Introduction Isabelle Loring Wallace and Jennie Hirsh Myths have no life of their own. They wait for us to give them body. —Albert Camus1 I. The Premise A book on the subject of classical myth and contemporary art is a book that raises the question of a more fundamental and well-documented relation, that of classical myth and the visual arts writ large. The subject of several exhibitions and half as many books, this more general relationship would hardly seem in need of documentation or further discussion, especially in the context of a book that takes as its primary subject a late and comparatively unexplored phase within this ongoing relation.2 And yet, from another point of view, one wonders: has the topic of art’s relation to myth even been broached? That is, has art history ever adequately addressed the essential nature of this relation? the potential reasons for its endurance? the particular frisson that results from myth’s translation into myriad of visual forms? Everywhere and nowhere at once, this relation, despite its embodiment in countless art objects, is oten elided, as if its endurance somehow negates the need to determine exactly what is at stake in art’s more than two-thousandyear-old atraction to the body of literature known as classical myth. Ater all, the thinking goes, why not leave it at this: classical myths are good stories with compelling characters, and, in so far as art has oten been in the business of telling good stories and representing compelling igures, a natural relation has developed between them. But is this really an adequate explanation? Such a rationale would surely fail to explain art’s comparably long-standing investment in Christian narratives—as would the equally inadequate notion of faith—and for precisely this reason intellectuals and scholars of various periods have writen at length about what it means to represent Christian subjects and give them form. Put in slightly more practical 2 contemporary art and classical myth terms, we might say that in contrast to the comparatively stymied discussion of art and classical myth, art historians have understood the relation of altarpieces to storytelling, for example, without ever making storytelling or illustration the limit of an altarpiece’s function and meaning. In the case of classical myth, however, art history’s conversations have failed to progress, and, as such, our engagement with the relationship between art and myth remains delimited by the catch-all concept of illustration, and this, despite mythology’s repeated insistence that representation is capable of more.3 More is certainly one of contemporary art’s chief mandates, and, since the 1960s, we have seen art dramatically expand its parameters and sense of purpose, while at the same time extending Modernism’s indiference to the task of faithful illustration.4 That modern and contemporary art thus necessitates a rethinking of the relation of art and myth is obvious, and though this volume is ultimately devoted to the art of the present, and though it engages this material for the larger purpose of inaugurating such rethinking, in this introduction, if indeed, in no other place, we wish to underscore the belatedness of this rethinking, thinking for which contemporary art is only a convenient occasion. Put otherwise, this volume, through its commitment to contemporary art and the speciic territory opened up by its intersection with classical myth, is intended as an intervention in a far broader topic (the relation of classical myth and Western art), the limits of which contemporary art makes manifest without in any way being their progenitor or primary cause. For if pressed and well chosen, works from other periods can manifest these same limits, even as they seem to bear out the ever inadequate notion of art as myth’s illustration. By way of example, consider the myth of Pygmalion as represented by Jean-Léon Gérôme at the end of the nineteenth century (Plate 1).5 Depicting the moment of the statue’s longed-for conversion from marble to lesh, the licked surface of Gérôme’s painting seems a straightforward illustration of the climatic scene within Ovid’s well-known tale. What’s more, Gérôme’s painting is an illustration, one might say, with beneits. Here, one is able to see a fully realized vision of Pygmalion’s sought-ater ideal, as well as other contextual details that lesh out, as it were, the myth’s original narration. Of course, this is just another way of saying that a work of art departs from the myths it illustrates—that it cannot help but do so—and that the representation of myth is inevitably less an illustration of myth than myth’s elaboration, perversion, and analysis. Along these lines, note Gérôme’s purposeful inclusion of the comedy-tragedy masks and gorgon shield, the faces of which seem to respond to the couple, grimacing as they, for the irst time, embrace. In contrast, Ovid’s narration includes no comparably moralizing component, indeed, includes no spectators—a fact which brings us to the real heart of the mater, namely the myth’s translation by Gérôme from word into image. For, from our perspective, the point is not so much that a myth’s reiteration in paint allows for certain inclusions or omissions that read the myth in advance of its consumption by spectators; Introduction 3 ater decades of theoretical writing on translation, surely it goes without saying that this is an ineluctable aspect of any translation whether from language to language or, as here, from word into image.6 Rather, as we see it, the salient point, both for this volume and its introductory discussion of Gérôme, is that there are consequences to engaging these stories visually— a possibility that is naturally ampliied when the represented myth is, on some level, about a visual image or object. Needless to say, the story of Pygmalion is one such myth, which when told by Ovid in words does litle to activate the predicament it describes between an individual and a work of art. Yet, when the same story is represented in either the two-dimensional medium of paint or the three-dimensional medium of marble (Gérôme will do both in the course of his career), this story about making and metamorphosis inds itself both illustrated and, with a spectator’s participation, enacted.7 Ater all, here it must be said that as painting Gérôme’s work succeeds in forging a certain relationship between the spectator’s experience as viewer and Pygmalion’s experience as maker and lover. Displeased with women and preferring the company of his hand-carved ideal, Pygmalion turns his back on reality, just as the beholder does when preferring the company of Gérôme’s idealized painting to that which surrounds him in the gallery. Moreover, just as Pygmalion owes to Venus the satisfaction of the marble’s transformation into animate lesh, so the spectator owes to Gérôme the satisfaction of seeing the canvas come to life in deiance of its status as a mute, two-dimensional plane.8 More than the myth’s illustration, Gérôme’s painting thus occasions the experience described therein, an experience that in turn facilitates serious relection about the nature of looking, art making, and desire. Aligning Western conventions of spectatorship with Pygmalion’s desirous and arguably misogynist behavior is already ample food for thought, and is perhaps suicient to justify dissatisfaction with the concept of illustration, even as applied to idealized, igurative works. But before leaving Pygmalion and Gérôme behind, consider this: whether witing or not, Gérôme’s entwinement of idealism and the concept of the ideal is occasioned by a myth that treats both as antithetical to the development and perpetuity of art. As Gérôme’s idealized painting makes perfectly clear, Pygmalion gets the girl but only at the expense of his idealized sculpture—a fact which perhaps explains the mixed reviews received by the couple from Gérôme’s editorializing and as of yet uninterpreted details. As noted, Cupid facilitates and patently approves of the sculpture’s metamorphosis, while the arts (both tragedy and comedy) join the Gorgon’s head in expressing a sense of horror at representation’s eclipse by the real. Witness to this same spectacle, spectators in the gallery (both then and now) are thus faced with a choice between two internally thematized sentiments, the staging of which by Gérôme reveals something profound about Western art and its long-standing fascination with the idea of the perfect copy.9 The perennial embodiment of this fascination, Pygmalion famously achieves the perfect 4 contemporary art and classical myth copy, and, although Ovid does not express this point of view, Gérôme will nevertheless insist in the context of his own near-perfect copy that Pygmalion’s longed-for moment of triumph is also a moment of tragedy for the majority of the work’s internal spectators, not to mention the history of art, as such. As observed already, the copy can be perfected but only at representation’s expense—a particularly interesting idea to contemplate circa 1890, given both the abandonment of realism by the avant-garde and the imminent invention of ilm, a medium that would indeed bring to life near-perfect representations. Associated by Ovid with life and pleasure, the perfect copy is apparently for the modern visual artist a more complex (and topical) afair, rightly associated with both the life-giving arrows of Cupid and the mortifying expression of Medusa. Of course, the story of Medusa is another myth entirely—or is it? Also associated with metamorphosis and stone, the Gorgon’s head is a provocative detail to include in a painting ostensibly about the animating myth of Pygmalion. As is well known, the Gorgon’s head is associated with death rather than life and with the petrifying transition from lesh to marble rather than the vivifying transition from marble to lesh. Consequently, her inclusion by Gérôme opens up the painting to an uterly destabilizing question: what exactly is the nature of the transformation we witness?10 In accordance with the myth of Pygmalion is it the longed-for transformation of marble to yielding lesh? Or is it instead the frightful transformation of lesh into immutable stone as efected by a Gorgon’s deadly gaze? In the spirit of these rhetorical questions, one could further observe that armor of the sort pictured here is itself an ambivalent object, since it conjures both the deadly shield of Athena famously decorated by the Medusa’s decapitated head and the life-saving process by which that decapitation originally took place. As is well known, Perseus famously negotiates the Medusa’s deadly presence by relecting her visage on the surface of the shield he borrows from Athena, a strategy that ultimately aligns him with Pygmalion, who also turned away from the (horrible, feminine) real for the purpose of engaging instead its mediated and more palatable relection.11 Add to this the fact that, like Narcissus, Pygmalion shuns the Other, substituting in its place an image of his own devising, and one can conclude that Gérôme’s painting does more than interpret and destabilize the myth of Pygmalion; indeed, it stages a conversation between myths with opposing things to say about images, reality, and death, while at the same time inding between them unexpected points of convergence.12 There is more. One could go on to discuss the complexities that result from the play between painting and sculpture, as well as a corresponding play between the senses of sight and touch; the fact that Gérôme’s painting is a self-portrait; the play of additional objects (both real and invented) in his studio; and still other aspects of the work that this brief discussion has failed to consider. All the same, we trust that what has been discussed thus far succeeds in establishing the circumstance in which this text intervenes Introduction 5 and amply demonstrates the unique possibilities opened up by the representation of myth by the visual arts. To reiterate, illustration is an entirely inadequate concept for thinking through the largely untheorized relation of art and myth—and not only because of the late nineteenth-century decoupling of art from mimesis. Indeed, though the material considered in this volume signiicantly postdates Gérôme’s Pygmalion, and though it inevitably relects certain modern and postmodern biases, chief among them a certain indiference to igurative illustration, it nevertheless aligns with Gérôme’s work in manifesting the profound complexities that have always emerged from the intersection of art and classical myth. In bringing those complexities to light, the essays assembled here have only a few examples to follow, most notably those of Louis Marin and Stephen Bann whose brilliant analyses of Caravaggio’s Medusa and various representations of Narcissus stand, respectively, as formidable examples of what might be done to elucidate and deepen the relation of classical myth and the visual arts.13 This is not the place to rehearse the details of these nuanced and sustained accounts, but suice it to say that in each case, it is the representation of myth as image that facilitates, at once leading these authors deep into and, at the same time, well beyond their immediate subjects. Those familiar with these texts know that their immediate subjects difer greatly: for Marin, it is Caravaggio’s Medusa as it, in contrast to Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, emblematizes a deadly visual circuit that is in turn emblematic of the experience of the modern spectator, whom Marin sees as frozen by his own implication in the visual ield. For Bann, the immediate subject is nothing less than the history of signiication and subjectivity as manifest in the variously painted image of Narcissus at water’s edge. Moving along diferent paths and at moments temporarily converging—both talk at length about Caravaggio and Poussin, for example—these books are nevertheless underwriten by a far more important commonality, which in turn inspires our own eforts here: for both Marin and Bann, the conjunction of art and myth allows art, and in turn art history, to know something of art’s shiting and historically constituted operations. In this way, two myths about death and stagnation become a source of vitalization for the discipline of art history, and, as is by now clear, it is our hope that the present volume continues in this same spirit, insisting on the perennial relevance of myth to the art of the present, no mater which present is in question. One might object that myths have this capacity only insofar as they take the visual ield as a thematized part of their narratives. No one would deny that igures like the Medusa and Narcissus are of particular interest to the history of art; all the same, following Camus and others, we would like to suggest, more fundamentally, that the nature of myth’s appeal—both to art history and the humanities more broadly—derives from the following essential fact: myths are stories whose real subjects lie elsewhere, somehow unbound by the minor narrative through which deeper meanings are inevitably conveyed.14 To be sure, all signs and stories refer to other signs 6 contemporary art and classical myth and subjects, but only some wear this truth on their sleeves, manifesting for readers of whatever persuasion the basic question of meaning. Myth’s insistence that its meaning and subject lie elsewhere functions as an invitation to the reader or viewer to interpret, that is, to construct meaning; and while this kind of (consciously felt) rerouting may not be the efect of myth exclusively—for example, allegory, which all myths may be, also takes as its deining characteristic the manifest elsewhereness of meaning—it is nevertheless surely at the heart of myth’s enduring appeal.15 At once full and empty, myths are thus like the surface of Narcissus’s pool: a contingent ield whose contents and depth are in some manifest sense imaginary, and thus all the beter for mental processes that require some other, external surface onto which to project their own self-relexive ruminations.16 In precisely this spirit, scholars outside the ield of art history have repeatedly used myth as a source of insight for their own ields—hence the reliance of Luce Irigaray on Antigone, Sigmund Freud on both Oedipus and Narcissus, Herbert Marcuse on both Narcissus and Orpheus, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on Odysseus, Maurice Blanchot on Orpheus, not to mention, the atraction of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Roland Barthes, and Hélène Cixous to the versatile myth of the Medusa. Surprising, then, the general indiference of art history to classical myth. Or, beter said, the unwillingness of art history to move beyond the notion of myth as a set of stock narratives from which artists occasionally draw for reasons that are not in and of themselves of interest beyond whatever personal impulse might explain their choices. Largely uninterested in the potential of myth to elucidate the shiting strategies and perceptions of representation—by which we do not mean the shiting history of style—art history has, with few exceptions, consistently ignored the possibilities and problems inherent in individual myths, not to mention their re-presentation in the context of the visual arts. So, why revisit the mater now? And why speciically with respect to contemporary art? It is a commonplace of art history to say that modern art begins with the invention of photography and the related liberation of art from the task of representing the real. Countless scholars have rightly maintained that this kind of explanation oversimpliies the complexities of nineteenthcentury art but without the efect of deposing this narrative as a general explanation for why art shits so dramatically in the course of that period. Whatever additional factors may be involved, the fact remains that art in the nineteenth century did shit in dramatic ways—a fact with signiicant consequences for all relationships within the visual arts, chief among them for our purposes: the relation of art and myth. As noted already, igurative art and, beter yet, idealized igurative art have made excellent vehicles for the reiteration of classical myth, so much so that the phenomenon of their pairing as question has rarely been posed. Thus, from one point of view, the disentanglement of art and mimesis might make myth seem irrelevant to the concerns of today’s art world—i.e., if art is no longer in the business of Introduction 7 telling stories in conventional ways, then of what use are these stories to art? And yet, from another point of view, one could just as easily say that these same circumstances make the relation of art and myth newly relevant, since artists and art historians are now in the position to think “art and myth” outside the dominant framework of illusionism. Put otherwise, one could say that it is precisely the severance of art and mimesis that renews the question of art and myth; for if the relationship between art and myth is no longer a mater of myth’s re-presentation, that is, its illusionistic translation from word into image, it becomes necessary to ask: in what manner, and for what purpose, the ongoing intersection of art and myth? If not mimesis, what exactly motivates and results from art that takes myth as its subject? The essays assembled here are, among other things, an efort to answer these questions. In the spirit of disclosure, we should note that not all of the essays included in this volume address art that is expressly about myth; in other words, while some essays locate the intersection of art and myth within the works they consider, others produce that intersection as the efect of their own readings. For essays in the later camp, classical myth is less a subject than a free-loating interpretive strategy—a strategy that in turn raises its own set of questions about the location of myth, and the eicacy of myth-asmethod. Before turning to a more detailed description of those essays and their methods, a inal issue—one sidestepped in the previous paragraph’s elision of modern and contemporary art. As the title of this volume suggests, our emphasis in the following pages is on contemporary art (loosely deined here as 1960–present) rather than the more expansive ield of modern art, which specialists generally locate between 1860 and 1960. As such, the explanation ofered above about the severance of art and mimesis will need both ine-tuning and supplementation if it is to speak directly to our decision to restrict the volume’s contents to art of the postwar period. By way of ine-tuning, the following postscript to the discussion on the art of mimesis: if modern art can be said to efect and then revel in the severance of art and mimesis, contemporary art seems to take for granted art’s freedom—so much so that it oten returns to illusionism without ever worrying about re-restricting art to the task of faithfully representing either reality or reality’s representation in the form of extant words and images. One option among many, this kind of faithful rendering is, in a postwar context, neither retrograde (as it oten was for artists aligned with the historical avant-garde) nor associated with a venerable rear-garde (as it was in the middle years of the nineteenth century). Thus, although both modern and contemporary art are informed by the severance of art and mimesis, within the context of pictorial modernism, illusionism still lingers as a charged term around which several well-rehearsed debates revolve. In contrast, within the postwar period, illusionism returns in practice, but, more importantly for our purposes, it simultaneously disappears as a charged concept to be rejected or embraced. Consequently, from our point of view, contemporary 8 contemporary art and classical myth art, in this particular sense, functions as a less complicated environment in which to ask the question of art and myth. Now for the supplement. As we all know, the subjects of classical myth vary greatly, and are typically understood as a means of grappling with universal truths or unexplained natural phenomena. But of greater relevance to our discussion here is the fact that classical myth is also among the earliest atempts at representation’s theorization—an efort to come to terms with what images are, what they are capable of, and what it is to regard and make them. Likewise the fact of verbal expression, which classical myth oten explores right alongside the image as a phenomenon in need of characterization and analysis: for example, the myth of Philomela establishes both speech and image-making as a means of coping with sexual abuse, and does so well in advance of psychoanalysis and art therapy, disciplines which will insist in the twentieth century that talking and image-making respectively are an essential means of working through trauma. Similarly, long before Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault will insist on the borrowedness of language and the mortiication inevitably associated with authorship, the disembodied igure of Echo will personify these very concepts and, in her tragic withering, anticipate the similarly morbid fate of Narcissus, who likewise inds himself mortifed by an “image” of his own making. Continuing in this same vein, but with an exclusive eye to images, we might further observe that in advance of Freud, the myth of Pygmalion theorizes art as libidinal sublimation; in advance of Lacan, the myth of Narcissus theorizes as foundational the relation of the individual to an idealized, mirrored image; and, in advance of an entire body scholarship known as feminist theory, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice establishes the concept of the male gaze as deadly extension, just as the myth of the mortifying Medusa would ofer that same literature a means of neutralizing this capacity and restoring some sense of agency to women.17 In making these observations about myth’s relation to the twentiethcentury theorization of word and image, we do mean to characterize classical myth as a container for ancient and immutable mysteries that are at last unlocked in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, we do want to suggest in light of the ainities sketched above that the late-twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries converge with myth in a unique way, as does the art of this period, given what has been called its “conceptual turn” in the course of the postwar period. Inaugurated by Duchamp at the beginning of the twentieth century, the shit from self-expression to analysis (oten of art’s own operations) is adopted wholesale only later in the postwar period ater the convergence of art history and literary criticism—a phenomenon that is itself an echo of myth’s own investment in directly juxtaposing and at times, mutually theorizing word and image. Thus, if modern art can be said to renew the question of art and myth by unhinging art and mimesis, contemporary art continues that call, while at the same time establishing Introduction 9 through art’s conceptual turn an unprecedented circumstance in which to think art and myth. To put the mater bluntly, one might say that in the atermath of the conceptual turn, the visual arts are positioned to participate in the aesthetic discourse inaugurated by myth, posing for themselves questions posed previously on their behalf by the plot lines of classical mythology. Of course, this is not to say that art has never before engaged in the task of its own theorization. As this introduction has tried to make clear both through the acknowledged examples of Marin and Bann, and through its own quick analysis of Gérôme’s deceptively complex painting of the myth of Pygmalion, works of art from earlier periods (when read by art historians trained in the twentieth century) successfully evidence art’s capacity to think about its own operations, provocatively, oten in conjunction with mythological themes.18 Thus, without saying that the postwar period invented either art theory or the concept of artistic self-consciousness, we nevertheless maintain that the present is a compelling context in which to consider the ongoing relation of art and myth, as is evidenced by new writing in this area, and by art itself when in some way engaged with the themes of classical myth.19 In sum, we might say that though the conjunction of art and myth is ancient and ever fertile, the products of this collaboration are now made manifest in the form of fruits ripened on the vine. As for the essays assembled here, we resist the temptation to characterize them as a type of harvest—which they surely are from our point of view—and say instead that they function both as an intervention and a form of eavesdropping, at times prodding and at other times simply listening to a discussion between interlocutors on equal footing, the volume of which has been recently ampliied to the point of tantalizing audibility. Before introducing those essays in more detail, we should set out a few deinitions along with several disclaimers. First, some clariication about how the word myth is used in this volume. Although most of the essays here focus on mythological characters and indeed conlate various textual sources, others engage more broadly—at times, even more loosely—with what we might call “the classical.” Essays in the later group invoke legendary stories drawn from authors such as Pliny the Elder, whose versions of “ancient history” certainly assume mythical proportions. As such, we acknowledge that the deinition of myth employed here is a lexible one, stretching at times to include ideas and narratives that are not, strictly speaking, mythological. Second—and this by way of further problematizing our use of “myth” as an organizing construct—we acknowledge and are, in fact, atracted to the fact that myths are dynamic and historically constituted. We take for granted the fact that myths mean diferent things in diferent places and times, and are equally conscious of the fact that representations of myth (whether visual or verbal) change in accordance with these contingencies. That said, we do not view such permutations as perversions of an original, retrievable form. Indeed, as is oten observed, our primary mythological texts (Metamorphoses, 10 contemporary art and classical myth Natural History, et al.) are themselves oten translations of extant narratives both oral and writen. Thus although there are primary sources from which to draw (Ovid, Pliny, et al.), our contributors remain mindful of the meanings myths have accrued both before and ater their codiication by ancient authors most oten associated with this genre. More practically, it should be observed that Contemporary Art and Classical Myth focuses on the legacy of Greco–Roman mythology, that is to say, the history of myth in the West, even if this objective is happily complicated by various factors, including the nationality of some of the artists considered (Yayoi Kusama, Ghada Amer) as well as, more generally, the inherent globalization of contemporary art and culture.20 That the essays collected here are not restricted to myths that focus most obviously on visual images, the gaze, and speech (Medusa, Orpheus, Narcissus and Echo) is also of note, and if Laocoön, Sisyphus, Oedipus, Philomela, Hades, and the Sphinx all make appearances in the text, it is, we feel, a testament to the expansive nature of an intersection only partially explored in the pages that follow. II. The Essays The essays that make up this volume engage with the classical on literal and metaphorical levels, and do so from a wide range of methodological perspectives. In Section One, the Prologue to this volume, Lisa Saltzman irmly establishes classical roots for contemporary art through an analysis of Pliny the Elder’s tale of the Corinthian poter’s daughter. Moving beyond the traditional reading of this “myth” as marking the origin of painting and sculpture, Saltzman sees both the spectral quality of these artistic gestures as well as their memorial content as preiguring both the formal strategies and thematic concerns of much of contemporary art. Establishing a compelling relationship between classical myth and contemporary art, Saltzman’s essay efectively sets the stage for a volume commited to exploring this relation. The ive essays clustered together in Section I, “Myth as Meaning,” address artists whose work explicitly references classical myth. In each case, the scholar explores contemporary instances of classical narratives that in turn generate interesting questions about authorship, spectatorship, and transformation. Focused on an artist in ceaseless dialogue with the classical, Craig Staf’s essay on Cy Twombly takes issue with Roland Barthes’s seminal reading of the artist, insisting contra Barthes that Twombly’s engagement with the classical is both purposeful and generative. Staf argues convincingly that Twombly is keenly interested in the idea of metamorphosis as igured in classical myth and as enacted in the process of iguration. Sharon Hecker explores Luciano Fabro’s Penelope, a work irst created on the occasion of the 1972 Venice Biennale, as an artistic critique that undermines traditional assumptions about this mythological character as a passive persona. Hecker’s analysis shows how Fabro’s work foregrounds Penelope’s agency as well as the critical role of the spectator, whose own sensorial experience, like that of Introduction 11 Penelope and Ulysses, is essential to understanding the power of this myth and indeed all creative acts. Departing from long-standing explanations of Yayoi Kusama’s work as a projection of her obsessional neurosis, Jody Cutler demonstrates how Kusama’s practice igures narcissistic conditions of viewing, while also establishing ainities between the artist and the alienated igure of Narcissus. Marissa Vigneault’s analysis of Bracha Etinger’s Eurydice series introduces an expressly historical dimension to this discussion. Arguing that Etinger’s Eurydice series functions as a tragic sign of both universal and personal loss in the context of post-holocaust representations of the Shoah, Vigneault suggests that Etinger’s victim-as-Eurydice compels the viewer not to forget, even as these works condemn their viewer to a deadly, Orphean role. In asserting that Etinger produces a complex meditation on the ethics of bearing witness to potentially unrepresentable events, Vingeault evidences the capacity of myth to thoughtfully engage histories that signiicantly postdate the classical period. Looking into a seemingly straightforward relection on the same myth, Jennie Hirsh explores Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s meditation on Orpheus, sustaining that his work thematizes membranes and mirrors for the purpose of posing complex questions about representation, spectatorship, and subjectivity that are implicit in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Her exploration of Untitled (Orpheus, Twice), 1991, a work that consists of two door-shaped mirrors mounted next to each other on the gallery wall, atends particularly to the salient efects of Gonzalez-Torres’s strategic doublings, relecting on not only the formal doubling of identical mirrors, but also the mythological doubling of Orpheus and Narcissus. The four essays that make up Section II explore “Myth as Medium,” focusing on artistic works that play out mythological narratives, but without taking myth as their manifest subject. As such, these four scholars identify mythological logics that inform not only aesthetic production but also the cultural context and reception of the objects under analysis. Devoted to Roy Lichtenstein’s Look Mickey, Graham Bader’s essay associates the central igure of Donald Duck with the mythological igure of Narcissus, whom Alberti famously describes as history’s irst painter. Ofering a sustained reading of this important work—one that Lichtenstein would repeatedly call his irst— Bader establishes the signiicance of the painting for the artist, as well as the signiicance of its mythological subtext for a broader cultural and intellectual context. Giulia Lamoni considers the work of Tracey Emin and Ghada Amer, both of whom make art that is in dialogue with the concepts of female sexuality, pornography, and seduction. Drawing on the less well-known myth of Philomela and paying particular atention to Emin’s and Amer’s use of traditionally feminine materials and methods, Lamoni reads the work of these artists as subversive reprisals of ancient narratives that are themselves about female agency and power. In facing head on what has become a kind of cultural Medusa, Sharon Sliwinski takes as her subject the so-called “Falling Man” photograph: Richard 12 contemporary art and classical myth Drew’s infamous photograph of an anonymous man in free fall, following his jump from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Reading this igure as a later-day Icarus, Sliwinski adopts a Warburgian approach in her analysis, aligning Drew’s photograph with other representations of Icarus as a means of exploring the photograph’s iconic power. In this section’s last essay, Isabelle Loring Wallace establishes the relevance of three classical myths to Wim Delvoye’s series of feces-producing machines. Arguing that Delvoye’s Cloaca project can be productively compared with the spectatorial scenarios found in the myths of Medusa, Narcissus, and Pygmalion, she reads Delyove’s work as relecting both fear and fascination in the face of the bodily real. Section III, “Myth as Method,” consists of three essays that use myth as a means of thinking through particular tropes and trends within contemporary artistic practice. At the same time, these essays ask questions that cut to the very core of the relationship between objects and their representations, engaging with philosophical debates that extend back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle. Considering a range of works from Jasper Johns’s Moratorium, 1969, to the hyperrealist sculpture of Duane Hanson, Elizabeth Mansield turns to the well-known tale of Zeuxis’s grapes in order to enter into the mysterious space between artworks and the objects that they mimetically represent. In her essay, Mansield examines what she calls the “uncanny moment” when one encounters an object and identiies its artistic (as opposed to physical) status as an object; moreover, she argues that this ontological crisis, though present from antiquity forward, is never more pressing than in the case of Pop art’s banal objects and their atermath. For Emma Cocker, whose essay focuses on the conceptual works of Bas Jan Ader, John Baldessari, Vlatka Horvat, and Francis Alÿs, the myth of Sisyphus serves as an apt metaphor for thinking about artworks that enact “purposeless repetition and non-teleological performativity.” Challenging the psychoanalytic reading of these works as instances of compulsive repetition, she advances a new reading of conceptual art oriented towards notions of play, disruption, and resistance. Sophie-Isabelle Dufour reads Bill Viola’s video installation, Ocean without a Shore, as a meditation on the idea of Hades and the status of the individual within this deadly realm. Grounded in the ancient perception of death and the aterlife, Dufour’s essay nevertheless opens out onto broad questions about the nature of video art as it relates to ancient concerns about immateriality and the passage from life to death. Arguing that the essential characteristics of video are preigured by the ancient concept of Hades, Dufour’s essay echoes Saltzman’s in establishing a direct link between classical and contemporary contexts. The volume concludes with an Epilogue in the form of a textual performance. In this piece, artist Joanna Frueh retraces her own engagement with the myth of the Theban Sphinx across nearly four decades of life and work. Frueh’s selfconsciously performative, autobiographical journey purposefully bridges the gap between art and art history, making all the more explicit the relevance of myth to both the making and meaning of art. Introduction 13 Notes 1 Albert Camus, Prometheus, L’Ete (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 88. 2 Walter R. Agard, Classical Myths in Sculpture (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951); Thomas H. Carpenter, Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991); Karl Kilinski II, Classical Myth in Western Art: Ancient through Modern, exh. cat. (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University, 1985); K. Schefold, Myth and Legend in Early Greek Art; The Golden Thread? Classical Mythology in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (Preston: Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 1986); Colin B. Bailey and Carrie A. Hamilton, eds. The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Wateau to David, exh. cat. (Dallas, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1992); Classical Myth and Imagery in Contemporary Art, exh. cat. (Flushing, NY: The Queens Museum, 1988); Solveig Köbernick, ed., Making Myth Modern: Primordial Themes in Twentieth Century German Sculpture, exh. br. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard/Busch-Reisinger Museum, 2007). There are also books that focus on the legacy of speciic myths over time and as they apply to individual artists, genres, and time periods: Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. The Medusa Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003); Norman Bryson and Bernard Barryte, In Medusa’s Gaze: Still Life Paintings in Upstate New York Museums, exh. cat. (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1991); Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Relection: The Modernist Myth of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Alexandra K. Wetlaufer, Pen vs. Paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac, and the Myth of Pygmalion in Post Revolutionary France (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 3 Here, we do not mean to imply that existing accounts of art and myth present that relation as somehow stagnant, since oten they include compelling explanations of how the treatment of mythological themes has developed in the course of Western art history. Rather, our point is simply that most of these conversations are organized under the aegis of assumptions that efectively short circuit other, more speculative conversations about the relation of art and myth. 4 This is not to say that contemporary art never represents the world illusionistically, only that it treats this possibility as one among several equally weighted options from which the artist might choose. 5 For a discussion of Vasari’s engagement with the myth of Pygmalion see, Paul Barolsky, “The Spirit of Pygmalion,” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 183– 84. See also Ernst Gombrich “Pygmalion’s Power,” in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 93–115. For a wide-ranging assessment of the Pygmalion myth and the art and literature that invoke it, see Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Efect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For a compelling contextualization of the myth within the broader phenomenon of moving statues, see Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). See also, George L. Hersey, Falling in Love with Statues: Artiicial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009), 91–110. Finally, for a sophisticated comparison of the Narcissus and Pygmalion myths, see Karsten Harries, “Narcissus and Pygmalion: Lessons of Two Tales,” in Philosophy and Art, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 53–72. 14 contemporary art and classical myth 6 See George Steiner, Ater Babel Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 7 For a full accounting of Gérôme’s work, see Gerald Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme with a Catalogue Raisonné (Courbevoie (Paris): ACR Edition Internationale, 1986). 8 Arguably, verbal narratives are also static representations brought to life by the reader’s desire, but a precise and suiciently deep parallel can only be achieved in the context of the visual arts. 9 On the role of the perfect copy in art and art theory see Isabelle Loring Wallace, “From the Garden of Eden and Back Again: People, Pictures and the Problem of the Perfect Copy,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 9, no. 3 (December 2004): 137–55. 10 Interestingly, another version of the painting, now lost, which features the sculpture in a three-quarter view has this same shield facing out towards the viewer, raising the additional possibility that spectators are themselves mortiied as a result of the transformation pictured by Gérôme. 11 Further, according to Apollodorus (The Library of Greek Mythology 3.10.3), the Gorgon is itself an ambivalent symbol since blood taken from the right side of a Gorgon could bring the dead back to life, while blood taken from the let side was thought to be fatal. 12 On the relationship between the myth of Pygmalion and the myth of Narcissus see Harries, “Narcissus and Pygmalion.” 13 See Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, trans. Mete Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 14 There are several working deinitions and analyses of myth in circulation. See, for example, Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annete Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972); Roland Barthes, The Eifel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979); Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (New York: Canongate, 2005). Mythology igures prominently in the work of René Girard, as seen, for example, in Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972). See also the illuminating work of Jean-Pierre Vernant on classical myth, esp. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1990); Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone, 1990); and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jef Fort (New York: Zone, 2006). 15 The concept of myth as an empty vessel is well rehearsed, though less has been said about the mechanisms by which myth encourages these projections. 16 In many instances, this will mean that myth is merely an occasion to airm what is already known about Western civilization and its cultural productions. In the context of the history of art, this might mean using art about myth for the purpose of telling again the received history of style as it unfolds from antiquity to the present. 17 On this last point, see Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, eds., Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (New York: Oxford 2006). See Introduction 15 again Majorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. The Medusa Reader, which not only collects various classical, medieval, and early modern sources in which Medusa appears but also later feminist (and other) interpretations of the igure as well. 18 It is worth noting that that these insights come to our atention through the work of contemporary art historians whose milieu allowed them to construct an account that is frankly unthinkable within any other intellectual context. 19 The artists and artworks discussed in this volume are but a fraction of the contemporary artists whose work in some way addresses the subject of classical myth. Other notable examples include: Robert Mapplethorpe, Louise Bourgeois, Jim Dine, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Gregory Crewsdon, Oscar Muñoz, Alfredo Jaar, Terence Koh, Paty Chang, and Eve Sussman. 20 On this point, see Salvatore Setis, The Future of the Classical, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006).