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Louise Lawler

Hand On Her Back (traced) 1997/1998/2013

© Louise Lawler 2015

I saw Lawler’s “tracing” at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, blown-up on a massively enlarged scale across one wall of a gallery. It is a tracing of Lawler’s photograph of a plaster cast of a crouching Aphrodite seen at the New York Academy of Fine Arts, the ancient original of which is now in the Musée du Louvre. As a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of an ancient artwork, it represents a chain of ever-more distant encounters with the classical (re-casting the three-dimensional in two-dimensions, putting the touchable out of touch, making substantial marble into ephemeral, reproducible, transient ink, a ghostly outline of that original sculpture). Each re-staging asks us to think about the ways in which the medium and the context affects how and what we see, and perhaps to question which, if any, offers a more  authentic experience.  

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This slide shows ancient Greek sculpture from the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus as displayed in the British Museum in the early 20th century. 

Read more at http://pickaslide.wordpress.com

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Aphrodite’s been checking herself out in two facing mirrors again... 

Théo Mercier, La grande réduction, 2015

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Belvedere Torso, Roman, circa 1st century BC, marble

Rome, Vatican Museums

Belvedere Torso, 1884 (?), plaster

Cambridge, Museum of Classical Archaeology

Gazing Ball (Belvedere Torso), 2013, plaster and glass

© Jeff Koons

I’ve been thinking again about My Museum Favourite, the Belvedere Torso, and the difference between seeing the marble original and its plaster replica(s). The sheer mass and weight of the original is inescapable: standing in front of it, you become a satellite caught in its gravitational pull, intimately aware of its very heavy physicality. For me, however, the most compelling thing about the ancient sculpture is that an incidence of time has left it a broken fragment of a hero, a poignant reminder that even mighty bodies can crumble. This recalibration of the heroic body is then played out even more insistently with its translation into plaster, which makes the monumental (appear) a lot more lightweight, temporary, kitsch even. These plaster bodies subvert the gravitas of both the classical physique and Classical Art, something that Jeff Koons brilliantly toys with in his Gazing Ball (Belvedere Torso) (2013), its icing-sugar whiteness a parody of antiquity’s pearly marbles, the glass globe floating as if without weight. Looking back to the original Belvedere Torso through the double lens of fragmentation and replication, therefore, makes us think much more carefully about what it might mean to be and to look like a classical hero.

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PET Woman #4, 2015

Juliette Bonneviot

Courtesy Juliette Bonneviot, via juliettebonneviot.com

Juliette Bonneviot’s plastic torso offers us an ephemeral vision of Aphrodite shimmering out of focus on the edge of immateriality. 

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Hans-Peter Feldmann Untitled (3 graces)

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My Museum Favourite: The Apollo Belvedere

I love this thing. Just look at it. It’s awesome.

Read more about why at resgerendae.

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Defining Beauty

‘He shone among the other pentathletes as the bright moon in the middle of the month outshines the stars; in this way he showed his wondrous body to the great ring of watching Greeks…’ (Bacchylides Ep. 9.20–23)

Written in praise of the victorious pentathlete Automedes of Phlius, the words of the 5th-century BC lyric poet Bacchylides reveal much about ancient Greek thinking on the (male) body. Nude, athletic, marvellous, the ideal body was a winning body, successful in competition as on the battlefield. Crucially, it was also a spectacle, a body performed, observed, admired and desired, and consequently a body that could be commented on and contested.

Read more at Apollo Magazine

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CLASSICICITY

There is no antiquity.’ So wrote Francis Picabia in response to a lecture given by Vivien de Mas at an exhibition of his work at the Galerie de l’Effort moderne in Paris in 1930. At the root of his statement is recognition of the ever-presence of the classical and conviction that the arts of modernity and of classical antiquity cannot be isolated. ‘CLASSICICITY’, an exhibition of ancient and contemporary art currently at Breese Little, likewise asserts the continued relevance of Greco-Roman art, proposing that contemporary responses to the classical are as eclectic and multilayered as the classical past itself.

Read more at Apollo magazine

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Francesco Vezzoli

Antique Not Antique: Self-Portrait as a Crying Roman Togatus, 2012

Roman togate bust, 2nd-3rd century AD

This sculpture by the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is on show at Phillips in London as part of their current exhibition, A Very Short History of Contemporary Art. It combines a modern marble portrait head with a Roman marble torso. In so doing it forces us to question how contemporary art might relate to ancient art, and our assumptions about the sanctity of classical artworks. Vezzoli is taking ownership of our Western artistic heritage and re-presenting it in an ambivalent way: the statue seems to ask in what ways modern art, and modern audiences, can be in dialogue with ancient art, or if that process always involves a metamorphosis of the original.

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Roman bronze bust, possibly of Dionysus

1st century BC

Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale inv. 5618

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These curls are perfection.

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The Greek and Roman galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge are full of treasures. I love this fragment of a Roman marble torso: it is delicious, with its hipshot pose and stretched shoulders, the languid curve of its back and soft muscles.

The torso originally belonged to a statue of Apollo, the ever-youthful god of music, depicted casually leaning against a tree as he teases a lizard. It is a famous statue type that survives in various versions from antiquity. I much prefer it as a fragment. We are given an abstracted body, one that shape-shifts in front of us, metamorphosing from undefined stone to male torso and back again. 

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Henri Matisse, Vénus (1952)

I visited Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern yesterday. In an exhibition full of pleasures, I was repeatedly drawn back to this image, Vénus. The silhouette is so casual, a glimpse of white space in the gap between the cut blue paper that somehow manages to suggest volume and something quietly monumental. It's an image that reminds me of the Aphrodite statuette in the Met (below): the same truncated arms, which are here also the goddess' breasts; the broad curve of the hips; the abruptly interrupted head. It is a fragment like these fragmented ancient statues, which have been made similarly abstract by time. But unlike the statuette, which makes physical the reality of the goddess, Matisse's Vénus plays with the immateriality of her beauty: her leftward lean promises that she might slip off the edge of the paper and slide away from view.

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Giuseppe Penone

Scrigno, 2007

Leather, bronze, gold, resin

I visited Gagosian Gallery in London a few weeks back to see Circling, their exhibition of Giuseppe Penone's monumental works Scrigno (Casket) (2007) and Sigillo (Seal) (2008). I found myself really drawn to Scrigno, a huge strip of patchwork leather panels creased like bark - but also a lot like skin - and wrapped around the long walls of the gallery. It was really hard not to touch the piece - something about the folds of the leather, the changing texture and colour, was really alluring.

Penone actually hammered the leather against the bark of a living tree to take an impression of its surface - like the moulages I saw in Brussels, this is also a cast, but it plays cleverly with ideas of surface and containment. No longer the outer casing of a tree, this bark becomes a flat plane against which is displayed a small tree cast in bronze. Split open and lined with gold, this tree-turned-branch-turned-casket reveals its precious resin, pooling at its centre. By taking casts from life and then reimagining them, Penone is challenging the idea of mimesis...that art must look like what it's representing. I like the representation of nature as an aestheticised object, the transformation of the original into something related but different. It reminds me of the myth of King Midas and his Midas Touch that turned everything to gold, changing living things into art, whether they liked it or not. 

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I was in Brussels over the Easter weekend and visited the wonderful Atelier de Moulage, a plaster-cast workshop located alongside the city's Royal Museums. The workshop was established in the 19th Century and still produces casts today. It has a collection of more than 4,000 plaster-casts of works of art dating from the prehistoric era to the 18th Century, and includes many famous works of Greek and Roman art.

Rows upon rows, shelves upon shelves are packed with strangely-shaped plaster moulds - like odd sarcophagi - holding torsos, limbs, secret faces, Greek gods and Christian saints. The air is full of plaster-dust, and very silent. I loved guessing what statue the moulds might be concealing, how the shape of the casing related to what was inside. It was also fun to think about the plaster-chain of casts and moulds that lead back to the first impression taken from the statue, like a string of echoes.

These casts are a modern re-telling of ancient sculpture, re-locating familiar forms in a new material and new location: more than just "copies", however, the moulds and casts are intriguing objects in their own right, asking us to question our notions of originality, replication, and creation.