Historic Insights
Seeking Otherness: Samuel Beckett and Giacometti, an Existential Response to the Art of Ancient Egypt
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Albert Alhadeff
My paper explores the ties that bind the sculpture of the renowned Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti with the Dynastic art of Ancient Egypt, bonds seeking Otherness that soldered Giacometti’s friendship with the author of Waiting for Godot, the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. Although the literature on Beckett and Giacometti is extensive, students of these masters of imagery and prose have never observed that Giacometti’s enduring interest in Egyptian art and its other-worldly silences was a prime factor that drew Giacometti and Beckett together. Giacometti’s intense study of Egyptian art began in the early 1920s in the Egyptian wing of the Vatican Museum in Rome and continued well into his career in the 1960s, with numerous drawings after Egyptian steles. The Egyptian quest for immortality resonates with Giacometti’s quest for ethereal transcendence, a quest that informed his understanding of Beckett’s static and enduring characters. Thus, whether kings, scribes or pharaohs or Beckett’s forlorn rags of humanity, they, with Giacometti’s many takes on the Walking Man, seek an otherworldly existence. As the many drawings by Giacometti after Egyptian statuary show, Giacometti found an existential resonance in Egyptian art, one he equated with Beckett’s own theoretical response to the otherworldly. I seek to draw a rapprochement between Beckett and Giacometti---with the latter’s drawings after Egyptian statuary as the cement that bound these two great artists in their probing for Other truths.
Featured Visualizing the Cosmos in Early China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zi Quan
In my research I investigate the "Shi Image', a meta-image and a representation of the Cosmos found in various forms in Ancient China. The image embodies the basic logic of Chinese philosophy and offers the basis for an understanding of the links between art forms that demonstrate a shared cosmological world view.' I examine the archive of such images that originated in the Han Dynasty. I start with the hazy and fragmented understanding of the Cosmos to be found in the late Neolithic period in China up to the beginnings of the Han Dynasty, before the emergence of the Shi Image. I look at various forms of textual inscription, including hieroglyphs and marks on tortoise shells, known as ‘oracle bones’, as well as traces of cosmology in myths and legends, maps and star charts. I then look at the cosmological image. This is an under-researched topic and at the heart of my project. There are comparatively few examples of such images, and they are found in different forms of cultural artefact, studied by disparate disciplines. One of my aims is to demonstrate the commonalities in these disparate images and show how they manifest a particular visual logic, manifested in various forms, including planar images and stereo images, and how, in turn, these offer representations of concepts of space and time and cosmological understanding.
Mourning in the Optative Mood: The Case of the Eleusis Amphora View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dena Gilby
The Eleusis Amphora is a Proto-Attic neck-handled amphora dating to c. 650-625 BCE. Attributed to the Polyphemus Painter, the ceramic includes scenes of the blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus (indeed, this vase is the one that gave the painter his name); a lion fighting a boar; and the beheading of Medusa. One may ask: what is the purpose of such imagery? One finds a possible answer in Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank’s essay entitled, “Introduction: Learning to Look and Think Critically,” in Reframing Art History. In this text Kilroy-Ewbank states that art is created for a variety of reasons, but one is “to soothe and calm”. Recognizing that the vase held the remains of an adolescent boy and using an object biography approach, one can interpret the pot’s narratives as a visual optative mood in which those for whom this container was created offer up to the child a wish that he be as clever as Odysseus, as fierce as the heroes Achilles and Hector, and as beloved by the gods as Perseus as he makes his way in shadowy Hades.
