Poor Nymphs, Poorer Selves

These poor nymphs of the present, distorted by the endless screens they must pass through before finding themselves in something resembling “the real world.” Unaccustomed to the weight of what we might call reality, they fall out of an infinite space-time into the brutal pull, or rather push, of gravity. Contorted and mutilated, their softened features and smooth, undifferentiated, albeit clothed, bodies still possess the residue of some former grace, now misplaced.

The nymph has historically been an encapsulation of humanity’s relationship with nature, a more pure, naive, sincere incarnation of life than we could ever hope to embody ourselves. The three poor, gray nymphs, splayed here at odd angles on the floor or leaning against the wall, rather resemble a shadow of their former selves—an embodiment of our collective decline and failure to reach some technologically enhanced ideal promised by the 21st century. Here, in this state of aspirational purgatory, the poor nymph is caught looking both forward and back, between a nostalgia for the porcelain-skin marble monoliths of ancient Greek and Roman statuary that embodied the height of artistic and, in terms of the Greek, engineering excellence—standing without tree stump or staff to hold them upright—and the imagined efficiency of our own replication and reconstruction within real and virtual futures that is somehow thought to ease our blight and take away our pain. 

This muddy space is one of glitches and afterimages, poor images and ever poorer selves. 

The nymphs, or ninfa, that Aby Warburg chronicled are “threshold beings,” frozen forever in a state of motion—between mobility and immobility—as an embodiment of universalized gesture (at least to his western, 20th century mind). This collection of innumerably repeated poses, from antiquity to the art historian’s 1920s present, that comprise his Mnemosyne Atlas, allegedly reveals “the life of images” or, I might argue by way of Panofsky, a history of bodily iconology. Yes, the gestures that characterize the figures culled by Warburg unveil a lasting, pseudomorphic correlation between past and present symbolization. We may continue to possess many of the same mannerisms and interpret them similarly, but no man alive tips his hat as he passes me on the street, and I should rather be alarmed if he makes eye contact at all. So while Panofsky attests that gestures carry some socially embodied and thus timeless meaning, our sociality inevitably shifts and with it the constant repetition and recontextualization, or more aptly insidious appropriation and manipulation, of gesture becomes the stuff of false narratives, and maybe even false hopes.

Is it a salute or is it a heil, is it ignorance or is it malice. It’s both, it’s neither; who’s looking and when? 

Now, trapped by the gaze of many lenses, the nymphs of the present are no longer carved in marble or wrought in bronze, but rather captured by the omnipresent presence of detection. The three individuals who allegedly offered up their bodily incarnations to the banal, algorithmic violence of our machines have here become depersonalized figures—products of a formula, a type. 

They are everyone and they are no one. 

— Hannah Sage Kay