Recasting Call
A Review of “RECASTING” at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge
Toward the end of my stint in Paris, I suffered a sudden bout of panic that I had not taken advantage of all that the city has to offer — not to mention my student discount — and I visited and revisited its many museums. On my very last night, I wandered into the Musée Picasso in Le Marais and through Pablo Picasso’s varied “periods”: Blue, Cubist — and Classical.
Pausing beside a sketch of toga-clad women, I learned for the first time (art history is not my area of expertise) that at one point the Spanish painter had returned to more classical themes, ostensibly out of a desire for order in the midst of post-war chaos. Classicism was meant to offer respite through the familiar during a time when everything was thrown into question.
“RECASTING,” a temporary exhibition at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, seems to turn that idea on its head while operating under a similar principle. Curated by Ruth Allen and James Cahill, both Ph.D. students in Classics at the University of Cambridge, it seeks disorder within clean if not unbroken classical lines, and to render the familiar unfamiliar via juxtaposition with the works of seven practicing artists: Paul Allen, Matthew Darbyshire, Tom de Freston, Maggi Hambling, Paul Kindersley, Rosie O’Grady, and REILLY. Of course, it cannot avoid doing the converse in the process; when we see something new placed next to something we know, we realize that history is deeper than initially apparent.
If you’re still unsure what that entails, the main image for the exhibition is Rihanna’s face spliced together with the goddess Artemis’ (a new media collage by REILLY) — but even that fails to encapsulate the wide range of forms, materials, and themes present in “RECASTING”: collages, monoprints, drawings, and sculptures made from acrylic, ink, and bronze that draw on the Minotaur and Orpheus and Eurydice. To name a few.
Allen and Cahill deliberately chose not to rope off the contemporary pieces from the rest of the museum, opting instead to interweave them among the permanent displays à la many other recent exhibitions; for example, Azzedine Alaïa’s “Couture/Sculpture” at the Villa Borghese in 2015.
In this way, “RECASTING” almost seems to invite a game of hide-and-seek. (It’s not hard to imagine the schoolchildren who frequent the museum having fun with this.) Not that they are hiding with much effort, mind you — the first thing that catches my eye upon entering is that fabulous fluorescent lion on the left, which I would not mind brightening up my room.
Nevertheless, I asked the Curator, Susanne Turner, whether the “RECASTING” players were clearly marked out of a secret fear that I’d accidentally review the plaster cast of a decrepit statue in the Musei Capitolini (again, I know very little about art history). I was just as secretly crestfallen when she said no. “But to be honest, they’re all works of modern art so they should be obvious,” she told me.
Should I be embarrassed that, despite what was meant to be reassurance and not admonishment, the permanent-(con)temporary distinction was not, in fact, immediately obvious to me? To be more specific, I could tell when something wasn’t from classical antiquity, but while on guard I did second-guess myself more than once when it came to the old stuff. As I prepared to begin my foray into the museum, I warily eyed a painted plaster cast hanging out near the entrance next to its unpainted buddy, wondering whether it was actually part of the “RECASTING” crew and making a statement about colorblindness and modern society (it wasn’t).
Admittedly, this kind of uncertainty carries with it a certain thrill if you, like me, feel that so much of the museum experience has come to be about what to expect, especially if you’re traveling. You go to the Musée d’Orsay expecting Monets; you go to the Uffizi expecting Botticelli’s Venus in her shell. Which — don’t get me wrong — are truly wonderful beyond words, but I’ve discovered that it’s also fun to attend an exhibition knowing what not to expect (original sculptures, in this case) and not knowing what to expect.
Quick note: for those of you who’ve never been to the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge — and until recently I was among your ranks — know that the place is really quite small. Some of the larger plaster casts, such as the Farnese Hercules, remind me of the above-average-height folks (I was never among your ranks) hunched over on the London Underground, defeated by the low ceiling. So the museum can feel a bit crowded even without the addition of the “RECASTING” artworks.
Know also that, as I hinted earlier, the Museum of Classical Archeology consists of hundreds upon hundreds of plaster casts, none of which are all that old, relatively speaking — which means that even without Allen and Cahill’s intervention we’re looking at the original art through a layer of reproduction. That’s the beauty of it, at least in part. For one, the artists do reproduce classical art in the course of reinterpreting them. For another, such plaster casts play a substantial role in extending the reach of ancient ideas. Obviously, there are only so many original sculptures to go around, and reproduction makes the Boxer at Rest accessible to a Cantabrigian as well as to a visitor to the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. Furthermore, both of these recursive impulses were present in antiquity as well—and as a result, much of what we have are Roman reproductions of Greek originals.
Similarly, “RECASTING” aims to demonstrate that products of the ancient world — relics to be sure, but this applies to texts and the ideas within them too — can not only endure, but also be widespread. But there’s a caveat: it’s not enough to reproduce classical art as such, you need to do something else in the process. Add a twist, remove an anachronism, reimagine, rebel.
Which is not to say that the original sculptures don’t matter, any more than it is to say that studying the ancient world for its own sake doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s a question of what keeps our work accessible and viable, and I think, and these artists show, that the answer requires some awareness of the present. (A show with exact replicas of exact replicas would be a show nevertheless, but I’m not sure if I’d have very much to say about it.)
In engaging with classical antiquity — whether to confirm or confront it — we admit that we are inevitably a continuation of the past, but simultaneously that the story is a fragmented one.
But let’s take a closer look at the exhibition in order to determine how close it comes to achieving its goal(s). In the introductory video, Allen notes the significance of color in many of the pieces. Indeed, one characteristic of “RECASTING” is how it imbues the desaturated gallery with splashes of reds, yellows, and blues. This is surprising, since we tend to think of classical sculptures as pristine and white, even though many of us are, in fact, aware that they were not always colorless.
So does Paul Allen’s “Crying Minotaur,” for example, recall the classical past (since its colors arguably smack of the original originals) or challenge it (since it clashes with common perception/representation of what said classical past was like)? In other words, is the “true” ancient world the one that existed at one point in time in reality, or the one that exists in our minds, available for constant examination, critique, and refurbishing?
Speaking of adding color to “whitewashed” (literally) antiquity, it’s difficult not to think about the racial implications. In museums and the academy, we have an ancient Greece and Rome that wasn’t as white as we like to think it was, and the colors bring to the surface, intentionally or not, issues of race and racism on the part of both the studying and the studied. Although this isn’t explicitly stated anywhere, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that REILLY chose two black artists for his new media collages.
Other pieces experiment with medium. Tom de Freston’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” is a rendering of the myth into graphic art, to be published as a book by Bloomsbury in 2017. But it’s not quite as simple as putting words into pictures — he also mixes elements in Dante (by way of Gustave Doré) and Jean Cocteau, hinting at intertextuality as well as reception.
Another experimentation in medium, Maggi Hambling’s “Aftermath (Sleeper),” stands out as the oddball of the exhibition — which, depending on how prudish you are about classical art and how familiar you are with modern art, is saying something:
I came very close to bypassing it while doing my rounds through the museum (I was eventually tipped off by the labeled pedestal), but even upon realizing what it was, I wasn’t quite sure what it was. According to the label, it’s a bronze sculpture based on a strangely shaped piece of dead wood. The press release helpfully suggests that it “probes the expressive potential of the fragmentary cast,” perhaps that of an unattached head. It conjures up the image of a plaster cast that, while undoubtedly indebted to its mold for giving it a vague form, refuses to stay within the confines and quickly takes up its own space in the world.
Unsurprisingly, eroticism looms over the exhibition much as it does over classical antiquity, particularly in Paul Kindersley’s “Classic Beauty,” a series of Japanese ink drawings on acrylic paper actually based on the statues in the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge and strategically placed among them. Kindersley, too, plays with the notion of fragmentation, depicting his subjects in pieces and with individual touches — for example, a close-up of the crotch area with “CAPITOLINE” tattooed on the thigh. The overall effect is the shattering of our image of the classics as wholesomely beautiful: clutch your pearls all you want, but the ancients were often more dirty than dignified.
But despite the ubiquity of eroticism, not to mention its significance, some interpretations of the erotic are, in my opinion, more debatable. For example, take this part of the description of REILLY’s “Rihanna”:
Recasting [Artemis] as Rihanna instead promotes the goddess’ sexuality, reminding us that she was also a hunter of men, a femme fatale made more alluring for being kept out of reach.
“Hunter of men” strikes me as an exaggeration, and certainly not a characterization that the virgin goddess herself would have been happy with, unless you’re referring to her history of setting hunting animals on naïve youths. Admittedly, I’m wary of our constant need to sexualize women, including and especially women who adamantly do not want to be sexualized, and wasn’t Artemis an archetype of that? (I’m not sure why Rihanna has to be brought into the equation in that respect either.) If Artemis is a femme fatale, she is only one in the most literal sense.
Then again, whether or not I agree with the interpretation is beside the point, while disagreement over interpretation is precisely the point. In the end, nobody “owns” art, not even the artists themselves. However, through constant debate and dialogue between the past and the present, as well as among the creators and the interpreters, we may come across something resembling meaning. It’s not hard to see why Allen and Cahill conceived of this exhibition as “a metaphor for classical reception.”
Is there anything left to say about, for example, Homer or Ovid, when so much has already been said? “RECASTING” offers a spirited defense of continuous study of the ancient world, arguing that there’s always more to do if only you’re willing look at what we have a bit differently. It throws everything into question, and in doing so provokes us to seek answers.
“RECASTING” is at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge until October 15th, 2016.
Yung In Chae is the Associate Editor of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2015, and after a year of studying History and Civilizations at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales is now pursuing an MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.
