Analyse the artist's use of materials and his intentions in artmaking. In your response make reference to Pieter Breugel's Parable of the Blind and Yasumasa Morimura's Blinded by the Light.

Yasumasa Morimura's Blinded by the Light is a clear appropriation of Pieter Breugel's Parable of the Blind. In close reference to the materials, techniques and art elements employed by both artists, we are able to understand how they communicate their ideas, feelings and effects in their artworks.

Painted in 1568, Parable of the Blind is a religious painting where Breugel portrays "a single moment but implies a whole sequence of events." In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus tells a parable "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch." Breugel has linked the characters in a composition that's leads symbolically to disaster.

The characters in the painting cross the diagonal from top left to bottom right of the painting. The fact that they are linked together portrays their reliance on each other. He painted figures of his own time to represent themes of everyday life or religious subjects.

Stained glass at St John the Baptist's Anglican Ch...

The Blind Leading the Blind

English: Yasumasa Morimura in his Osaka studio dis...

These religious characters are not idealised as this painting is of a parable from the gospel used to teach morality. "Breugel's six blind men depict the results of straying from the straight and narrow path of Christianity. They are slowly falling on top of each other as they head towards a ditch."

On the other hand, Morimura has photographically reconstructed Pieter Breugel's Parable of the Blind. "Breugel studied various forms of blindness and portrays glaucoma, cataracts and athropy of the muscles. Morimura's contemporary substitutes are 'blinded by the light.' This possibly alludes to the influences of a materialistic capitalist economy, blinded by the consummation of mass media, technology and the modern culture of consumerism.

Morimura is playing with traditions by using technology. Technology makes no image sacred. It makes any work fast, loose, immediate, and sometimes untraceable, but it gives a helping hand to artistic ideas...