(^100) | APRIL 2016
below
Landscape for Baucis
and Philemon
Oil on canvas
48” x 34”
1984
Collection of
Wadsworth Atheneum,
Hartford
opposite
Landscape with an Archer
Oil on canvas
78” x 110”
1991
Collection of
Pasadena Museum
of California Art
wonderful stories and ideas that are worth being repeated,
my painting called Landscape for Baucis and Philemon, for
instance. It is from the Roman writer Ovid, and is basically
about homelessness, hospitality and human kindness. I
believe that it’s really important to try to make works that
are about our history, about some of these really amazing
ideas and insights that people have had over the centuries.
I call it recurrent classicism.
“Recurrent” is better than “neo” because classicism comes
in waves, doesn’t it?
It has come back over and over again. So many times over
the centuries, people have said that classicism was dead.
But there are so many profound ideas folded in that each
generation has the potential to see something new. For
instance, take fifth century BC Greek sculptor Polykleitos,
whose most famous statue was called The Doryphorous or
Spearbearer. Now, after the emergence of conceptual art, it’s
possible to think of The Doryphorous as a conceptual work.
It was meant to be the embodiment (literally) of a treatise
about the proportional integration of the diverse parts of the
human body. As I said, it was very famous in ancient times.
The manuscript no longer exists, but the statue exists in many
copies done in Roman times, sort of like Duchamp’s urinal,
which now only exists in copies, though the idea of applying
harmonic proportions to the body and also architecture
and city planning and even politics superseded the statue’s
physicality. But it all started with...
A finger, a proportioning system based on the finger, right?
Yes, based on the finger, and then the hand, and then each part
related to every other part in the human body. This integrative
system was called Symmetria. Generally, we think of symmetry
as being a balance between two equal things, but what it
meant with Symmetria was the balanced integration between
all of the diverse parts of the body and society, etc. It was
meant to be a metaphor for a much larger idea—the whole idea
of integration. It’s one of those things that we are confronted
with over and over again in our modern lives, this idea of
integrating different ethnicities, different nationalities, even
different genders. So I think that it is very useful to understand
the foundations of that idea of harmonic integration.
Today we have all kinds of new genres and art practices.
Do you think these other forms can possibly contribute
more than painting?
There has never been a period in all of history with such
a variety of styles and concepts, and I don’t have any
trouble with that. It has been proven that, within the right
context, anything can be art. But with thousands of artists
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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