Avery, Milton.
Painting, Fencers. 1944. The selected images in this page, depict human struggle with
crossed lines or “X” patterns in their composition. For example,
the wings of Hesoid’s muse and Hesoid’s leg describe an “X”
pattern. The poem, We’ re All Naked Bodies In Our Minds
portrays the dichotomy between two viewpoints of perspective as
inner and outer, subjective and objective, the observed and the
observer.
Evelyn Tribble’s, "The Peopled Page" in The Iconic Page
critiques the editorial features of John Foxe’s trope, Actes
and Monuments (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583) better known as the
Book of the Martyrs, a massive record of the martyrs of the
Protestant church with annotations accumulating to 2000 pages in
the 1583 edition. Foxe’s book attacks the Catholic Church by
reprinting and annotating a Mass Book, with mocking
marginal notes, criticizing the liturgy and the belief in
transubstantiation.
Tribble observes that the placement of the critical text
in the margin is more strident, like a heckler in the stands,
compared to later normalized publications, which place the
critical text as footnotes at the bottom of the page. She
concludes that the distinction between text and margin is broken
down with this type of text arrangement.
Her research also invites considerations of the centrality of
the question of embodiment, represented in the body of the Christ
as the Eucharist (communion host) during the medieval and early
modern period. Actes’ elaborate woodcut front piece
portrays the communion host raised to the grasping hands of a
satanic demon. The Protestant and Anglican reformations mark the
significant break with the medieval. In the transition to the
enlightenment, the debate over the embodied Christ, resolves into
a reconstitution of the human as the free and sovereign
individual. As the locus of argument, the challenge to the
Eucharist refutes papal sovereignty and the precept of faith,
transferring the loci of knowledge from theological authority to
science and the individual.
Questions of embodiment were at issue in this historic
transition as they are now in the transition to the digital era.
Although globalization signals the end of colonialism, Paul
Virilio proposes that the future terrain of colonization is the
human body and mind via implants and technologies of surveillance
and influence. The current penchant for piercing may be a cultural
precursor to implantation. Blake’s visionary idealism imprinted an
image of the sovereign human while resisting the empiricism of his
age. In Blake's time, a period of industrialization and
mechanization followed the scientific inquiry of the
Enlightenment, and the current experimentation with
computerization, genetics and robotics is the beginning of a new
historical period of cyborg technology and digital automation.
Like Blake, Ginsberg et al inscribe an ideal of the primitive
embodied human, while resisting cyborg aspirations of postmodern
homogenization.
Chagall, Marc. Painting, White Crucifixion. 1937.
Degas Edgar. Painting, The Rape. 1868-1869.
Duchamp, Marcel. Collage, Impossible Bed. (1960s).
Freidlander, Lee. Photograph, Boy in the Window.
1962.
Moreau, Gustav. Painting, Hesoid’s Muse. 1887.
Tintoretto. Painting, Origin of the Milky Way. 1578.
Titian. Painting, Venus and Adonis. 1555.
Trevino, Jesse. Painting, La Panderia. 1977.
Van Baburen, Dirk. Painting, Prometheus Being Chained by
Vulcan. 1623.
Van Haarlem, Cornelius. Painting, The Fall of Man.
1577.
Poem “We’ re All Naked Bodies In Our Minds”. 1993.