an anatomy of pictures

What is an anatomy? And what could be an anatomy of pictures?

Early images were drawn on cave walls, sculpted as statuary, handmade as masks, carved, engraved and etched on armor and silver, painted on fresco and canvas. With photography all these living and sites-specific works, that come to be called art, are presented to us as two dimensional works on paper and more recently as electronic files. As images we see them out of context and out of time, and as such it is very hard to discern their materiality, their scale and origination, their very purpose and use. And so this led me to want to see and know them as living things, to uncover an anatomy in them.

In the summer of 2012, I spent one month attending an all day drawing class at the Arts Students League in New York City. The following month, I traveled to the town of Wellfleet in Cape Cod, MA with every intention to continue to be engaged with drawing. In my desire to sketch, I took out anatomy books from the Wellfleet Public Library; books by the naturalists Ernst Haeckel, Maria Sibylla Merian, Ernest Thompson Seton and others. Together with a variety of art history books (including Andre Malraux’s, extraordinary The Voices of Silence) I wanted to make drawings that would incorporate the anatomies of the human form with the forms of plants and animals.

One afternoon, while on a walk, having found a dead silver fish, the size of my out stretched hand, I returned with it to my place of drawing. I placed the fish onto a page of one of the anatomy books which had a very precise line drawing of a wolf. I took out my pencil and looked down at the fish. I began to move my eye from the fish to the sheet of drawing paper, back and forth, observing closely the gill bearing creature, translating it to lines on the paper/

Intermittently while drawing, I took photographs with my camera to record the process. To my surprise I saw that the camera had also drawn a picture. The optics of the camera had a visioning of its own. The camera sees through its instrumentation something we do not see with our human eyes. What I saw was that the fish was “reading” the wolf; the fish “showed” me the wolf: a real fish, living just moments or hours ago, lay there on the drawing of a perfectly scaled and anatomically correct wolf. The scale of the fish with flies hovering around it was perfectly aligned with the scale of the wolf as it laid on the page of the book.

If the fish could let me see the wolf, then perhaps nature itself could be a way through which to see these pictures of art. I would touch the work of art by seeing it again, by touching it with nature. As children our tactility lets us come to know space, dimension, scale and texture. And just as drawing with models is a heightened way to perception, I turned my attention to a series of canonical works of art, to draw them into my sensate and perceptual realm, and thereby render them real to me through nature. I would ‘draw’ in a very novel way. I would draw them not by copying them but by bringing to them the underlying elements of their composition. In nature I would find the elements of their being and of their life force.

This force abounds in Cape Cod which is rich with plant and marine life. The area is profuse with an abundance of shapes, colors, densities, smells, textures and materials. Nature here is wild and prodigious and with a sense of time much larger than human life.We live within eons of extinctions and exigencies around us.

From here, there, everywhere I took stones, flowers, mushrooms, shells, barks, seeds, wood, fish bones, insects, and sea plants back to the books, to the many reproductions and began placing them. With each
placement there was a discovery of what made the works.

I began to see again through the found detritus of nature not just shapes and textures but the very inner structure of these works, getting a sense of the hands that created them.

Initially the works of art in these books appeared out of context and out of history. Once a collection of image reproductions, these works now had intimately revealed themselves to me.

I had begun to discover an anatomy of pictures, a genealogy of forms, a relationship between the material world of nature and the object of art. It was a process of uncovering these works, digging them out in a sense. Hence the titles of the works are all the original titles of the underlying works, preceded by the word ‘uncovering.’

Like living forms works of art have genealogies and material form and continually change over time. As the processes that produce art works change (including their materials, cultures and techniques), so does their raison d’etre, their place and meaning in cultures change.

Like nature itself, the method in creating these new works was contingent, circumstantial and adaptive.

The new works are site specific in the sense that both the books I discovered and the elements I found in the wild were of a particular moment, of that day, at this time, of that season. They come together and find themselves connected out of a certain necessity, or rather a possibility, or contingency, that with each step announced itself in surprising ways.

The anatomy becomes a quest for something essential, primal, and primordial, a desire for a material and tactile discovery, a desire to discover the sensate and intelligent in all things.

Marc Lafia
Wellfleet, Cape Cod, MA and Brooklyn, NY
2012-2013