Did their Catullus walk this way?

[sovay]

More or less reproducing an e-mail I sent derspatchel this morning, after we'd both seen "Classical sculptures dressed as hipsters look contemporary and totally badass."

I agree it's an interesting project. It's more of a Rorschach of the viewer's perceptions than any kind of statement about the objective relatability of classical art. It wins points with me for not being an exercise in irony—hey, look, it's the Mona Lisa in skinny jeans, isn't that just too postmodern for words—but I object to the implicit claim that the sculpture is remote and boring and inacessible otherwise, the same point you identify: that we should only be expected to relate to people like us.

(For the sake of the argument, let's ignore that most of these examples are not portrait sculpture, but idealized representations of gods, heroes, nymphs, etc.—that's Aristaios with the mirrorshades in the first picture, a Maenad with the kid and the tambourine farther down—that we are looking mostly at Renaissance versions rather than marbles from classical Greece or Rome, and that if they were the latter, in their original contexts they'd have been brightly painted and a contemporary viewer wouldn't suffer from the stylizing effect of blank white stone that the modern clothes are partly intended to combat; the author of this post would probably find them distractingly gaudy instead.)

I personally find the hipster drag a lot weirder to relate to than nude or ivy-dressed marble, but it's not my subculture anyway. It is possible that if this project had been undertaken with punk fashion, I'd be like HELL YES THAT IS TOTALLY DIONYSOS WITH THE EYESHADOW AND THE RIPPED BLACK LEATHER WHERE CAN I COMMISSION THIS OBJECT I WANT ONE IN MY LIVING ROOM STAT, OH ORPHEUS ARE YOU EVER TOO EMO FOR WORDS. But I also wonder whether the blogger is getting the same questions out of this series the photographers put into it, or whether I am, or whether I would feel less prickly about this concept if it had been executed with Olympian victors or funeral stelae rather than mythological figures. I am all for seeing the past as though it were alive and confusing as the next person, not safely tidied into interchangeable Roman and Greek names and something about hetairas. But there is also the danger of thinking just like us. I love Sappho, but we wouldn't even use the same words for it.

(Even a copy of the Barberini Faun isn't supposed to have pants on.)

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

It may be a tangent, but I find this interesting: As you point out, the blog which posted those photos is not connected to the artist and placed them in a dumber context than, as far as I can tell, was the original intent. Looking at Leo Caillard's site, the intent seems to be a simple visual joke, pointing out clothes instantly alter perception of nudes and maybe that hipster looks, particularly hipster facial hair, goes back a long way. There's no statement on that series, perhaps because anything beyond the title "hipsters in stone" belabors the point - the site seems to draw a line between self-evident and statment work - but the statement on another - Art Game - indicates he'd question that blogger: "Colliding the aesthetic of modern minimalist Apple products with the classical architecture of the Louvre Museum, the viewer is forced to asses the question of new creation in our modern society." whereas that blogger might look at the same pictures and say, "a museum with interactive painting display devices would be pretty amazing!" Looking at the retoucher's site, it was primarily a technical challenge of making cloth drape on stone, which may explain why there's no attempt to have the clothes comment on the meaning of the sculptures.

This points to how internet culture frequently involves, but rarely addresses, issues of appropriation, reappropriation and framing rhetoric. Especially with the glut of sites, like the Cheezeburger empire, which makes a business out of repackaging pre-existing content with minimal attribution. Upon first glance, that "Today I Learned Something New" post creates the impression of a much stronger connection to the creators and their intent. Indeed, upon my first lazy look, I thought the site had originated the images. It's another, harder to percieve version of how certain photos can be artful, empowering or porny depending on how they are posted. [Tangent within tangent: this is why I love google reader and the livejounal friendslist and other things which funnel content into one format. It doesn't strip all framing - a title or comment can still alter the perception of an image - but it does allow one to be more aware of it. Even facebook has this in its favor, which is why some people are caught out by it, I suspect. They don't realize having all pages look alike and in the same stream may remove presumed cultural buffers and excuses.] I don't know if my mind will fully catch up with it and sometimes I perfer not to contemplate it because I then must confront my own perceptional bias.

[sovay]

This points to how internet culture frequently involves, but rarely addresses, issues of appropriation, reappropriation and framing rhetoric.

In which I take part as much as the next person, because it's very difficult to talk about something without some kind of preface, even if it's just oh, man, you've got to hear this or what the fuck? But as I said to steepholm above, I think I would have liked the opportunity to discover the pictures with the minimal commentary offered by their creators, rather than the blogger's notions of what the art was doing interposed before whatever first reactions I might have had to it. I would hope I've never ruined anything for anyone on the internet by the way I talked about it before they could get to the images or the music or the video, but I'm sure I have.

Indeed, upon my first lazy look, I thought the site had originated the images.

No, same. I thought the blogger had been playing around with Photoshop until I got to the end.