Tim Smith-Laing reviews Jérémie Koering’s recent book with Zone, Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images, for Apollo Magazine. Read the full review here. Purchase the book here. An excerpt appears below:

“I paused on the threshold of iconophagy: the act of eating an image. Under the form of confectionery effigy, it is not so very aberrant – we still eat, as Koering notes, ‘figured’ foods today, particularly as children – but it is nevertheless a practice that, he maintains, has become ‘in large part foreign to us’. The physical consumption of ‘icons, frescoes, sculptures, devotional engravings’, of which there is a storied history in Europe and the Mediterranean world, has now disappeared in ‘the long process of rationalization that forms our heritage’. The aim of Iconophages is to reclaim and explain such acts both as a means of contributing to a history of images outside the ‘already traced lines of a triumphant art history’.

For minds of a certain tilt, Iconophages will seem likely to be great fun. It starts promisingly with series of stills from the movie Red Dragon(2002), showing Ralph Fiennes’s serial killer Francis Dolarhyde compulsively devouring the William Blake watercolour The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun (c.1803–05). Bug-eyed with the desire to have and become the image, Fiennes’s expression is extraordinary. We may be ‘in the fictional register of cinematographic fable’, as Koering puts it, but the scene shows how modernity has turned ‘iconophagy into an exemplary transgressive act’. Museums do not let you touch pictures, let alone eat them. Koering is keen to point out, however, that this is not ‘an aberrant form of consumption’, but of a particular kind of ‘conjunction […] that transforms the very nature of […] representation’ itself.

Iconophages sets out ‘to cover, as much as possible, the entirety of the phenomenon’ in a narrative that is, as Koering puts it, a history with ‘no beginning and no end […] synchronic and polyrhythmic’. Though an early modernist by training, Koering has admirable range. Divided into three broad sections, Iconophages runs from Egyptian healing statues, through early Christian debates on the roles of icons, up to early modern social practices and through to Hogarth, with a little Piero Manzoni, John Cage and other moderns thrown in for seasoning. All the analyses are framed by Koering’s division of iconophagy into two broad categories: ‘constituting’ and ‘instituting’ – respectively, acts designed to heal or protect the eater, and acts, like the sharing of marked foods, designed to delineate the eater as belonging to a community.”