Inspired by a novel, "Antibody Warriors," is an expression of my view of the man inside the soldier as seen during the Civil War. Three years ago while reading a book, Jacob's Ladder by Donald McCaig, I was profoundly moved by some powerful imagery that came to me after reading a passage at the end of chapter 29:
"Litter bearers steered silently around the bodies.
A sergeant sat on a dead horse inspecting each object he took from the saddlebags before adding to a row along the animal's neck.
Naked alabaster corpses stretched as far as Catsby Byrd could see, and a choir of lights sang as thousands of men went about the business of the living."
I was struck by a vision of these "alabaster corpses" as concrete sculptures, fossil-like in appearance, as though they had remained on the earth and weathered the years as stony reminders of the vulnerability of the soldier, now escaped from his life and his uniform.
The uniform not only represents part of the soldier's personal identity on the battlefield, it further serves to symbolize the military/government regulations that protect him from scorn and degradation in the antisocial pursuit of plundering the bodies of the dead.
Questions arise: "Who are these men without their clothing, and as such, could they, or we, distinguish one "side" from the other? Who/what determines the good from the bad?"
In my two-dimensional mixed-media work, I represent the soldiers without their uniforms in an effort to expose their vulnerability to the political ideologies of their governments, in this case, represented by Confederate flags. Their regulated clothing is a reflection of the government's power to take away the rights of the individual in its exercise of sovereignty.
Stripped of the obstruction of the uniform, and the power of government it represents, the body then is limited to how it can be looked at, and how it can be approached.
The human mind, almost in abstraction, crosses the space between the living and the dead. The figure emerges as a symbolic representative of the social forces of the times and the cultural circumstances that ravaged it. The dead are more easily turned into metaphors than the living. We tend not to see the war or even the body directly; the boundaries dissolve and the emerging imagery and metamorphoses are endless.
The "Antibody Warriors" become rigid and unforgiving; a solid reminder of the space between life and death. |
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