Sara Cwynar Follow

Mythologies, by Roland Barthes





The conceptual photographer and video artist celebrates this iconic look at “how the most seemingly benign products of our popular culture are actually filled with meaning and power,” a notion that’s perfectly in keeping with her own practice. Barthes’s work, she says, shows “how kitsch has a class-based motivation. He breaks down how the bourgeoisie present their ideologies as ‘natural’ in order to mask hierarchies of power, and this happens through the everyday images and objects of pop culture: travel guides, cooking photography, movie stars.”

Of all the everyday things dissected in Mythologies, Cwynar’s favorite passage concerns plastics: “It is a ‘shaped’ substance: whatever its final state, plastic keeps a flocculent appearance, something opaque, creamy and curdled, something powerless ever to achieve the triumphant smoothness of Nature.…Its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical-looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality, and uses them as mere names, being able to display only concepts of colour.”



