Verity Platt (Cornell University)
The authority of the classical aesthetic is associated with formal precision and conceptual clarity, but antiquity has also bequeathed us a wealth of visual detritus that resists taxonomy and interpretation. The former continues to inspire a vigorous engagement with classical sculpture, exemplified by contemporary artists from Jeff Koons to Oliver Laric and increasingly aligned with digital technologies. But what happens when artists forgo the authority of classicism in pursuit of more critical modes of reception?
This paper focuses on two women artists whose use of drawing, alongside the two-dimensional media of painting and photography, performs an abstraction and dissolution of the antique that visibly muddies meaning. In her 2014 exhibition Oxyrhyncus, British artist Jenny Saville drew on the excavation of the Egyptian site to conceptualize the “visual rubble” embodied in her large-scale canvases of bodies entwined in sensual, haptic and elusively shifting formations. Combining oil-painting’s intense materiality with the dynamism of charcoal, Saville’s palimpsestic symplegmata evoke the stratigraphy of the archaeological trash heap – that which has been “treasured and discarded” like the piles of papyri recovered from Oxyrhyncus itself (Elderfield 2015). The viewer’s effort to search through this “visual rubble” in order to make sense of the flesh, contours, reflections, and shadows in each canvas echoes the labour of sifting, sorting, selecting, and interpreting required by the detritus of history, which is also routed through the art-historical resonances of Saville’s painterly style. The sketchy, raw, and equivocal qualities of the Oxyrhyncus series challenge us to rethink the authority of the past, the embodied intimacies of others, and the limits of our own heuristic powers.
The subversive indeterminacy of line is also integral to American artist Rachel Harrison’s 2017 series, The Classics (Harrison 2020). Here, palimpsestic layerings of form exhibit a kind of media archaeology as Harrison lays pastel and fluorescent doodles over pictures of scrawled-on notepaper featuring photographs of Greco-Roman sculptures. These “drawings on photographs of drawings of photographs of sculpture” perform multiple remediations of the antique that combine the textbook authority of the classical canon with the vernacular DIY and “sly anti-monumentality” of Harrison’s irreverent sculptures (Doran 2020; Dillon 2019). Like Saville’s Oxyrhyncus, The Classics dance uneasily between figuration and abstraction, playfully alluding to sculptures such as the Kritios Boy and Terme Boxer even as they resist attempts to sort them into coherent representations. The ancient ‘original’ thereby becomes something “empty, unnerving, even frightening and increasingly absurd” (Weinberg 2019).
Harrison’s work energetically unravels the fixities of the antique through a riotous visual multiplicity that operates as “part ridicule and part homage” (Schjeldahl 2014). In their “willfully incoherent” composites of media and technique, both Saville and Harrison generate what Chan calls a “non-salvific” art (Chan 2019). As female artists challenging the authority of a male-dominated tradition, they do not engage with classicism through the evocation of fixed or ideal forms, but through a radically open process of unlearning aligned with an embrace of the disordered, the discarded, and the incomplete.