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The Four Master Tropes (2011)

A collage video playing on a wall-mounted flat screen with a speaker on each side
The Four Master Tropes (2011), video, installation view

The photograph shows the video on a wall-mounted flat screen with a speaker on each side: a still of overlaid line drawings, red bands and a black-and-white photograph.

What the notes say

Note 1005 is the only description of the work: "The Four Master Tropes, 2011 – (Slightly reordered) Kindle highlights from a few ebooks on contemporary philosophy and ethics, with images from Deviant Arts and random photos taken in my studio". Note 690 and note 662 ("The four master tropes (still)") both embed the same YouTube video. harm.work has no page for it.

The Related lists of 690, 1005, 685 and 686 carry thumbnails whose filenames begin with nimk_, among them nimk_thefourmastertropes.jpg and installation views of the Assemblage sculptures on doorstoppers. That suggests the video was shown at the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMK) in Amsterdam beside those sculptures. No note names the exhibition or its date.

The title

The title repeats that of Kenneth Burke's essay "Four Master Tropes" (1941, reprinted as an appendix to A Grammar of Motives, 1945), on metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. Burke did not invent the set: Giambattista Vico had treated the same four tropes in the Scienza Nuova (1725–1744), and Hayden White later made them the deep structure of historical writing in Metahistory (1973). The notes do not say how the video relates to the tropes beyond its title.

Beside Strategies

The Four Master Tropes and Strategies (2010/2011) are video collages of the same years, both built from other people's sentences. Strategies sets rewritten advice "given by business experts, martial arts gurus, software developers and Jacques Derrida" (harm.work) over screenshots and found footage (3004; Strategies). The Four Master Tropes reorders Kindle highlights over DeviantArt images and studio photographs. In both the artist selects and arranges sentences that already exist, which is also how many notes in this archive are made.

See also