Alchemy has three aspects: chemical work on matter; spiritual work by the alchemists on themselves; semantic work in creating a new form of symbol, often visual, expressing the identity of all things with each other. The aim is the transmutation of base matter, whether material or spiritual, into gold through the creation of the philosophers' stone.

Herbert Silberer in the late nineteenth century made the first study of alchemical imagery from a psychological point of view.I He took note of the early work of both Freud and lung in his analysis of the role of alchemical symbols in human maturation. Silberer, unlike Freud, did not dismiss the testimony of mystics who sometimes used alchemical images as metaphors for their experiences. They described their sense of union and identity with God, world and other humans. In short, they transcended the duality between subject and object, spirit and matter, male and female. Freud (and, on occasion, lung) dismissed such testi monies as a longing for the womb, evidence of psychological regression into less mature levels of the psyche.

Silberer accepted that alchemical symbols could well describe the regression of certain people into the pre-conscious, pre-speech, pre-individual levels of the neonate. However, for many others, these same symbols described a genuine evolution towards higher, more developed psychic levels. Indeed, alchemical symbols could function both in an 'upward' as well as in a 'downward ' direction. This was a problem in respect to spiritual illumination which the Catholic Church had always recognized. Since 'mystic' signs are ambiguous, the Church examined other factors in order to distinguish between the illuminated, the imbecillic and the demonic.

Jung argued further that alchemical images were archetypes, unvarying symbols of various psychological processes.2 In observing them, it was possible to recognize patterns in psychological maturation. For this to be achieved, the undeveloped but powerful unconscious mind had to unite with rational consciousness. Thus, the alchemists were projecting their own psychological changes onto matter in a mistaken identification with it. Jung identified these alchemical visions with the collective unconscious which was at the foundation of every human mind.

Hypnotic as Jung's theories are, they have to be questioned. Jung did not appreciate the historical changes in alchemy. Further, he did not understand, or could not accept, the full intentions of the alchemists. Through the process of seeing, they aimed to create a new language which would no longer distinguish opposites. Their aims were more radical even than Jung's own theory which actually protected the dualistic concepts of Western philosophy.

Jung derived his archetypes from the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of perfect, eternal ideas in the mind of God.

These were abstract forms which nature mirrors imperfectly. But Jung's theory is not always appropriate to alchemy. With regard to its visual imagery, for example, the symbols are displayed in cartoon-strip form in the manuscripts. The very presentation itself causes the meaning of each symbol to become inconstant. For, as one's eye scans the pictures, each image seems to be transferring its meaning along the line to its neighbours, even to those which, at first glance, are its logical opposite. The consequence of the process of viewing is that one can enter into the middle of an alchemical procedure. This does not occur in the case of a textual account which demands a sequential reading.

This gives alchemical symbols quite a different character from the heroic, absolute nature of Jung's archetypes, or ideas. In contrast, Jung's archetypes are founded on unchanging oppositions: child/old man, whore/mother, trickster/sage, animus/anima, male/female etc.3

Jung did not take account of the role of the viewer in the meaning and functioning of alchemical imagery. Thus, he failed to recognize its full implications for Western philosophy and psychology. Visual observation was important to the alchemists in gaging the success of their work, since they lacked measuring equipment and were not clear about the chemical construction of most of their substances.

However, Jung did notice, and, this fact led him to despair, that for the alchemists each symbol ultimately represents the one same thing. Hence, the strange confusion and ambiguity of alchemical theories. For, literally, in the eyes of the alchemists, nothing is separate from anything else and, more, everything IS everything else. Their vision is monistic. The world is one substance which they called 'prime matter' or ‘mercury’. It is irrelevant to ask whether this is a spiritual or a material substance. The very question makes no sense if there exists only one thing anyway.4

In the laboratory, however, it was necessary to begin in the realm of differentiated form and to find 'prime matter' chemically. This was half the battle. The texts never revealed the secret. They called it various names-  'inform chaos', 'blood' and every possible known human, animal and mineral substance. There are heart-rending and scarcely credible accounts of who tried what, whether in the chemical flask or in the stomach. The results were often unexpected (gunpowder, sulphur products, brandy, mercury poisoning). However, theoretically, the next step was to remove the original form of prime matter (kill it) and, by sowing the seed of gold in the now 'dead' matter, imprint onto it the form of the philosopher's stone. Hence, the many scenes of sex and violence in the manuscripts (the medieval Sunday Sun). The stone would then produce either gold from base metals or the elixir of life.

In the original seventeenth century source for Farrell and Parkin's alchemical emblems the central character is Mercury in the form of an angel/cupid with wings.5 Some of their photographs concern the Eros of alchemy, although as a much subdued, more poignant and contemplative experience, rather than the usual outrageous sexual battles.

Alchemists sought to 'evolve ' matter by freeing the spirit, or Mercury, trapped in it (anima mundi or pneuma). Mercury mediates between heaven and earth. His function as the Redeemer of alchemy is similar to that of Christ (though it is simplistic to identify Christ with either Mercury or the philosophers' stone in alchemy). In Greek erotic myth Eros united matter to God. Mercury has his nature also.

Mercury has many contradictory significations. It is a purposely open sign indicating ambiguity and paradox, symbolizing the childlike nature of primeval matter in need of maturation.

This sign can be the chemical substance quicksilver. It can be one of the alchemical Trinity of Being (Moon-Mercury-Sun / Silver-Mercury-Gold / Materia-Spiritus-Anima). It may also represent the volatile spirits which are separated from the matter in the alchemical flask while both are purified through distillation and calcination. Or Mercury may be first matter in its impure state.

Conversely, it may signify the end result as the philosophers' stone in its pure state as the union of opposites. Thus, Mercury may be the hermaphroditic child of the Sun and Moon in a resolution of their sexual conflict.6

The images chosen by Farrell and Parkin are not intended to be read as a series. Each one expresses the same longing for perfection through following the higher Eros to union with God. Nonetheless, each refers to highly specific stages in the alchemical procedure.

The source for the images is a very rare seventeenth century Rosicrucian poem, intended for private meditation and concerned with the aspiration to divinity. The text is illustrated with original figurative engravings which may be interpreted alchemically. The illustrations are quite unique to this poem. The text appears elsewhere with variant imagery. It is little known to scholars. Thus, Farrell and Parkin have retrieved an important historical document. The whole series has a biblical couplet attached to each image.

Farrell and Parkin have chosen some of these for their translation.

The photograph of Eros/Mercury crucified is the most striking. The form is related to meditative Catholic crucifixions in which the Virgin Mary silently reflects on Christ's sacrifice. But, in the alchemical context it describes, first, Mercury (the anima) trapped in prime matter and, second, the 'killing' of prime matter (or mercury in its 'poisonous' state) in order to rid it of the impurities that render it base.

The image, however, is also an alchemical sexual conjunction. Crucifixion can have a sexual connotation in myth. Mystical texts interpret Christ nailed to the Cross as 'wedding' his Bride. In this context it recalls the ancient annual sacrifice of the King (as described in Frazer 's Golden Bough). This was a fertility ritual related to matriarchal cultures. Such a meaning passed into alchemy. The image can also have homosexual connotations both in early alchemy and in other contexts.

Here, Mercury is crucified on a tree which Farrell and Parkin have interpreted as bearing golden fruit. It is a traditional image of the alchemical tree of the metals, itself a metaphor of the philosophers' stone.7 The fruit is the gold produced by the stone, itself created out of the purgations and torments of prime matter. Mercury bears wings to signify his nature as spirit, an angelic guide. He is the volatile bird of alchemical distillation.

Most of the images describe the longing for union in terms of painful piercing or burning. The strongest of these is the figure personified as hunter/Diana (Moon goddess). Male or female is not specified. It has laid aside a mask, the symbol of false persona/hypocrisy/pride. From its heart arise four arrows aimed at God who takes the form of a downward looking eye and two ears. The all-seeing eye of God is an ancient hieroglyph. His ears are rarer. The image is an early stage of alchemy in which the opposites, spirit and earth, are totally set apart from each other. There is only aspiration.

The crucifixion is a serene image. It is probably one of the penultimate stages of the process. More unpleasant is another scene referring to the purgation of base matter, or the 'killing' of poisonous Mercury. The angel of God smiles Job in the cave inhabited by venomous serpents. It is a rare appearance of the snake symbol in this text. It directly signifies Mercury. Prime Matter is reduced to even more basic form in order to isolate the impurities.

To begin the process of union, Eros melts the heart of an androgynous child with the sweetness of his words. The picture signifies union of the Sun and Moon in base matter. In prime matter all the opposites are present but they are confused together rather than truly united: a childlike condition. The symbol represents the effect of alchemical fire on matter. Opposition (fire/water, male/female etc) is referred to by the sea. These must be united. The castle is an alchemical furnace. The image is very subtle. It is a romantic rather than a sexual alchemical conjunction. There are several conjunctions. This would be an early one because of the youthfulness of the protagonists and their delicate, as yet uncertain, sexuality.

Elsewhere, the Poor Fool is begging for love and, thus, salvation from Eros (the longing for divine Being). He is drowning, being fished and being trapped at the same time. In this form he is still base matter (but also a Wise Fool for he will become gold eventually). In the original illustration his bells carry the alchemical symbol for 'earth'. Here the sea shows that matter has now been placed in the alchemical flask. The image may indicate the release or 'fishing-out' of spirit from matter in the distillation/circulation process in order to purify it. The furnace is represented by the castle in the background. Mercury in the boat as catalyst/intermediary organizes the procedure.

Alchemy was sometimes compared to music because of the importance of right proportion to both arts. In Pythagorean theory they both related to the singing celestial bodies and, thus, to astrology. Hence, the Muse proclaims that she sings to the greater Being. (Her lute has eight strings like the eight heavenly spheres, the number also of Saturn, or lead). Earthly Cupid with his bows and arrows is conquered and all the vainglory of the globe is far beneath the spiritual adept. Or rather it is now at her feet but she gazes away still further towards divinity which she is to wed. The Muse is the Queen of alchemy, the silver producing stone. With its reference to gold coinage, the image describes the last stage of the process as the gold producing stone is worked. The withered alchemical trees are about to blossom again. On one of them hangs the laurel crown of victory. The birds on the shield refer to the volatile spirits of distillation and to the alchemical Trinity of Moon-Mercury-Sun finally nearing total purification.

It must be noted how rare are such very direct references to alchemy in contemporary art. Most artists use alchemy in a cavalier and generalized way or sporadic details from it (usually conjunctions).

Alchemists have always reflected the society, culture and especially the politics of their time.8 Contemporary artists such as Farrell and Parkin are not merely reviving decrepit ideas in an attempt to retreat from material reality.

For example, Joseph Beuys, with his intention to spiritually re-generate humanity, as well as the German peoples, not only disseminated but also developed further concepts drawn from the history of medicine, alchemy and other esoteric fields. In fact, most contemporary alchemical art is influenced far more heavily by nineteenth century Theosophy than by medieval Hermetic texts.9 Arturo Schwartz's interpretation of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass as an alchemical saga influenced many artists and art-historians. In fact, it remains unproven that Duchamp's primary interests were alchemical. Schwartz, more likely, wrote a new alchemical treatise. 10

To clarify the actual relationship between art and alchemy in the twentieth century it is helpful to divide artists into two camps:

1) those who directly employed the conventional iconographic motifs of alchemical emblematics; and

2) those who saw the hermetic endeavour as a sweeping paradigmatic metaphor of artistic creation in the most general sense. As one might expect, the latter greatly outnumbered the former…

...The Great Work (Alchemical Practice) =Artistic

Creation: 2) Artifex (Alchemist) =Artist…11

Artists such as Paul Klee compared an art-work to a simile of the Creation or re-Creation of the world, just as the alchemist claimed to be producing a microcosm of the world in his flask. The artist was a kind of magus. Earlier in this century the avant-garde had a concept of itself as a redemptive class of prophets leading common humanity onwards.

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future ... The word ART when reversed, or read after the manner of sacred and primitive characters from right to left, gives three initials which express the different grades of the Great Work. T signifies triad, theory and travail; R, realization; A, adaptation.'2

Unfortunately, alchemy can be misused. The fate of the male/hero/artist was a central theme in painting of the late seventies and early eighties. There was a crisis over the nature of 'masculinity' caused by the attack of the feminist movement, as well as a broader disbelief in artists as visionary prophets. Therefore, alchemical myths of rejection and suffering leading to a glorious resurrection were appealing to male artists in search of an excuse to be self-sacrificial. Examples of this are in the works of Francesco Clemente (Stations of the Cross) and Sandro Chia.

The artist aspires to be both a son of God and a demon; he is torn between the sublime and the squalid ... the artist knows that he must be reborn at every moment, and it is his destiny that every time he falls he will rise again, that every descent will be the preparation for a new ascent. For as the son of God he has the right to be born again-a right that no other has.13

'Alchemy' in the mid-eighties became a handy metaphor conjuring up notions of 'transformation', 'evolution', 'change', 'hope', 'magic', etc. Suddenly, many surprising names revealed themselves to be 'alchemists'. Had a replacement term been found at last for that discredited concept 'art'? Since art-works were rocketing in price as a form of recession investment, 'alchemical' truly described the condition of the art-world.

In particular, the theme appeared at the Biennales of Sydney (6th Biennale, 1986), Venice (42nd, 1987) and in the Art and Time exhibition at the Barbican, London, 1985. They stereotyped alchemy, focusing on its sexual symbology, rather than on the larger notion of unification of dualities. The alchemical egg haunted regressive art critics in search of haven.

... after the traumatic realization that the centre cannot hold, there is still the egg ... Its round form approximates the circle, a sign of totality, unity, harmony, the universe ... 14

In fact, when artists really do use genuine alchemical concepts, they engage them in two different ways. Those who use symbols and icons to illustrate alchemy. The work borders on decorative 'acid' kitsch and contains a large narrative element. These include artists of the post-war school of Vienna and others working in Eastern Europe, such as Wolfgang Hutter, Ernst Fuchs and Ljuba. From the early seventies their works have taken 'psychydelically' -related art forms. Unfortunately, earlier Surrealists such as Dali largely fall into this category. Among the Italian transavantgardists, Stefano di Stasio, Flavia Passamonti, Bruno Ceccobelli, Claudio Parmiggiani, have produced alchemical work. In Australia, John Lethbridge, with varying degrees of success, has referred to alchemy.

Second, there are those who emphasize their unformed raw materials, thereby, attempting to re-create an alchemical procedure. Arte Povera in Italy from 1969 re-introduced the alchemical concept of transmutation of base matter (the debris of industrial, urbanized society) into the 'gold' of art. Such an action effected simultaneous spiritual transformation in the artist and in society. In this group must be included Max Ernst, Beuys, and, in a highly specific way, Duchamp (for his studies of light, optics and 'sight-lines'). Pollock used alchemy, due to his Jungian interests and to Kurt Seligmann's occultist history. So did Gottlieb. Yves Klein owed his radical art-practice to Theosophy and his use of gold and Klein blue to the alchemists. 15

Sigmar Polke is an outstanding alchemist in his investigation of heat- and light-sensitive chemicals and of the transformation of photographic material (Venice Biennale, 1986). Mario and Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Eric Orr in Australia are more Arte Povera. While Robert Owen has a dramatic, sensual use of alchemy which is sheer visual beauty. Jannis Kounellis, though he discourages tight alchemical interpretations, acknowledges the same general intentions especially in his use of fire.

Francesco Clemente's work encompasses both categories of alchemical art. Like the alchemists, he engages in a semiotic quest for a type of sign which can unite opposites. Sandro Chia, Luciano Fabro and Rebecca Horn have used alchemical references in relation to visual linguistics. In New Zealand, Julia Morison has used complex systems involving matter 'speaking itself', icons and semiology, with uneven results. Far fewer women artists use alchemical concepts, but that may change as different aspects of alchemy come to light.

Rose Farrell and George Parkin's alchemical photographs, Worthy Habits and Mantles, created at Griffith University this year fall into the second category of alchemical art.16

Their primary interest is in the coding system of photographic practice, in the way that an image is constructed by light and by the mechanism of the camera lens. They are concerned with translation of pictorial codes from one visual form into another. They do not 'copy ' other images. Decisions have to be made about how to rebuild the syntax of a flat painted or drawn image into the three-dimensional theatre of a studio, living bodies included. What sort of colour to add to the black and white alchemical drawings, how much is to be human flesh , fabric or 3-D props? How much is to be constructed out of plaster and paint? (With a visual trick regarding the materiality of one character). It all has to be redirected into the form of the photograph. This itself is bound under the law of chance however careful the preparation.

Unlike Farrell and Parkin's earlier use of public imagery, such as the Mannerist religious sources for Repentance, alchemy is a very private art form (albeit, a startling and dramatic one). Thus, a careful reticence is present in the photographs. Farrell and Parkin have left large sections in 'graphic ' form as a three-dimensional translation of the original delicate contemplative text. Paradoxically, the images are more overtly theatre than the earlier Baroque rhetorical sets due to the use of painted plaster. The adding of a black frame to the alchemical images, incorporated as part of the shooting process, reminds us that they come from the pages of a book. They are meant to hang freely like a scroll within a box frame. It suggests the discrete privacy of a book, also of an illuminated manuscript in a museum case. This is more appropriate than framing the alchemical photographs in the grand iconic manner of a public painting.

The plaster, painted with graphics taken from the engraved sources, is both flat and 3D, for the absence of back lighting causes the scenery to cast a shadow on the backdrop. The rejection of realistic illusion is reminiscent of the stylization of theatre sets, as are the yellowish tones of the imagery and waxy faces of the characters. They give the work an element of detachment which prevents romantic melancholia. Pensiveness could cloy and over-load the images. Since the alchemical visions are already so passionate in narrative, the artificiality of the photographs in colour, struck-poses, and drawn-sets is a welcome defence against an over-dose of alchemical super-realism.

In fact, Farrell's and Parkin's earlier Baroque work is quite tame in comparison to the potency of the present alchemical text. Curiously, in the originals of the photographs, the naivety of the engraver has given a sweet disengagement and repose to his mythological characters. They pass gently through the strangest and most painful engagements. Farrell and Parkin are translating this absence of emotion directly into a naturalistic physical form. In such a context the people become other-worldly as well as openly theatrical.

However, Farrell and Parkin retain the soft amiability of the originals. Their photography, whatever the subject, is honest and unpretentious.

Farrell and Parkin are creating a new alchemical text. They are engaging in a real alchemical procedure by concentrating on the materiality of their practice, that is, on visual form as it mutes between two and three dimensions (book, installation, photograph)-from life, to mind, to engraving, to stage-set, to light, to print. They are far from merely illustrating a text. But, in terms of art-theory, the issue of verbalizing what these two artists are doing specifically is vexed. There have been critical attempts to fit them, unsatisfactorily, into the too-tight shoe of post-modernist deconstruction.l7 Nor is their work a camp debunking of the imagery, tearing down its power through mockery. They play it straight. Nor do they find it necessary to resort to anachronism as does Anne Zahalka. Such a strategy is redundant, for, any photograph is already in our own time and space. Thus, it prevents us from escaping the image by mystifying it into a left-over of another historical time.

Farrell and Parkin's work belongs in the category of a type of art that is rarely, if ever, seen in Australia, since this country lacks a living inheritance of classical and Renaissance imagery. The Italian transavant-garde, such as Carlo Maria Mariani, are an example of such work. Artists who recollect, reorganize and mirror a mind haunted by the rhetoric of spiritual authority, pagan and Catholic. However, Farrell and Parkin have no such personal connection with their imagery, no emotional involvement related to their backgrounds. They have no nostalgia like the Italians and no bones to pick. They come to the imagery freely with open detachment. But not with cold analysis. They admit the strength of such iconography and its attraction. Working with it is an intense and exhausting experience.

Like the European work, however, their subject matter, whether public (film stills, Film Noir, 1987), political propaganda and Socialist Realism (Red Squares, 1987), Mannerist and Baroque religious iconography (Repentance, 1988, Miserable Pleasures and Glorious Mysteries, 1989 ) or private (alchemical) deals with loss of meaning, the loss of knowledge and, hence, of power. Ignorance of the original meanings presents a conundrum to the viewer whose reading of them generates strange narratives, just like the characters in Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies who read the stylizations of Tarot cards as literal truth, rather than understanding them to be conventions.

Repentance consisted of eleven large colour photographs of models in biblical garb with props such as crowns, keys, crucifixes, skulls, scrolls and rocks: St Veronica, St Francis in Ecstasy, The Virgin in Prayer, the Annunciation. Also, there were two landscapes Blue Landscape with Skull and Landscape with Keys.. (their sets photographed as installations without the human characters). The images intimate that religious iconography can nowadays be consumed just like any other commodity since it floats free of original context. It has become a bizarre, surrealistic world of fantasy to us. Twentieth century icons from film and politics have inherited the power of ancient imagery. The material scale and exact presentation of these photographs "conforms to contemporary art display convention. Their context is the art institution and any significance is secular". I8

Miserable Pleasures and Glorious Mysteries was based on a little known Virgin Mary type from Quito Ecquador, the Apocalyptic Woman clothed in the sun and crowned with the stars, the moon at her feet, wearing wings from the Apocalypse. Fifty 20 x 24 Polaroids were displayed unframed, hung casually as if on the walls of Latin American churches. The installation was completed by a 6 x 6 foot Pieta (for which the artists had posed themselves), also based on an emotive image in Quito. Hanging as a scroll, there were candles and flowers at its feet. (A practical ploy, intended to prevent damage from viewers' feet).

Farrell and Parkin's primary interest is not in religious rhetoric as such. Another new work will examine the passing of the tradition of complex bandaging, another loss of forms and of knowledge.

More central to their work is the problem of the specific nature of a photograph. As Roland Barthes has pointed out, our culture is still not clear about what it is seeing when it examines a photograph. Viewers look through the surface as if through a window, naively fooled by the seeming actuality, the presence of the object to them in their own time and space. Viewers perceive the object rather than the image of it. Rarely do they see the photograph itself as an object.19

In fact, this expectation of documentary truth means that photographers are subjected to out-dated aesthetic pressure. More so than painters or installationists. There are contradictory demands placed on photographers: first, that the photograph be a true window on what is seen: yet, at the same time, that it obey academic criteria of form. Hence, the unconventional, deliberately underlit quality of Farrell and Parkin's alchemical imagery is as disturbing as the subject-matter, causing the viewer to peer and squint anxiously into the photograph. In an academic painting this would not be a problem.

Farrell and Parkin create a photograph which is, above all, an object in itself. It does, indeed, have a referent in film, political propaganda, art history, alchemy. Nonetheless, it stands free of such 'text' .

Many people find Farrell and Parkin's imagery confrontational and embarrassing. Images that were thought to be dead and lacking intellectual respectability continue in full strength, regardless. Their presence disturbs and shuffles us aside. They cause us to try to remember fretfully something we once knew but cannot locate again. Not interpretations of anything, disconnected from context, they continue as pure performance. Like an unscripted Warhol movie without a story-line, we view them hypnotically. Someone might let us into the action and release us from our breath-held voyeurism.

Farrell and Parkin, in common with the alchemical illustrators want to create actualized visions of the contradictory, of the paradoxical, to show the impossible as possible. But, their work is not a dream. The materialism of the works gives them directness. For example, compare the glamourized hedonism of Bill Henson 's imagery. Purporting to document, Henson, in fact, romanticizes the sordid, makes it sexually desirable, a fantasy of beautiful decadence. This is the consumerist aggression against our personal life which magazines like The Face promote in their fashion photography.

The use of visual imagery by the alchemists was a strategy intended to 'wove' the truth of their strange claims by showing them to the eye, so that reason would be silenced by fact. For, in medieval theology sight was divine. Mystics 'saw' sacred visions. Drawn images were a type of mystical vision. Hence, logicians could no longer query the claims of the alchemists when 'revealed' in visual form. In any case, alchemical symbols visualize aphorisms, rather than sequential logic.

Farrell and Parkin's photographs create a text which was the visual ideal of the alchemists. The alchemists did not mean that their images should be read only as metaphors of a banal chemical process. They intuited and maybe SAW them as real accounts of what was actually happening in those particular forms. A visual presence in the text caused the alchemical process to happen spontaneously. Morris Berman has called such a psychological state 'participatory consciousness' .20

Sight unites viewer and thing viewed, spirit and matter. In the medieval esoteric concept vision was actively creative. It made and unmade matter, just as the alchemists unmade prime matter in their flasks and made the philosopher's stone out of it. Thus, the world is totally subjective.

In the materialized visions and paradoxes of Farrell and Parkin's theatres there is such a philosophical implication of visual monism. It is made more clear by their recourse to alchemy. However, they do this without manipulating subjective emotion. Their work is not expressionistic. In the rationale of their practice metaphor becomes literal. Their style registers no distinctions between the symbolic and the literal use of visual language.