The Subject-Object Relationship Between Artist And Art:A Blow-up On Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up

Blow-up, the 1966 commercially and critically successful masterpiece of Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the cornerstones of Italian Neo-realism, engages in a self-reflexive contemplation on the subject-object relationship between artist and art, a complexion that has engaged theorists and philosophers since ancient Greece, on account of which, the film is rendered undeniable magnitude. Nevertheless, existing literature on Antonioni’s film art as well as on the film Blow-up lacks an attentive study on this particular subject. This paper results from an attempt to fill this vacancy.Current literature on the film art of Antonioni, on the one hand, maintains that the film artist opens up the space of interpretation for his films with an objective and distant artistic style, while on the other hand, acknowledges him as a skillful master of film color and space. In what ways a dominant film artist, who meticulously sculpts his images, could give birth to an autonomous and liberated film deserves detailed examination. This paper thus results also from an attempt to approach this aporia with a specific focus on Blow-up.This paper first addresses the artist-art relationship constructed by the protagonist of the film, a fashion photographer devoted to documentary photography, which demonstrates an ostensible superiority on the part of the artist subject, then explores the film’s illustration of the art object’s revenge that aims at overthrowing the imbalanced relationship, and finally analyzes an alternative artist-art relationship latent in Antonioni’s film art itself.The paper argues that the photographer in the film dominates over his art, making use of photography to seize reality and to legitimize forbidden unconscious wishes to possess the inaccessible, so as to gain a masterful ego in face of the psychedelic storm that sweeps the Swinging London. Nevertheless, borrowing from the respective theories of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard, the paper contends that the film forcefully deconstructs the photographer’s wishful thinking. The film illustrates incisively the fundamental gap between photography and reality as well as the underlying unattainability of unconscious desire, and thus overthrows the subject-object intricacy characteristic of the subject’s dominance. Antonioni’s idiosyncratic film art also betrays an alternative affinity between artist subject and art object, in which he meticulously sculpts color and space demonstrative of his dominating desire as the artist subject in order to fulfill personal understanding towards the world and his self. What is more, this personal understanding assumes the form of an aesthetic looking based on optical-sound images, which eventually signify a detachment between author and art and which endow the object world with an autonomous essence embracing possibilities. Therefore, Antonioni’s film art demonstrates a new form of subject-object relationship that begins with the artist’s dominance but ends with the art’s liberation. It demonstrates that to emphasize the artist subject’s intention and intuition does not necessarily result in suppression of the art object’s autonomy, and thus transcends the historical debate on subject-object relationship between artist and art that has largely assumed a binary nature since ancient Greece.