Or, The Whale by Jos Sances: Ark of the Anthropocene

Abstract

Abstract: This essay offers the first critical consideration of Jos Sances's 14- by 51-foot scratchboard mural, Or, The Whale (2019–20), a work of panoramic cultural-historical reference and eco-political urgency inspired by Moby-Dick . I set the mural in the context of the series of Moby-Dick illustrations that Sances executed in 2016–2018, showing how they record his formative engagement with Rockwell Kent and document his search for a visual language capable of matching the imagistic density and encyclopedic range of Melville's novel. If Rockwell Kent mediates Sances's portrait-scale encounters with Moby-Dick , C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways provides the keynote for Sances's biopolitical sequel to Melville's epic in mural form, a pictorial history of American capitalism inscribed on the body of a life-size sperm whale. Or, The Whale is a summa of Anthropocene visual art, its sweeping narrative of virtuosic hand-drawn scenes presenting densely layered constellations of images that perform the work of cultural memory, unearthing the damage done to exploited peoples and natural resources.