I would use Barthes’s mythology approach for understanding inherent myths in the installation. According to Barthes, “any semiology postulates a relation between two terms, a signifier and a signified. This relation concerns objects which belong to different categories, and this is why it is not one of equality but one of equivalence. We must here be on our guard for despite common parlance which simply says that the signifier expresses the signified, we are dealing, in any semiological system, not with two, but with three different terms.
For what we grasp is not at all one term after the other, but the correlation which unites them.” As I stated previously, through the perspective of the alien-poststructuralist, chain of meanings could be discerned from a signifier or more because they are never at the same place in any form.
The installation with human image and material objects is the first signifier, which depicts a protest scene and indicates a revolutionary movement. The revolutionary movement represents a call for freedom. On the second level of meaning, which is the myth, it signifies people’s demands for social principles that give everyone sense of truly being French citizen. With the presence of men at the lower and upper classes of the society, the scene is another signifier which represents the readiness of people of all ages’ unification towards their liberty.
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The man at the centre who looks wealthy because of his top hat reveals a myth, indicating that the rich also feels the impact of not having liberty. A gentleman with an Infantry saber in his white shirt and the apron of a printer with a gun tucked into his waist as well as two men seem to be angry, which indicate they are all ready to follow liberty.
In the installation, the woman appears to be the leader as she is presented in a bigger form by the artist. She is holding a bayoneted musket in her left hand and raising the tricolor, the French flag, with her right. A young boy is seeing standing by her side, holding two pistols and an ammo bag around his torso. He takes off his guard and is prepared to engage in the combat.
The boy represents the role of youth in the uprising. Her yellow dress has fallen from her shoulders, exposing her armpit, which a man looks at, as if it would help her in defeating the security officers. The man looking up at her is dressed in a manner that echoes the colours of the flag, representing his readiness in joining the liberty movement. She makes a strong forward stride while checking to see if those she is leading are following by looking back over her right shoulder.
The patterns of myths in the image resonate with the Barthes’s view that “some objects become the prey of mythical speech for a while, then they disappear, others take their place and attain the status of myth” (Derrida, 1993 and 2006) notes that the connections between the signifier and the signified continually broke apart only to re-emerge in new, unpredictable combinations. In our analyst’s view, this is clearly demonstrated in the ways the various objects and subjects that connect with the woman constitute different discourses and point to the Barthes’s submission that “everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse.”