Geryon's Box

Object

Where is the line between artistry and monstrosity? Anne Carson asks this question in her Autobiography of Red, a novel from the perspective of photographer and winged volcanic monster Geryon. Although set in a modern age, the story harkens back to the ancient Greek myth of Herakles and thematizes the fluidity and fear of time itself. In her introduction, Carson references the Geryoneis, an archaic text by the poet Stesichoros retelling the myth from the monster’s point of view. However, this work only exists in fragments, “as if Stesichoros had composed a substantial narrative poem then ripped it to pieces and buried the pieces in a box with some song lyrics and lecture notes and scraps of meat.” Carson explains, “The fragment numbers tell you roughly how the pieces fell out of the box,” but then she instructs the reader, “You can of course keep shaking the box…Here. Shake” (7). By giving the reader agency to interact with and even re-order the story, Carson complicates the idea of an autobiography, in which an author chronicles their own life. I would like to allow my audience to similarly shake up my work. My piece will consist of a box like Carson describes, filled with photographic collages, each depicting a body part at a moment in time. The viewer can free the images from the box, mix them up and assemble the human – or otherwise– figure of Geryon, exploring monstrosity, self-construction, autonomy, and identity in Autobiography of Red. Such an act of creation from an audience exposes the break between how the world sees an artist versus how they choose to represent themself, a tension between interior and exterior, subject and object, self and other that fascinates and frightens me in my own art.

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Photography

Perhaps Geryon’s monstrosity is not a source of horror, but rather a superpower. Carson implies that Geryon could be a Yazamac, an “eyewitness” or “One[] Who Went and Saw and Came Back,” one of the mythic Andeans who descended into a volcano and “return[ed] as red people with wings, all their weaknesses burned away – and their mortality” (128-129). Indeed, Geryon’s role of a photographer is that of an eyewitness, an observer who with the click of a shutter captures a moment in time. Geryon claims photography is “a way of playing with perceptual relationships” and describes a photograph as “a memory burn” (65-66). He characterizes an image of a volcano as “a photograph that has comprised on its motionless surface fifteen different moments of time, nine hundred seconds of bombs moving up and ash moving down and pines in the kill process” (51). This long exposure photograph both freezes an instant in time and immortalizes it forever, just as the Yazamac become eternal and invincible through their act of witness. Yet time itself is an ever-present anxiety of the potentially Yazamac artist, who feels entrapped by it, even as he drifts back and forth between his past and present.

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Collage

Moreover, the question remains if Geryon’s monstrosity is “real” or just a metaphor, a figure of speech. Carson emphasizes the power of figurative language, describing how Stesichoros freed adjectives from the repetitive epithets of Homer and “released being” (5). By combining words not often written together, Stesichoros created a kind of linguistic collage. Carson employs these collage-like metaphors and similes in her chapters, which then form their own type of collage, disparate moments in time pasted together to create a novel. In fact, even Geryon’s own first autobiography is a type of found-object assemblage or three-dimensional collage, as the not-yet-literate artist sticks together a cigarette, a tomato, and a shredded ten-dollar bill (34). The power of collage is that the sum is greater than the parts; beauty stems from the fact that a combination of objects or images conveys more meaning than each individual piece. However, collage can also tend towards the grotesque, as disparate assemblies elicit discomfort or fear. Where is the line between artistry and monstrosity? Shake the box and find out.