in god's image

by luke first

My second collage is a continuation of the first. It is part of what I call the Now. I started by creating a background out of nature paintings. I then added a piece of Giovanni di Paolo's The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise to show the creation of the Earth. I added to it a statue of Adam by Tullio Lombardo and finally changed Adam’s stone arm into the arm from Michaengelo’s The Creation of Adam, but instead of touching god, it was touching a barrel of pollutants. This collage was put in the second panel, which shows the sins of man before punishment. The goal of my collage was to show the sins that exist in the Anthropocene, and the reason we are in the state we are. Timothy Morton had the most effect on this composition. Timothy Morton pushed back on the idea of nature that we have cultivated because he believed that it objectified something that shouldn’t be objectified. Heidegger said: “Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are, however, but function to reveal and evolve a community’s shared understanding”. Following this logic we can assume that the paintings of nature, the statue of Adam, and the painting of God creating the earth for us show that humans have a collective understanding, or more accurately an assumption, that the world was built for us. We believe that nature is our playground to destroy as we please because God gave it to us for that purpose. I think that Bosch, despite painting this several centuries before the industrial revolution, made this argument himself. The collective egocentrism of humankind has been the single most detrimental aspect of our existence. When I created the collage, I had Adam’s arm pushing the polluted barrel because I wanted to show that the arm which is normally seen reaching toward god to accept life, to be created, to give thanks to God, is instead willfully destroying what God gave to the people. Though I want to be clear that I don’t believe the answer is to ‘treat nature better’, but instead to entirely disengage with the idea of nature, as Morton said: “While structuralist and poststructuralist theorists have destabilized the binary opposition of nature to culture, the political and epistemological imperative to engage with nature as simultaneously material and semiotic has spawned an array of theoretical developments, from Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure and other “natureculture” assemblages to new materialisms. Meanwhile, nature circulates as a commodity form and spectacle animating digital, film, and television screens as well as many other consumer products and experiences.”