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27 March 2020 Following from the previous posts looking at performativity more generally and of violence specifically in the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable sculptures, it is worth turning to the many performances of sexuality, camp, the body and gender. After the striking reveal of the Calendar Stone upon entering the first room in Punta della Dogana, visitors came to the towering headless figure of The Diver , a 5m-tall coral-covered bronze depicting a buxom naked woman outstretched in a diving pose. This was accompanied by a light-box photograph of the sculpture on the ocean floor being found by the divers playing the role of the recovery team. In Hettie Judah’s words , The Diver has ‘the figure of a porn star, complete with full bikini wax and peeping labia’. As a headless woman with her points of interest, shall we say, left rather unobscured by the coral, this sculpture does call to mind leering images framed to ‘decap

20 March 2020 *As is indicated by the title, there is unpleasantness ahead including mentions of rape and child-murder* In the previous post on sculpture as performance, I edged into specifically thinking about violence and sexuality as types of performativity embodied in many of the works in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable . I’ve looked previously at the impending violence in Hydra and Kali and Andromeda and the Sea Monster , as well as the aftermath of violence across several versions of The Severed Head of Medusa . Here I want to focus on the sculptures in which the figures are stilled while in the throes of violent acts, for example, The Minotaur and Cronos Devouring his Children , both of which include the perpetrator and victim(s). The guide description for The Minotaur reads (p. 33): ‘ This depiction of the half-man, half-bull of Greek myth raping an Athenian virgin presents the violent threat of unfettered male sexua

13 March 2020 For a while now I've been thinking about sculpture in relation to performance, turning on their head my studies of performance as an extension of sculpture in space and time. All sculptures are one way or another the documents of a series of performative acts. They also often depict performative acts, including the pose. Viewing them is a performative act on the part of the viewer; we must move around them, take them in from different angles, resist the urge to touch unless permitted, and can usually take as much time as desired to regard them. Imperceptible to those of us stuck in human time rather than epochal time, sculptures are in states of flux. Their chemical make-up, as with all things, gradually changes with every turn around the sun. Theirs is a performance that outlasts us all. With this in mind it is useful to rethink our relationships with art media. Normally video art is regarded as a time-based extension of sculpture, but

6 March 2020 In a previous post , I played with a bit of a conspiracy theory that the coins in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable were from the aptly named and rather mysterious Prospero Collection. I’ve since found videos on YouTube in which exhibition visitors have filmed their walk-through of each venue and captured detail of many of the works and the collections, and these have allowed me to see some of the coins more closely. Many are embossed with animals or humanoid faces – one even looks something between those, a bit like the Wolf-man in the 1930s Universal horror pictures, or even the teen-wolf trope in 1950s ‘red scare’ B-movies. At least one other has a relief that the video-maker reckoned looks like Damien Hirst in profile, which would make sense given his appearance in the bust of The Collector and what I’ve learnt concerning enlargements and miniatures being created using pantographs. As well as Greek and Latin, many of the c