Collage and the New Laocoön

It is all well and good to get excited as a Classicist when you come across a Modern Art version of a Classical sculpture – such as Roy Lichtenstein’s Laocoon – as the splashes of color and Pop-landscape bring the iconic statue somehow up to date. But should we get excited? What makes Lichtenstein’s Laocoon modern? In terms of Greenberg’s famous essay ‘Towards a New Laocoon’ (1940), Lichtenstein’s Laocoon, neither disrupts the Classical sculpture’s ‘content’ in how it ‘reflects’ its own social and cultural circumstances nor disturbs the Classicism of its form – the colors neither ‘crack’ nor ‘splinter’ the flat plane of the canvas. More compelling are the uses of the Laocoon sculpture in the works of three artists – Richard Hawkins, Anita Steckel (see her obituary by Richard Meyer in the Summer edition of Artforum for a better view & to understand why it is a ‘new Laocoon’) and Leigh Ledare. In each work, the form of collage and the manipulated photograph, engage with questions of gender, sexuality and even incest that reconfigure our recognition of Laocoon and his sons in potentially more exciting ways than Lichtenstein’s Pop Classicism.