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the Minneapolis Institute of Art) gave a good sense of the parodic postmodern play with
the histoty of photography - both as scientifically accurate documentacy recording and as
formalist art. Marion Faller and Hollis Frampton presented 'Sixteen studies from
"vegetable locomotion" ' which (in title and fonn) parodied Muybridge's famous human
and animal scientific locomotion studies by using (normally inert) vegetables and fruit as
the subjects. Other artists in the show chose to parody icons of photography-as-high-art
by Ansel Adams (John Pfahl, Jim Stone) or Weston (Pfahl again, Kenneth Josephson),
always pointing with irony to how modernism contributed to the mystification and
canonization of photographic representation.

2. DOUBLE-CODED POLITICS

Because it represents an ironic, ultimately a parody in double codes in political

tenns that parody is legitimizing and undermining what it parodies. This official offense
is what makes it a vehicle ready for the widespread political contradiction of
postmodernism. Parody can be used as a self-reflexive technique that shows art as art,
but also art as inevitably tied to its aesthetics and even its social past. The ironic reaction
also offers an internalized sign of self-awareness of our cultural ways of ideological
legitimacy.

In his feminist pacifist work, Cassandra, we have seen that Christa Wolf
parodically rewrote Homer's account of men and war, offering economic and political
reasons rather than romantic reasons for the Trojan war (access to Bosporus and sexual
one-by- crew, not Helen) and tells a silenced story about the daily lives of Trojan women
who were omitted by historical and epic stories written by conquering aliens, the Greeks.
Other texts have also been parodied - Oresteia Aeschylus, Herodotus and Aristotle's
writings, Goethe's Faust and Schiller 'Cassandra' - and often it is a representation of the
female (or lack of) men who are the focus ofrewriting.

Some male artists have used parody to investigate their own complicity in such
apparatuses of representation, while still trying to find a space for a criticism, however
compromised . Victor Burgin's photography is one example of this vety postmodern form
of complicitous critique. In one photo, from the series The Bridge, he parodies John
Everett Millais's Ophelia through a 'transcoding' of its female subject into a
representation of a model in Ophelia's pose but portraying Kim Novak's representation of
the character Madeleine in Hitchcock's Vertigo. This is no transparent realist
representation: the water is obviously cellophane (a parodic echo of Cecil Beaton' s use of
cellophane in his fashion photography) and the model is obviously posed in a periodpiece
wig and dress. But this Ophelia/Madeleine/(fashion) model figure is still represented as
dead or dying and, given the context, also as an enigma to be investigated obsessively by
male voyeuristic curiosity.

When parody and its politics are discussed, it is not only this kind of visual art
that should be considered. Latin American fiction, for instance, has consistently
underlined the intrinsically political character of parody and its challenges to the