Pea Arts About

31 January 2020 ‘ Perseus [sometime after beheading Medusa] paused for refreshment at Chemmis in Egypt, where he is still worshipped, and then flew on. As he rounded the coast of Philistia to the north, he caught sight of a naked woman chained to a sea-cliff, and instantly fell in love with her. This was Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, the Ethiopian King of Joppa, and Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia had boasted that both she and her daughter were more beautiful than the Nereids, who complained of this insult to their protector Poseidon. Poseidon sent a flood and a female sea-monster to devastate Philistia; and when Cepheus consulted the Oracle of Ammon, he was told that his only hope of deliverance lay in sacrificing Andromeda to the monster. His subjects had therefore obliged him to chain her to a rock, naked except for certain jewels, and leave her to be devoured. [... After saving her, Perseus] laid [the Gorgon’s head] face downwards on a bed of leaves and sea-weed (which instant

24 January 2020 Where deities such as Ishtar were imaged in Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable through mixing the guises of contemporary celebrities, as was worship of The Aten , the ancient Egyptian sun god, in being gazed up to by Rihanna , other works in the 2017 show juxtaposed figures from different mythologies in ways that speak to the merging of cultures in the ancient past and in the contemporary period. An incongruous and yet fitting pairing amongst the mythology-inspired sculptures wa s Hydra and Kali , pitting the Greco-Roman many-headed water serpent from Lerna against the Hindu goddess of time in a never-ending battle featuring cycles of death, renewal and endless work, frozen before it can commence. In the Greek myths, Herakles’s second of twelve labours was to defeat the Lernaean Hydra, which, Robert Graves explains (p. 430), ‘had its lair beneath a plane-tree at the sevenfold source of the River Amymone and haun

17 January 2020 In parts 8 and 9 of these posts on Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable exhibition in 2017, I worked through some issues and points raised by its central mythology of a freed slave who became an excessively wealthy art collector whose attempt to ship his collection for display in a custom-built temple met with disaster. I want to turn now to the notional temple and the Mesopotamian goddess in whose honour it was said to be built: Ishtar. This is a gap in the plot filled out by the film that shares the exhibition’s title. At least I hope that’s from where I understand this detail as it is not in the guidebook and the film’s license on Netflix has expired, so for now I cannot double-check. Let’s assume until I can that my memory is correct and have a look at relevant aspects of the show and their possible significance s . Hailing from an area that is now part of Turkey, the collector in question, Cif Amotan II, is sa

10 January 2020 The guidebook text for Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is attributed to Amie Corry who has been an editor, writer and the head of content for Damien Hirst and his company Science Ltd since 2013. The exhibition’s introductory text draws attention to the significance and etymology of names, and there is much to be gleaned from probing its claims. While detailing the story of the freed slave Cif Amotan II whose shipwrecked cargo of one hundred recovered items was said to feature in the exhibition, the text asserts that apistos , the name of the ship, is ancient Greek for unbelievable . i Upon consulting various dictionaries, the meaning seems to be more complex depending on the context. More nuanced meanings include finding something to be untrustworthy, to be an unbeliever, a disbeliever, to be unpersuaded and therefore without (religious) faith. The Henry Liddell and Robert Scott Greek-English Lexicon short definitio