Ella Haselswerdt (UCLA)
In a discussion of contemporary artist Allyson Mitchell's call for contemporary queers to engage both critically and generously with the lesbian separatism of the 2nd wave (Cvetkovich & Mitchell, 2011) queer theorist Elizabeth Freeman describes digging into 'geologic time, the time of feminism and other dinosaurs, of fossilized icons and sedimented layers of meaning' (Freeman, 2011, 85). This paper locates Sappho’s corpus as a productive site for such an excavation, focusing on a series of contemporary artist’s books, all of which simultaneously transmit the fragments and respond to the affective excesses they have accrued over their reception history. To varying degrees, these pieces offer antiquity as a site for queer identification without relying on reductive or positivist tropes. At the same time, they demonstrate more broadly contemporary art's potential to enact an embodied, situated, and critical approach to classical antiquity.
I consider Anne Carson’s edition of Sappho, If Not, Winter (2003), in the context not only of the author's philological career, but also in her capacity as an occasional visual/performance artist. Transparency serves as the governing aesthetic of the volume, clean pages with wide open spaces that depict the precise dimensions of the fragments accompanied by Carson's characteristically limpid translations. I link the sterility of Carson’s presentation to her lack of interest in the question of the ancient poet's sexual proclivities (Carson, 2003, x). In an attempt to cut through an often-unproductive debate, Carson presents the fragments excised from their material, embodied potential.
Poetry of Sappho (2015) is a lavish edition presented in new translation by John Daley and Page duBois with facing Greek, and, interspersed at regular intervals throughout, prints by high-profile abstract artist Julie Mehretu. She layers urgent, writing-like scribbles into her typical larger-scale, chaotic, cartographic pieces that, as she puts it, 'create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history.' The drawings become tangled strata of time, language, and bodies. But the traditional formal characteristics of the volume ultimately relegate Mehretu’s interventions to the detached role of paratextual commentary on Sappho’s poems. Furthermore, the volume’s status (and price tag) as a luxury item calls into question the liberatory power of contemporary art that plays into market demands.
Rose Frain’s Sappho Fragments (1989) consists of fragile, hand-made, unbound pages, some sheets featuring Suzy Q. Groden’s translations engraved with letter press. The piece is not figurative, but it is wholly corporeal. Many of the sheets feature a light pink or purple wash, its shape reminiscent in turns of a womb, a vagina, a bruise. Though deeply affecting and materially attentive to the fragments, as a one-of-a-kind creation its power will only ever be experienced by a few.
I conclude with more anarchic approaches: collages, zines, and chapbooks, including j/j hastain's erotic 'queer biography' Sapphopunk (2015), which the author describes as ‘a vivid, visceral experiment in “somatic abundance.”' By depicting more or less obliquely both Sappho’s corpus and Sappho’s body, these books posit a queer identity connected (but not beholden) to history, and a posture towards antiquity that eschews positivism.