by graylyn rhee

My third collage was inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and her comments on the technological advancements humanity has been making. The collage is located in the sky above the Garden of Earthly Delights in the center panel of Bosch’s painting. I drew my source material from Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, Birch’s Little Boy, and from the Bosch painting itself.
   In the prologue to her book, Arendt wrote that until recently, “nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men's bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon,” mourning the new understanding of Earth as a place to escape and as space as a place to conquer. Although the center panel of Bosch’s painting – which depicts human self-indulgence – precedes this new understanding, it does not precede the human tendency to over-indulge, which is demonstrated in the representations of lust and sin throughout the panel. My collage inserts my depiction of Arendt’s interpretation of this new understanding into the painting: a flying figure both escape the jaws of the monster behind it and chases after the moon. 
   The body of the figure and the face of the monster eating it are one of the Olympians and Saturn, respectively, as Saturn devoured his children to avoid being overthrown. The painting Saturn Devouring His Son can be interpreted as the wrath of God, and so by escaping from Saturn’s mouth, the figure is also escaping the wrath of God (and, therefore, the fate of humanity). Saturn has the creator’s eyes from the creation of Adam and Eve as humanity moves further from him and his will and closer to an unknown future.
In place of the figure's legs is the back of the bomb that was used to bomb Japan during World War II – Little Boy – which contributed to humanity’s propelment into a position of complete power over the future of the world. The figure chases after the unreal and abstract moon from Van Gogh’s Starry Night, just as humanity has pursued an escape from Earth to unreal and abstract ends. 
Among Bosch’s depictions of what he thought to be human sins by over-indulging in the most human pleasures, I collaged in what I believe Arendt would argue is a worse sin: becoming inhuman. As we have continued our search for knowledge and elevation above mortality, we are no longer subject to the wrath of God; rather, we are subject to the wrath of ourselves.