John Stathatos
EXQUISITE CORPSES:
Viktor Koen's "Transmigrations"

"A monster", observes Jorge Luis Borges in the preface to his Handbook of Fantastic Zoology (1957), "is no more than a combination of parts of real beings, and the possibilities of permutation border on the infinite". Most monstrous inventions, in truth, aim to astonish either by a simple change of scale such as transforms a whale into Leviathan, or else through the assemblage of heterogeneous but otherwise familiar elements – for instance, the mixture of serpent and cock which make up a basilisk. More sinister than these sometimes unintentionally comic zoological medleys are those whose appearance combines animal and human elements, or else twists the human shape into something grotesquely or terrifyingly other.
     Such monstrous conflations are encountered not only in mythological accounts, but also in works of acknowledged scientific import. Composed in the first century AD, Pliny the Elder's monumental Historia Naturalis described " men whose feet grow the tother way backward, and of either foot they have eight toes, as Megasthenes doth report. And in many other hils of that countrey, there is a kind of men with heads like dogs, clad all over with the skins of wild beasts, who in lieu of speech use to barke [...] Againe, beyond these Westward, some there bee without heads standing upon their necks, who carrie eies in their shoulders".
     A fascination with the monstrous characterised the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; published in 1601, Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny, quoted above, became an instant best-seller. A century earlier, the anonymous Travels of Sir John Mandeville assured readers that beyond Cathay might be encountered "...many hippotaynes that dwell some-time in the water and sometime on the land. And they be half man and half horse, as I have said before. And they eat men when they may take them". A few decades later, Fortunio Liceti's De Monstris (1665) described such freakish hybrids as an elephant-headed man. This obsession with the grotesque can be ascribed to more than mere sensationalism; at a time when one of science's primary concerns was the elaboration of systems of classification by means of which order might be imposed upon the apparent chaos of nature, monsters squatted on the boundaries and represented the exceptions against which such systems could be tested.
     Up to the end of the 18th century, monstrous beings were considered the work of God or nature; since the 19th, they have been increasingly ascribed to man, or rather, to man's commerce with science. The archetypal modern monster was, of course, devised by Mary Shelley. Behind Dr. Frankenstein's nameless creation follows a shambling procession of monstrous beings engendered by irresponsible scientific experimentation, among them Stevenson's Edward Hyde and the pathetic beast men of the island of Dr. Moreau. In the 20th century, the pace accelerated; nuclear fallout, pollution and vivisection all contributed to an anti-scientific malaise giving rise to fresh nightmares, this time primarily on celluloid, from the human/insect clone of Kurt Neumann's 1958 The Fly to the man/machine interfaces or cyborgs of the Terminator and Robocop series.
     In "Concerning a Monstrous Offspring", Hélène Frichot comments that "if the archetypal monster can be imagined as a concatenation of mismatched or disparate parts, stolen from the dead or appropriated from a past now turning toward decay, then the process of montage may illuminate a means of composing such a monster". She goes on to compare such an assemblage to the surrealist game called cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), in which a piece of paper is folded over several times, allowing each participant to contribute part only of a drawing, the preceding sections remaining hidden; almost invariably, the drawing develops in a vertical direction, resulting in vaguely humanoid forms with, for instance, a owl for a head, a cello for a trunk and roller skates for legs.
     If there is one thing the digital manipulation of photographs does particularly well, it is precisely this process of montage, the seamless assemblage of disparate parts into a new and monstrous reality. As Viktor Koen has realised, Photoshop is essentially a tool for producing improved exquisite corpses. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein sought the elements of his creation in "the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse", or else "dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave", but the menacing protagonists of Transmigrations are assembled from virtual sources; stitched together from human, insect and inanimate imagery, Koen's monsters are inspired by that ultimate contemporary bogeyman, the inhuman bureaucrat. A bull-headed man may no longer inspire terror, but a grey-faced immigration official in a dark suit is another matter entirely, particularly when endowed with the abdomen of a wasp and scissored hands. In these images, Robocop has morphed with the Fly under the sign of Kafka. 

© John Stathatos, 2001
From Viktor Koen, Transmigrations, Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Thessaloniki 2001
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