Genesis at its heart is a story about the ills of consumption. When Eve is persuaded to consume the fruit, and therefore moralistic knowledge, she begins a legacy of sin. In the right hand panel, Bosch depicts life immediately before this scene, Adam and Eve positioned adjacent to a fruit-bearing tree. Throughout the left and center panels, the figures interact with numerous red berries, seemingly grown from this Tree of Knowledge. In the section I chose, a large crowd of figures is gorging themselves on a massive berry. Over the berry, I superimposed the cover of The Golden Book of Words, written by Selma Lola Chambers in 1948. This book was designed to teach young, innocent children about language through image association. By reading this book, children are able to learn through consuming information, rather than having to experience reality. Above this, I positioned an image of a young girl from Henry Lyman’s painting Child on Sofa. I altered the colors of this image to give her an angelic hue, similar to the paleness of Eve in the right panel. This alteration is designed to visually connect my collage to the Genesis scene in Bosch’s right hand panel. Through this, I aim to juxtapose the Genesis story with modern language learning, specifically learning through consumption. 

 

Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, illustrates this phenomena through Caliban’s relationship with language. Caliban learns human language isolated on an island, with Miranda as his only input of information. He never has any opportunity to learn from and apply language in the realities of the outside world. Perhaps because of this, he is disdainful about language in general and finds its only use to be spreading hate and expressing frustration. Applying this metaphor to the collage, the potential negative effects of learning through consumption rather than experience are clear.

 

According to German philosopher Martin Heidigger, “Great art… not only expresses “truth” in a culture but provides a springboard from which “that which is” can be revealed.” To relate this idea to Bosch, I emphasized two distinct groups of viewers. The three figures clustered together in the pool are physically watching the berry scene, with no special lens or editing. Those entering the egg however are choosing to enter into art, therefore watching through the eye of the camera. In order to show the progression of art and technology, I decided to design the figures to be entering into an early cave painting, painted around 30,000 BCE. Then, purposefully chosen to be a similar color scheme, I interposed Emilio Nicolas Sr.'s painting, Televisa Television on top of the egg. The juxtaposition of the figures is designed to question who is truly seeing the berry scene, and whether art distorts or clarifies our perception of reality.