Unbelievable part 27: Cronos Devouring his Children

 

Cronos Devouring his Children, Damien Hirst, 2011, image from Pinterest

I remembered his eyes bulging as he tore his children apart. They were actually closed and his mouth gaped. You can almost hear the yells of him. Perhaps my memory of the bulging eyes and manic flesh eating came from an equally graphic painting rather than this sculpture. Knowing me, it was of a totally different character if so.

Much of the confronting horror of Cronos Devouring his Children is obscured by coral, with enough of the scene visible that Cronos’s headless young son stretched between his hands and other children gripping his knees evoke the debauched fuller picture. There are other figures around the mounded base of the sculpture, and the guide text assures me that baby Zeus, who would go on to liberate his siblings from inside of his father and later destroy him in the Olympians’ war against the Titans, is present, but I can’t verify this for myself from the photos at my disposal. As happens in Blow-up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), the more I zoom in to the tragedy, the less I can see.

Kronos (I prefer the closer-to-Greek transliterations) was king of the Titans, the second level of the ancient Greek gods, and also known as his Roman equivalent, Saturn. As king, he was the ruler of the universe, and he oversaw time, harvests, fate, justice and evil, until his demise and the reapportioning of these roles. He and his sister Rhea parented the first generation of the Olympian gods who, in order of birth, were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus.

Kronos himself had a tyrannical parent. His father Ouranos (Uranus) personified the sky and was a hard ruler. He had children in batches with his mother and wife Gaea, some of whom were monstrous, and he had them banished to Tartarus, the darkest part of the underworld. This angered Gaea, and she went to her Titan children asking them to slay their father with a specially made scythe. In many tellings, Kronos, the youngest, was the only one willing to acquiesce. He chopped his father into pieces and spread them over land and sea, then heralded a new era; the first generation of gods gave way to the Golden Age led by Kronos.

Kronos called his time in charge the Golden Age because he believed – or wanted everyone else to believe – that there was peace on Earth relative to life under Ouranos. This was untrue. There was chaos and ignorance and Kronos had absolute control. The last straw for Rhea was when Kronos repeatedly ate each new child they had because of his father’s prophecy that history would repeat itself and he, too, would be killed and replaced as king of the gods by one of his offspring. So, naturally, he ate them all. Rhea had had enough. When pregnant for the sixth time, she gave birth to Zeus in secret and presented to Kronos a swaddled boulder – provided by Gaea (mother earth’s been fighting the patriarchy for a long time) – which he duly swallowed.

When Zeus was old enough he worked his way into a position as his father’s cup-bearer and gave him a concoction that made him vomit up the five older brothers and sisters. They were so enraged by their father’s cannibalism that they released their monstrous siblings from Tartarus and declared war on the Titans – the Titanomachy. War raged for ten years until the Olympians gained the Titans’ territories and power. Zeus subjected Kronos to the same fate as Ouranos, cutting him up with Gaea’s scythe, and the Titans who had supported Kronos were themselves banished to Tartarus. Zeus’s rule over Olympus is a whole other fiasco, but none of his children ever managed to kill him.

A short-lived animated show I loved as a teenager and whose heart has never left me is God, the Devil and Bob (2000). There’s an episode in which Bob (French Stewart) receives word that his father (Troy Evans) is dying. Bob visits him in hospital hoping to make amends, but his father’s abuse was too much and he tells him to go to hell. After his father dies, Bob is joined by God (James Garner) in a bar who fills him in on his father’s childhood; he had suffered even worse abuse at the hands of Bob’s grandfather. As Bob worries about what kind of father he’ll be to his son Andy (Kath Soucie), God tells Bob that each generation of fathers ‘passed on a softer punch’, and the best he can do is the same. When I read these mythologies about tyrannical god-parents whose progeny become tyrannical god-parents, but maybe not quite as tyrannical as their tyrannical god-parents, it puts me in mind of this sweet and largely lost-to-obscurity episode of television, which helps me see that my own lineages full of abusive tendencies – while still not acceptable – is a human condition, and the best we can do is pass on a softer punch to the next generation. It doesn’t make the earlier brutal punches easier to accept or confront, though.

The parallel suggested by the Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable gallery notes, guide and catalogue referencing the version of imprisoned nobleman Ugolino della Gherardesca in Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century epic poem Inferno is feeling personally prescient. The text claims that renaissance artists found mileage in what they took as ‘the loss of reason in the face of the inexplicable forces of chaos in the world’ symbolised in Ugolino’s consumption of his offspring. At the time of writing I feel figuratively consumed by events surrounding my mother’s health with a great big backdrop of wars in eastern Europe and the Middle-East, mass deaths in natural disasters and accidents in Asia, political chaos in the UK Government and Northern Ireland Assembly, a widespread cost of living crisis and an ongoing viral pandemic that on one hand we’re being gaslit into believing ended a year ago and on the other hand met with angry insistence that it never happened at all. This is why Cronos Devouring his Children has come on my radar now when it never has in the five-plus years I’ve been researching and writing about Damien Hirst's 2017 show in Venice. My mum would deny feeling any expectation, and yet at times I have felt like Atlas buckling under the weight of the sky. Compared to her own upbringing, mum has very much passed on a softer punch than she received, but it hasn’t always felt soft. My sister and I are between many rocks and hard places as we try to navigate the uncertainty of what comes next as our mum’s new status quo shifts and emerges. At the worst moments, with my blank brain and exhausted body I felt like the decapitated child being torn asunder. At the best, I am grateful to be part of a loving and supportive family unit who’ve survived worse together.

At over three meters tall, seeing Cronos Devouring his Children in person was monumental, and yet it was in turn consumed by the sheer excess of the whole show. I’ve been getting reacquainted with film studies terminology recently. Mise en abîme, French for ‘put in the abyss’ – a smaller copy of or reference to the whole placed within the whole. An elaborate sculpture read as a response to chaos within an excessively elaborate exhibition that generated responses to chaos. Too simplistic? Logical? Thematically, what are we dealing with here?
Consumption
Jealousy
Abuse
Anger
Fear
Anxiety
Mortality
Our progeny are part of ourselves, and yet are their own. What makes a parent feel a sense of ownership and control over their children, even into their adulthood? What is the source of the desire to have events go a certain way? The narrative structure of ‘god/king fathers a child, child kills father and takes his place’ spirals dizzyingly throughout ancient-world mythologies. That a self-fulfilling prophecy is usually behind it puts me in mind of the ouroboros. The snake eating its own tale in this context feels like a futile and endless repetition. The characters become so fixated on avoiding their prophecy that their vision is narrowed such that they cannot take any other path and their dysregulation means they don’t even realise they’re nibbling at their own tail. When our parents are passing on their punches, are they eating their own tails?

Jenn and I didn’t dwell on Cronos Devouring his Children at the exhibition. It being so tall, the actions depicted felt at a remove, which likely dissipated their brutality. Studying photos of it now, giant Cronos looks as if he is letting out a primal scream as he rips apart either Hades or Poseidon. His eyes are shut, his nose splayed and his mouth wide, baring teeth. His head veers off and up to the left, as if he is avoiding catching the eyes of the other children gripping his legs. His shoulders, arms, chest and the rest of his body are patched with differently coloured and shaped corals, while his face remains clear. The small, headless male body he’s holding up by an arm and a leg is mostly laid bare except for coral patches on the torn and limp limbs, making the body look starkly gory. As with The Minotaur depicting a violent rape, this sculpture is confronting, and could almost visualise the actions we might imagine when evoked by inflammatory tabloid headlines employing sensationalism to sell copies and generate judgement. TITAN EATS KIDS IN FEEDING FRENZY, when, as the myths imply, the giant swallows them whole as babies one at a time as soon as they are born and they emerge fully grown when he boaks them up. Consumed and stifled by the parent until adulthood, then a prolonged war until you oust them once and for all. Sounds about right. 

Saturno devorando a su hijo, Francisco Goya, c. 1819-23, image from Wikimedia

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