“It seems, then, that hybridity and metamorphosis are very different images for the possibility we all face, that a thing may be, or become, partly or totally something else.”
“We might think of ornament as a medium for experiments in corporeal perception. Both arabesque and grotesque pose a kind of frisson or corporeal shock. The shock of the grotesque is that bodies that could not possibly belong together are juxtaposed - confronting the viewer with a body in pieces. The disruption offered by the arabesque is more abstract, as it implies not a body in pieces as much as the mind dispersed. Arabesque and other kinds of pattern cajole our gaze to seek and search for what is beyond them, at the risk of perishing in the attempt ...”
