Unbelievable part 22: Ancients at the Movies

3 April 2020

In previous posts I’ve outlined some of the many references to film culture embedded in the works amounting to Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, but cool, postmodern appropriations of movie characters are not the only ways that the exhibition could be regarded as somewhat cinematic. For starters, the narrative threads throughout the show only came to life – were animated – by visitors moving through the galleries and around the works. We were the cameras in our own first-person point-of-view of the story. We also had stock roles to play: the believer, the unbeliever, the sceptic, the discoverer, the critic, the dissenter, the psuedo-expert, etc.

Some of the works themselves can be regarded as cinematic in other ways if we take a more ‘expanded’ or historical approach to the ontological ‘what is cinema?’ question. Some of the earliest ancient and even prehistorical art took the form of conveying narratives: members of a tribe on a hunt, the gods creating the earth, the heroes winning their greatest battles, mortals being punished for angering a deity, and so on. Whether in a series of cave paintings or narratives told around urns and vessels, humans seem to have always had a compulsion to relate stories through series of still images that, when movement is added in some way, play out the narrative. In the mythologies in question, this is exemplified in The Shield of Achilles, a partial gold/silver (re)creation of the shield as described in the Iliad. 

Some blurred detail from The Shield of Achilles, Punta della Dogana, taken June 2017

Its guide text reads (p. 25):

‘Homer’s description of Achilles’ great shield in The Iliad constitutes the first known example of ekphrasis – a verbal representation of visual art – in Western literature. Crafted in secret by Hephaestus, the god of fire and forge, the shield features illustrations of the many shades of human experience within the poet’s cosmos: marriage, litigation, war, farming, dancing, feasting and arguing. Although this fractured object may originally have been presented to the collector as a priceless historical artefact, Homer’s shield is – by its very nature – a fiction, an exercise in artistic invention that exceeds anything a human craftsman should be capable of producing.’

And yet, there it was, the caveat being that it was likely programmed machines that produced the fragmented shield mounted on a black plate which imagined the rest of the stories detailed on its front. Sensing a Hirstian tongue-in-cheek reference to craftsmanship here (as we know, Damien Hirst has little to do with the making of sculptures attributed to his name), it is worth looking at how the forging of the shield is described in Greek myth. I turn here to Jenny March, who explains (p. 96):

‘In Book 18 [of the Iliad], Homer depicts the master-craftsman, with his massive, hairy torso and spindly legs, at work in his forge. He sweats and puffs over his anvil as he makes marvellous armour for Achilles, most notably a famous, fantastically ornate shield, in gold and silver, bronze and tin, decorated with a multitude of intricate pictures. Lame and ugly Hephaistos may be, but he can still create objects of magical beauty.’

The Treasures shield depicts scenes of agriculture, trade and war framed by sea waves and spoked outwards from a central eye, the flesh around which is inscribed with Greek lettering (which I must at some point attempt to transliterate). This is encircled in sixteen round embellishments showing representations of the moon at the top, the sun at the bottom and stars in between on both sides, that is, the passage of time demonstrated by daily sky cycles. Starting from the top right and moving clockwise, the shield shows the narrative of a year in farming beginning with sowing seeds on tilled fields, time passing in other pursuits including seduction and hunting for meat, the harvest gathered by what appears to be slave labour, a battle between armed forces, and the trade of goods at a market. This series of still images depicting complex and interconnected actions around the shield is reminiscent of early moving-image media such as zoopraxiscope discs upon which were printed slices of time and projected at an appropriate speed to reanimate the fragmented movement. Rather than a few steps in a trot, the shield depicts the passing of days and years and experiences of time that shape human life. As with many of the works in the show, time is reproduced in space.

Another moving image we can imaginatively animate from the stills in the exhibition is the moment of horrific death shown across the four sculptural versions and the drawing of The Severed Head of Medusa. As explained previously, they are copies that aren’t copies; none of them can be identified as an original and they are not the same. They express repetition to an extent but they are not replicas. Given the different positions of the snake heads and Medusa’s face, they are separate works, like film stills, but are the same work with the same title, as is every frame that makes up a film when run through a projector. To me they are the component parts of a moving image – a giving of life in death like Medusa’s blood, and an animation of dead moments (and a moment of death) in cinema.

Another instance of progressive movement in what initially seems to be a miniature replica is found in the small silver Hydra and Kali in which Kali’s right leg is raised as if she’s taking a defensive posture in her impending battle with Hydra. The guide text for the coral-covered version offers a reading (p. 20) of Kali’s multiple arms and Hydra’s many heads and necks ‘as an expression of movement: the woman’s sword-wielding arms presented in three positions at varying heights; and the reeling heads of her foe symbolising the serpent’s single thrashing body’. That it also points out they ‘emerge from a base of primordial crystals, in which naturally perfect cubic forms are replicated in cast metal’ nods towards cubism, and cubist experiments with painting movement as cinema came of age in the 1910s (for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1913). It also points towards Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion Hydra in Jason and the Argonauts (dir. Don Chaffey, 1963), Kali in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (dir. Gordon Hessler, 1973) and the world of cinematic special effects.

What disrupts the guide’s offered reading is that all six of Kali’s swords are different. After a tip-off from my Lord of the Rings fan of a partner and much probing on http://lotr.wikia.com, I found the swords resemble the named blades from the fantasy franchise, namely, for example Hadhafang, the Ringwraiths’ swords, Glamdring, Anguirel and Narsil. It’s also possible there’s some Highlander in there with further connections between owners and weapons. They could well be indicating that Kali, or at least this version of her, is an amalgamation of many warriors/warrior goddesses. What else are contemporary and rebooted characters if not a bricolage of traces of their progenitors?    

Further parallels can be drawn when thinking about cinema and sculptures as documents signifying ephemeral originals. As outlined in part 17, most casting techniques result in the destruction of or damage to the original from which the mould was made. In live-action film, the performances for camera are lost to space and time, the resulting edited film being the trace of their existence (what film theorist Laura Mulvey terms as ‘thenness’ and ‘nowness’). The finished sculpture is also the trace resulting from the editing (carving, welding, finishing, etc.) of the materials, materials which embody geological time rather than the relatively young and fleeting nature of the range of materials that store, preserve and project works of cinema. Whereas cinema gives time to flattened moments of arrest, sculpture spatialises layers of time: the time of the materials’ making, the documented duration of its assemblage, the moment depicted, and its gradual degradation thereafter.

When the sculptures made from raw stone or alloyed metals depict characters and personae from contemporary (broadly twentieth- and twenty-first-century) culture, a connection is made between the now of the recent and the then of the ancient past and pre-history. When faced with the vastness of time and space represented in rocks and ores that took millions of years to form, is Jaws truly any less profound than Cetus as a mythological sea monster? Surely as far as our billions-of-years-old Earth is concerned, it’s all just human nonsense anyway. But for us, our fictions are nonsense we use to learn and to share empathy, to experience and to feel, and as such are more than nonsense to us. They help us understand and communicate the incommunicable. Given the arguments over whether Hirst's work can even be considered as art or if it is ‘high art lite’, I must think through the other ontological question of ‘what is art?’, and in particular what the nature and significance of art is or could be well into the twenty-first century.

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