isabelle loring wallace

FROM THE GARDENOF EDEN AND BACKAGAINpictures, people and theproblem of the perfectcopy

A N G E L A K Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 9 number 3 december 2004

form of the famous “Let there be …” Achievingand in this way narrating the creation fromnothing of heaven and earth, land and sea, sunand moon, fish and fowl, cattle and that whichcreeps, Genesis turns in its twenty-sixth verse toMan’s creation. Of Man and Man alone God willsay that he is made after – after not only in thesense of being made after the other creations butafter in the far more crucial sense of beingmodeled, of being, in other words, not a creationor a presentation but rather a re-presentation,something made, as God is said to have said, inthe image of another.Born of this iterative logic, Judeo-Christian

Man is aligned from the outset with the notion of

IAnd God said, Let us make man in our image,after our likeness …

Genesis 1.26

In the beginning there was the word, but therewas also the image and the concept of like-ness, and in the course of the present essay Irevisit the story of Man’s creation for the pur-pose of exposing an ancient, but never moretopical, relation between Man and the concept ofthe image. I should say at the outset that myanalysis of this relation and the tradition (arthistory) which has this relation at its crux pro-ceeds from a willful but precedented misreading:namely, the a-historical conflation of image andpicture, such that the story of Man’s origins canbe made to function as the origin of my ownstory about an essential and evolving link be-tween people and pictures.1 Indeed, although Iam aware that the image featured in Genesis 1.26is said to have little to do with what we, today,call “pictures,” the present essay neverthelesspersists in their conflation, for it is my con-tention that this (mis)reading has been the mis-reading of Western culture writ large, theconsequences of which are the subject of thisessay.

II

As is well known, Genesis begins with a series ofrepetitive verses which relay the creation ofheaven and earth and all their contents, and ineach instance, excepting Man, these creativefeats are accomplished by utterance alone in the

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/030137–19 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of AngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725042000307682

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Fig. 1. Michelangelo (1475–1564). The Creation of Adam. Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace, Vatican State. Photo credit:Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

picture, and that likeness (demuth, homoioos, orsimilitude3) is, in this context, a clarifying syn-onym for (immaterial) similitude, biblical schol-ars working to preserve the iconoclastic impulseof the Judeo-Christian tradition have gone togreat lengths to undo the confusion of the mod-ern anglophone, who assumes, however wrongly,that the image in question is visual.4 About thisconfusion – a confusion which is both the sub-ject and springboard for this paper about peopleand pictures – I have three things to say, two ofwhich will require further elaboration: (1) theconfusion of images and pictures is ancient his-tory; tselem, eikon, and imago – the words usedin the original Hebrew, Greek and Latin Bibles –have always meant both similitude and picture;5

(2) the more recent confusion of image andpicture exceeds philology; it derives from genu-ine, historical developments in the fields of the-

representation. But just what kind of representa-tion are we talking about here? And, more point-edly, what exactly is it that Man re-presents?Certainly, the reliance of the text on the notionof the image (tselem, eikon, imago) complicatesmatters, as does my own inclusion of theverse’s belated, but equally well-known, illus-tration (see Fig. 1).2 Indeed, as aides to thisdiscussion of the link between representationand subjectivity we now have two texts – onewritten, one painted – which establish the pri-macy of Man’s relation to God in ways thatcannot be extracted from the notion of theimage, however defined.A tremendously complicated and important

issue, the precise meaning of the word image inthe context of the creation myth has occupiedmany scholars both in and beyond the field oftheology. Asserting that image does not mean

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ology and aesthetics, which together have alteredboth the meaning of the original verse and ourconception of images;6 (3) the confusion of im-age and picture is today an ineluctable part ofthe story Westerners tell themselves about theirorigins; it is their inheritance and perhaps theirdestiny.As regards the first point, I defer to the work

of specialists in the field, noting only for therecord here that there are many documentedinstances of tselem, eikon and imago meaningpicture or visual object – as in, for example,Plato’s use of eikon to refer to an image in amirror, Cicero’s use of imago to refer to statu-ary, and several Old Testament passages inwhich tselem refers to outward, visible form:Numbers 33.52, Samuel I 6.5, Kings II 16.10,etc. As regards the second more involved point,I defer in large part to the influential work ofW.J.T. Mitchell whose seminal study on imagesasks and answers virtually all of the relevantquestions: how, when and why did images be-come identified with pictures, and spiritual like-ness become synonymous with visualsimilitude?7

It goes without saying that the conflation ofimage and picture does not have a precise pointof origin, but for Mitchell, Milton’s seventeenth-century treatment of Adam and Eve as imagodei in Paradise Lost stands as a concrete exam-ple of the modern – i.e., the avowed and deliber-ate – conflation of image and picture:

Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,Godlike erect, with native Honour cladIn naked Majesty seemed Lords of allAnd worthie seemed, for in their looks divineThe image of thir glorious Maker shon,Truth, Wisdome, Sanctitude severe and pure,Severe, but in true filial freedom plac’t.

(Paradise Lost 4.288–948)

Calling attention to Milton’s use of the word“looks” in the preceding verse, Mitchell deducesthat Milton’s reading of Genesis is purposefullyconfused: on the one hand, Man looks like Godin that he can be called God’s picture and, on theother hand, Man looks like God in that he and

God share attributes which allow them to see theworld in similar, but, of course, not identicalways. A reading of Genesis that acknowledges itsirreducibly double meaning, Milton is thusamong the first to openly concede the roleplayed by the visual image in Man’s creation.The question remaining, then, is this: what fac-tors contributed to this shift in our understand-ing of the image, such that it was at last possibleto concede the role played by imaging, indeedby pictures, in the book of Genesis? Or, putotherwise, how can we explain ambiguity’s em-brace in the verse of Milton, given centuries ofclarifying disavowal in the form of iconoclasticbiblical commentary?By way of explanation, I return our attention

to Michelangelo’s fresco – both becauseMichelangelo cannot help but describe the like-ness of Man and God in terms of visual simili-tude, and because it is, as W.J.T. Mitchell hassuggested, the Renaissance, and more preciselythe Renaissance invention of perspective, whichleaves as its legacy the conflation of which we(and Milton) now speak. First systematized byAlberti in 1435, perspective played a major rolein the revolution we call the Renaissance, and weare well accustomed to rehearsing its importancefor a visual tradition that would become increas-ingly more (and then less) concerned with repro-ducing the look of the real.9 Less wellestablished is the impact this developmentwould have on our conception of images as such,and it is this issue that Mitchell takes up in hisstudy.Put simply, perspective’s great accomplish-

ment was that it allowed pictures to accuratelyreproduce the look of the real. Much has beenwritten about the errors implicit in this line ofthought, yet what is of interest to Mitchell andme are the received truths of perspective, for itis they that produced a fundamental shift in ourconception of the image. Prior to the inventionof perspective, images were many; there weremental images, visual images, verbal images, etc.After the invention of perspective there werestill many kinds of images, but one kind ofimage reigned supreme and was indeed the

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paradigm under which all other images wereseen to operate. This kind of image is, of course,the visual image and it was in large part perspec-tive which granted it this supremacy. And whynot? With the invention of perspective, picturescould now claim to be coincident with reality inways that seemed to conclusively subvert long-standing rhetoric about the difference betweenimage and essence. Having made appearance andreality more or less the same, the invention ofperspective implied a fundamental philosophicalshift, one that would eventually lay waste to thetheologically important distinction between look-ing like a God and seeing like he sees.10

More than a crucial passage in the history ofart, the invention of perspective can thus becredited with effecting a profound shift in ourperception of images and their relation to bothreality and Man. Understood to be linked to thetruth of what is, visual images were now be-lieved to be inextricable from other kinds ofsimilitude which may or may not have beenvisible previously. As such, Man’s resemblanceof God, post-perspective, is necessarily a matterof the visual; after the Renaissance, being likeGod means appearing like him, as is perhapsevidenced by the careful mirroring of Adam andGod in Michelangelo’s fresco. Returning to Gen-esis 1.26 with this in mind, we might say that theinvention of perspective – an invention whichwas both catalyst and symptom of a larger cul-tural shift – retrospectively altered (revealed?)the meaning of the story of Man’s creation, andwith that the meaning and identity of Man.Indeed, when read from the perspective inaugu-rated in the Renaissance, Genesis 1.26 can beseen to speak of God’s appearance and essencesimultaneously – a fact which brings us to theother question posed at the outset: what exactlyis it that Man re-presents at the moment of hismaking?Like the related question of the image, the

question of what Adam re-presents is answeredin historically determined ways. Consider: if im-age is interpreted in immaterial terms, then it issome aspect of God’s character that Adam re-presents. If image is interpreted in light of thedevelopments we’ve been tracking here, thenAdam re-presents God’s appearance, which is

itself necessarily a reflection, or re-presentation,of the divine’s essential characteristics. As such,the point isn’t simply that with the Renaissanceimages give way to pictures, it is also that, asimage, or indeed as picture, Adam can now besaid to picture another picture, and thus repre-sents for his more modern audience not only theprimacy of Man’s relation to God but also theprimacy of Man’s relation to the visual image.And it is with this contention that we arrive at amore direct description of my essay’s subjectand the final of my three comments concerningthis more recent conflation of image and picture.If Genesis 1.26 is typically invoked for the

purpose of establishing the singularity of Man’srelation to the divine, by now it is clear that Ihave invoked this verse for the alternative pur-pose of establishing the importance of a lesstheorized, but no less foundational, link: namely,the link the verse implies between Man and thehistorically constituted concept of the image.Asserting that the meaning of image in thiscontext has always been multiple, and that Man’sconception of his creation has always beeninflected by the often repressed role of the vis-ual, I have nevertheless followed Mitchell inasserting that the meaning of the verse hasevolved toward this once unpopular reading, andwill claim in what remains that this evolution hashad dramatic consequences for our conception ofpictures, people and the relation between them.Arguing that Genesis 1.26 does speak to us of

the visual and that it may have spoken to theWest of the visual all along, I assume in whatfollows (here is my third point concerning theconflation of image and picture) that whateverthe historical truth (or textual multi-valency),the story of Western Man’s origins, as readtoday, is the story of the visual and the role ithas played in Man’s formation and fate. Takingseriously an idea I see everywhere reflected inthe present – the idea that Man is made in theimage of an image – I propose in the remainderof this essay that a historically conditioned(mis)reading of Genesis 1.26 can clarify theterms of an essential and evolving relation be-tween people and pictures, to which my own textnow adds a third, never more relevant, concept– that of the perfect copy.

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III

By way of a second beginning and by way ofintroducing the idea of the perfect copy – anidea that has played a significant role in thehistory of art and which will lead us, howeverperversely, to the literal intersection of peopleand pictures – consider one of art history’sfoundational myths: the story of the rivalry be-tween Apollodorus, who is said to have begunart, Zeuxis, who is said to have perfected art,and Parrhasius, who can be said in the end toremind us that perfection in art is impossible.11

According to Pliny, the rivalry between Apol-lodorus and Zeuxis was resolved in favor of thelatter, for, as the story goes, Apollodorus wasunable to compete with the level of realismachieved by Zeuxis – the emblem and proof ofwhich was a bird’s attempt to pluck a grape fromZeuxis’ painted, two-dimensional vine. Thus,though Pliny will say of Apollodorus in book 35of Natural Histories that his paintings madeobsolete his predecessors, he will also say in thatsame book that his greatest accomplishment wasthat “he opened the gate” for Zeuxis, his grape-painting rival and successor (307).Already a compelling story, there is yet an-

other chapter in Pliny’s account of this artistictriumvirate, one that concerns the competitionbetween Zeuxis and his successor, Parrhasius.As with the tale of Zeuxis and Apollodorus, thetale of Zeuxis and Parrhasius will turn on theissue of realism – a fact which testifies to theprivileged status afforded to realism in the West,both then and now.12 Indeed, however obvious,it seems important to note that Pliny’s narrativeretains currency today because, though artisticmedia and subject matter have changed, the ideaof the perfect copy continues to dominate bothwithin and, as we shall see, beyond theboundaries of fine art.13

Having said that, it is important to note of“the perfect copy” that its attainment, both thenand now, is by definition impossible, as repre-sentation is necessarily a re-presentation of –which is to say a necessarily different and thusimperfect version of – the thing to which itrefers. Seen in this light, it is not so much thatart continues to fail in its attempt to achieve the

perfect copy, though this is of course true; it ismore that the perfect copy is by design animpossible and paradoxical goal – a fact ac-knowledged long ago by Pliny in his account ofZeuxis’ rivalry with Parrhasius:

Parrhasius entered into competition withZeuxis, who produced a picture of grapes sosuccessfully represented that the birds flew upto the stage buildings; whereupon Parrhasiushimself produced such a realistic picture of acurtain that Zeuxis, proud of the verdict of thebirds, requested that the curtain should now bedrawn and the picture displayed; and when herealized his mistake, with a modesty that didhim honour, he yielded up the prize, sayingthat whereas he had deceived the birds,Parrhasius has deceived him, an artist.14

Always out of reach, mastery of the perfect copyis shown by Pliny to be short lived and illusion-ary. Indeed, the moral of the story is that paint-ing can always be more realistic. Thus, thoughZeuxis’ trompe l’oeil painting of grapes earnedhim a reputation as the man who perfected artunder the paradigm of realism, this accolade isquickly rescinded, for in the aftermath of hisencounter with Parrhasius the insufficiency ofhis likeness, and by extension the insufficiencyof all likenesses, is revealed to be an essentialpart of art history’s narration within theparadigm of realism. Indeed, if the story ofZeuxis’ success and failure is a testament to thecentrality of the perfect copy within aestheticdiscourse, it is at the same time a testament toits absence, and to the benefits this absenceengenders.One such benefit concerns the discipline of art

history, for, as we have seen, it is perfection’sunattainability that lends to art history’s narra-tion a certain innate drama and dynamism. Afterall, it isn’t just that the paradigm of realismgives us a theatrical and/or decisive way ofstaging aesthetic rivalries; it’s that it “opens thegates,” as Pliny might say, for an endless num-ber of similarly dramatic episodes. Indeed, look-ing back at a trajectory that seems always to lookforward, tales like the one we’ve just consideredseem to multiply and cohere, resolving as theydo into a cumulative succession of increasinglyheroic attempts to achieve the unachievable. We

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call this progression “art history,” and do so inthe knowledge that art’s romance with the“perfect copy” makes for consistently good arthistorical copy, the drama of which is measuredby the heroism of successive failures along theasymptote.15

Though failure will be my focus in the pagesthat remain, I should note that certain episodesin the history of art have been credited withproducing the elusive perfect copy.16 I’m think-ing here of the invention of the photograph inthe 1820s and the still more promising inventionof the readymade by Marcel Duchamp in the1910s. So as not to get waylaid by either of thesecrucial and complex moments in modern arthistory – moments to which I attend elsewhere –I’ll simply concede that both the invention ofthe photograph and the iconoclastic gesture ofthe readymade did bring art dangerously close tothe perfect copy, which is also to say danger-ously close to art’s extinction.17 Indeed, thoughmany things link the photograph and the ready-made, what I want to stress here is that theflirtation of each with perfection as definedwithin the paradigm of realism resulted not injubilation at the realization of representation’slong-standing goal (At last! At last! The perfectcopy is here!), but rather in theatrical expres-sions of despair, the precise form of which wouldbe a series of hyperbolic claims about the deathof painting and the death of art more broadly.18

As these audiences came quickly to realize, thecopy is perfected only at representation’s ex-pense, which is of course why the story of art’squest for perfection is the asymptotic tale that itis.Dramatic moments within this tale, the inven-

tion of the photograph and readymade did morethan challenge the investment of art in tra-ditional notions of authorship; in addition, theirextreme pursuit of representation’s obsolescencemade uncomfortably visible what one might callthe underpinning nihilism of art as conceived inthe West. Exposing the threat that the perfectcopy always carries and the danger implicit in itspursuit, the photograph and readymade broughtto the surface the strange logic of the Westerntradition, and in that way forced an acknowl-edgement of representation’s desire to replace

representation with its referent. Seen throughthe lens of the photograph and readymade, art inthe West emerges as a tradition compelled bythe possibility of its own demise, and is thus bestcharacterized by a distinct and near-consistentself-loathing. In light of this suicidal profile, Isuggest that the terms of this discussion berearranged; the real question is not how repre-sentation negotiates the problem of the unattain-able, perfect copy, but rather how the perfectcopy negotiates what I will call hereafter “theproblem of representation.”19

IV

What is the problem of representation? A returnto the texts with which we began may provide uswith something of the answer. In conjunctionwith a second fresco from the Sistine (see Fig.2), here is a second passage from the book ofGenesis:

Now the serpent was more subtil than anybeast of the field which the Lord God hadmade. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hathGod said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of theGarden?

And the woman said unto the serpent, We mayeat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midstof the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eatit, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye shall die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shallnot surely die:

For God doth know that on the day ye eatthereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and yeshall be as Gods, knowing of good and of evil.

And when the woman saw that the tree wasgood for food, and that it was pleasant to theeyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise,she took the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gavealso unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

And the eyes of them both were opened, andthey knew, that they were naked … (Genesis3.1–7)

Two questions emerge from this passage, theanswers to which will return us to the link

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Fig. 2. Michelangelo (1475–1564). The Temptation and Expulsion from Paradise. Detail of Sistine ceiling. Sistine Chapel,Vatican Palace, Vatican State. Photo credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

between people and pictures, while at the sametime clarifying the so-called problem of repre-sentation: (1) what is the nature of the knowl-edge gained by Adam and Eve in the Gardenand (2) what exactly are the consequences of thatknowledge’s attainment? After all, Adam andEve do not, in fact, die on the day that theypartake of the tree. Rather, having been expelledfrom the Garden, Adam and Eve go on to bearCain, Abel and others, dying of natural causesseveral years later. Thus although they do ac-quire in this moment the certainty of a deferreddeath, they are for that momentous day never-theless unharmed.Interestingly, what does happen in the im-

mediate aftermath of the fruit’s consumption –and this by way of answering the first of our twoquestions – is Adam and Eve’s knowledge oftheir mutual nakedness. Again, paradoxes wouldseem to abound. Adam and Eve have, of course,

always been naked, yet in the wake of the forbid-den fruit they are suddenly ashamed, as is evi-denced by their subsequent adoption of figleaves. The conventional way of understandingthis gesture is to imagine that Adam and Eveare, having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge,newly aware, and thus newly ashamed of theirnudity. Such a reading seems right but alsosimplistic, in that it does not examine enoughthe nature of the knowledge gained in thatinstant. Certainly on one level what they nowknow is indeed their nakedness, yet knowledgeof nakedness presumes a far deeper knowledgeof which “shame” is only a symptom. Theknowledge of which I speak is the knowledge ofone’s self as seen, or, to put that in slightly morepointed terms, it is the knowledge of oneself asa visual object in the mind of another subjectwho gazes upon you.So, although Adam and Eve do not die a

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literal death in the aftermath of the forbiddenfruit, they nevertheless do endure a kind ofdeath in this moment. That death is the death ofauthentic and unmediated subjectivity (unself-consciousness, if you will), and it occurs in themoment that Adam and Eve are each riven by adeeper knowledge – specifically, knowledge ofthemselves as representation, as the visual im-ages that readers of Genesis already knew themto be. That the experience of being seen is thuscomparable to, and thus takes the place of, animplied, immediate death is a fact that estab-lishes a compelling link between representationand mortality, while at the same time adding afatal layer to the relationship Genesis had al-ready established between people and pictures.A final thought on the link between death and

the image, before looping back to our discussionof the perfect copy’s intervention in the problemof representation. In the immediate context ofGenesis, representation’s link to death has to dowith seeing oneself as seen – i.e., with under-standing that one is always from another per-spective only the mortified image of the Other.Yet it is possible to forge a more abstract rela-tion between representation and death, the es-sence of which can be summed up a la Blanchotin the following way.20 Arguing that the strange-ness of the cadaver is also the strangeness of theimage, Blanchot suggests that the connectionbetween representation and death turns on theviolent severance, in each, of form from anoriginal context. Consider: in the instant awoman is photographed her appearance is repli-cated and thus proves separable from its originalcontext, however broadly or narrowly the idea ofcontext is defined. A similar dynamic takes holdat the moment of death, for although form andcontent still seem united in the figure of thecorpse they are in fact asunder, as the originalcontext and meaning are, in the most profoundsense, no longer present. Thus in both corpseand image, meaning and materiality arewrenched apart, and as such, we might say, it isthe logic of death that makes the image possible,if also in the end unbearable.It is interesting to consider Michelangelo’s

fresco with this in mind. As if in accordancewith the shared logic of representation and death

– the discovery of which is, in some sense, thesubject of the Fall – Michelangelo’s compositionturns on the problem of severance as articulatedby the divisive Tree of Knowledge at the compo-sition’s center, and on the separation of oneselffrom oneself, as articulated in the doubling,indeed the re-presenting, of both Adam and Eve.Though surely not Michelangelo’s intent, hiswork nevertheless manages to articulate in ex-actly the right context in impossibly knowingways a fundamental and uncomfortable connec-tion between death and representation, each ofwhich Adam and Eve come to know in the verymoment the fresco is given to describe. Indeed,having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, it isthis that they come to understand: between rep-resentation and death there is the deepest andmost unnerving connection, the existence ofwhich is representation’s so-called problem.Enter here the paradigm of realism and its

mascot, the perfect copy. After all, what bettersolution to the problem of representation thanits elimination, and what better agent of elimin-ation than an entity capable of suturing thedivide that representation inevitably is. Render-ing unintelligible the difference between repre-sentation and referent, the perfect copy’srealization would substitute unified plenitude forthe moribund fragment that is the image, andwould in this way dissolve representation’s re-liance on the logic of severance. Of course, hereit must be recalled that this sought-after solutionto the problem of representation is one thatcomes at representation’s own expense, and assuch we might conclude that the Western tra-dition and its quest for “the perfect copy” are atone and the same time a symptom of, and theinadequate solution for, the problem of repre-sentation and its unseemly relation to death.

V

At this point it is clear that the problem ofrepresentation has to do with mortality. Alignedwith Man’s literal death in the future and withthe more abstract and immediate mortificationthat comes from seeing oneself seen, representa-tion emerges in the West as a problem in need

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Fig. 3. Albrecht Durer (1471–1528). Melancholia I. Engraving (1514). 23.8 � 18.9 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,London, UK. Photo credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY.

of solving – a fact which may help to explain theWest’s two-thousand-year-old pursuit of the per-fect copy, as well as the West’s more recentdemonization of art that elects not to take as itsgoal this self-defeating but nevertheless imposs-ible end.21 Indeed, here it must be said that thesheer duration of this self-destructive romanceonly returns us to the fact of the perfect copy’sunattainability – an unattainability that I claimis the core of representation’s equally long-stand-ing battle with melancholia, as testified to byDurer in the North at the very same momentthat Michelangelo is unwittingly testifying to therelated fact of representation’s link to both Manand death in the South (see Fig. 3). A key partof the story I am telling about people andpictures, the relation between art and melancho-lia has many facets and has generated a good

deal of scholarship, but to my knowledge thefollowing has not yet been said in precisely thisway: Man and the image after which he is madeare each potentially melancholic entities,defined, as in keeping with the illness they keepat bay, by a loss that cannot be mourned.22

Let’s put the image on the couch first.23 Char-acterized by Freud in 1917 as the inability toproductively mourn an intolerable loss, melan-cholia is easily associated with representation,given the constitutive loss of the referent, with-out which representation ceases to be.24 Definedby the loss of a referent it compulsively strivesto duplicate in the form of an unachievableperfect copy, representation can neither repairthis loss – as we’ve seen, that happens only atrepresentation’s expense – nor mourn it. Indeed,it isn’t merely that the loss has always already

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happened, it’s also that the loss in question isone that cannot be articulated in accordancewith the demands of the “talking cure.” Afterall, how would representation articulate, which isto say mourn, the trauma of the referent’s losswithout inflicting upon itself again via symbol-ization the trauma from which it hopes to es-cape?Condemned to live with a loss it can neither

amend nor accept, representation seems to havefound an alternative means of coping with theloss that defines it, and in this regard the psy-choanalytic theories of Nicholas Abraham andMaria Torok may be of some help. Building onFreud’s ground-breaking work in this area,Abraham and Torok maintain that a bereavedsubject has two options for processing loss: in-trojection and incorporation.25 On their account,introjection is like mourning in that it is a“normative” procedure in which the loss inquestion is conscious, and successfully negoti-ated through a process of reclamation in whichthe bereaved recovers that which had been dis-placed onto the object recently lost. Needless tosay, this procedure is not an option for represen-tation, for were it to reclaim for itself the pleni-tude of the referent it would engender its ownannihilation in the process. What to do, then,with a loss that cannot be mourned? How to riseabove mourning’s impossibility such that theinertness pictured by Durer can be transformedinto the productive lineage we call art history?On Abraham and Torok’s account, there is a

means of negotiating losses which defy ex-pression. As they argue in The Shell and theKernel, the subject who cannot mourn oftenengages in an unconscious process called incor-poration, in which he or she swallows whole andunprocessed both the lost object and the traumaassociated with its loss.26 Erecting an internaltomb in which to house both the lost object andthe trauma of having lost it, the subject unwit-tingly encrypts what it cannot bear to loose andcontinues to identify with the object preservedtherein.27 The status quo thus maintained, thetraumatized subject avoids melancholia and pro-ceeds as before, asymptotically approaching butnever in fact achieving complete identificationwith the object whose loss cannot, and effec-

tively need not, be acknowledged.28

At this point the relationship of incorporationto representation is perhaps clear, but a finaldetail should drive the point home. According toAbraham and Torok, incorporation typically oc-curs given a very particular type of relationshipbetween the bereaved and the lost object. Inpsychoanalytic terms, that relationship can bedescribed as the relationship of the subject tothe necessarily unattainable ego-ideal – a rela-tionship not at all unlike the one we’ve beentracking between representation and itsunattainable ideal: the perfect copy and/or refer-ent.29 Seen in this light, the subject diagnosed byAbraham and Torok is very much like the entitywe call representation. Fated by a loss it canneither assimilate nor mourn, representationnevertheless manages to transcend melancholia,perhaps through the erection of a crypt whichcontains both the idea of the referent and thetrauma associated with this constitutive loss.Looking at a posthumous work like MarcelDuchamp’s Etant donnes – a work whose instal-lation at the Philadelphia Museum is exactlycontemporaneous with the publication of Abra-ham and Torok’s theory30 – I’m tempted to saythat it shares with Michelangelo’s Temptationand Expulsion a kind of impossible knowing,assuming on behalf of all representation thecharacteristic structure of the crypt (see Fig. 4).Indeed, as we look at this crypt’s facade, weneed not peer inside to know something of itscontents; unknown and unknowable, it is thereferent and the trauma of its loss that residestherein, assuming for the shell that is representa-tion the role of the traumatic and inassimilablekernel.At the same time, if we were to peer inside,

we would only see further evidence to supportthe (utterly theatrical) idea that death allowedDuchamp to know and picture the very essenceof representation, the truth of which he seems toaffirm through the inclusion of an illuminatedgas lamp, visible, as it were, on the door’s otherside (see Fig. 5). Speaking to us from the grave,Duchamp presents a headless female (?) body,access to which for us is eternally foreclosedgiven the presence of multiple barriers whichtogether can be seen to symbolize the constitu-

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Fig. 4. Marcel Duchamp. Etant donnes: 1. La Chute d’eau, 2. Le Gaz d’eclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The IlluminatingGas) (1946–66). Exterior view. 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession MarcelDuchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969.

tive inaccessibility of the purely material refer-ent or thing-in-itself. Divided in its structure andmorbid in its content, Duchamp’s work thusspeaks to and is representation’s double bind inattempting to access and re-present that whichremains unknowable outside the context of cer-tain ineluctable givens: tradition, language, time,space, etc.31 Adding another layer to our dis-cussion of the referent’s loss, the Given managesto concisely picture the problems of picturing,all the while recalling that these problems ulti-mately intersect with the idea of the crypt,symbolic as it is of both death and the will topreserve.

As I move to a consideration of Man’s constitu-tive loss, a confession must be made concerningthis paper’s original conceit. I began this essaywith a re-reading of Genesis, and in the spirit of

literalism I argued that Man is made in theimage of an image, and that there is, therefore,a primary and mutually reflexive bond betweenpeople and pictures in the West. The truth ofthe matter is that images are made in the imageof Man, and are that which provides him withan externalized picture of himself through whichhe can observe his own constitution, evolution,and logic. Indeed, if we live with a category ofobjects we call pictures, it is because we areourselves seen, and feel ourselves divided bythat seen-ness, the burden of which we displaceonto a category of objects which exist for pre-cisely the purpose of their witnessing. MirroringMan’s status as visual object, the image is thusboth after us and of us, reflexive of us andsomehow formative of us, a category of objectswhich compulsively restages for our consider-ation not only our seen-ness but also, because of

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Fig. 5. Marcel Duchamp. Etant donnes: 1. La Chute d’eau, 2. Le Gaz d’eclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The IlluminatingGas) (1946–66). Interior view. 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession MarcelDuchamp. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Cassandra Foundation, 1969.

that, the distilled essence of the experience thatwas the Fall, at the precise moment Man becameboth seen and mortal.At the same time, we might say that the image

reflects Man’s predicament in the aftermath ofthe Fall, reflecting back to its traumatized cre-ators his own bereft structure, characterized as itis by a comparably constitutive loss. Indeed, ifwe can say that the image incorporates whole thememory of the referent and its absence, anddoes so for the purpose of continuing to identifywith this unattainable ego-ideal, then we can also

say that it does this because on some level it isserving to reflect Man’s incorporation of his ownconstitutive loss as narrated by Man in the mythof the Expulsion: the loss of unmediated subjec-tivity as it occurred in the Garden at the mo-ment Man comes to know he is the mortifiedpicture Genesis consigns him to be.32 Further,we might also say that if representation is rivenby a loss that is constitutive, and if it is thereforeobsessed with the distracting but ultimately inef-fectual fetish the West has called the perfectcopy, it is because representation is the playing

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Fig. 6. Jake and Dinos Chapman. Tragic Anatomies (1996). Fiberglass, resin, paint, smoke devices. Dimensions variable. The artists. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London).

field on which Man unwittingly rehearses thetrauma of his own loss, and, as we shall see, hisown ineffectual pursuit of the perfect copy, how-ever nihilistic and moribund its achievementmight (also) be.

VI

In essence, this essay has concerned the relationbetween people and pictures, and tangentiallythe relation between pictures and the concept ofthe image. Maintaining that images and pictureshave never been fully extricable concepts, I pro-posed at the outset that time has made them stillless so, and suggested that the Renaissance’smore purposeful confusion of image and pictureallowed for a re-reading of Genesis which se-cured via the logic of likeness a fateful relationbetween people on the one hand, and on the

other the (divine) picture after which they weremade. In conclusion, I propose an end to thistrajectory, and at the same time a highly prob-lematic return to the beginning – a double move-ment I claim is now possible given a culturedefined by genetic engineering, cosmetic surgeryand, above all, the soon-to-be-realized phenom-enon of the human clone.33

Read as the logical terminus of a story aboutthe link between people and pictures, these sci-entific developments also immediately conjureour story’s third term – the perfect copy – andare in many ways our story’s end, for theymanifest in no uncertain terms not a simplerelation between perfect copies, people, and pic-tures, but rather the possibility of their completeand literal conflation. Simultaneously, these de-velopments also return us to the beginning, anddo so in ways that round out the more abstract

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Fig. 7. Jake and Dinos Chapman. Detail of Tragic Anatomies (1996). Fiberglass, resin, paint, smoke devices. Dimensionsvariable. The artists. Courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube (London).

with varying degrees of viability and success, tosolve the problem of being after the Fall byeliminating any trace of difference, and with thatthe possibility of death. Thus, however one mayfeel about cloning and face-lifts, it is fair to saythat Man’s attempt to realize his own version of“the perfect copy” makes manifest the uttercomplexity of the relation between people andpictures, while also recalling the problem to

analogy we’ve been tracking between the bereft-ness of people and pictures, for which the per-fect copy continues to be a most imperfectsolution.As we have seen, the perfect copy promises to

solve the so-called “problem of representation”by eliminating the difference between image andreferent; so, too, genetic engineering, cosmeticsurgery and the clone, each of which promises,

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which the perfect copy is always addressed. Thatproblem is, of course, mortality, and throughgenetic engineering and the clone that problemmay be solved in ways that return us to thebeginning – by which I mean not only theGarden of Eden, but also a much more primor-dial past in which immortality and samenesswere “humanity’s” defining characteristics. In-deed, by replacing procreation and differencewith the clinical and surgical reproduction of thesame, cloning and the rest threaten to return usto the innocence and immortality of the Garden,itself a compelling myth for our shared biologi-cal history as single-celled, asexual organismsthat lived eternally, given their own exact dupli-cation.The perfect copy’s elusiveness has been a

recurring theme of this paper, and whether ornot the technologies under discussion here canin fact produce the perfect copy, and whether ornot they will thus return us to the Garden ofEden, remains to be seen. But looking at theperversely Edenic work of the Chapman broth-ers, it’s plain to see that many remain dubious –both about the possibility of the perfect copy’srealization and about the desirability of thatphenomenon (see Fig. 6).34 Of course, at the endof this essay it goes without saying that artistshave particular insight into the nature of theperfect copy, insight that might temper theirenthusiasm for the solution it promises to de-liver. Indeed, as we’ve said, the artist knows alltoo well the consequence of the perfect copy’srealization; eliminating difference, and thus rep-resentation, the perfect copy makes everything,and thus nothing, an image, and in this regardwe might say that the work of the Chapmanbrothers visualizes not the essence of representa-tion a la Michelangelo and Duchamp, but ratherthe essence of representation’s elimination as itwould occur at the hands of the perfect copy.Comparing Michelangelo’s representation of theExpulsion with the Chapman brothers’ ironicrepresentation of Man’s return, and lookingspecifically at the Tragic Anatomy of the Chap-man’s identical, eternal youths, we see that whileknowledge of representation doubles, dividesand mortifies, representation’s elimination, orconversely representation’s transcendence at the

hands of the perfect copy, doubles without div-ision and without the mortification that thatdivision has always entailed (see Fig. 7). Borntogether in the mind of Man at the moment ofthe Fall, death and representation would thusdie together, and with them Man as he has beendefined in the West for centuries.I have maintained throughout this paper that

pursuit of the perfect copy is an exercise innihilism, and that its achievement would markthe end of representation and the difference onwhich it depends. What I didn’t say, and whatPliny could not have anticipated, is that anattempt to realize the perfect copy would alsoresult in the end of both image and Man asdefined by their essential characteristics. Absolv-ing the image of its difference from the referent,and Man of his mortality and the need of sexualdifference, not to mention the burden ofhis constitutive difference from himself, theperfect copy may well return us to a Gardenof Eden, but in the process Man willundoubtedly find himself and his pictures funda-mentally changed, given anunprecedented conflation ofthe terms this paper hassought to track and dis-tinguish: perfect copies, pic-tures, and people.

notesA version of this paper was delivered at the“Inventions of Death” conference at the Univer-sity of Warwick in June 2001, and again at BrynMawr College in spring 2003. Thanks are due tothese audiences, my students, and the followingindividuals in particular: Steven Z. Levine, DavidCast, Lisa Saltzman and Linda Wallace.

1 My introductory remarks draw heavily on thework of W.J.T. Mitchell whose seminal analysis ofthe idea of the image did much to inspire andinform the present remarks. See his Iconology:Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: U of Chicago P,1986) 5–52. For an account of the creationwhich is attentive to the role played by genderand difference, see Mieke Bal, “Sexuality, Sin, andSorrow: The Emergence of a Female Character(A Reading of Genesis 1–3)” in The Female Bodyin Western Culture, ed. Susan Suleiman (Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986) 317–38.

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2 For an analysis of the Creation in relation toanother work of art, see Penny Howell Jolly,Made in God’s Image? Adam and Eve in the GenesisMosaics at San Marco, Venice (Berkeley: U ofCalifornia P, 1997).

3 Mitchell, Iconology 31.

4 Here is a standard example:

A further hint of a lower theological pos-ition has been seen by some in the repeatedphrase in our image, in his image, in the imageof God, which is thought to point to a timewhen men believed that God had a materialframe like that which man possesses. Yet isit more probable that the expression in theimage of God has no physical implications,but is meant to suggest that man differsfrom all the rest of creation in the pos-session of self-conscious personality, inwhich he alone of all creatures resemblesGod. (Abingdon Bible Commentary, ed. Fred-erick Carl Eiselen (New York: Abingdon,1929) 221)

For commentary which entertains the oppositeview, arguing that the incorporeality of God wastoo abstract a thought for Israelites of the fifthcentury, see The Interpreter’s Bible, ed. GeorgeButtrick (New York: Abingdon, 1952) 482–85.Lending credence to the idea that the Biblereferences God’s material form are several OldTestament references to his hands, feet andmouth: Psalms 119.73, 33.6; Isaiah 60.13;Zechariah 14.4.

5 Seen from this perspective, the modern con-fusion of image and picture is only a retrospec-tive illumination of an uncertainty that has alwaysbeen present and in large part repressed.

6 My own remarks will concentrate on develop-ments in the field of aesthetics which necessarilyintersect with the complex history of icono-clasm.

7 Mitchell, Iconology 31–40.

8 John Milton, Paradise Lost (Menston: Scholar,1968).

9 The most sustained and rigorous work onperspective has been that by E.H. Gombrich andHubert Damisch. See, Art and Illusion: A Study inthe Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Prince-ton: Princeton UP, 1960) 242–87 and The Originof Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge,MA: MIT P, 1995), respectively.

10 Here I do not mean to suggest that debatesabout the meaning of image in Genesis ceased,nor do I mean to suggest that there was anythinglike an acknowledgement of the fact that themeaning of the verse had changed. Rather, Imean to imply that the invention of perspectivecontributed to, but did not on its own cause, ageneral trend toward the material which hadobvious consequences for everything, but in par-ticular the West’s conception of Man’s relationto the divine.

11 Pliny offers the definitive account of thisrivalry. See Natural Histories, vol. IX, trans. H.Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1961)307–15. For an account of this legend’s implica-tions for the conception of tradition in the West,see Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: FromDavid to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1984) 1–31.

12 I am aware that “realism” is a tremendouslycomplicated term, which has inspired a great dealof specialized literature. Here, I use the term ina very general way to refer to the commonnotion that art ought to “look like” its subject.That some movements – Mannerism and theRococo, for example – will be excluded by adefinition of art that privileges visual similitude isinteresting in and of itself. What does it meanthat we tell the story of the history of art in away that marginalizes art that refuses to partici-pate in its own self-effacement? Might it be thatthe West only tolerates art that is intolerant ofitself? On realism and the marginalization of Ro-coco art, see Norman Bryson, Word and Image:French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1987).

Also, here is as good a point as any to assertthat the idea of the perfect copy looms largeeven in, and perhaps especially in, those mo-ments when realism seems to have been aban-doned for an alternative schema. AbstractExpressionism, for example, seems to have hadlittle to do with the concerns of realism in so faras it abandons entirely the language of reference.Yet one of the most popular and enduring waysof thinking about Abstract Expressionist paintingsis to see them as the unmediated reflections ofthe men who made them. Realism by anothername, Abstract Expressionism thus shares withany realist painting the desire “to be true” to itssubject, to truly re-present it, and in that sense,it might be possible to say that virtually allWestern art is produced within a realistparadigm, and is therefore plagued by the notion

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of perfect and unattainable copy. In this regard, itmight also be interesting to consider the rela-tionship between the tradition of icon paintingand the story of St Luke painting the Virgin, as itis this presumed event which transforms all iconsinto realistic likenesses.

13 Today, the drive toward the perfect copy ismost clearly expressed outside the terrain oftraditional fine art and applies mostly to Man’sduplication of himself. Here, I’m thinking of de-velopments in the field of virtual reality (in the-ory this technology allows you to be an evenmore real version of yourself, given the mutabilityof one’s appearance in this arena), and otherdevelopments I discuss in closing: genetic engin-eering, cosmetic surgery, and, of course, cloning.Together, these technologies may undo theWest’s faith in the truth of the image, as estab-lished by the invention of perspective.

14 Of course, the story does not end withParrhasius. As Pliny will say of Apelles, he“surpassed all the other artists put together andall who were to come after” (319). Significantly,Pliny’s account of Apelles also manages to main-tain the logic of the perfect copy’s unattainability,noting of Apelles that he was inferior to severalcontemporaries in some very particular respects:to Melanthius in terms of grouping, to Asclepi-odorus in terms of measurement, etc. Pliny,Natural Histories IX: 319–33.

15 Norman Bryson’s account of tradition in theWest will choose to stress the belatedness ofthe artist in light of the past’s accumulation. I seeno reason to disagree with this account, and infact second his emphasis on failure. See NormanBryson, Tradition and Desire, throughout.

16 And there are certainly mythological exam-ples of the perfect copy’s realization, amongthem the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. Here,as elsewhere, the realization of the perfect copymeans the loss of representation, for at the endof the story Pygmalion, happily, has a womaninstead of a statue, the thing instead of the thing’srepresentation.

17 On the death of painting and the implicationsof the readymade for art, see my own “From theDeath of Painting to the Death in Painting: Or,What Jasper Johns Found in Marcel Duchamp’sTu m’/Tomb,” Angelaki 7.1 (2002): 133–55. Seealso Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cam-bridge, MA: MIT P, 1990) 229–44.

18 Most famously, Paul Delaroche’s remark con-cerning the invention of photography: “Fromtoday painting is dead!” (though there is no hardevidence that the French painter ever made sucha statement).

19 Interestingly, loathing also plays a role in themyth of Pygmalion, as it is his loathing of womenthat propels his art, and in turn his quest for theperfect copy.

20 See Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and theRight to Death” and “Two Versions of the Imag-inary” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other LiteraryEssays (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1981) 21–62,79–89. More recent efforts to address the rela-tion between art and death are: Gregg Horowitzand Tom Huhn, “The Wake of Art: Criticism,Philosophy and the Ends of Taste” in The Wakeof Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the Ends of Taste byArthur Danto, eds. Greg Horowitz and TomHuhn (Amsterdam: OPA, 1998) 1–56; and PeterSchwenger, “Corpsing the Image,” Critical Inquiry26 (spring 2000): 395–413.

21 See n. 10.

22 Actually, I will argue that Man and imagetriumph over melancholy through the erection ofan intra-psychic crypt. Also, in terms of art’srelation to melancholia, I should note that whatgoes for art also goes for art history, as thehistorian is always searching for a lost object,context, etc. that cannot be found. On this point,see Michael Ann Holly, “Mourning and Method,”Art Bulletin 84.4 (2002): 660–69.

23 If psychoanalyzing art history seems to con-fuse traditional distinctions between people (theusual objects of psychoanalysis) and pictures, it isan intentional and welcomed side-effect of argu-ing that the two are each other’s mirrorreflection.

24 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”(1917), vol. 14 of the Standard Edition, ed. andtrans. James Strachey 239–58. In light of thediagnosis I am making, it seems important tonote a couple of additional things: (1) mourningand melancholia are distinguishable from oneanother at the level of symptom in only one way:the loss of self-esteem, which is experienced onlyin the case of melancholia; (2) melancholics ex-perience this loss of self-esteem because theiridentification with the lost object is of a narcissis-tic variety in that the lost object somehow re-sembles the bereaved. For me, each of thesepoints tracks well with the idea of representation

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as: (1) suicidally convinced of its unworthinessand (2) narcissistically attached to the referentvia the idea of resemblance.

25 See Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, TheShell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas Rand, vol. 1(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994) 99–156. Intro-jection and incorporation are terms inheritedfrom other psychoanalysts including Ferenczi,Freud, and Klein.

26 Here it is important to note the followingstipulation concerning incorporation: “The abruptloss of a narcissistically indispensable object of lovehas occurred, yet the loss is of a type that prohibitsits being communicated. If this were not so, incorpo-ration would have no reason for being. Cases ofreluctant mourning are well known. Yet they donot inevitably lead to incorporation” (Abrahamand Torok, The Shell and the Kernel 129).

27 Abraham and Torok refer to this process as“preservative repression” by which they mean toimply the dramatic consequences the subjectwould have to face were he or she to introjectthe incorporated loss. The idea is that the incor-porated loss is one whose introjection wouldfundamentally reorganize the bereaved, some-thing which is, of course, true of representationvis-a-vis the loss of the referent.

28 On Freud’s account, normal psychology re-quires that there be an appreciable differencebetween the ego and its ideal. Omnipotent maniais the unhappy result of their conflation – hencethe asymptotic nature of this identification.

29 Though I do not wish to push this too far,there are two more preconditions of the cryptwhich have obvious resonance for this paper: (1)the existence of a love totally free of ambiv-alence, such that only a “real and traumaticcause” could put an end to it; and (2) a previousexperience tainted with “shame … death, dis-grace, or removal” (136). Needless to say, stipu-lations more evocative of the Fall would bedifficult to come by, though it should be notedthat it is the ego-ideal’s shame that is in questionhere and not, strictly speaking, the shame of thesubject him/herself. In the context of our dis-cussion, the original mirroring of Man and Godrenders difficult the distinction between Man andego-ideal, as does the related distinction be-tween Man pre- and post-Fall (Abraham andTorok, The Shell and the Kernel 131–38).

30 According to the translator and editorNicholas Rand, Abraham and Torok’s theories ofincorporation were, with one exception, all pub-lished between 1967 and 1975. Duchampworked on Etant donnes in secret between 1946and 1966; in accordance with Duchamp’s wishes,it was installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Artin 1969. For a sustained analysis of the work, seeDalia Judovitz, “Rendezvous with MarcelDuchamp: Given,” Dada/Surrealism 16 (1987):184–202.

31 Of course, it is possible to read Duchamp’swork in a myriad of ways, none of which arenegated by my own reading here. Also, though Icannot pursue this here, I find Duchamp’s ready-mades intriguing in light of the following passageconcerning the crypt’s dissolution:

It should be remarked that as long as thecrypt holds there is no melancholia. Iterupts when the walls are shaken, often asa result of some secondary love-object whohad buttressed them. Faced with the dangerof seeing the crypt crumble, the whole ofthe ego becomes one with the crypt, show-ing the concealed object of love in its ownguise … Consequently, the ego begins thepublic display of an interminable process ofmourning. (136)

Might it be that having shaken the walls of thecrypt the readymade inaugurated a new chapterin modern art history – high modernism – inwhich self-reflexivity ensured complete and totalidentification of the image with its referent? Cer-tainly the notion of interminable mourning canbe applied to modernism, given its asymptoticapproach toward what Greenberg might call theabsolute essence of each medium; further, in sofar as Abraham and Torok also note that thisprocess all culminates – if it is, in fact, to culmi-nate – in the fantasy of the love-object’s suicide– an outcome not at all unlike the fate of thereferent (i.e., reality) which is said to have disap-peared in postmodern culture (see Abraham andTorok, The Shell and the Kernel 136–38).

32 In this regard, it is interesting to note thatAbraham and Torok repeatedly use the wordidyll to describe the contents of the crypt.

33 My thoughts on the clone are influenced bythe work of Jean Baudrillard, especially The VitalIllusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York: ColumbiaUP, 1999). For an overview of cloning and the

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debate it has generated, see Nicholar Agar, Per-fect Copy: Unraveling the Cloning Debate (Cam-bridge: Icon, 2002). Despite its suggestive title –a title I came across while well immersed in thepresent text – The Perfect Copy does not engagethe intersection of aesthetic and scientific orpsychoanalytic discourse. For an analysis ofcloning’s implications for the idea of sex andgender, see my own “Sex, Sameness and Desire:Thoughts on Versace and the Clone” in WAR:Women, Advertising and Representation: Extendingbeyond Familiar Paradigms, eds. Sue Abel, AnitaNowak and Karen Ross (New Jersey: Hampton,forthcoming 2004).

34 There is a great deal that one could say aboutthe Chapman brothers’ work, especially as itconcerns the implications of recent technologiesfor the issues of sex and gender. Here, thesameness wrought by these phenomena ends upmaking heterosexual sex (and perhaps all sex)impossible – both because we’ve been returnedto the age of innocence in the Garden andbecause our attempts to get there via geneticengineering and cloning have resulted in dysfunc-tional amalgams like the ones that populate theirwork. Also, I should note that the relevance ofthis work to the Judeo-Christian tradition isacknowledged by the Chapman brothers in vari-ous ways; most obviously the correspondingexhibition catalogue, which took the form of aBible (gold edges, thin pages, etc.) and was enti-tled Unholy Libel. See Unholy Libel (London:Gagosian, 1997). For other artists working alongthese lines, see the exhibition catalogue ParadiseNow: Picturing the Genetic Revolution, ed. Ian Berry(New York: D.A.P., 2000); and Gene(sis): Contem-porary Art Explores Human Genomics, available� http://www.gene-sis.net/splash.html � .

Isabelle Loring WallaceLamar Dodd School of ArtUniversity of GeorgiaVisual Arts BuildingAthens, GA 30602-4102USAE-mail: iwallace@uga.edu