Contemporary Art in Britain and Its Relationships with Greco-Roman Antiquity
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The Classical in the Contemporary: Contemporary Art in Britain and its Relationships with Greco-Roman Antiquity James Matthew Cahill Christ’s College, Cambridge Date of submission: 1 August 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Preface This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma, or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. Word length: 79,998 words. Summary Title: The Classical in the Contemporary: Contemporary Art in Britain and its Relationships with Greco-Roman Antiquity. James Cahill My thesis is titled ‘The Classical in the Contemporary: Contemporary Art in Britain and its Relationships with Greco-Roman Antiquity.’ From the viewpoint of classical reception studies, I am asking what contemporary British art (by, for example, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, and Mark Wallinger) has to do with the classical tradition – both the art and literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. I have conducted face-to-face interviews with some of the leading artists working in Britain today, including Lucas, Hirst, Wallinger, Marc Quinn, and Gilbert & George. In addition to contemporary art, the thesis focuses on Greco-Roman art and on myths and modes of looking that have come to shape the western art historical tradition – seeking to offer a different perspective on them from that of the Renaissance and neoclassicism. The thesis concentrates on the generation of artists known as the YBAs, or Young British Artists, who came to prominence in London in the 1990s. These artists are not renowned for their deference to the classical tradition, and are widely regarded as having turned their backs on classical art and its legacies. The introductory chapter asks whether their work, which has received little scholarly attention, might be productively reassessed from the perspective of classical reception studies. It argues that while their work no longer subscribes to a traditional understanding of classical ‘influence’, it continues to depend – for its power and provocativeness – on classical concepts of figuration, realism, and the basic nature of art. Without claiming that the work of the YBAs is classical or classicizing, the thesis sets out to challenge the assumption that their work has nothing to do with ancient art, or that it fails to conform to ancient understandings of what art is. In order to do this, the thesis analyses contemporary works of art through three classical ‘lenses’, across three chapters. Each lens allows contemporary art to be examined in the context of a longer history: contemporary case studies are analysed against examples of art and text from antiquity, and against later examples of western art which belong squarely to the classical tradition. The first lens is the concept of realism, as seen in artistic and literary explorations of the relationship between art and life. This chapter uses the myth of Pygmalion’s statue as a way of thinking about contemporary art’s continued engagement with ideas of mimesis and the ‘real’ which were theorised and debated in antiquity. The second lens is corporeal fragmentation, as evidenced by the broken condition of ancient statues, the popular theme of dismemberment in western art, and the fragmentary body in contemporary art. The final chapter focuses on the figurative plaster cast, arguing that contemporary art continues to invoke and reinvent the long tradition of plaster reproductions of ancient statues and bodies. Through each of these ‘lenses’, I argue that contemporary art remains linked, both in form and meaning, to the classical past – often in ways which go beyond the stated intentions of an artist. Contemporary art continues to be informed by ideas and processes that were theorised and practised in the classical world; indeed, it is these ideas and processes that make it deserving of the art label. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Caroline Vout, without whose constant encouragement, advice and faith in the thesis, this PhD would not have been accomplished. I would also like to thank my family – my mother Frances, my brothers Tom and Patrick, and above all my husband Alex who has put up with the many hours of work involved. Finally I want to express gratitude to my examiners, Professors Simon Goldhill and Elizabeth Prettejohn, for their detailed insights and suggestions. Chapter 1: Introduction 1. Tracey Emin, My Bed: contemporary art through the prism of the classical Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1998; fig. 1) is a sprawling accumulation of stained sheets, liquor bottles, cigarette packets, and other detritus.1 It began not as an artwork but as an ordinary bed in the artist’s flat in Waterloo, and it bears witness to a phase of suicidal depression, casual sex and intoxication. Reframing abject reality as art, My Bed is a ‘found object’ in the mould of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, an upturned urinal re-presented as a sculptural ‘readymade’; fig. 2),2 but also an upturning of the age-old formula of the self-portrait, with the subject evoked as an absent presence. Emin has explained how the work began with a moment of epiphany, as she crawled drunkenly from her bedroom into the kitchen and looked back at the bed: “It was disgusting. And then, from one second looking horrible, it suddenly transformed itself into something removed from me, and something beautiful.” She was struck, she recalled, by “how classical it looked.”3 What can we learn from Emin’s ‘epiphany’? What does it mean to see her sculpture through the prism of the classical? This thesis addresses the relationship between classical antiquity and art made in Britain in the last three decades – a relationship that is regularly dismissed as vanishingly slight. It offers this reassessment from three angles, or by means of three modalities or ‘lenses’, all of which can be considered archetypally classical, and at the same time as characteristic of contemporary artistic production – the striving towards representational realism, the fragmented body, and the figurative plaster cast. Placing emphasis on the ways in which artworks act on viewers,4 the thesis proposes that contemporary art can be productively analysed and understood in relation to the classical past – specifically the art of ancient Greece and Rome, and the foundations of Art History found in Greek and Latin literature. One possibility, hinted at by Emin herself, is that, in cosmopolitan London at least, art needs to invoke this history in order to qualify as art at all. 1 On My Bed, see Brown, 2006, 100-102; Freedman et al, 2006, 251-253; Merck, 2002, 119-133; Cherry, 2002; Wilson, 1999. 2 The bibliography on Duchamp is vast. On Fountain and the readymades, see especially Schwarz, 2000, 25-51, 199-200; Tomkins, 1997, 181-186, 426-427; Judovitz, 1995, 124-135; Camfield, 1989. On readymades in twentieth-century art, see Buskirk and Nixon, 1999, 205-224; Jones, 1994, 36-40, 41-42, 49-61. 3 She continues: “From a distance, it looked like a painting”. Quoted in Gleadell, 2014. Cf. Freedman et al, 2006, 251-252. The idea of re-envisioning reality as art is addressed in Chapter 2. 4 On the agency of artworks, see Gell, 1998, especially 23-24. See also Section 5, below. For critiques of Gell see Leach, 2007; Bowden 2004. 1 In this introduction, I address the fundamental question raised by Emin’s statement – that of what is meant by ‘classical’ inflection or (a different term again) ‘influence’. For Emin, the experience of seeing her unmade bed as an artwork was synonymous with seeing its classical qualities. But what are classical qualities? Traditionally, when art-historians have seen classical influence in post-antique production, they have seen retellings of classical stories, or quotations of classical bodies, buildings or postures. They have identified the next link in the chain called ‘classicism’ – a deliberate, retrospective glance to antiquity.5 (We need only think of twentieth-century art historians such as Aby Warburg or Erwin Panofsky, whose writings continue to shape understandings of the classical tradition in western art.)6 Often, this art-historical way of seeing does little justice to the complex and revolutionary ways in which artists have reinvented or reacted against the classical past,7 and arguably relies on as narrow a definition of the ‘classical’ as of ‘influence’: it strips the classical of its complexities – its errors, even – seeking instead to map the ‘then’ to the ‘now’ by locating the meaning of the new work in the ancient origins of its bodies or buildings, its plots, or postures.8 Small wonder that influence should be felt to produce anxiety:9 the narrative of artists struggling to equal or surpass the ancients (and driven to despair as well as admiration in the process) has become a commonplace – even a cliché – of Art History.10 By privileging ways of seeing other than the identification of supposedly shared features that qualify as antique, this thesis creates space for analysing contemporary art in the context of the classical past without needing to imprison it in the pinpointing of iconographic or thematic debts.