The Body, Deconstructed
Close attention to one thing at a time.
Six fragments, arranged at gallery distance. Each image holds one isolated part of the human form — a shoulder, a wrist, a hipline, a back — and refuses the whole. The mind keeps assembling. The composite is interested in that involuntary work.
Cubism made the argument formally; medical illustration makes it diagnostically; pornography makes it commercially. *The Body, Deconstructed* takes the question seriously: what happens when figurative attention is held on a fragment rather than a whole figure? The composite is a working answer in six panels. Read it for the way the eye negotiates between *part* and *whole* without your permission. Read it as a study in how figurative art has always known that the body is unread until the viewer reads it. The arrangement is fixed — these six in this order — because the order does work the images on their own do not. Play it as a sequence and the pacing changes; the composite holds them in simultaneous view by design.
Six fragments. The mind assembles.
Works in this composite
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What did this arrangement do?
In the magazine
Read alongside
- Morning, Six Ways
The other six-panel composite; reads time-of-day rather than body-part. Together they map two questions about what six adjacent images can do.
- Classical and Now
Four centuries on the same question — useful as a register comparison. Body-deconstructed is formalist; classical-and-now is historical.
Through another lens
- DesireEmotion
The fragmenting impulse is a desire register; the composite is a way of studying it without staging it.