Mid Point review

Research:
Mutation of forms in Myths. 
Comparing the mutational imagery in Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" to the  mutational imagery of a contemporary artist.



Someone could find a strong similarity between the mythologies and religions of human kind.This is a theme of transformation, considered to be a natural law which encompasses the whole universe. The essence of oneself and the essence of the whole universe is one, while bodies are transient :
"...Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openess- that void or being, beyond the categories- into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved..."( Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with a thousand Faces", ch.The Cosmogenic Cycle, 1993)

In mythologies we encounter various images of gods who reperesent change and fluidity:

Wheel of fortune, from ms. of John Lydgate's Troy Book and Story of Thebes, England,c.1455-1462












In myths outer changes of shape reveal an inner, "hidden" character. Animals, vegetables, munerals, beasts, humans are transformed one in to the other. Myths teach a sense of "unity in multiplicity", a "truth" beyond names and forms.







Bosh's "Garden of Earthly Delights"

Bosh's painting involves a merging of forms, monsters associated with eggs and hatching. All these disturbing hybrid forms are thought to be related to an alchemical process while the whole triptych repeats the nature's circuit of birth, life , death and rebirth. Bosh's painting constitutes a microcosm, a garden which encloses a world. It is a uniting of different genres in the same place, a strangely fluid distant land.

My question would be: How could technology be used to create an imagery of the mutation of forms? And how could this reveal a secret , "personal" interpretation of the world?
To answer this, I will try to compare Bosh's Garden of Earthly Delights to an artwork of a contemporary artist.

The artist Barbara Rauch was a suggestion of my tutor Jonnathan Kearney.
In Rauch' s work we participate in a transformative act as human feelings appear to alter the form of the body.
Human passions and feelings take the form of animal characteristics ; an act which proves the close affinity existing among man and animals.

I encountered this image of Richard Stammer's untitled piece (1991) in a book named "Digital dialogues", which is a collection of articles focusing on the meaning of technology.
Richard Stammer "dismembers"a body and creates a figure resembling a mythical creature.
He achieves a new "synthesis" through the destruction of the old familiar form of the human body, as well as a new image of the world. Fiction seems to take over reality.





I would like to end with the following images from the book I am reading at the moment. It is called "Anamorphic Art"of Jurgis Baltusaitis and take us back to the 18th century:

Anamorphic art:"...A system with basis of mathematics and physics around which figurative forms and mental speculations are made and unmade.."
It seems to me that the distortion techniques of technology could be used easily to create a sense of a "false"reality, and yet a "universe" full of personal meanings.