Hot Rod Biology

Aristides was an Athenian politician who was fanatical about justice, so much so he lived a life of self imposed poverty, and was banished from Athens (in 482 BC) basically because he refused to let the corruption of other politicians go unnoticed. He was ostracised by a public vote and the image in the background here is from a story whereby an illiterate man approaches Aristides (but who doesn't know him) and asks him to mark his vote for Aristides because he's just so sick of always hearing him referred to as "the just".

The foreground image is obviously Elvis shaking hands with Nixon. In the 60s Elvis became increasingly righteous and obsessed with justice. He collected police badges and guns, he was made an honorary member of various police forces, and in 1970 was presented with a Narcotics Bureau badge and ID by Richard Nixon! Elvis had previously written, what Marcus refers to as "The King's demented letter to the president", in which Elvis voices his concern about "the drug culture, the hippie elements, etc", and offered his services as a "federal agent at large". The irony being of course that by this stage Elvis was himself heavily addicted to drugs, only his were prescription.

I thought this brought out an interesting hybrid Elvis, if perhaps one of the more obvious. The good and the bad, Elvis as the good christian boy vs Elvis the rockabilly rebel singing the devil's music. I think one of Elvis's big problems was his desire to be all things to all people. Hence this most bizarre of Elvis images, the King shaking hands with President Nixon?

Regarding the image I've made, there's a few things this has brought up.

The size and importance of the letterform in the scene. I kinda' felt this was becoming more about constructing a picture than an illustrated capital ñ I think the letterform needs to relate to the image, and basically be a shit load bigger.

The other thing I've realised through making this image is that perhaps making the 'collage' so obvious, the 'cut & paste' is not going to facilitate a 'hybrid' statement, or image to come about? I do like the shadows that are created by having images on different layers (I've discussed the relevance of the shadows previously I think?), but I'm wondering if this is stopping the images from essentially being 'grafted' together . . . does this make sense?

Also, I was thinking more about my Hot Rod Biology book, actually looking through it and decided that, in purely formal terms, the way I construct the image could still involve the attempt to hybridise the pop/trash conventions with the scientific . . . I like the possibility of interaction between truth and fiction, right and wrong, sincerity and scandal . . . and of course all these binary opposites, or actually the contradiction in their negation is what Elvis represented.

Anyway, blah blah blah, what I was getting to was an introduction to the line at the top of the image which carries the number and title . . . it's supposed to reference the notion of an empirical truth, a system, superimposed or floating over the image.