The Body Book by Media Arts Department Member Marissa Cameron: A Review

The Chicago Academy for the Arts held its Winter Juried Media Arts Show February 13, 2009 at the LaSalle Building on Irving Park Road in Chicago. In addition to reading poetry and excerpts from short stories and novels, and showing films, students offered for sale limited edition copies of hand-made creations. The following is a review of the piece submitted by Media Arts Department freshman Marissa Cameron.

Cameron’s multi-media arts project is an intriguing combination of biological science, geometry, sculpture, literary device, ancient religion, and popular metaphysics. A mysterious, shiny, colorful, pyramid-shaped box, it informs the viewer right away that the body of the work is entombed like a mummified Egyptian oracle that will be revealed only if, say, the god Osiris allows it to be. The project’s contents are listed as a series of organs on the front side, promising a kind of anatomy and physiology treasure hunt.

The title is The Body Book. The metaphor of Nature as Book is a literary device that is traceable to medieval conceptions of nature and which was heavily used by nineteenth century American scientists. The naturalist John Muir used it, for instance, to help uncover for a literate eastern readership the wonders of the glaciated Yosemite. “Two years ago,” he wrote, “while picking flowers in the mountains back of Yosemite Valley, I found a book. It was blotted and storm-beaten; all of its outer pages were mealy and crumbly, the paper seemed to dissolve like the snow beneath which it had been buried; but many of the inner pages were well preserved and though all were more or less stained and torn, whole chapters were easily readable.” Similarly, Cameron sees that connections between phenomena are not material; rather, they are intellectual, or ideal. There is divine intent for making the human body, whose foundation was laid down in the dawn of time, and can be reverently interpreted with a kind of religious text.

The stiff paper sides are held together by circular rings and are bedecked in wall paper motifs of soothing pastels under clear plastic overlay. The front side is a door that beckons the mesmerized viewer cum grave-robber digging in ancient Egyptian sands to access it by loosing the fancy ribbon drawstrings festooned with finely sculpted bead pull handles that hold it shut.

Down comes the gate like a medieval castle entrance. A raised palm of a hand print greets the investigator to the EPIDERMIS, the surface layer of the body’s cutaneous epithelium. It is on the side of a smaller pyramid. So, the investigator discovers that to reveal the body will require unpacking the concentric layers of the body’s organ systems like a series of Chinese boxes. Other symbols on the pyramid’s sides for this organ include Barbie’s and Ken’s naked torsos and a thumb’s up gesture. On the bottom is a picture of foot prints in the sand.

The next “chapter,” the CIRCULATORY SYSTEM, is a combination of the metaphorical and the literal. Blood flowing through the body is like riding the L, especially when it circulates around the Loop. Cut outs from CTA’s Blue and Red transit routes illustrate the sides, and the Loop’s is presented on the bottom. A cut out of the oceanic thermal convection current finishes the pattern. Half of the current is red, and the other half is blue. Warmed by the Sun (“red”), tropical waters are driven toward the poles. They ride the surface buoyed by the heat, which makes them less dense. When they reach the poles they have cooled (“blue”), are denser, and sink to the bottom of the ocean to return to the equator as the submerged parts of the circuit. Cameron is expressing the idea that Earth contains a set of embedded natural systems, from very small to very large, which cycle matter as energy passes through them.

The next pyramid spooks the investigator with the image of a skull made out of sweet confection. Outlined with colorful pastry icing, as if to moderate the Halloween scare tactic, the image introduces the SKELETON. An x-ray of the hand, the rib cage, the sacrum and coxal bones, and, on the bottom of course, the lower appendages and feet complete the pattern.

Open up the pyramid, and there’s the Grinch who stole Christmas. Using the clever and smarmy mischievousness of the Grinch’s heart, Cameron beckons dissectors to explore the body’s INTERNAL ORGANS. Like a body-snatching thief with a bag of visceral booty, she shows you a bottle of antacid syrup for the a tummy ache you may be feeling by now, a fluorescent bulb that stands for the brain, an image of Millennial Park’s silvery “BEAN” for the kidney, and, on the bottom, the label to a bottle of laxative to denote what comes out this end.

Immersed in the guts of the matter, investigators are finally led into the sanctum of the body’s core. They will need to dust off their copies of The Da Vinci Code if they are to understand what the heart of the matter is really for Cameron. There at the center of the tomb is resurrected a small, clear Plexiglas pyramid, riveted together by little circular fasteners. This represents life’s smallest equilibrium systems, THE CELL and THE ATOM, out of which all of life is made. Rather ingeniously, it also represents Cameron’s attempt to transcend both to the mystery that lies at the center: THE SOUL. With this cute little plastic devise, she puts the investigator in the place of the protagonist of Dan Brown’s detective mystery novel. A dogged hunt for revelatory clues kept secret for millennia leads the seeker toward the answer to the mystery of life, how the body, a microcosm of the infinite, is a system held together by forces in balance.

The Body Book is a remarkable work. It is an arresting fusion of scientific and religious elements tensely held together. The art is not in the pyramid per se; it is in the viewer who is compelled to resolve this creative tension set up deliberately by Cameron. Like Eeyore who resolves the tension Winnie the Pooh and Piglet feel by putting his broken birthday balloon into and then out of the sticky honey pot, the viewer is compelled to take the pyramid apart and then put it back together again. The result is restoration of balance in the viewer. And, with enough repetition, the viewer recognizes an overarching idea that ties all the elements together, that heaven and earth, including atom and cell, organ and body, land and ocean, planet and sun, solar system and galaxy, all in the universe, reverberate with a rather remarkable and, perhaps, sacred tendency to return to new states of equilibrium as the forces that disturb them come and go.

David DePrez

Science Department

Why I Teach at Chicago Academy for the Arts

It is a special privilege to be a part of the small, intimate community of learners and professionals at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. Here I find it easy to apply my skills doing what I love to do: teach science. I have a highly supportive administration, which helps me advance the science curriculum and the excellence of science instruction at the school. Spirited by the arts and a chance to learn, students want to be here and are, therefore, very teachable. I also enjoy the challenge of getting students to recognize the importance of integrating fundamental scientific concepts and process skills into their training in the arts.

Dreams of Passion Wide Awake

After many years of living, loving, and learning, I feel ready to share what I know. Evolutionary time is long, and eternity even longer. I think that one can effectively recognize the properly attenuated place set for an individual human being in the scheme of things if one lives long enough. I believe this recognition will help me in my choice of words to share in this blog.

And so I start with Esme Kenney.

Saturday afternoon, March 7, 2009, Esme Louise Kenney was beaten, abducted, molested, strangled, and then partially burned by a convicted murderer and sex offender. The tragedy occurred while I watched a Saturday matinee performance of The Pillow Man. The performance included a scene written by the pillow man character during which the character played by freshman Cora Swise is flogged, crucified, and then buried alive.

The passion that 14-year-old Cora was acting on stage in our Chicago Academy for the Arts where I teach was actually happening to 13-year-old Esme at that very moment near her Cincinnati School for the Creative and Performing Arts where she was enrolled as a middle school student.

This juxtaposition of passions conjured up memories of a film I saw in 1978, A Dream of Passion starring Melina Mercouri and Ellen Burstyn. Mercouri's character is a Greek diva who returns to her native country after many years to perform in Euripides’s play Medea on the actual stage in Dionysia where it was first performed in 431 B. C. Medea killed her own children to revenge her husband Jason's betrayal. Mercouri learns that an American in a nearby Greek prison actually did kill her own children to revenge her Greek husband's philandering. She interviews the woman in prison, played by Burstyn, initially for publicity, but finds herself assimilating into her rehearsals the passion the woman suffers as she tells her story.

I am horrified knowing now how poor Esme groped and writhed in terrified agony at the very moment of Cora's acting, now reminiscent of the final scene in Dream. Burstyn's character is shown in flash asides gripped in pain on the jail cell floor, tormented by the memory of her actions, while Mercouri's character passionately enacts the reality of them during opening night on Euripides’s stage.

A Dream of Passion had been the most riveting fictional act of passion I had ever seen. It too had been a Saturday matinee. It was offered to unwitting passersby on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, NC where I had gone for badly needed time off from counseling emotionally disturbed boys in a residential therapeutic wilderness camping program. The marque indicated that it was a foreign film, and initially had not made much of an impression on me. But when it was over, I was stunned, transfixed in my chair, unable to move. Everyone slowly got up to leave except me. There I sat through the next showing and the next.

Now there is the passion of Esme Kenney. God inscrutably allowed the all but crucifixion of an unblemished innocent at the hands of a man manipulated by malevolent evil who was inexplicably lurking in the woods across the street from her home where she had gone jogging.

Esme's fate is now the most riveting act of passion I know. Uninvited, unscripted, unrehearsed, this passion really happened. I remain stunned, transfixed, immobilized.

So life sometimes imitates fiction, making the story so much harder to bear, especially given the kind and gentle nature of its victim in this case. Like the antagonist pillow man who is shot for writing such stories, even though the stories are collected and preserved, Esme's antagonist will surely be put on death row for his crimes and the story preserved so that Esme will never be forgotten.