Dialogues with the Dead

Catalog description

This seminar considers the dynamism and resilience of Greek art and culture. The dialogues in question are not with ancient shades in the underworld but with later artists who build on the creative vision (and blind spots) of the past to addressthe issues of their day.Roman philhellenes, Renaissance humanists and Neoclassical loyalists have received much attention. More remains to be explored in the work of modern and contemporary artists such as Romare Bearden, Robert Mapplethorpe, Lawrence Argent, Daniel Arsham, Yinka Shonibare and Xu Zhen.In the Cantor Center and the Rodin Garden, the artist's debts to antiquity run deep; freed from his shadow, Camille Claudel's bronzes reflect the sunlit surfaces of Greek sculpture. On Meyer Green, the capital puns of Xu Zhen reverberate from Shanghai to Athens, from archetypes in the Louvre to galleries around the world, where classical "icons" - subverted, inverted and recharged - engage contemporary eyes. Classical tragedy spoke to war-weary Greeks in the 5th century. Today, Sophocles and Bryan Doerries' Theatre of War Productions help veterans to feel less alone as they return to civilian life bearing the wounds of war, visible and invisible. The vibrant and varied afterlife of Greek art is the subject of the seminar, but we will not ignore the sinister aspects of its legacy: the advertising industry's Botoxic embrace of "Greek perfection," the quest for fitness at any price and the persistence of white, western, ableist ideals of male and female beauty. Darker still is the lethal appropriation of classical art and architecture by genocidal tyrants and racists. These dialogues are deadly.