Ledbetter, Grace M.

English

Works

 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Classics Faculty Works   2012  Review Of "Contemporary Art And Classical Myth" Edited By J. Hirsh And I. L. Wallace  Grace M. Ledbetter Swarthmore College, gledbet1@swarthmore.edu   Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/  Part of the Classics Commons   Recommended Citation Grace M. Ledbetter. (2012). "Review Of "Contemporary Art And Classical Myth" Edited By J. Hirsh And I. L. Wallace". Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Volume 4. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/57  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Classics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Isabelle Loring Wallace, Jennie Hirsh (ed.), Contemporary Artand Classical Myth.   Farnham; Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xviii, 376; 16 p. of plates.  ISBN 9780754669746.  $124.95.bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2012/2012-04-26.htmlBryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.04.26Reviewed by Grace Ledbetter, Swarthmore College (gledbet1@swarthmore.edu)PreviewIn Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 Look Mickey, the work the artist considered the origin and fountain of his popoeuvre, Donald Duck stands on a fishing pier looking with gleeful anticipation into the water as he feels thepull of a huge fish at the end of his line. As he stares at what should be his own reflected image, but is insteadthe artist’s signature amid the water’s waves, Mickey Mouse stands behind with his hand over his mouth,holding in his laughter, as he—and we, the viewers—see that Donald has in fact caught himself; he cannotsee that his fishing line has caught on the back of his jacket: “Look Mickey, I’ve Hooked a Big One!!” readsthe caption at the painting’s top left corner.The underlying presence and transformation of the Narcissus myth in this painting is unmistakable, andGraham Bader’s analysis (Chapter 7 “Lichtenstein’s Narcissus”) embodies this exciting volume’s interest inbringing to light the potent—yet largely unexplored—relationship between classical mythology andcontemporary art. Here, Bader explores how Lichtenstein’s return to the primal scene of classical mythologyaids the artist in defining a new genre, and how Look Mickey reenacts the Narcissus myth with Lacanianinflections. Classical antiquity in fact played an important role in Lichtenstein’s work more generally (Templeof Apollo, 1964; Laocoon, 1988; Galatea, sculpture 1990) and marks a stage in the history of mythologywhen it is linked to post-Freudian cultural discourse.Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace have done a superb job in bringing together a rich collection ofessays that not only uncovers the (perhaps surprising) role that classical mythology plays in a wide variety ofcontemporary art (here defined as 1960 to the present), but also shows us how contemporary art historianscan fruitfully employ classical myths as part of their methods of interpretation. Classicists will find here anexemplary volume on the reception of Classical mythology in the history of art distinguished by the theoreticalsophistication of the essays, the art-historical expertise of the authors, and the depth and far-reachingimplications of the editors’ introduction. As Hirsh and Wallace see it, the question of the relation betweenclassical myth and the visual arts in general has not been adequately addressed, as art historians have not(with a few notable exceptions) progressed beyond the notion of art as an illustration of mythology; of artistsas choosing mythological subjects because they are “good stories.” What our editors propose instead, andwhat the essays in this volume exemplify, is that art, and in this case, contemporary art, ”dynamically andhistorically” constitute mythology, “myth’s elaboration, perversion, analysis.” Painting, sculpture, and otherartistic media enact, transform, and adapt myths. Because many contemporary artists are uniquelypreoccupied with issues of representation, the idealized mirror image, the male and female gazes, and withart as libidinal sublimation, these artists have gravitated to the myths of Pygmalion, Narcissus, Orpheus, and1/32/3Medusa as early attempts to engage with these concepts. At the same time, art historians have aptlyemployed these myths as interpretive strategies, i.e. as ways of thinking through contemporary art.Put in another way, Hirsh and Wallace embrace a notion of classical reception that rejects the superficiality ofapproaching the uses of mythology in the history of art as though they merely reflected a history of changingstyles, and instead propose that complexities and deeper meanings in the myths themselves account formyth’s continued relevance and formative role in art. This volume thus promises not only to illuminatecontemporary art, but also to teach us something about the meaning of classical mythology. The reader willnot be disappointed.The book’s three sections, framed by a prologue and epilogue that both fittingly push beyond the scope ofthe other chapters, offer one engaging essay after another. The first section, “Myth as Meaning,” treats fiveartists whose works refer explicitly to mythology: Cy Twombly, Luciano Fabro, Yayoi Kusama, Bracha L.Ettinger, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The second section, “Myth as Medium,” uncovers implicit mythologicalnarratives in works by Roy Lichtenstein, Tracey Emin, Ghada Amer, Richard Drew and Wim Delvoye. Theauthors in the final section, “Myth as Method,” link the conceptual preoccupations of artists as diverse asDuane Hanson, Bas Jan Ader, Vlatka Horvat, Francis Alÿs, and Bill Viola with classical mythical narratives ofrealism, repetition, and the underworld. The volume’s masterful prologue by Lisa Saltzman proposes thatKara Walker’s vaudevillian silhouettes of the antebellum South work in the same tradition that Pliny foundedmythically in his tale of the birth of art and the Corinthian maiden. What for Pliny is art’s foundational attemptto capture the material trace of a desired body, becomes in Walker’s work art’s invocation of historical traumaand absorption in issues of memory, loss, and distance from the real. The prologue by Joanna Fruehcombines scholarly with personal reflection in a meditation on the myth of the Sphinx and the role it hasplayed in her own work.When a work of contemporary art bears a title from classical mythology without any straightforwardrepresentational or iconographic relation to the work, what are we to make of this use of mythology? Theessays in Section One address this question, at least indirectly, as they all consider examples of this kind.Classicists may be particularly interested in Craig Staff’s essay on Cy Twombly. Twombly’s Proteus (1984)conveys the same emotional intensity and inscrutability as many of Twombly works with mythological titlesand/or ancient names scratched on the surface (e.g. Apollo (1975) Venus(1975) Bacchus (1981), Libation ofPriapus (1982). Roland Barthes would view Twombly’s “Mediterranean effect” as imposed on materials withno connection to it, but Staff’s essay develops a view of Twombly’s Proteus where the painting’s mythologicaland material dimensions work in unison to enact (rather than to represent) notions of becoming andmetamorphosis central, Staff argues, to Twombly’s view of the Greeks. Proteus, moreover, rewrites theProteus myth by denying the elusive Proteus any final form. Viewed in this way, Twombly's painting, it seemsto me, does its own work of mythologizing; it is part of the mythological tradition. The only thing that I wouldhave liked to see more of in this essay is fuller background on Twombly’s connection to the Classics – forexample, on the importance to him of the modernist poets and their uses of Greek and Latin poetry, and aconsideration of the particular range of mythological material in Twombly’s oeuvre as a whole.As Twombly rewrites the myth of Proteus, so other contemporary artists revise the myth of Orpheus in orderto question its gender dynamics of male domination and its preoccupation with transgressive looking.Orpheus’s gaze destroys Eurydice (for Blanchot, for example, Orpheus enacts the artist’s controlling gaze).Marissa Vigneault’s essay on Bracha L. Ettinger’s mixed media Eurydice series (begun in 1992) shows ushow one artist tries to rework this dynamic by giving the viewer access to a non-punishing, Eurydicean gazeand a fluid connection to Eurydice’s subjectivity. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s minimalist installation, “Untitled”(Orpheus Twice) 1991 also explores gender and subjectivity by invoking a mythical dimension. JennieHirsh’s admirably lucid and learned treatment of Gonzalez-Torres’s complex work unpacks the way that themyths of Orpheus and Narcissus work in this piece to allow spectators both to “see as men and be seen aswomen” thereby undercutting the traditional gender split and the separation between subject and object.Contemporary works of art without explicit mythological subjects can nonetheless play out mythologicalnarratives as part of their meaning. Understanding these implicit narratives can do nothing short of illuminatethe inscrutable. Besides Bader’s exemplary piece on Lichtenstein which I discussed briefly earlier, I findparticularly engaging Sharon Sliwinski’s essay “Icarus returned: The Falling Man and the Survival ofAntiquity” on Richard’s Drew’s 9/11 photograph. The photograph, which was published in the New YorkTimes and many other newspapers on September 12, 2001, inflicts instant trauma on the viewer; it is in mostways simply unseeable. It becomes comprehensible, if no less traumatic, when put in the context of imagesof the myth of Icarus in the spirit of the German art historian Aby Warburg’s Nachleben der Antike .Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca project is not so much unseeable as deeply unlovable. And yet, a machine designedto complete the human digestive cycle from beginning to end, is not designed, one might imagine, to beloved. Or is it? Isabelle Loring Wallace deftly analyzes Delvoye’s various versions of this project as thefulfillment of a fantasy of purification, of radical detachment of the subject from the more abject aspects ofbeing human. Wallace uncovers a crucial pattern found in the myths of Medusa, Pygmalion, and Narcissus:all three domesticate the (Lacanian) Real – the unseeable. Medusa cannot be looked at; Pygmalion cannotbear real women; Narcissus prefers his immaterial image to himself. Each myths offers art a means ofprotection from the Real – Medusa becomes part of Athena’s shield; Pygmalion crafts his Galatea, andNarcissus falls in love with his idealized image. Delvoye’s Cloaca connects in surprisingly particular ways tothese myths, and most generally, repeats the same gesture of idealization/purification. So too, I wouldsuggest, mythological analysis domesticates the Cloaca project itself.“Each civilization has a notion of hell. . . “, so begins Sophie-Isabelle Dufour’s essay on Bill Viola, “Video Artin the House of Hades.” Viola’s 2007 three-screen video installation Ocean without a Shore, temporarilyplaced in a fifteenth century Venetian church, enacts a kind of Odyssean nekuia, with human shadowsgradually emerging from the dead and taking on some characteristic of the living, just as the shades of theOdyssey do when they drink blood. Separated from the living by a wall of water, Viola’s ghosts invoke thepower of mimesis, of images and their connection to the sacred. Most interestingly, perhaps, they take usaway from Christianity (subverting their religious context) and back to the pagan notion of the dead asdisturbing spectral presences.I have not had the chance to discuss every essay in this volume, but taken as a whole, they teach us muchabout contemporary art and about classical mythology. What we learn about contemporary art is the extent towhich it engages with, rewrites, and moves forward the traditions of classical mythology, either directly orindirectly. What we learn about classical mythology is the degree to which it prefigures concepts that arecentral to contemporary theory like art as libidinal sublimation, trauma, the male gaze, and the relation of theindividual to the idealized mirror image. Along the way, we are illuminated about how to interpret somefascinating and difficult works of contemporary art. Classicists might also find themselves inspired to usemyth as method in interpreting other ancient and modern texts of all sorts, as we broaden our understandingof the theoretical preoccupations of the Greeks and Romans.BMCR, Bryn Mawr College, 101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 HTML generated at 21:32:58, Sunday, 15 April 20123/3

Review Of  Contemporary Art And Classical Myth  Edited By J. Hirsh And I. L. Wallace

 Swarthmore College
Works 
 
 
Classics Faculty Works 
 
 
2012 
 
Review Of "Contemporary Art And 
Classical Myth" Edited By J. Hirsh And I. 
L. Wallace 
 
Grace M. Ledbetter 
Swarthmore College, gledbet1@swarthmore.edu  
 
Let us know how access to this work benefits you. 
 
Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/ 
 Part of the Classics Commons 
 
 
Recommended Citation 
Grace M. Ledbetter. (2012). "Review Of "Contemporary Art And Classical Myth" Edited By J. Hirsh And I. 
L. Wallace". Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Volume 4. 
http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/57 
 
This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Classics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For 
more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. 
Isabelle Loring Wallace, Jennie Hirsh (ed.), Contemporary Art
and Classical Myth.   Farnham; Burlington, VT:  Ashgate, 2011.
 Pp. xviii, 376; 16 p. of plates.  ISBN 9780754669746.  $124.95.
bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2012/2012-04-26.html
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.04.26
Reviewed by Grace Ledbetter, Swarthmore College (gledbet1@swarthmore.edu)
Preview
In Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 Look Mickey, the work the artist considered the origin and fountain of his pop
oeuvre, Donald Duck stands on a fishing pier looking with gleeful anticipation into the water as he feels the
pull of a huge fish at the end of his line. As he stares at what should be his own reflected image, but is instead
the artist’s signature amid the water’s waves, Mickey Mouse stands behind with his hand over his mouth,
holding in his laughter, as he—and we, the viewers—see that Donald has in fact caught himself; he cannot
see that his fishing line has caught on the back of his jacket: “Look Mickey, I’ve Hooked a Big One!!” reads
the caption at the painting’s top left corner.
The underlying presence and transformation of the Narcissus myth in this painting is unmistakable, and
Graham Bader’s analysis (Chapter 7 “Lichtenstein’s Narcissus”) embodies this exciting volume’s interest in
bringing to light the potent—yet largely unexplored—relationship between classical mythology and
contemporary art. Here, Bader explores how Lichtenstein’s return to the primal scene of classical mythology
aids the artist in defining a new genre, and how Look Mickey reenacts the Narcissus myth with Lacanian
inflections. Classical antiquity in fact played an important role in Lichtenstein’s work more generally (Temple
of Apollo, 1964; Laocoon, 1988; Galatea, sculpture 1990) and marks a stage in the history of mythology
when it is linked to post-Freudian cultural discourse.
Jennie Hirsh and Isabelle Loring Wallace have done a superb job in bringing together a rich collection of
essays that not only uncovers the (perhaps surprising) role that classical mythology plays in a wide variety of
contemporary art (here defined as 1960 to the present), but also shows us how contemporary art historians
can fruitfully employ classical myths as part of their methods of interpretation. Classicists will find here an
exemplary volume on the reception of Classical mythology in the history of art distinguished by the theoretical
sophistication of the essays, the art-historical expertise of the authors, and the depth and far-reaching
implications of the editors’ introduction. As Hirsh and Wallace see it, the question of the relation between
classical myth and the visual arts in general has not been adequately addressed, as art historians have not
(with a few notable exceptions) progressed beyond the notion of art as an illustration of mythology; of artists
as choosing mythological subjects because they are “good stories.” What our editors propose instead, and
what the essays in this volume exemplify, is that art, and in this case, contemporary art, ”dynamically and
historically” constitute mythology, “myth’s elaboration, perversion, analysis.” Painting, sculpture, and other
artistic media enact, transform, and adapt myths. Because many contemporary artists are uniquely
preoccupied with issues of representation, the idealized mirror image, the male and female gazes, and with
art as libidinal sublimation, these artists have gravitated to the myths of Pygmalion, Narcissus, Orpheus, and
1/3
2/3
Medusa as early attempts to engage with these concepts. At the same time, art historians have aptly
employed these myths as interpretive strategies, i.e. as ways of thinking through contemporary art.
Put in another way, Hirsh and Wallace embrace a notion of classical reception that rejects the superficiality of
approaching the uses of mythology in the history of art as though they merely reflected a history of changing
styles, and instead propose that complexities and deeper meanings in the myths themselves account for
myth’s continued relevance and formative role in art. This volume thus promises not only to illuminate
contemporary art, but also to teach us something about the meaning of classical mythology. The reader will
not be disappointed.
The book’s three sections, framed by a prologue and epilogue that both fittingly push beyond the scope of
the other chapters, offer one engaging essay after another. The first section, “Myth as Meaning,” treats five
artists whose works refer explicitly to mythology: Cy Twombly, Luciano Fabro, Yayoi Kusama, Bracha L.
Ettinger, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The second section, “Myth as Medium,” uncovers implicit mythological
narratives in works by Roy Lichtenstein, Tracey Emin, Ghada Amer, Richard Drew and Wim Delvoye. The
authors in the final section, “Myth as Method,” link the conceptual preoccupations of artists as diverse as
Duane Hanson, Bas Jan Ader, Vlatka Horvat, Francis Alÿs, and Bill Viola with classical mythical narratives of
realism, repetition, and the underworld. The volume’s masterful prologue by Lisa Saltzman proposes that
Kara Walker’s vaudevillian silhouettes of the antebellum South work in the same tradition that Pliny founded
mythically in his tale of the birth of art and the Corinthian maiden. What for Pliny is art’s foundational attempt
to capture the material trace of a desired body, becomes in Walker’s work art’s invocation of historical trauma
and absorption in issues of memory, loss, and distance from the real. The prologue by Joanna Frueh
combines scholarly with personal reflection in a meditation on the myth of the Sphinx and the role it has
played in her own work.
When a work of contemporary art bears a title from classical mythology without any straightforward
representational or iconographic relation to the work, what are we to make of this use of mythology? The
essays in Section One address this question, at least indirectly, as they all consider examples of this kind.
Classicists may be particularly interested in Craig Staff’s essay on Cy Twombly. Twombly’s Proteus (1984)
conveys the same emotional intensity and inscrutability as many of Twombly works with mythological titles
and/or ancient names scratched on the surface (e.g. Apollo (1975) Venus(1975) Bacchus (1981), Libation of
Priapus (1982). Roland Barthes would view Twombly’s “Mediterranean effect” as imposed on materials with
no connection to it, but Staff’s essay develops a view of Twombly’s Proteus where the painting’s mythological
and material dimensions work in unison to enact (rather than to represent) notions of becoming and
metamorphosis central, Staff argues, to Twombly’s view of the Greeks. Proteus, moreover, rewrites the
Proteus myth by denying the elusive Proteus any final form. Viewed in this way, Twombly's painting, it seems
to me, does its own work of mythologizing; it is part of the mythological tradition. The only thing that I would
have liked to see more of in this essay is fuller background on Twombly’s connection to the Classics – for
example, on the importance to him of the modernist poets and their uses of Greek and Latin poetry, and a
consideration of the particular range of mythological material in Twombly’s oeuvre as a whole.
As Twombly rewrites the myth of Proteus, so other contemporary artists revise the myth of Orpheus in order
to question its gender dynamics of male domination and its preoccupation with transgressive looking.
Orpheus’s gaze destroys Eurydice (for Blanchot, for example, Orpheus enacts the artist’s controlling gaze).
Marissa Vigneault’s essay on Bracha L. Ettinger’s mixed media Eurydice series (begun in 1992) shows us
how one artist tries to rework this dynamic by giving the viewer access to a non-punishing, Eurydicean gaze
and a fluid connection to Eurydice’s subjectivity. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s minimalist installation, “Untitled”
(Orpheus Twice) 1991 also explores gender and subjectivity by invoking a mythical dimension. Jennie
Hirsh’s admirably lucid and learned treatment of Gonzalez-Torres’s complex work unpacks the way that the
myths of Orpheus and Narcissus work in this piece to allow spectators both to “see as men and be seen as
women” thereby undercutting the traditional gender split and the separation between subject and object.
Contemporary works of art without explicit mythological subjects can nonetheless play out mythological
narratives as part of their meaning. Understanding these implicit narratives can do nothing short of illuminate
the inscrutable. Besides Bader’s exemplary piece on Lichtenstein which I discussed briefly earlier, I find
particularly engaging Sharon Sliwinski’s essay “Icarus returned: The Falling Man and the Survival of
Antiquity” on Richard’s Drew’s 9/11 photograph. The photograph, which was published in the New York
Times and many other newspapers on September 12, 2001, inflicts instant trauma on the viewer; it is in most
ways simply unseeable. It becomes comprehensible, if no less traumatic, when put in the context of images
of the myth of Icarus in the spirit of the German art historian Aby Warburg’s Nachleben der Antike .
Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca project is not so much unseeable as deeply unlovable. And yet, a machine designed
to complete the human digestive cycle from beginning to end, is not designed, one might imagine, to be
loved. Or is it? Isabelle Loring Wallace deftly analyzes Delvoye’s various versions of this project as the
fulfillment of a fantasy of purification, of radical detachment of the subject from the more abject aspects of
being human. Wallace uncovers a crucial pattern found in the myths of Medusa, Pygmalion, and Narcissus:
all three domesticate the (Lacanian) Real – the unseeable. Medusa cannot be looked at; Pygmalion cannot
bear real women; Narcissus prefers his immaterial image to himself. Each myths offers art a means of
protection from the Real – Medusa becomes part of Athena’s shield; Pygmalion crafts his Galatea, and
Narcissus falls in love with his idealized image. Delvoye’s Cloaca connects in surprisingly particular ways to
these myths, and most generally, repeats the same gesture of idealization/purification. So too, I would
suggest, mythological analysis domesticates the Cloaca project itself.
“Each civilization has a notion of hell. . . “, so begins Sophie-Isabelle Dufour’s essay on Bill Viola, “Video Art
in the House of Hades.” Viola’s 2007 three-screen video installation Ocean without a Shore, temporarily
placed in a fifteenth century Venetian church, enacts a kind of Odyssean nekuia, with human shadows
gradually emerging from the dead and taking on some characteristic of the living, just as the shades of the
Odyssey do when they drink blood. Separated from the living by a wall of water, Viola’s ghosts invoke the
power of mimesis, of images and their connection to the sacred. Most interestingly, perhaps, they take us
away from Christianity (subverting their religious context) and back to the pagan notion of the dead as
disturbing spectral presences.
I have not had the chance to discuss every essay in this volume, but taken as a whole, they teach us much
about contemporary art and about classical mythology. What we learn about contemporary art is the extent to
which it engages with, rewrites, and moves forward the traditions of classical mythology, either directly or
indirectly. What we learn about classical mythology is the degree to which it prefigures concepts that are
central to contemporary theory like art as libidinal sublimation, trauma, the male gaze, and the relation of the
individual to the idealized mirror image. Along the way, we are illuminated about how to interpret some
fascinating and difficult works of contemporary art. Classicists might also find themselves inspired to use
myth as method in interpreting other ancient and modern texts of all sorts, as we broaden our understanding
of the theoretical preoccupations of the Greeks and Romans.
BMCR, Bryn Mawr College, 101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010 
HTML generated at 21:32:58, Sunday, 15 April 2012
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Review Of Contemporary Art And Classical Myth Edited By J. Hirsh And I. L. Wallace

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