After a week’s break, following our wrapping up of ‘Minus Plato Return Reform Refresh’ and the first draft of our forthcoming book No Philosopher King: An Ancient Guide to Art and Life under Trump, we are now ready to dive into the next project. It is called Our Ancient Group Material and it comprises our collaboration with the panel “Democritising Classics” at the 11th Celtic Conference in Classics at St. Andrews on July 11-14, 2018. Here is the original call for papers:
This panel aims to explore the “democratisation” of Classics in academia and the creative arts in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and to consider the impact of this process on Classics as a discipline, on classical receptions produced during this period, and on the interaction between art and academia.
Classical texts are now widely available in translation, allusions are rife in mass media, and comparisons between ancient and contemporary politics abound. But despite the presence of classical antiquity in popular discourse, Classics is not yet open to all. Barriers remain for students who want to study Classics at a high academic level—particularly if they have not had access to a traditional education in Latin and Ancient Greek. In the UK today, Latin and Greek teaching provision in schools varies greatly, and remains heavily concentrated in independent schools. Initiatives like the “Advocating Classics Education” and “Literacy Through Latin” projects, however, show there is significant interest in ensuring Classics is truly open to all students.
An overall interest in exploring Classics beyond the confines of elite institutions and social groups has been borne out in recent scholarship, such as Hardwick & Harrison (2013) on the “democratic turn” in Classics, and Stead & Hall (2015) on the role of class. Post-colonial receptions of classical material have played an important role in the destabilisation of the elite Western canon and its cultural hegemony, and increasingly innovative ways of discussing Classics with audiences far and wide (through platforms like the online journal Eidolon, blogs like Minus Plato, and hybrids of contemporary art and scholarship like Liquid Antiquity) have also begun to push all Classicists, not just Classical Reception scholars, to question the assumptions and biases that underpin their discipline.
Central to this debate—and to the process of “democratisation”—are creative practitioners, including translators, writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers. Practitioners are often at the forefront of shaping the wider public’s engagement with Classics, and frequently spearhead new ways of approaching classical antiquity which later permeate academic debate. Practitioners also have varying levels of traditional classical expertise: they might inhabit both the “creative” and “academic” spheres, but their work may also challenge ideas of “authenticity” and “ownership”, as in the case of Vincenzo Monti’s Italian translation of Homer’s Iliad (1810) and Christopher Logue’s War Music (1959-2011), produced with little knowledge of the Greek language. Is this democratisation in action? Has Classics moved beyond its role as the “intellectual furniture of the well-to-do-middle class” (Brecht 2003: 77)? If so, what have been the implications for the discipline? Who was and is tasked with the translation of ancient works, with teaching others about classical antiquity, and with shaping the future of the subject? What has been the impact of “democratisation” on creative responses to the classical world, and how do these responses feed into academic debate and practice?
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
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Notions of democracy, authenticity, ownership and expertise in classical receptions and scholarship
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Points of convergence and friction between the creative arts and academia
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Twentieth and twenty-first classical receptions that confront ideas of “incomplete”, “inauthentic”, or “partial” knowledge of the Classics
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Classics, class, and elitism
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Challenges to the “classical canon” –
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The impact of post-colonial studies, and gender and sexuality studies in Classics
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Classical reception in contemporary art, books, music and films
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The history of classical scholarship
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The role of Latin and Greek within the study and reception of Classics
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Teaching and studying Classics today worldwide
Intrigued and flattered by our appearance in what looked to be a timely and interesting panel, we proceeded to submit the following proposal to the organizers Jenny Messenger and Rossana Zetti:
We propose curating an online exhibition in the form of a series of weekly blogposts in collaboration with the authors of accepted abstracts for the “Democratising Classics” panel. If accepted, we will work with the panelists on four posts, two published on the two Mondays before the conference (July 2nd & 9th, 2018), and two on the two Mondays following the conference (July 16th and 23rd, 2018) that investigate the way contemporary artists can intervene and expand discussions and practices of democracy in the discipline of Classics today.
We are inspired by the artistic collective Group Material’s four-part 1988 exhibition Democracy at the Dia Foundation. As they write in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, ‘The subject of democracy not only became our content, but influenced our method of working. This theme prompted a great awareness of our own process.’ As such, across the four exhibitions devoted to the topics of ‘Education’, ‘Politics’, ‘Cultural Participation’ and the case-study of the AIDS crisis, the group also included town meetings and other participatory projects.
Learning from Group Material, we will work with the panelists in selecting a group of contemporary artists to accompany and develop their ideas about ‘Democritising Classics’, with a particular attention to issues of education, politics, participation and an agreed upon pressing case-study. The first two posts, before the panel, will display our collaborative work in generating a dialogue between classicists and artists, while the post immediately following the panel will take the form of a report on the discussions that took place at the panel itself. The final post will look to the next steps and implications of the panel by writing a position paper on an urgent topic that needs to be addressed in our discipline and beyond.
We need to work together on a variety of platforms to reinvigorate the discipline of Classics and we believe that pushing the boundaries of academic structures by engaging with living creative communities is essential to the project of democritising Classics.
In the next few weeks, before our scheduled first collaborative post of July 2nd, we will post our preparations for collaboration with the panelists. The first question that is preoccupying us as we embark on this new project is whether classicists can allow themselves to learn from contemporary artists on a topic of shared interest and investment such as democracy? Or do they necessarily raid any such contemporary creative engagements for material pertaining to their focus on understanding the ancient world? Before bringing Group Material’s project forward as a case-study in our attempt to pose this question, let us kick things off with a potentially simpler example: Daniel G. Andújar’s ongoing project Let’s Democratise Democracy (2011-).
Installed across various sites in Europe, Let’s Democratise Democracy consists of the slogan of the title printed in the local language in black print on a yellow background on posters of a range of sizes placed in a range of contexts (see the images illustrating the present post). The simplicity of Andújar’s project speaks to the need to question how democracies are compromised by people in power and how the process of democratization is continuous and should involve the people as well as politicians who represent them. Where does the role of ancient Greece as the birthplace of the democratic ideal figure in this continuous process of democratization? Given the well-known limitations of Athenian democracy in its exclusion of women, foreigners and slaves, what would a scholar’s democratization of ancient democracy look like? In more general terms, how would Andújar’s project not only translate onto the questions of the panel “Democratising Classics”, but also forge a dialogue that broke down the distinctions between an art project and an academic debate? (We should mention here that there is considerable cross-over potential for this dialogue between Andújar’s work and the discipline of classics, especially given his recent contribution to documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, which we wrote about here.)
So, to get started on our summer project of debating the ‘how’ of democracy between classics and contemporary art, we invite both the “Democratising Classics” panelists and Daniel G. Andújar, to use the space of the comment section to this post to begin this dialogue. Appreciating that such delegation of debate to the comment section is itself potentially un-democratic, we at Minus Plato will also work on how to democratize ourselves!
For more info on the panel see here. And for the list of panelists and schedule of talks, see here.
For more on Daniel G. Andújar, go here.
