COGNITIVE IMPORTANCE AND FUNCTIONS OF: READYMADE, METAPHOR, ALLEGORY AND SIMULATION

Abstract

A scheme is proposed and examples given of readymade, metaphor, allegory and simulation. Readymade takes objects, beings, institutions, situations and events, as the material of work (object), media work and the content of work. Metaphor moves the references of art work from one possible world into another, a third one, Nth, thus shifting the meaning to a degree in which ,knowledge' becomes lost of what was the reference and which of the possible worlds was the initial one. If a certain text or picture can be interpreted in the way that the meaning of its sentences or visual structures as a whole, in all its particularities, is transferred onto an entirely different series of phenomena, of which not a word or visual element was mentioned in the text or picture, and that the real meaning of the text or picture can be seen precisely in that transferred meaning, then one speaks of allegory. Simulation is a consequent or nonconsequent use of an X, the X being anything which can be used syntactically or semantically. Readymade, metaphor, allegory and simulation are discussed in the works of Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Philipp Otto Runge, the OHO Group and Art & Language.