Bill Armstrong wants to unsettle your eye. His colorful blurred images are meant to disorient you, and I Modi (The Ways) re-imagines a collection of notorious Renaissance erotica detailing 16 sexual positions.
Armstong has long manipulated found images by cutting them up and reassembling them, applying paint, then photographing them up close with the camera’s focus set to infinity. The result is dreamy, alternating between haunting and titillating. He first shot this way in the late '90s, using odds and ends he'd find around New York, and fell in love with the technique. “I never shot with a focused camera again,” he said.
About a decade later, Armstrong was rifling through the stacks of the Metropolitan Library looking for reproductions of Renaissance-era figurative master drawings when he found a thin paperback of engravings, some of which “were a little erotic.” He felt a bit like his preteen self, back in Boston in the mid '60s, sneaking a peek at his first Playboy. “When I was a kid even finding an image with a breast showing was a huge deal,” he said.
A bit of online sleuthing to track the source of those bawdy drawings led him to one of the more bizarre and confusing yarns in art history. The drawings, known as I Modi, were created by a Renaissance painter in the early 1500s, banned by the pope and supposedly destroyed. They were republished a few years later, and again in the 1700s. A pirated copy, from centuries ago, was discovered in the 1920s.
Delighted with his illicit discovery, Armstrong holed up in his apartment disassembling and reassembling the images, then shooting them on the floor lit by light through the window. The photos pulse and throb in swirling colors, emanating warmth in their visual confusion. The images also suggest an element of blushing repression—almost as if you’re viewing them through a confession booth. Armstrong says that he never could have made this work while his father—“a very Victorian gentleman”—was still alive. “There’s a funny thing that happens when your second parent dies,” he said. “Along with the mourning there’s this freeing of super ego forces that have to do with authority.”
In the latest twist to the story of I Modi, the Holy See has invited Armstrong to visit in May, so he may create a new body of work using his signature style. It appears cultural norms have shifted from the dour Renaissance-era papacy of Clement VII to Pope Francis.