Blødende billeder
Vådlegemer, væskende animationer og billeder i flux
Keywords:
Bleeding imagery, animation, blood miracles, blood mechanics, hydromaterialityAbstract
How do images bleed, and – more importantly – why do images bleed? The Middle Ages is the right place to look for answers to these questions because medieval imagery exhibits a marked propensity for bleeding in an actual, bodily sense. Throughout the period, pictures and figures make use of blood to reach out to their viewer and consumer, often quite tangibly or even physiologically. Liquid animation is a common feature of holy blood miracles super naturam and hydraulic blood mechanics contra naturam. Both miraculous and mechanical bleeding invoke living body functions to animate the image as an organism in flux. As an embodied locus of confluence, the molten effigy liquefies received ontological distinctions and dissolves given thresholds between solid and fluid, animate and inanimate, this-worldly and other-worldly, life and death, image and reality. Actualizing “our bodies’ wet constitution” (Neimanis) as well as “the fundamental fluidity of matter” (Ingold and Simonetti), the bleeding crucifix exudes its visceral outpourings as a transgressive emission of power and grace that overflows the boundaries of individual bodies. The unifying “hydrocommons” reaches a culmination in potable images offering their sanguine secretions for physical consumption and, thus, for becoming one with the confluent community of the Corpus Christi.
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