Earlier tonight something crossed my mind and started to make me wonder if mimesis had the ability to be both intentional and unintentional. In certain situations it appears that some people purposely imitate things while in other situations people could mimic things unconsciously. I thought of this in relation to the pop culture debate from February over the similarities of Rhianna’s music video for “S&M” as it compared to certain photographs by David LaChapelle.

Thinking of this from both sides, one could say that the director for this video may have intentionally copied LaChapelle’s styling and synthesized it into a music video. On the other hand, what if the director unknowingly did this? Perhaps she was familiar with LaChapelle’s work, which it would be kind of hard to imagine she was not, and unknowingly incorporated things of his she had seen into her vision. I believe this happens a lot in creative activities, where someone thinks of a really good concept or idea only to later realize why they had thought of it, coming to the conclusion that their idea is not totally organic. Sometimes this isn’t even a self-realization, but others have to point it out for them, because the idea seemed to be so original.

From this I began to wonder how mimesis related to other artistic terms that deal with motivation for creation. How do these different approaches to mimesis relate to the ideas of inspiration and genre and style? Is there anything that is not mimetic in some way? Because everything has to have inspiration, right? Or are there some things that are organic? How does mimesis work when you consider genres of painting? Is this mimesis? Or can some things just be similarities?

I look forward to further developing these ideas as I gain a better understanding of mimesis in general and will hopefully be able to go a little deeper with my thoughts in the future.

Here is a link to a news article pertaining to my example incase some of you are not familiar with it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1353935/Rihannas-S-M-music-video-strikingly-similar-David-LaChapelles-work.html

Hi. My name is Julianne and I am a senior Art History major, so everything I know about mimesis is in relation to art, and really only specifically Surrealism.

Philosophy is not usually my friend, but I will try anyway and hopefully this exploration will be productive and interesting.

During the first day of class, the first thing I thought of in relation to mimesis was a movie. Recently I saw “Limitless”, the new Bradley Cooper film about a drug, NZT, which is kind of like a super-Adderall, that is suppose to unlock the areas of a person’s brain that they can’t typically access.

The first time Cooper’s character takes the drug, it shows a sequence in his apartment that instantly reminded me of “Fight Club” and how some of the scenes showing interaction between Edward Norton and Tyler Durden were constructed.  This almost instinctual association is what I would consider to be mimesis, perhaps at a very simple level.

While movies are in themselves a form of mimesis in relation to how they emulate everyday life, or reality, as we have talked about, I think the similarity between certain movies is also an aspect of mimesis and makes me think mimesis is something that could be thought of as having multiple layers.

 In the future I hope to be able to talk about mimesis a little more captivatingly and intelligently. Hopefully next I will be able to explore mimesis as I have learned about it in relation to Surrealism, as soon as I can find my notes from last quarter…

Note: If I can find clips of the scenes I am thinking of I will definitely post them, but I am not technologically savvy, so it is really a miracle I even figured out how to make this page.