loading . . . Mark Armijo McKnight Posthume __
_Imago Mortis_ translates to âImage of Death.â It is a concept that has representations as far back as the Middle Ages, likely exploding across imagery as an extension of the mood following years of bubonic plague, which killed off nearly 1/3 to 2/3âs of Europeâs population over the course of a decade. Over the years that followed, Christian tradition, no stranger to the image of death, further embraced its countenance as material for visual narrative. Christian societies during the Middle Ages through the twentieth century are indebted to the image of death, conveyed through sermons and general conversation about the foundation of their religion. Christâs crucifixion on the hill of Golgotha (itself a necro-pareidolic representation of a skull) in the New Testament is a significantly illustrated process. I use the word âprocessâ because, through twelve stages of the cross, it is often devised as a process of mourning and reconciliation. Each step filled with suffering and misery.
With modest conjecture, I relate the first significant imago mortis as the impression of Jesusâs face on the veil of Veronica, an image, drawn as a life mask, but that precludes the eternal image of death, followed shortly thereafter by the crucifixion and deposition of Jesusâs body from the cross. As the ascension bears no image, the imago mortis ends in Christâs figure supine, and limp, cared for by his family and painted ad infinitum by painters from Andrea Mantegna, Roger Van der Weyden, Rembrandt, to Max Beckmann. There is no shortage of imago mortis as religious iconography, nor of its use in post-plague Europe through the Renaissance.
A similar point of interest when discussing the historical image of death in the landscape through Western traditions of European art is the _Danse Macabre,_ or _Dance of Death_ , a traditional image, or type of animated memento mori that shows a skeleton or corpse mythically leading a group of people of all classes to the grave. From kings to paupers, all are invited to the tune of death, to follow, and to which inevitable end, the cessation of life presides over the present living tissue as an arguably fatalistic reminder of our mortal selves. Nobody is allowed to break the line, to release from the horseless cavalcade of necrotic destiny. It is manifest, inescapable, and a significant motif of imago mortis within the landscape of Western art founded on Christian traditions. Arguably, the cavalcade/procession is an interesting metaphor for this tradition, with death replaced by the Roman sentry.
Regarding the body of Christ in the tradition of iconography related to these tropes concerning death, it must be pointed out that the depiction of death through the lithe and suffering body of Christ has, at its genesis, a queer potential to be read as an emblem for the community. Christ, the eternal light of suffering, whose feminised Twinkish form is disrobed, and featured climbing Golgotha in pain, being whipped, asked to carry his own cross, crossing the divide into a territory of ecstasy, adjacent to tendencies in S&M. Mapplethorpe, thoough focussed on a more pagan and esoteric, if not outright Greek tradition of symbolic order emphaszied this in his more extrem work from the XYZ portfolio. His body, a temple to be twisted, made sufferable, and documented, a leatherboy with twinkish slenderness that revealed as much about this fascination with the boot and whip as it did with the shovel and casket, presenting a category that might be considered a type of _queer necrology._
Queer necrology in the case of Mapplethrope presents an interesting piece of conjecture between the historical tendencies of Western Art, and its Christian and pre-Christian roots, a steadfast interest in erotism combined with the exceptional foreknowledge of death through suffering, which many artists struggled with through the 1970s and 80s with the rise of AIDS and adapted while others suffered and died, most beautifully captured by Benetton, though with no small amount of controversy of David Kirbyâs death from AIDS, a religious representation of Christâs death by AIDS. This necrology can also be seen in the work of F. Holland Day in 1898, with his _The Seven Words_ , an autoportrait on a cross, in which Day, performing Christ in deathly ecstasy, delivers the last words of Christ.
In Mark Armijo McKnightâs work, the queer body is often situated within the Western American landscape. In his previous monograph, _Heaven is a Prison_ , the artist explores variations of gay coupling in an open landscape, defying the traditional notions of how the landscape has been co-opted by butch visions of American manifest destiny and the toxicity of masculinity in rugged and death-prone climates in the pursuit of what is, alleged to the notion of Manifest Destiny, God-given, thus suggesting that in claiming the landscape for queer masculinity, the vision of the American West can be reshaped to be inclusive, while also understanding its proximity to the American death drive on a short-chained leash. It is a defiant work that pushes against convention, that eliminates the saccharine Hollywood co-opting of the queer frontier image by Hollywood in films like Brokeback Mountain, and instead forces the viewer to understand the death drive (and intimacy) related to partial scenes of S&M sex. The pain, mixed with the violence of the ritual, the dehumanization of golden showers, and the chains allude to a similar ecstatic suffering that we see along the horizon of Western art.
Where this motif changes in Posthume, Markâs new book, is that in the new work, we have transcended from the mortal place and are now posited in a realm that qualifies less as a playground for sex than an acceptance of queer necrology full tilt. The motif of imago mortis is exemplified in the living corpses of Mark and his intimates reclining along the landscape, prone, sitting, and playing in skull masks, reminding the viewer of the carnivalesque paintings of Belgian/Scottish artist James Ensor, whose masks often featured skulls and whose psychedelic paintings are like a fever dream. This lucidity of death, recumbent or prostrate, playing in an idyllic, halcyon spring/summer depiction of the American West, draws on a purgatorial or liminal state and is an incredible stage to matriculate from the fucking of his previous work into the fully realized queer necrology of the present.
In understanding queer necrology as a symbolic order of suffering, death, and queer life, we might also suggest that the -ology of the term be understood in a fourth context: ecology. Whereas queer ecologies are discussed widely in the context of the 21st Century, what i believe makes Markâs work sensational and progressive is that he is tying the element of the ecological body to the queer community, but is 3doing so through the lens of death and the Western cononization of the tiopic of suffering in the arts which provides a flexible attitude to the work and question whether or not the death is related to something larger in the age of ecocide. Though I believe Markâs work is oriented toward ritual, abjection, self, and queer ecology, we simply cannot leave out or dismiss the death drive present in the work. And what this does is bridge queerness to the universal topic of ecology. This suggests that, instead of shoe-gazing his way through the lens of prohibitive queerness, what Armijo McKnight is doing is tying every landscape, every individual, every promise of God to the millstone of magnificent and sublime death. The subtext, which presents as a Danse Macabre, reminds us that no matter our class, race, gender, or sexual preferences, we are all heading to the same mound of dirt.
Concerning the pictures themselves, having mentioned the various recumbent Christian depositional poses via Day and Ensorâs specific carnivalesque painterly framing, I think, photographically speaking, I find a brilliant synthesis of the work of Frederick Sommer in Markâs work. Sommer was also adept at seeing the landscape as a paradox of death and chaos as he tried to compress and frame it before his camera. In a similar fashion, Wynn Bullock, particularly his image of a naked child lying in the forest, is invoked through Markâs sparse use of the landscape. Arthur Tressâs and Ralph Eugene Meatyard also spring to mind, the first for the playful, surreal, queer, and morbid dressing up of the subject, and Meatyard for the masks. Clarence John Laughlin creates a visual world, albeit in closer proximity to non-Western forms, to suggest a potential synergy between works. As mentioned to Mark, I also see his work as having some minor legacy to Edmund Teske, a Californian artist who should be better known. Finally, it would be remiss of me not mention William Mortensen, the master of the photographic macabre, whose Laguna Beach school of photography presented a playful dream-like investigation of pictorial photography based on the tropes of Hollywood and the Witchâs Sabbath. Though not Christian, the interest in abjection, horror, and death pervades Mortensenâs work.
What makes Posthume itself grandiose first is its size. A huge 14Ă18 book in a craft-paper brown box, screen printed with title and delicate edging, cannot be ignored. For the most part, I am not exactly a fan of huge books like this, but in the case of Posthume, it is necessary, as the 14 tips on plates must give the viewer an understanding of analog photography. The plates are tipped in, and the fleshy craft paper colored of the box suggests a type of communion with the images that, in turn, make them fleshy, and in doing so transubstantiate the book into something organic and bodily, and give the viewer pause to understand the ritual of experiencing the book in a very physical way, which reflects the work itself. The use of craft packaging and paper also reduces the object to a minimal and acutely designed object that enables, but does not distract from, the work inside, a facet of publishing that recently has been ignored for over-complicated gimmickry design that asks the viewer to read the design over the images, which is unfortunate and annoying. Deftly handled, TBW has given Posthume space to articulate its essential nature to the viewer, thereby emphasizing Markâs work. I wish more publishers would take note.
For me, this was my highlight of last year. It was the one book that I struggled to write about because I wanted to do it justice. It is rare that works of this nature come across my desk and will be cared for, examined, and thought about for years to come, as they have lasting power, are universal, and can be seen in a tradition of image-making that, though socially and politically flawed, is rich. I mentioned this before, but I think it will be hard to compete with TBW over the next few years. They are consistently knocking it out of the park with their productions. For Mark, I canât thank you enough for your sensibility, your openness, and the truest aspects of your vision, which supersede our daily travails. Your vision is unique, and it has been a pleasure watching your evolution.
# Mark Armijo McKnight
# Postume
# TBW Books https://americansuburbx.com/2026/01/mark-armijo-mcknight-posthume.html
