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

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

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.

That's it in a nutshell, right? On the one hand, there's the danger of exoticizing (or performing other sorts of othering rituals/thought patterns). On the other hand, there's the danger of wrongly making the different familiar and losing what makes it unique.

Really, though, the whole project seems strange to me because if there's any non-current, representational art that's easily accessible, it's Greco-Roman sculpture and its imitations. The human form gets stylized in ways people have been brought up to think of as ideals, whereas, for instance, that's not the case with figures from Japanese ukiyoe prints or Mayan bas reliefs.

[zdenka]

I would find it more interesting if there seemed to be any effort to match the clothing to the character. Otherwise, it's sort of like dressing up your cat.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

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.

This is the nub of it, I think. All discourse about the past has to deal with both these indispensable dangers.

On the one hand, accuracy, scholarship, awareness of specific contexts - the flip side of which is remoteness, inaccessibility, hierophantism, the sense that you're not qualified to appreciate art until you've taken a degree in classics.

On the other hand, a revelation of what is held in common with the past, empathy, communication, the flip side of which is self-indulgence, sentimentality, anachronism, cultural appropriation.

Naturally we strive for the positive terms and try to circumvent the negative, but I doubt it's possible to do so entirely successfully, and certainly not for every audience (a successful sculpture should look good from all angles). These photos are a case in point. We can rightly say that "We're all the same, really" is a facile statement. We can point out the important distinctions it glosses over - between realism and myth, Greece and Rome, the classical age and the Renaissance, all these and the present. Or, we can look at it (as was my first instinct) as an exercise in old-fashioned defamiliarization - in which terms it works very well, I think. I don't really feel any need to choose between these perspectives.

[alankria.livejournal.com]

Ha! Yes. Dionysos with the eyeshadow and the ripped black leather would work in a way these blandly dressed statues didn't.

It also bothered me that we see a succession of fully clothed men and then the first woman is wearing only a bra.

[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]

Or, we can look at it (as was my first instinct) as an exercise in old-fashioned defamiliarization - in which terms it works very well, I think. I don't really feel any need to choose between these perspectives.

I think it would have been easier for me to see it as a straight-up exercise in defamiliarization if I had encountered the images without the blogger's congratulatory introduction; that I suppose is a hazard of the internet.

[sovay]

The human form gets stylized in ways people have been brought up to think of as ideals, whereas, for instance, that's not the case with figures from Japanese ukiyoe prints or Mayan bas reliefs.

You should write more about this.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm just spouting off in a non-expert way. And I even misspoke, because other cultures' art forms do express ideals, and sometimes even physical ideals, but not focusing on the body, necessarily. Like, say, Heian-period paintings of people--the way the sweep of women's hair was portrayed--that was a physical ideal. But the body? Not important. And even the faces: not so important. What would it take for a modern American teenager to see what represented vitality and personality in the Heian figures? They're much more removed than Greco-Roman statuary!

Here's an illustration from the Takafusa-kyo handscroll. It's done all in pale ink with only the barest hints of color--and then there's the beautiful, dark sweep of the hair.

[sovay]

I would find it more interesting if there seemed to be any effort to match the clothing to the character.

Looking at steepholm and fengi's comments, I think the lack of tailoring must have been part of the point, attempting to divorce the statues from any of their classical associations. I would still like to know what governed the choice of clothing—whether the artists simply treated the marbles like mannequins, or whether something in a modern interpretation of their poses suggested a popped-collar denim shirt for Meleager, a zip-up hoodie for a faun. (I don't see it. Perhaps it works best if you don't know who they are.) The one video is technical and wordless.

Otherwise, it's sort of like dressing up your cat.

At least they weren't classical statues dressed like sushi.

[sovay]

Dionysos with the eyeshadow and the ripped black leather would work in a way these blandly dressed statues didn't.

If you can do anything with him, he's yours!

It also bothered me that we see a succession of fully clothed men and then the first woman is wearing only a bra.

Huh. On the photographer's website, you encounter the lingerie nymph only after the girl in the red dress and the Maenad in the T-shirt. She's the last in the set.

[sovay]

And I even misspoke, because other cultures' art forms do express ideals, and sometimes even physical ideals, but not focusing on the body, necessarily.

I thought your comment made perfect sense: I didn't take it to mean that the art of non-Western cultures doesn't express aesthetic ideals, only that it doesn't express aesthetic ideals which are so thoroughly and ancestrally assimilated with our own that a classical nude is still the default against which any other presentation of the human form still has to work.

It's done all in pale ink with only the barest hints of color--and then there's the beautiful, dark sweep of the hair.

That's really cool. Thank you for showing me!

What else is an ideal of physical beauty in Heian art?

[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.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Honestly, for the women it's almost entirely about their calligraphy or the way they arrange their robes, or sometimes about the quality of their voices--if you think that they were always hidden away behind screens, so the men only ever saw them face to face if they were having a tryst--and that was likely to be at night, in the almost complete darkness. Smooth, pale skin was valued--same for the men--and for the men, not too much body or facial hair. I remember in Genji a big deal was made about this one guy who was hairy and uncouth. Kaoru (son of Genji's nephew, but known to the world as Genji's son) and Niou (son of Genji's daughter) both have names with implications of fragrance, and sweet-smelling-ness was also very important.

[zdenka]

I don't really get a lot of what the 21st century considers art, but I guess it can do its thing and I can do my thing.

*blinks confusedly at the sushi cats*

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've got to admit I skipped the blogger's comments and went straight to the pics.

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

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

If you'll please excuse me, I need to take a little time for myself now.

[sovay]

If you'll please excuse me, I need to take a little time for myself now.

That is entirely fair.

See above to alankria: I have no copyrights on this god.

[sovay]

for the women it's almost entirely about their calligraphy or the way they arrange their robes, or sometimes about the quality of their voices--if you think that they were always hidden away behind screens, so the men only ever saw them face to face if they were having a tryst--and that was likely to be at night, in the almost complete darkness.

And that interests me, because vocal quality is partly innate and partly adaptable, but the other two are strictly learned skills. Fine, yes, any person starting from scratch may be better or worse at drapery or calligaphy than the next, but I still don't consider it quite the same kind of ideal as muscular symmetry or hip-to-waist ratio or a particular curve of cheekbone or color of hair or eyes.

Smooth, pale skin was valued--same for the men--and for the men, not too much body or facial hair.

Whereas that's more genetic.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Nan Fairbrother made a similar point (I think in An English Year, though I can't find it at the moment -- bother).