humans are nature

by ridley hoyte

For this image, I focused on the intertwining of humans, plants, and animals Bosch presents throughout the painting, but specifically in the middle panel. Many place the middle panel of his painting as the human vices and sins that pave the road to hell. It certainly seems this way considering the rampant nudity, indulgence, and lust: traditional sins in the Bible. Another way to think about this panel, however, may be the weaving of the human form and nature. Morton says we need to redefine our use of nature and we are too close to have any real distance to decide on the matter. This is what Bosch shows with his human figures so twined with the typical nature scenes of plants and animals. We are so close to nature, we are literally part of nature. That is what my installation addition tries to mimic. For this one, I tried to copy Bosch’s style focused less on obvious collage and more on seamless transition. In this way I attempted to show how my addition changed nothing of Bocsh’s effect because much of his impact comes from the combination of wildly different things that are not that different. We think ourselves to be so removed from other species, we are the only ones with such intelligence and altruism, but Bosch displays that at our core, we are much more similar to other animals and nature. 

I used the three images below to think more about this concept, as well as Bo Burnham’s Inside. In some ways, there is more going on in Emily Erb’s depiction of The Garden of Earthly Delights than in Bosch’s. She fully embodies the “little bit of everything all of the time” mentality coined by Burnham, while also further closing the already narrow gap between humans and animals in the original painting. Especially in Erb’s rendering of the “hell” panel, she explores how hell is not a place where we are headed, it is our current reality. There is so much happening, all of it true, that we can not differentiate between curated and authentic, painted and physical. We are too close to everything for any of it to mean anything. The other point Erb illustrates is the lack of difference between humans and their surroundings. She replaces many of Bosch’s human figures with monkeys, and fantastical creatures with even wilder ones. In this way she may be returning humans to their “primitive” state to make a point about where our society currently stands, but she also contributes to the point Bosch makes and I am trying to emphasize; that humans, plants, and animals are not that different from each other. Replacing humans with other animals does not take away from the actions or their symbols of lust and consumption. The other two images by Yang Yongliang and Hugo Barros I included because they embody the seamless transition I was going for. In both pieces you can not tell something has been added but you know intellectually it must have been. Specifically in Barros’ the looming capacity of nature felt prevalent as Bosch depicts it all over the painting encroaching on human space. However, in the same way it does not seem out of place in Bosch’s painting, Barros’ addition of space and a giant typhoon next to a normal human scene does not strike the viewer as odd when first considering his collages. The same can be said for Yongliang with the collage looking entirely normal. On the other hand, in Yongliang’s piece, the human world is encroaching on and overrunning the natural world in a way that feels vaguely threatening, a force that is not felt from Bosch’s work.