Revisioning Classicism in Contemporary Art

In Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture (2018), John Levi Bernard ‘bring[s] together postcolonial insights on the classical tradition as a mechanism of imperial power, while aligning with … [a] dialectical reading of African American cultural production in relation to dominant American culture of classical monumentalism and public historiography’ (11).

In response to the colleague who once asked whether the artist Kehinde Wiley directly engaged with classics “rather than just classicism as an aesthetic,” this paper argues that more exacting attention to Black classicisms in the visual arts frees us from the tyranny of this artificial and unproductive distinction. Wiley’s equestrian portraits in particular open up two approaches for turning the colleague’s question on its head: 1. the provincialization of classics as, in the end, one contingent form of classicism, sorely in need of rewriting its relationship to Blackness; 2.

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).

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?

Since the early 2000s, classical archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann have made tremendous strides in the forensic study and reconstruction of polychromy in ancient sculpture. Many of these reconstructions are physical; others are virtual; still others are a combination of the two. What they all share in common, however, is a processual grasping at the “truth” through recursive chains of technical operations.

Over the last few decades, scholars have increasingly highlighted the role of archaeological imagery as a rich repository of both visual clichés and, more importantly, of intellectual stimuli for contemporary visual artists and performers (see, e.g. Roelstraete 2013; Settis 2020). An increasing number of works has attuned to a distinctive historiographic mode, drawing on the archaeological theory and practice in order to explore the dynamics of cultural production, the accumulation and institutionalization of knowledge, and the construction of (social, economic, and political) authority.