CHAPTER 24
Ethnicity and Representation
S. Rebecca Martin
Two qualities of Greek art relate it to this volume’s overarching subject. First, Greek
art is concerned with mimesis, often explicitly. Second, Greek art regularly thematizes
binaries. A mimetic art interested in oppositions is linked easily to the articulation of
sameness and difference that we think informs ethnicity. If ethnicity is something we can
see and empirically measure, it follows that Greek art could represent it.
Determining an image’s relationship with its object—the problem of representation—
is, of course, a complex task. Some insist that representation is a fundamentally mimetic
process dependent upon resemblance to a model (see Halliwell 2002). Others reject
mimesis as necessary or even sufficient for representation, thereby claiming representa-
tion is an arbitrary act of denotation (Gombrich 1960; Goodman 1968; see also Frigg and
Hunter 2010). In the mimetic and arbitrary views, an image refers to real models, even if
abstracted, mediated, or twice removed, as in the Platonic understanding of art as a rep-
resentation of only the phenomenological world (e.g., famously, in theRepublic;cf.the
distinction between copy and simulacrum in Deleuze 1983). A highly idealized or com-
posite mimetic image has similarities to observed models in some fashion. So, too, does
arbitrary representation denote real objects, even if it foregoes verisimilitude. Denota-
tion’s basic tools are the symbol and other visual conventions (Gombrich’s “schemata”).
Even when the image does not denote a real object but a fiction (Wollheim 1970: 535),
what the image means to express is important. The difficulty of understanding artistic
intentionality is a persistent problem of a Greek art that is largely anonymous and whose
artists are very difficult to reconstruct (Palagia and Pollitt 1996). Viewer perception is
equally important to some theories (Gombrich’s, notably) and our study. Still another
theory of representation follows literary Deconstruction, and challenges, complicates, or
denies the idea of a straightforward original model (e.g., Derrida 1967; cf. Baudrillard’s
Simulacra and Simulation).
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.