My recent visit to New York City fell exactly in the gap between exhibitions at Greene Naftali. The Paul Chan exhibition RHI ANIMA had just closed and Rachel Harrison’s Prasine had yet to open. As you can tell I’m slightly bitter about this. Something I am much more bitter about is what Trump and the […]
Yesterday I discussed the question of ‘Who Speaks for Sappho?’ and Louise Lawler’s work that extends the ‘mansplaining’ ‘of Sappho’s poetry into a general critique of patriarchy. Today let’s take one example of the very literal ‘mansplaining’ of ancient Roman poets – Catullus 51 as a remake of Sappho 31 (here are the translations of […]
Who speaks for Sappho? I was reminded of this question this morning when I saw this post on Hans Urich Obrist’s Instagram feed depicting a work by Kasper Bosmans (an artist whose engagement with antiquity I blogged about on the first day of 2017): Bosmans’ drawing imagines the smoke of incense somehow ‘speaking the name […]
There is no original text, no “right,” perfect, whole object; we only have a broken bit of ceramic, mediated by centuries. This is how Page duBois, in her book Sappho is Burning (complete with a Nancy Spero work on the cover), describes the potsherd that contains what we know of as Sappho fragment 2. Here […]
SapphoMartialPublilius SyrusAristotleEuripides[EuripidesThe Trojan Women]Seneca’s Thyestes DiogenesVirgilAeneid Benjamin Jowett[Ovid Amores 1. 8. 40?]Plutarch re CaesarSophoclesAristotle (again)SimonidesSpartansSlain atPlateaLucretius wroteBeing Euripides (again)Being Seneca (again?)[Horace Odes 4. 7 16] Quoth HoraceOdysseus once says Asks someone in Aristophanes
Tomorrow I will be giving a talk along with Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway) on the topic of ‘Cy Twombly, Modern Painting and the Reception of the Classics’. It will be part of the interdisciplinary research network hosted by the Institute of Classical Studies called TRIVIUM: Classical Intersections. Sadly I cannot be in London in person […]
A few Sundays back (04/22/12), I visited the exhibition of Columbus-based artist, Tom Kelly called the greatest thing on the black earth – comprising of the artist’s most recent work to engage with the poetry of the Archaic Greek poet, Sappho. (Previous exhibitions on this theme include his museum debut at the Southern Ohio Museum […]