When arriving at Cambridge station, travellers might not expect to confront a multitemporal meditation on abandonment and alienation. Yet thanks to the installation of Gavin Turk’s ‘Ariadne Wrapped’ in the square outside the station entrance, departures and arrivals have become an immersive encounter with an art-historical image which is itself complex and multi-layered. The placing of the statue recalls Giorgio De Chirico’s early twentieth-century cityscapes, which are often populated only by his version of this classical statue reclining alone. Under her wrapping and bronze cords, the figure of Ariadne is still recognisable; the colonnade of the Victorian station building entrance stands in for De Chirico’s arched city buildings, although the trains running past are electric rather than steam.
Gavin Turk’s ‘Ariadne Wrapped’, installed in front of Cambridge station.
Ariadne, probably a Roman version of a lost Greek statue and now part of the Vatican Museums collection, herself evokes further thoughts of travel and loss, of Catullus’ story of Ariadne left sleeping (Catullus 64), and Ovid’s account of her grief (Ovid Heroides 10), as Theseus departed for Athens without her. She is perhaps not the most cheerful figure to place at a travel interchange.
‘Ariadne’, in the Vatican Museum.
The much-criticised Cambridge square now echoes the elements De Chirico recombined in works like The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Ariadne (1913, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). But although the visual pun works well, the parallel is inexact. The building which matches De Chirico’s vision is the preserved railway station rather than the bland commercial buildings on the other sides of the square. The bustle of taxis and buses, and the constant stream of travellers arriving and departing, dispel the parallel even further.
‘Anachronism and Antiquity’, featuring De Chirico’s 1913 The Soothsayer’s Recompense, Philadelphia Museum of Art
In Anachronism and Antiquity, we wrote of the ‘dialectical tension between the momentary and the monumental’ evoked by Ariadne as ‘a paradigm of temporal complexity’, the permanence of the marble figure compared with the quickly dissipating smoke from the passing train. We explored De Chirico’s ‘use of an ancient myth to ground aesthetic modes foreign to antiquity itself’ as he brought antiquity and modernity together.
Turk has returned frequently to the figure of Ariadne, showing one version, ‘Her’ (2003) with a De Chirico backdrop, as part of his exhibition ‘Et In Arcadia Eggo’ at the suitably idyllic New Court Sculpture Park:
Gavin Turk’s ‘Here’, 2003, displayed at New Court Sculpture Park with a De Chirico-inspired backdrop.
The square’s developers quote the artist explaining the appeal of the sculpture of Ariadne, which has been a constant motif of his work: ‘She is this classical figure who gives Theseus the golden thread so he can kill the Minotaur; a surrealist mental image. Here she is reclining like in a classical painting, and wrapped; a blurred vision of an archetypal sculpture.’
Ariadne Wrapped: Artist @gavinturk explains: "She is this classical figure who gives Theseus the golden thread so he can kill the Minotaur; a surrealist mental image. Here she is reclining like in a classical painting, and wrapped; a blurred vision of an archetypal sculpture." pic.twitter.com/VaUMIRBOhn
More on the installation from the CB1 Development website
More on De Chirico, Ariadne and connecting classical antiquity and modernity in Anachronism and Antiquity, Interlude: Ariadne on Naxos on the Bloomsbury website.
The art of the special exhibition may be to create a special and otherwise unobtainable experience, offering in a single event, such as Titian: Love, Desire, Death at London’s National Gallery, something which would otherwise take time and travel to experience. While such exhibitions often bring together new combinations of artworks, they can also involve the recreation of a past arrangement, normally unattainable. The National Gallery’s exhibition brings together a small group of paintings originally intended to be shown together but long since scattered into separate collections. The paintings, known as the ‘Poesie’ because they respond to scenes from classical poems, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were supplied to Philip II of Spain to decorate his private apartments. They were delivered to Philip in Spain by Titian from his workshop in Venice between 1551 and 1562, but separated soon afterwards, eventually finding homes in major collections across Europe and the USA. The exhibition would provide the visitor with a glimpse of something private and rare, in a short moment in time recreated in the present.
Titian (1490-1576) – Diana and Actaeon, 1556-9, National Galleries of Scotland/National Gallery. One of the six Poesie paintings displayed at the National Gallery.
But what is at stake in such an act of recreation? Whose view is being recreated, that of Philip or those visiting his apartments? It is not that of Titian himself. Only Philip and his courtiers had access to these paintings as a group, and even then not for long. Titian himself never saw this specific group of paintings as they are presented here, assembled together in matching frames; the canvases were dispatched piecemeal on completion (payment was far from prompt). Possibly Titian and his team could have assembled a display from studio copies and derivative renderings of the same scenes – and identification of these particular canvases, rather than other versions, as the Poesie series is fairly recent. It seems that we are looking at an act of collection rather than an act of creation, and that what is being re-created is the display of Philip’s monarchical power as much as Titian’s creative brilliance.
Can the contemporary viewer recreate those original acts of viewing, or has Philip’s power and Titian’s message leached away to leave only an aesthetic experience? Viewing and decoding the details of the scenes might require a knowledge of classical texts and mythology, such as an educated sixteenth-century prince and his courtiers might well have had, but many modern visitors will need to consult the website, the catalogue, or listen to Mary Beard’s informed classicist take. On the other hand, a modern viewer sensitised to the depiction of power in human relations might appreciate the interactions of Titian’s characters, divine and human, male and female, without possessing a detailed knowledge of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Titian, The Death of Actaeon, 1559-75, begun as part of the Poesie series but not delivered to Philip.
The paintings themselves explore critical moments of danger and change, encounters between divine and mortal, male and female, mediated through sexual desire and the exercise of power, which are fateful to the weaker party. Jupiter appears to Danae as a shower of gold, setting in motion future events which are illustrated in another painting in which their son the hero Perseus rescues Andromeda. The power of goddesses is less certain. Diana will take revenge on Actaeon, the hunter who sees her bathing, as well as on the nymph Callisto, whose pregnancy by Jupiter is revealed. Venus clings to her beloved, the hunter Adonis, but cannot prevent his departure or death. In the final completed painting Jupiter, in the form of a bull, carries off Europa; a related but unfinished picture, shown here although never delivered to Philip, shows the death of Actaeon, at the moment at which Diana transforms him into a stag and his own hounds attack him. Titian simultaneously valorises the display of power and questions its impact on humans: his message to the court is not an entirely comfortable one.
Recreating historical collections for private display is a familiar organising principle for art exhibitions. Some recent examples include the Royal Academy’s Charles I: King and Collector (2018) and Houghton Revisited at Houghton Hall in Norfolk (2013), which took the format to another level by redisplaying the collection, now at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, in its original site, where it was displayed before Robert Walpole sold his collection to Catherine the Great in 1779. These shows, while providing insights into the eye of the historical collector, also contained implicit questions about the transience of wealth and power. But more could be said, both about the way such displays risk, without careful curation and contextualisation, a bleaching of the politics involved in the acquisition of the collections and the power wielded by their owners, and about the use of such acts of recreation as an organising principle. While not precisely commemorations, these recreated exhibitions are suggestive of the ‘regime of heritage’ outlined by François Hartog in his Regimes of Historicity as a current cultural mode for managing our relationship with the past. While they can be presented as acts of democratisation, opening up the palace and the country house to all, by presenting them as special and limited experiences, they may simply create a new form of cultural privilege. One might even see such events as
In a way, history repeated itself. Just as an outbreak of plague in 1576 ravaged Titian’s Venice and ended his long and productive life, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the National Gallery to shut its doors only days after the exhibition opened. The exquisite moment would remain unattainable for months, until the gallery briefly re-opened in July, permitting lucky visitors to see Titian’s work in much less crowded conditions than has previously been normal for special exhibitions. The planned schedule which took many of the paintings on a tour of their home galleries was abandoned, and the London display had to close twice again as further lockdowns shut museums. For a culture of heritage in which participation in a spectacular event is valued so highly, the thwarting of the exhibition and loss of the potential experience became an event in itself, with its own BBC documentary ‘Titian – Behind Closed Doors’. Titian’s depiction of humans, powerless against capricious forces, was as applicable to the 2020 exhibition as it had been to the Poesie’s original viewers.
References:
Hartog, F. (2015) [2003], Regimes of Historicity: presentism and experiences of time, trans. S. Brown (New York: Columbia University Press).
Wivel, M., et al. (2020) Titian: love, desire, death (London: National Gallery Company).
Reviewers described the first version of Linder’s performance piece ‘Bower of Bliss’ as ‘remixing history’, surely a working definition of anachronism. That was already an apt description of her 2018 film in which powerful women of the 16th century, Bess of Hardwick and Mary Queen of Scots, encountered each other in the house and grounds of Georgian Chatsworth. This latest instance of ‘Bower of Bliss’ was performed at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge on March 14, 2020, as part of the Linderism exhibition at Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard, and added further layers of multi-temporal myth-making to a rich and provocative performance.
Linder opens the Bower of Bliss: an improper architecture, performed in Cambridge 14/3/20
Linder’s layering of time and place is emphatically multi-sensory. Louise Gray’s costumes mixed historical elements, notably the Tudor elements of the queen’s costume, with textures and layers reminiscent of eighties street fashion. Under the college’s brutalist dome, relit in spring green, Linder re-created her bower as ‘an improper architecture’ (a phrase used by critics of this women’s college modernist buildings) using music, lighting, scent – the House of Helen scent created for her Kettle’s Yard exhibition, sprayed into the audience by dancer Kirstin Halliday – and flowers and blossom from the college gardens. Maxwell Sterling and Kenichi Iwasa provided a shifting soundscape, from electronic drone to acoustic instruments and percussion. Elements from Linder’s visual art reappeared in performance, her critique and subversion of the domestic; a sieve is passed between the dancers to become a handheld mirror in the past and a phone for selfies in the present.
The phrase ‘bowre of blisse’ appears in Edmund Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Book II, Canto XII, stanza 42), an epic poem from 1590 which explores the power of women in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and which Linder interprets as ‘a critique of irresponsible femininity’. Spenser’s bower of bliss is the ‘wandering isle’ home of Acrasia, a personification of female pleasure, and both delightful and dangerous; eventually it is destroyed as masculine power trumps the feminine. Akrasia is a canonically classical vice, the weakness of will and the triumph of desire over reason; for Plato, that is the outcome of education which empowers the rational part of the soul to command the lower desires. Feminists have long questioned the gendering of desire and reason in philosophers’ models.
Spenser’s description of the bower further invokes classical exempla through description and ecphrasis, the depiction of Jason and Medea on its gate, and the nod to ancient poetic descriptions of gardens such as that of Alcinous (Homer, Odyssey 7.112-32). Linder’s complex web of allusion acknowledges Spenser and his sources, but also reaches from the classical past through the northern club cultures of post-punk music and Northern Soul to the contemporary reality television of Love Island. In this anachronic Bower of Bliss, women explore and express their distinctive identities and allegiances through clashing dance styles from the formality of classical ballet to the vitality of Northern Soul.
Dancers scatter daffodils in the bower of bliss
As daffodils were strewn across the floor to create the bower, Linder opened up and reclaimed another past, her own part in England’s post-punk heritage as friend and muse to Morrissey, whose early performances with the Smiths featured him strewing daffodils across the stage as fans surged on to it. Full marks to Lillian Wang for dancing on pointe amid the petals, as Linder’s characters reframed the often-masculine experience of the stage invasion as female delight.
Linder also opposed the academic and institutional context of this bower through sound. The Inter Alios choir, students from Murray Edwards and Churchill Colleges, circled the performance space, their black academic gowns a stark contrast to the colourful dancers. The eclectic and contemporary soundtrack made way for a sombre choral version of ‘Dido’s Lament’, from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, linking back to Virgil’s Aeneid, another classical text in which female experience and pleasure is suppressed and denied, before the choir provided drones and chants for Maxwell Sterling’s soundscape.
The Bower of Bliss musicians and dancers: (back row, l to r) Ashley Young, Maxwell Sterling, Linder, Kenichi Iwasa, Kirstin Halliday; (front, l to r) Lilian Wang, Lauren Fitzpatrick
In Linder’s reimagining of the Bower of Bliss, her women characters create a space in which they can express their desires. The temporary installation and performance of the bower upends and replaces the usual order – even in a women’s college, traditional academic hierarchies are usually upheld. The transformation continues in the Linderism exhibition, which features imagery from the project, screens the film, and transforms Kettle’s Yard into a feminine space even to the extent of re-gendering the Kettle’s Yard House website.
In engaging with the distant literary and artistic past, Linder also re-examines her own often transgressive and provocative past as artist and performer, as when she fronted her band Ludus wearing a dress made of raw meat and a dildo in a 1982 performance at Manchester’s Hacienda, a performance intended to criticise artificial conventions of femininity, restrictions on women’s role in the music world, and the macho culture of the Manchester scene. Her performance in the Bower of Bliss was no less provocative, yet completely of the moment. There had been some debate as to whether the performance on March 14 should go ahead at all, as arts organisations began to respond to the arrival of coronavirus. Linder and the musicians performed in dark surgical masks, and Linder turned her opening song into the most transgressive sound of the present moment, the cough.
Linder’s subtle interventions in the Kettle’s Yard house included opening a secret door between the floors, through which Jim and Helen Ede communicated.
A couple of days later, Kettle’s Yard followed the other University museums in closing its doors. Linder’s intervention in the Kettle’s Yard house, opening up a small door through which Jim and Helen Ede communicated between the floors of the cottage, was left in place. As Sarah Victoria Turner notes, Linder’s engagement with Kettle’s Yard and particularly with Helen’s Room ‘necessarily looks to the past’ as part of her ‘retrospective practice’ of ‘making invisible women visible’. Linder’s Bower of Bliss envisions an anachronic world in which women’s emotions are revalued and their presence in the past is revealed.
Kettle’s Yard has now released a video of the performance on March 14.
Edmund Spenser (2007)[1590], The Faerie Queene, edited A.C. Hamilton, London.
Amy Tobin (2020) ‘Linderism: the red period’ in Linderism, edited A. Tobin and A. Khakoo, London, 39-48.
Sarah Victoria Turner (2020) ‘Raising Old Ghosts: Linder’s Conversations with the Dead’ in Linderism, edited A. Tobin and A. Khakoo, London, 65-71.
Images from the Bower of Bliss is also installed on billboards at Southwark tube station until May 2020. A version has also been displayed at Glasgow Women’s Library.
Our project’s book Anachronism and Antiquity, written collaboratively by Tim Rood, Carol Atack, and Tom Phillips, will be published in the new year by Bloomsbury Academic. The official launch date is February 6, 2020, but you can take a look inside now. Click on this link to read the opening prelude, ‘Look to the end’, in full.
If that isn’t enough, there’s also a Google Books preview.
The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, released in 1977 as commentary on the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, offered a powerful warning of the dangers of political nostalgia. The message was reinforced by Jamie Reid’s powerful image of a familiar portrait of the queen with her features obliterated by the ransom-note rendering of the song title and group name.
God save the queen
We mean it man
There’s no future
In England’s dreaming
The song’s lyrics assess the consequences of monarchy as an element of the political imaginary, the shared ideas and images with which a community thinks about its political institutions and practices, the queen isn’t a ‘human being’ but is nonetheless loved (see music and culture website Louder than War for a detailed analysis).
‘God Save the Queen’ single sleeve from 1977, designed by Jamie Reid.
As Jon Savage showed in his cultural history of the punk years, England’s Dreaming, nostalgia for an imaginary past was part of the culture of English decline to which punk’s ideology emerged as a response; when England dreams, it looks to the past. Savage opens his survey of punk with the observation that ‘first we need the location, the vacant space where, like the buddleia on the still plentiful bombsites, these flowers can bloom’.
In identifying this void, Savage tapped into a broader critique of democratic culture. The problem of sovereignty for republican democracy is that there is no figurehead. But even in a democracy with a constitutional monarchy, the institution of monarchy operates as much as part of the political imaginary as it does as a real institution. Witness, for example, speculation about the queen’s feelings about Brexit and parliament, as in this Guardian article about her blue and yellow hat.
Classical Athens handled the problem of the democratic void in a distinctive way, as cultural historians have shown. In the same year as the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols released their single, the French ancient historian Nicole Loraux completed her doctoral thesis, ‘Athènes imaginaire. Histoire de l’oraison funèbre athénienne et de sa fonction dans la cité classique’, which would be published in book form a few years later as The Invention of Athens, and which remains one of the most powerful explorations of the democratic Athenian political imaginary. The synchronism is not coincidental – this was a time when cultural theorists drew on new insights to explore societies ancient and modern. Loraux’s exploration of Athens was focused on a specific location – the public funeral speeches held to commemorate the war dead – in which Athenian politicians shaped the city’s political imaginary.
But location within Athens where some of the most visible work was done, as Cornelius Castoriadis, theorist of the political imaginary, noted, was the tragic stage. Athenian tragedy peoples the political imaginary and fills the democratic void, the lack of an identifiable individual holder of sovereignty. The citizens perform their politeia to themselves and the wider audience, but the Athens on stage is quite different from the Athens of the present. Athenian tragedy thus presents an intriguing anachronism, in the figure of the democratic king, who personifies Athenian virtues in his speech and actions. The Athenians’ self-image revolved around their support for those who asked for help, and tragedies such as Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Children of Heracles show Athenian kings, Theseus and Demophon, delivering that in person.
However, the figure of the tragic king is not entirely politically innocent. Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, written during the final stages of the Peloponnesian War when Athenian democracy was severely weakened, shows Athens at the point when it was newly united into a single political entity, with Theseus as its king. The citizens of Colonus are unsure of how to operate in this new environment, or how they should receive the problematic suppliant Oedipus. It falls to the king to assert the wishes of the unified centre, receive the suppliant and ensure the divine favour his cult will bring to the city. But, as the recent production of this play as the 2019 Cambridge Greek Play showed, the articulation of Theseus to the democracy is not entirely explicit in Sophocles’ play. This production opted to set the intricacies of Athenian political debate to one side, and to focus on the powerful story of Oedipus’ rejection of Thebes and of the successors fighting for control of it. Oedipus’ grant of support to Theseus and his successors asserts a continuity of Athenian rule from the king himself to the democratic archons who performed the religious role of the king in the democracy of Sophocles’ time.
Theseus and the Crommyonian Sow: detail from a red-figured kylix showing the deeds of Theseus, attributed to the Codrus Painter, c 440-30 BCE, British Museum.
In The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece, I explore the developing role of the image of the king in critical discussions of Athenian Democracy. Theseus was, in democratic Athens, as much of an iconographic presence as Queen Elizabeth II is in the contemporary United Kingdom. His statue appeared on temple pediments, his deeds were illustrated on temple friezes, as did paintings in public buildings. The labours he performed on behalf of the city were often depicted on painted pottery; he was often presented in similar clothing and poses to the tyrannicides, his clothing used to connect him to the iconography of democracy, rather like the queen’s hat. Like the Sex Pistols’ queen, Theseus could be a beloved monarch of Athens without being a human being, a living presence in the city. And Athenian nostalgia for the imaginary political past was often invoked and manipulated during times of civil strife, as is its contemporary British equivalent.
See previous post Anachronism and Antiquity for more on Nicole Loraux’s study of anachronism and ancient history
References
Atack, C. (2020) The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (London: Routledge).
Castoriadis, C. (1987) [1975], The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey (Cambridge: Polity).
Easterling, P.E. (1985), ‘Anachronism in Greek Tragedy’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 105, 1–10.
Lefort, C. (1988) [1986], Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D. Macey (Cambridge: Polity).
Loraux, N. (1986) [1981] The Invention of Athens: the funeral oration in the classical city, trans. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Savage, J. (1991) England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and punk rock (London: Faber).
Worley, M. (2017) No Future: punk, politics and British youth culture, 1976-1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Anachronism and Antiquity 