Phrenes, 2016. Vandyke Brown Collage, 9"x12".
The top image was created with an old family x-ray negative, one of many I found when I was moving from Clarksville to Nashville, Tennessee. Framed over one of a pair of lungs, the spinal cord rooted a quarter of the image from the right, the Vandyke Brown print produced a positive image of the bones, ribcage and organs that the x-ray captured.
The bands of rib bones that arc across the chest seem to buttress a very delicate cavity, the space that the lungs reside. The structure of bones in this exposure appears very frail, at times faint where they fade into the dense space of the lungs. Using an x-ray for a negative gives a 1:1 ratio, a life-size print of human biology. Each bone in the image is a true-to-size shadow, and guided me in slicing and cutting a pattern of negative space.
The shape of a lung is quite strange and unfamiliar to me; not often in art or elsewhere would one want to replicate its shape or be able to study it. A photograph (or x-ray for this matter) seems more practical, and can help in revealing natural patterns and wonderful shapes that organic matter can form as. They remind me of life-sized photographs done by Adam Fuss, particularly graphic and unsettlingly beautiful images of deceased rabbits with their insides displayed outside their body overtop photographic paper. When you see his works involving snakes captured within his large-sized photograms, it's the repeating spines and bone structures of the snakes that seem full of vitality (such as Medusa (2010) of which I myself saw at Nashville’s Frist Museum). The organs and bones in his images are very impressionable. In a similar way I hope the prints I exposed of this ribcage x-ray in Phrenes does the same.
Adam Fuss, Love, 1993. (All rights to image reserved to appropriate owner)
COLLAGE
I reiterated the shape I used in one of my recent works, that of infinite shape, or in this case a hyperbola shape. The curved lines bend in opposite directions and divide the image into three sections. On the outer side sections the top print of the lungs x-ray are un-cut, but in the center in an area that resembles an hour-glass shape the paper has been cut apart. It is as if the image has been cut open in a pattern of droplet shapes, to reveal an inner space behind the ribcage full of deep brown.
Lines of ascending and descending droplets follow the lungs interior, ending in the center of the cut sections with one large droplet shape. Past the outline of cut design is another print, the profile-silhouette of a head. The x-ray of a head and it's shoulders follow the contour of the hourglass from underneath the exposed parts.
CLOCK
As the descending droplets reach the diaphragm, it seems they are absolved of form under the peak of a clock. Similar droplet patterns share form with the face of the clock. Like a constant dripping of water to a puddle, the granules of sand that fall between the hourglass of time.
Perhaps unlike water, time does not appear to accumulate; it could gather in immensity, but in a way that cannot be measured by hour-glass, a clock or the number of breaths taken by a living creature.
Only within that limitless time is everything broken down and absolved. Our flesh returns to the form of droplets of water, in the same way we consume a glass of water, but time makes difference of the two. We attempt to map the span of time, only to find out it continues even beyond our understanding.
The philosopher and phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty understood that time "arises from our relation to things,"(1) and our mapping of time does the same by focusing on humanity in a space of time. So long as there is continuous witness to our existence, our time can hold structure. What relates each of us to the things around us is limited by our own life-span and the experience of it through our perceptions.
PHRENES
Each time we inhale could be an interval of time, each is like a second passing. We are limited by the body and the organs we have, like an hour-glass limited by the number of grains of sand within it.
In the translations of the Iliad written by Homer in ancient Greece, there were certain words used that refer to the self. According to Julian Jaynes, these precursors to the words we understand as a soul, spirit, psyche or consciousness were originally metaphors for the feelings within oneself.
One of these early precursor words, phrenes, referenced the space within the chest where the lungs sit and is a response to changes in breathing.(2) As ancient Greeks noticed thier own bodily functions in relation to themselves, they might have slowly developed a sense of self-reflection.
Noticing their phrenes (lungs and breathing) as well as thumos (adrenaline), kradie (heart-beating), noos (sight and perception) and others helped develop a mind-space that allowed them to recognize themselves within their surroundings, and the lungs become the respiratory recordings of their lifespan.
TIME
Once mankind can witness themselves within space, it seems natural that we become witness to time. But our relation to time is always dependent on our own flesh and mortality, quite like a clock counting down with limited time. Are other organisms able to sense time and an impending end to time as their body decays like mankind?
Merleau-Ponty seemed to think that it is "consciousness that deploys or constitutes time," and that "eternity...will be at the core of our experience of time," (3) but well all know that eternity is an infinite concept that we cannot grasp so long as we are restricted by the limited time of the body.
"Like the back of a house of which I can only see the facade, or like the background of a figure," (4) time seems to reveal only parts of itself to us, while the rest of the span of time is only complete within the mind. In a sense, it it only our mortality that provides us with any understanding of time, and that it is relative to each one of us and our own experience with time.
In a similar way, the questions of time and of clocks are only revealed in this Vandyke Brown collage through the sliced images of flesh, bone, and organ; it reveals itself in pattern but only through the body's form. Without the corporeal frame, there is little understanding of time.
Time is influenced by the lifespan we live, and until we live outside of our bodies, I resolve to think that our physical being has more affect on how we percieve time than we typically reason.
The intervals of time and a clock are precise, but not universal (since our clocks are based on the rotation of Earth and patterns of days). The experience we have to time is not specific or precise, but may be universal. Afterall, our experience of time is based on our body and in the end we each live one-hundred percent of our own life-span.
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1. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge, 1958, 2002. pg. 478.
2. Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1976. pg. 263.
3. Merleau-Ponty, 481.
4. Meleau-Ponty, 483.
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