Post by StickieBun on Mar 23, 2008 21:10:50 GMT -5
I had to do a report on the fur cup one... i need to write one more page but heres what i have on it. it's everything i need to say... i only need to stretch it.
Upon looking at the fur covered cup and saucer by Meret Oppenheim, most gazers see only a spoon, cup and saucer made of fur. But there is meaning behind the art for those with both open minds and a keen eye for deep meanings.
What s well known about this surrealist sculpture is the story behind the creation of the fur-trimmed cup, which is fairly unspectacular: Oppenheim made her own bracelets from fur-covered metal tubes. She was wearing one of these as she sat one day with Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso in the Café de Flore in Paris. Picasso remarked that you could actually cover anything you liked with fur. To which Oppenheim replied: "Even this cup and saucer...". When asked to participate in an exhibition of Surrealist objects, she created a fur-trimmed cup that André Breton, the doyen of the Surrealist movement in Paris, dubbed it Déjeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur), an allusion both to Edouard Manet's painting "Déjeuner sur l'herbe" (Breakfast on the Grass) and Leopold Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs. The fur cup was acquired that same year by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
When Looking for a deeper meaning some people find that the surealistic art has a Feminism quality. Oppenheim is said to have described Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, the fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, as "the image of femininity imprinted in the minds of men and projected on to women". Reification, according to the feminist orthodoxy of the 1980s, is something that men do to women. Oppenheim's judgment, if she ever really uttered it, could have been made by any lecturer in elementary feminist theory.
The plate of the world where she comes from is the same yet ever changing. She is the cup holding knowledge her dreams and appearance yet give this standoffish presents. She appears as to exert her independence. She sees the spoon, or man, very simple in his thinking and his self assuring his importance. He waits and watches for her to fail but does not see that she can gain successes with out him, yet they co-exist in the world. It does not mean she needs him to sustain her existence it just means she prefers someone with a brain and not a self-important egoist. In short she tells the spoon to “shove it else where” because she can get along in life perfectly well without his help.
Yet, what the cup does not realize is that she is not only distancing the spoon from her world but she is distancing others from herself. Others are put off by her selfish ways when she could accept them as help that impendence doesn't. She doesn’t realize that she does not have to do everything alone, that she can rely on them to help and be her support. While she sees the spoon as threat to her impendence, she could try to see it as a friend and a helping hand so that she wouldn't have to live in a cold world where she has to sourly focus on her own existence. In shoveling the spoon to the side she is only forcing herself into a lonely world.
The fact that the art is made of fur and that the symbolism shown on the surface a set of dishes imply that the cup is repulsed by the spoon, yet is blind to the fact that she, as well, is the same. She is blind to the fact that she sees herself reflected in the spoon.
