Of late, the visual world has attracted increasing attention from all corners of our society. The technological revolution, as witnessed by the rise of the Internet and the advancement of digitally enhanced pictures, has resulted in a culture that needs guidance in its understanding of the power of images. Art historian Barbara Stafford has recently remarked that although these changes are occurring with breakneck speed, the common character of the visual (as opposed to the written) is still one of deceit and delusion. Images are mutable and thus open to adaptation and co-option. One need only consider the issues of visual copyright and piracy that plague the Internet today to get a glimpse as to what is at stake. Beginning with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and continuing through the modern era, the split between the written and the visual, between the abstract and the sensorial, was codified in the Cartesian concept of the mind and the body. From this philosophy, two distinct entities emerged with the mind privileged over the body ("I think therefore I am."). The visual had been linked with an oral culture; and with the preference for the written over the oral, the visual was relegated to a lower position. Such a split still dominates our cultural perceptions of the truthfulness of the image.

Within this context, Jeff Murphy's digitally manipulated pictures underscore how visual images today are linked with and even indebted to earlier attitudes toward the ideology of images. His work provides an excellent opportunity to consider how images today are saddled with past untrustworthiness. While technologically advanced, Murphy's imagery recalls earlier art historical precedents, in particular, seventeenth century cabinets of curiosities and still life paintings. The cabinets were proto-museum displays that presented contiguous objects, images, and concepts for the viewer's contemplation, edification and, above all, enjoyment. These exhibitions of items, often packed within a tight space, offered the observer layer upon layer of information, all deriving from the visual world. The spectator was to make sense of the associations between artifacts, whether they be scientific, religious, technological, cultural, or artistic. Coupled with these associations was the spectator's own personal experiences which contributed to the formulation of the meaning of the object. Meaning, as such, was always contingent, fluid, culturally determined, and even reversible. In Murphy's body of work and its reliance on the discourses of religion, science, and art, the spectator is required to engage with the work on the same level of interaction as with the cabinets of curiosities. The artist has purposely called our attention to the claims to truth on which such discourses depend. Murphy is using the new found power of the image in the telepresent culture as the necessary site from which to examine other, seemingly less gulling disciplines.

In Swallow (Job 21:15), the artist as mediator and creator of such contemporary cabinets is highlighted. In today's culture, the X ray stands apart from the world of created images. There is a perceived and even agreed upon truth to the X ray and its concomitant technology. Its ability to transcend beyond treacherous reproach makes it the ideal vehicle to plumb the body's boundaries and to discover the relationship of health to pathology without invading the body's surface. The technique of this procedure has become so commonplace in our culture that no one seems to question the ideology that supports and enables it. The manipulation of the text by Murphy focuses our attention on what is and what is not in/on the patient and make us ponder what the artist has added and deleted. The blasphemous nature of such uncertainty within the realm of the medical and all that stems from the consequences of such uncertainty leave an unsettling effect on the viewer. Moreover, Swallow (Job 21:15) forces us to question the seamlessness of medical imagery. It has been, in fact, this sort of scientific imagery that has stood above all other imagery as unsusceptible to the charges of fraudulence.

In Fester, exactly what is being represented is just the first of many questions generated by the picture. As we excavate the image, we discover that this is an X ray of a male patient with what appears to be a pierced penis. The slippage between reality and deception within the image occurs at several points. Is the piercing genuine, or did the artist add it? To what does the title, "Fester," refer-the pierced area itself or the act of piercing in general? In addition, who is the culprit indicted in the Biblical passage ("he has left my flesh raw and open")? Is this a further questioning of science and thus the "he" is a doctor? Is it an inquiry into the process of piercing and thus the "he" is the practitioner of the action? Or, is it a questioning of religion and thus "he" could be God, Christ, or Their human spokesman?

The primacy afforded the human body within Murphy's art can be seen in the dominant place of the X ray and CAT scan within his aesthetic choices. The body serves as the site for the debates about religion, science, technology, and art history. Murphy's work relies heavily on the human body for its power as both subject and object, as viewer and viewed. This relationship, however, does not exist in seeming harmony; rather, Murphy's art calls attention to the new position of the physical body within our telepresent age. This era has altered the nature of viewing; the coherence based on gender relations has been completely put asunder by competing claims on parts of the body. The body as represented text remains a formable locus for vying concerns of power and prestige, to be sure; yet, the mere representation of a female body by a male artist, in the case of Murphy, can no longer be simply reduced to a unidirectional power arrangement. Postmodernism focused inordinate attention on the study of the power that the male artist/viewer derived from gazing upon the female object. Such an easy critical stance is no longer possible.

The presentation of the body by means of the X ray, whether male (as in Fester) or female (as in Mortify), encourages a gender-neutral understanding of health and pathology. This is not the case of a male artist picturing the female body as the lone site for the examination of disease. What emerges in Murphy's work instead is a transgendered body-one which is not defined by its sex characteristics, but by its possibility as a terrain for the investigation of a new body. In the end, Murphy confirms that bodies are not born, but are made, in the sense that it is the role of society to actively make and remake the human body as a social entity.

The use of a scientifically rendered body (and not the fleshy, corporeal one) in the case of the X rays and CAT scans draws our attention to the "devaluation of materiality and embodiment," as curator Lynne Cooke has characterized our telepresent moment. This shift likewise finds its corollary in the nature of spectatorship. As art historian Jonathan Crary has suggested, the new world of digital imagery has inescapably altered the notion of the spectator. The new practices and techniques are ones "in which visual images no longer have any reference to the positions of an observer in a 'real' optically perceived world." The male artist and implied male viewer cease to control their claims to domination. What occurs instead in the realm of the telepresent imagery is a disavowal of the whole visceral viewer/interpreter. The physical, empowered, and complete body which used to stand in front of a painting or sculpture has been replaced by a disembodied "unit" (for lack of a better term). Cyberspace, the world from which Murphy's imagery emerges, derives its freshness from its ability to transcend the body. The viewer's body has been dissected into small parts prized for their connection to the computer; thus the Cartesian split between the mind and the body, between the abstract and the visceral, is challenged.

The new spectator experiences the changing visual world through analogy and randomness. The process of interpretation can no longer follow a linear course but must be understood in terms of analogy. One image does not lead to only one other image; instead, one image can lead to a whole host of others. Consideration of the World Wide Web as a metaphor, as a "spider's web," for the process of nonlinear relationships finds an analogy in the type of spectatorial pleasure defined here. The scrutiny of layer upon layer of symbol and meaning is being replaced by a series of divergent instances of image next to image. The whole can no longer exist in a world where the part must stand for the whole.

Murphy's work lays out the inherent contradiction between the binary system of computer imagery (they are after all based on either 1's or 0's) and the perception of the mutability of images. While it might appear that the digitally manipulated imagery represents an opening up of the potential for the constantly changeable state of pictures, it should be pointed out that the technology that undergirds this endeavor is premised on the simple relationship within a system of either/or. In the end, the output is a rather calculated product due to the very nature of its production. Thus the claim that religion placed on the fraudulent quality of imagery as seen in the Reformation and iconoclasm of the sixteenth century is offered within Murphy's work, not as a positive or negative action, but simply an action that needs reevaluation in our telepresent age.

What Murphy successfully presents to the audience is the very nature of this fear of treachery and deceit waged at imagery. By creating images that take as their impetus, their aesthetic, and their meaning the slippery and unattainable hold on truth that dominant discourses attempt to maintain, the artist offers his vision as the battleground for these debates. His art relishes in the unsettling nature of imagery as mutable and static, powerful and powerless, iconic and iconoclastic.

The vanitas-inspired work Orange features the decadence of the citrus fruit violated by razors, insects, and time. The dead insects indicate a world upside-down, an exposure to the dangers of fruit a la the Garden of Eden. Similar to the natural world betrayed by manmade technology and the purity of faith blemished by Doubting Thomas, the orange symbolizes the far reaches of believability. It supports the idea that the natural (the realm of the unquestioned) is as much a construct as the manmade. Furthermore, the image calls to our attention that the attempt by the discourses which appear to exist as natural (such as religion and even technology) to hide their means of operation is a manufactured project requiring a high level of maintenance.

The flesh of the orange, like Christ's, is punctured, pierced, and penetrated. The body's boundary in each case is violated; the sanctity of the whole is compromised. Likewise, the sanctity of the concepts that guide the images is left vulnerable. The inner workings and the dark underbelly of these concepts have been made visible. Additionally, the ineffective circuitry panel serves to underscore again the fragile epistemological condition of religion, science, and nature. The desire to probe beneath the surface, to enter the body as it were, holds undeniable consequences as the art makes clear.

In Golden Delicious, another work from this series, the irony of the title is one of its most striking aspects. The foregone association of the apple with the fall of Adam is highlighted specifically with the female figure's grasping of the apple on the far right of the composition. Like Orange, this work presents the other side of acceptable still lifes. It is as if the artist has literally overturned the table and showed us what others have attempted to hide-not unlike a shifty butcher who conceals the diseased meat from the public counter. All of the operations necessary for a seamless representation of the world are laid before the viewer.

In the end, Murphy's work is nostalgic, sentimental, and regressive, not in its aesthetic, certainly, but in its politics. What it strives for is not a new frontier of virtual reality and total disembodiment; instead, it searches through current technologies for a wholeness that cannot exist within these technologies. His search reinforces a conservative belief that art can stand before and apart from ideology; his desire is for a world in which the Cartesian split of mind and body is reattached. This nostalgia finds its place in Murphy's focus on the claims to unity that characterize religion and science.

At the end of Douglas Coupland's novel Life After God, considered a key text for the late postmodernist reader, the narrator claims as he is wading in the water, "I float within the pool and yet, even here, I hear the roar of water, the roar of clapping hands. These hands-the hands that care, the hands that touch the lips, the lips that speak the words-the words that tell us we are whole." The novel's intense journey parallels that of Murphy's search for a unity that he knows never existed nor could exist but nevertheless a unity that represents utopia. While the novel and Murphy's work on their surface appear to flout religious and scientific doctrine, in the end, they both seek a prelapsarian moment. Murphy's adaptation of Biblical passages, while possibly inflammatory to some, is actually an attempt to reestablish the power of the words within a post-postmodern moment.

At the penultimate scene in the novel, the narrator voices very forcefully, if somewhat privately, his need for religion. "My secret is that I need God-that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love." The same journey that brought Coupland's narrator to this point supports Murphy's project. The narrator of the novel and Murphy develop from two opposite religious positions, yet they attain the same result. The narrator was "raised without religion" and acknowledged that he "was cut off from their (Christians') experience in a way that was never connectable." A Catholic by birth and culture, Murphy continues to wrestle with the necessity, urgency, and place of God in a highly skeptical environment-the current technological world. Unable and unwilling to embrace the religion of his upbringing, Murphy is likewise undesiring of a rejection of the power of religion. His art uses the relationship between religion and science, between faith and skepticism, as the site for a desired reconciliation. His employment of the computer and all of its capabilities to render the unseen seen and the unknown known only mirrors the operational strategies of religion and science. Like the narrator in Life After God, Murphy yearns for the reconciliation of all that modernism and postmodernism has separated and laid bare. At the end, we are left not with a wholesale indictment and casting off of dominant discursive practices; rather what emerges within Murphy's environments is a preoedipal yearning for wholeness and cohesion-an imagined, mediated, and nonexistent state, to be sure.