Call it an absence of the realist impulse. With Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Eden, we see a sense of visual chaos that is all the more striking given our inability to comprehend a central theme. The tension, though unsettled and disquieting, arise from the juxtaposition between sequence and sensation and the lack of a discernible binding that would fit into a conventional narrative. The simultaneous impression is a radical departure from the representational forms used by other classical artists which used realism as an anchor; making this work appear as a precursor to Freudian influenced Andre Breton and surrealist influenced artists such as Miro, Man Ray, and Dali.
Jenkins:It is this notion of the "shape of the page" which got dropped when Scott McCloud reworked Eisner for Understanding Comics and for my money, it may be Eisner's most significant contribution to the theory of the medium. Read More: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/01/
Henry Jenkins: Increasingly, though, I am wondering if there might not be some value in looking at a range of these “eccentric” forms of expression side by side as I am trying to gesture towards here and see if we might identify an alternative aesthetic system — one which is more often than not associated with popular forms of representation and one which has to do with simultaneity of impressions or to go back to Eisner, “the shape of the page”. Read More: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/01/more_thoughts_on_haw_par_villa.html a
Bosch. The Temptation of Saint Anthony. "The concept of free will may be simultaneously the most beautiful and the most corruptible of all. The cultural media pierce us to the core; their influence penetrates us everywhere, generating a conformism that can be considered obscene. We are both its vector and instrument. What we like to do is just the opposite, to seek out the dark side, our animal side, in order to subvert the other side using reactive and emotional data." Read More: http://www.new-territories.com/blog/ image: http://iampetjack.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/10/
Bosch with his triptych panels results in us, like the comic book idiom, of taking in information through peripheral vision that shapes our interpretation of each framed image. Jenkins has remarked on Eisner’s work succeeding on exploring relationships among information communicated sequentially, on a panel to panel basis as well as simultaneously, through the shape of the page. Bosch set out, quite consciously, to take the triptych off the mantle of altar piece art by embedding contradictory images of saints and sinners, the sacred and the profane that served to invert and subvert the established triptych format based on a hierarchical structure. In so doing, he established new artistic tensions that “gamed” the realistic impulse into a conflict between depth and flatness as well as between detailed renderings and the more vague and murky.
Bosch. "It’s difficult for me to trace or track the monstrosity you talked about. The musicians in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the Hell section of the triptych, produce the most ambiguous sensation, specifically because in our recent and contemporary history of barbarism, the musician was also used as the last perverse concert before the Zyklon B shower. " Read More: http://www.new-territories.com/blog/
“Consider this example taken from one of Eisner’s very last published pieces — note how he weaves the Spirit and the Escapist, his two protagonists, across the page in multiple ways. We can take in an overall impression of what’s happening here at a glance but as we examine the page more closely, we see that it does contain a series of implicitly and explicitly framed actions which can be read sequentially to form a narrative.” …”In the case of the Haw Par Villa vignette depicted here, some of the frame lines are defined very emphatically — there are two separate scenes staged side by side here — while others are more ambiguous — see the way features of the space function as implicit frames encouraging us to focus on one part of the action at a time.” Read More: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/01/
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ADDENDUM:
“Not only was the bestiality increased, but I suspect that it was also the highest point of horror and pleasure (for the barbarian) – the combined malefaction and jouissance of human perversity. We reached so high a level of monstrosity in the 20th century – from Verdun to the slaughters of Pol Pot to the recent atrocities in Rwanda – that it is now difficult to hierarchically re-qualify this notion of human bestiality and the industrial dimensions of terror.
But the musician playing and dancing in Hell cannot be compared to anything else. This unnamable amoral cultural artifact elicits repulsion and vomiting that cannot be framed or clearly unfolded; vomiting in this case to be read as the ultimate expression of language.
"This volume of Michael Chabon Presents the Amazing Adventures of the Escapist collects issues five and six of the popular, Eisner and Harvey Award winning quarterly series, and features the late Will Eisner's final return to the Spirit, in a crossover tale with the Escapis
uot; Read More: http://libraries.darkhorse.com/reviews/previews.php?theid=13-435&p=2Some extreme (in)human cultural productions, such as Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom by Sade-Pasolini, or Eden, Eden, Eden by Guyotat – have found ways to transmit and vectorize this ambivalent perception, weaving a sophisticated barbarism with empathy for the suffering victim. The most uncomfortable aspect is that they are not developed from voyeurism (at a distance), but are intrinsically embedded in our own bestial, individual schizophrenia. These works force us to look at the devil, not in front of us, but contained in our own nervous sweat. Read More: http://www.new-territories.com/blog/
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