It is a red haired woman missing her body below the torso. That is it.
Then in the novel length catalogue note we are told how this is some kind of commentary on Orientalist paintings of odalisques.:dubious:
(It is like a harem member in training)
There is no way to infer any of that from the painting, there is nothing to even suggest the “Cage Of Flesh” title.
I can’t view the artist or download the pdf’s from work, but I notice that the artist doesn’t appear to have much of a following outside of his native Turkey, which usually means that he needs to show how important his work is in order to get “street cred” in the art world. Taner Ceylan - Wikipedia.
I believe it’s still porn month on the SDMB. Let’s save ‘you call this art?’ month for February. It’s going to be a long winter, folks.
Perhaps if you knew something about Orientalist paintings of odalisques, the connection would be evident. 
They both feature unclothed women, well that narrows it down!
I’m still trying to figure out what the commentary is, only going by the painting.
EDIT:I don’t even think the painting is BAD per se.
Okay, found an abstract:
Does that put it into perspective for you?
All that purple prose is just another way to say “pitcher of a nekkid gurl”.
Okay, a few notes. (FWIW, I’ve been an art appraiser for 15 years.)
An odalisque is a painting of a harem girl, usually in lush interior surroundings, and, yep, it’s high quality early porn. In your typical odalisque, she is shown reclinging, with all the good parts prominently on display. Many of these works were large, with lifesize figures. The female form is usually spread out, with elongaged arms and legs. Still, being a nude woman in a harem, she is still “caged flesh”, so to speak.
This painting starts with that, but this is less erotic. By not showing the legs, and covering her face with her hair, and turning her to the side to deemphasize the breasts, Kafesi is portraying her mainly as a torso. No legs means she can’t run away from her situation. Her arms are still elongated, but she’s not as curvaceous as a typical harem nudie.
Veiling her face with her hair is an obvious shout out to Sufi/Muslim tradition, and also removes her sense of identity.
Kafesi’s a photorealist, meaning he took lots of photos of a model, and then painted from a projection of the photos, in order to show a real woman trapped in a cage of flesh.
I’ve seen a lot worse, and a great lot more pretentious. I think he’s expressed his stated purpose better than most.
Yea pretty much, and I could swear that text was in my original link(I don’t think you need to download a .pdf).
Unless comment on just means presenting.
I obviously didn’t see your post, but you have done a good job at well your job.
Although rather than making her less erotic, I wondered if making her less curvaceous was an effort to cater to modern tastes.
I do think you got at what I was missing with the lack of legs and your observation on the real woman trapped in a cage of flesh. Good job.
Do you happen to remember any of those worst you’ve seen, or more pretentious? I’d like to take a look.
Sure, if you read all the right articles and know the history concerned, the painting kinda makes sense. I think most folks, myself included, would just look at the painting and say, “Nice bod. Why’d he leave off her butt?”
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. To the casual observer, it’s an interesting piece with a dynamic shape and looks suitably ‘arty’. To someone familiar with the artist’s body of work and the art it is a response to, there is a deeper level of meaning. Being unable to see that initially is no knock against the average viewer.
It is a pretty remarkable painting. Don’t get too hung up with the pop psychology and metaphysics of the catalogue writers. Just look at the thing and enjoy it for what it is.
I was mentioning art in general, not odalisques. For my personal taste, the worst and most pretentious award goes to the duo of Gilbertand George.
Warning: probably NSFW.
If a piece of art needs an artist’s statement attached to it to get the message across, then the art itself is a failure. Yeah, if you read the statement you can kind of get what he’s going for, but would you have gotten any of that without the statement?
It should be noted, first off, that that description wasn’t written by the artist, so it’s not really an “artist’s statement.” It’s an interpretation of the piece by the person (or, in this case, persons) who wrote the catalog. It’s probably safe to assume that the artist doesn’t radically disagree with the interpretation of his work, in a catalog intended to help him sell it, but we should not assume that it represents the artist’s intent precisely.
Secondly, the idea that art that doesn’t communicate a message is failed art is problematic on several levels. Chiefly, there’s the fact that a vast amount of art is not intended to convey a message at all. Impressionism, for example, is often about bypassing the intellect altogether to elicit a purely emotional response to the work. But a more pervasive, yet subtle, problem is the idea of interpreting a work solely on its own merits in the first place, which is arguably impossible. Take Norman Rockwell, for example. You show this painting to almost any American, and they’ll instantly recognize the context, understand the emotions involved in the image, and understand the message the artist was trying to convey. Show the same painting to a Chinese peasant, and he’s probably not going to understand what’s going on at all, unless someone explains to him the history of race relations and segregation in the US. Does this mean the painting is a failure?
All that being said, the interpretation quoted is actually a pretty straightforward take on the painting. I really only see two terms of art that might be confusing to a layman: odalisque, which was a new term to me, and the concept of Orientalism in Western art. How much of that description would I have got on my own? Well, I probably would have missed the connection to harem imagery and Orientalism. But then, as a white American, I don’t spend as much time thinking about the way Western media portrays Eastern cultures as someone growing up in those cultures, but still consuming Western media, probably does. Much the same way a Chinese peasant doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about racial tensions in mid 20th century America.
On the other hand, I think I’d have picked up on the issues of the presentations of sex and the sexualization of women pretty easily. I mean, naked woman = sex is pretty easy for anyone to spot. I’ve read enough feminist criticism to recognize the trope of a dismembered female body as a comment on negative presentations of female sexuality - the habit of mainstream art to present female bodies in ways that crop out everything except their breasts and/or genitals is a common complaint in that field, so a naked female torso with the legs removed and the face obscured is a pretty recognizable symbol to me. Is that as obvious to someone who isn’t familiar with similar imagery in other contexts, and discussions around exactly what that sort of imagery implies? I dunno. If that is a necessary background to interpreting this painting, is that the same as needing an “artist’s message” to understand it? Or is that more on the nature of cultural background knowledge, similar to what’s necessary to understand the Rockwell painting, only with an even smaller in group? I might have made the leap from that, to the hair covering the woman’s face specifically echoing a veil on my own eventually. If I knew the artist was middle-eastern, I suspect I’d have gotten it much more quickly. Connecting it specifically to harem imagery, or recognizing it as a comment on Orientalism, would still be a stretch for me, but if it were presented alongside more of the artists works, where this was a specific theme he repeatedly returned to, might make it more obvious, as would seeing it in a gallery with works by other artists on the same theme.
If a piece of art needs some background knowledge of its context, or familiarity with the conventions of its genre, to be appreciated, that’s… fairly normal, isn’t it?
The description is pretentious horseshit on the level of a fifteen-minute discourse about the qualities of a sip from a bottle of Gallo Red.
If that’s a playful, insightful deconstruction of “orientalism” then Bazooka Joe is an interpretation of the works of Bill Mauldin.
Remember everyone, it’s vitally important that all works of art be immediately interpretable by everyone, everywhere!
(And by everyone, everywhere, I mean, of course, middle-brow Americans like me.)
Works created as part of an ongoing conversation that I’m not part of … ARE NOT ALLOWED!
All works must take into account my cultural background. Other cultural backgrounds don’t exist.
If someone says that a work means something and that meaning is not something that makes sense to ME, then they are lying scammers whole are preying on the gullibility of rich art collectors. Or they are cynical pranksters trying to make middle-brow Americans like me feel foolish. Both of these things are WRONG and NOT ALLOWED!
Also, here’s a painting done by an elephant.
Of other elephants playing poker!
