

Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ARTnews, January 1971: 22-39, 67-71.

Nixon, Mignon. "You Thrive on Mistaken Identity." October 60 (1992): 58-81.

O'Dell, Kathy. Contact with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998.

Owens, Craig. "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983): 335-51.

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