Metamorphosis

In the Marina Warner reading the myth of Er is used as an example to describe the meaning of the word. In the myth heroes choose their fate for their next life. The heroes future metamorphoses in some ways to correspond to their past character. The souls are deathless and migrate from one form to another. The idea of changing from one form to another is described by Marina Warner as metamorphosis.

“Metamorphosis now evokes a vision of endless, creative energy and movement, ranging from chaos and degeneration to the possibility of almost infinite refinement and transfiguration.” It sounds like the route towards utopia. (Week four.)

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century botanists used the word metamorphosis as the vital principle of natural processes of generation, growth, evolution and decay. Metamorphosis is now taking place all around us. It governs the organic development of all living things, and the individual transformations that take place in everyone’s life, Warner writes. She further suggests that the word has metamorphosed itself through history. Partly as it has encountered with science and the theory of evolution. “It now evokes images of not just of shape shifting but of a smooth, organic unfolding of forms in time and space – a process imitated in the computer technique ‘morphing’.”

With all the advanced technologies of the 21^st century there is a potential extent of metamorphosis. Cloning, stem cell research, cyborg prostheses, transplantation of animal organs, genetic modifications of both foods and ultimately of ourselves. As the reading points out, these are very complex issues. Are we heading towards dystopia?

The way Kapoor, as a sculptor, uses the word is close to the way architects use it. “translation of forms from plane to volume, from line to field, the tension between contour and space, and then boundary of inner and outer bodies.”