Anodyne
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
 

Biomorphic abstraction is alive and well and living underwater, reports today's NYT:

"On page after page, it is as if aliens had descended from another world to amaze and delight. A small octopus looks like a child’s squeeze toy. A seadevil looks like something out of a bad dream. A Ping-Pong tree sponge rivals artwork that might be seen in an upscale gallery.

Interspersed among 220 color photographs are essays by some of the world’s top experts on deep-sea life that reflect on what lies beneath. For example, Laurence Madin of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution notes the violence that air and gravity do to creatures without internal or external skeletons when they are pulled up to the deck of a ship, obliterating their varieties of form and function.

'This unattractive jello-like mass,' he writes, 'is the unfair land version of amazing and delicate creatures that can display their true beauty only in their natural watery environment.' The photographs in the book right that wrong, and not just for jellyfish."
- posted by cjb @ 9:15 AM


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