A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

The Iliad and Odyssey Seen Differently

Charlayn von Solms

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350194571
• eBook ISBN: 9781350039605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Modern Art

In the popular imagination, Homer as author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, epitomises poetic genius. So, when scholars proposed that the Homeric epics were not the unique creation of an individual author, but instead reflected a traditional compositional system developed by generations of singer-poets, swathes of assumptions about the poems and their 'author' were swept aside and called into question. Much had to be re-evaluated through a new lens. The creative process described by scholars for the Homeric epics shares many key attributes with the modern visual art-forms of collage and its less familiar variant: sculptural assemblage. A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes describes a series of twelve sculptures that together function as an abstract portrait of Homer: not a depiction of him as an individual, but as a compositional system. The technique by which the artworks were produced reflects the poetic method that scholars termed oral-formulaic. In both of these creative processes the artwork is constructed from pre-existing elements: such as phrases, characters, and plot-lines in the epics; and objects, fragmented items, and borrowed forms in the sculptures. The artist/author presents a largely unknown characterisation of Homeric poetics in a manner that emphasizes the extent and complexity of this Homer's artistry.

1

Seeing Differently

In the invocation of the Muses at the outset of the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93), the poet contrasts the limitations of human knowledge with that of the gods by declaring that as the Muses are present at every significant event they know everything, whereas poets can only rely on their ability to hear the Muses’ account.¹ Nagy regards this comparison as a veiled boast: a poet’s insight extends beyond human sensory and geographic limitations to an unlimited source of first-hand knowledge.² This is demonstrated in the Odyssey by the Phaeacian singer Demodocus, whose portrayal of events at Troy brings Odysseus – who witnessed these himself – to tears. Like the Homer of popular imagination, Demodocus is blind. It is not known if the idea that Homer was blind derives from this character, but another Homeric association between poet and loss of sight is suggested by the figure of Thamyris, whose punitive maiming by the Muses (in the Pylian entry of the Catalogue of Ships) was already interpreted to include blinding in antiquity (they also took his voice and made him forget how to play his instrument).³ An association between an inability to see and the composer of the epics is particularly ironic in the context of the renowned ‘visuality’ of Homeric poetics. The vividness of the poems, as noted by critics from antiquity to modernity, reflects descriptive techniques premised on providing a bare minimum of detailed ‘visual’ information. Paradoxically, despite the absence of an exhaustive listing of the characteristics of people, objects and places, the audience is nonetheless convinced of the richness of Homeric descriptions.

It has recently been proposed that the success of Homeric descriptive techniques derive from the extent to which they echo the complex processes underlying human perception. In their analysis of the paradoxical nature of Homeric vividness, Jonas Grethlen and Luuk Huitink ‘agree with Strauss Clay and others that the listener or reader is made to “perceive” the narrated world imaginatively’.⁴ But this perception is not premised on the narrator building an encyclopaedic ‘picture’. Instead, perception is based on the rapid provision of limited multi-sensory information to determine the formal and functional attributes of the perceived object and its spatial relation to the viewer. Grethlen and Huitink therefore

retain the idea that the Iliad can be called a highly ‘imageable’ text, if it can be shown that it prompts the audience through verbal cues imaginatively to connect with the narrated world as they would perceptually connect with the real world [but] take issue with the claim that it is cognitively realistic to suppose that perception and the imagination primarily depend on building up detailed internal pictures which are read off by the ‘minds eye’ and with the corollary claim that detailed, ‘picturesque’ descriptions are particularly vivid.⁵

The notion that the creation of highly detailed images in the mind of an audience is an essential requirement for that audience to be able to imagine a scene, character or object, reflects long-held assumptions about human perception. Sight is associated with truth, reliability and reality. To see is to believe, while incredulity is characterized as the inability to believe one’s eyes. But in physiological and conceptual terms, visual perception is far more complex and subjective than it may seem. Human vision is not seamless, objective and photographic. In neurological terms, the eye does not capture and transmit whole snapshots to the brain for processing. Instead, as David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel discovered in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there are cells and columns of cells in the visual cortex which act as

‘feature detectors,’ specifically sensitive to horizontals, verticals, edges, alignments, and other features of the visual field. The idea began to develop that vision had components, that visual representations were in no sense ‘given,’ like optical images or photographs, but were constructed by an enormously complex and intricate correlation of different processes. Perception was now seen as composite, as modular; the interaction of huge numbers of components. The seamlessness of perception was not a ‘given,’ but had to be achieved in the brain.⁶

Metaphorically expressed, this notion of perception resembles an assembly line as opposed to a projector and a screen. The pictorialist theory of perception in which an image is ‘projected’ in the brain was based on scientific observations, such as Johannes Kepler’s discovery that the eye consists of a lens ‘that refracts light and imagery before projecting an image onto the surface of the retina. He left it to “natural philosophers” to determine how the retinal image subsequently appeared before the soul, but he described this image as something that is painted on the retina: “The retina is painted by the coloured rays of visible things.”’⁷

More recently, the ‘enactivist’ theory of perception as championed by Alva Noë suggests that humans construct an understanding of their environment largely in terms of embodied action, incorporating limited visual detail that is only mentally registered when required. Comprehension is not based on the mental construction of an all-inclusive highly detailed ‘image’ but a concise assessment of the spatial relationship of the viewer to the perceived and possible means of interaction (and utilization in the case of an object). In an enactivist model, perception is a process of rapid assignation of meaning that is informed by prior experience, and an ability to distinguish familiar shapes and make sense of unfamiliar ones. In extending the enactive model to the imagination, Grethlen and Huitink note that the ‘imageability’ of narrative texts does not require lengthy and detailed descriptions as these ‘contradict the economy and selectivity which are intrinsic to the normal perception attention which we give to the world around us’.⁸

The idea that humans see in pictures feels intuitively true in an environment where naturalistic – and more recently photographic – images are an established (and preferred) method of representation. However, as the processes by which such images are produced illustrate, representing the observed world in this manner is not as natural as an audience accustomed to it may assume it to be. One of the greatest challenges in learning to draw or paint from life is to surmount a persistent reluctance to pay deep attention to an object’s formal qualities beyond the moment where key identifying attributes have been mentally registered. Seeing something in terms of its complete visual minutiae is surprisingly difficult and mainly superfluous in an everyday setting. In addition, creating two-dimensional illusions of three-dimensional objects in space involves complex technical expertise and the development of abstract systems such as linear perspective and technologies like the camera obscura. Photography likewise requires great skill and technological advances. Photographers do not just ‘point and click’ but select and manipulate environmental conditions (such as the addition of light) to minimize distortions, enhance specific features, and omit or diminish others. This process results in images that are not simply impartial visual records but expressions of the photographer’s formal and conceptual intentions. In the age of digital photography such manipulations extend beyond the moment an image is captured and can include everything from adjustments of contrast and colour to radical alteration of an image.

A similar selectivity applies to perception. Once sensory inputs have been assembled, the process by which they are understood and contextualized is deeply idiosyncratic, yet (in an apparent contradiction) highly prone to social conditioning. A range of communal, cultural and personal factors determine which aspects of what is seen will be overlooked or acknowledged, and how the latter will be categorized. As group identity invariably incorporates shared habits of seeing, established iconographic and representational systems, cultural and social biases, and shared experiential associations will all inform interpretation. And if what is seen is partial and pre-determined, it follows that representation will be informed by ways of seeing.

Artists and authors can draw on and exploit human perceptive habits in various ways. Homeric descriptions take multiple forms, ranging from immersive and direct portrayals of events and people as, where and how they occur, to more complex and allusive descriptive strategies such as the simile (see Chapter 6). While movement, sound and other such multi-sensory modes of perception are employed with great effect in these descriptions, their effectiveness derives from the extent to which they are sufficiently succinct and allusive to activate and draw on the audience’s own established repertoire of perceptive experiences. For example, in an analysis of Homeric similes, Oliver Taplin notes that a

high proportion of them would be familiar to most audiences in most places and at most times, including most audiences still even today … The local and temporal non-specificity of Homer’s similes is worth elaborating. Not only is there no one single simile in Homer which can be tied to the poet personally, there are remarkably few that are fixed in time, or which refer to people placed within the continuum of time.⁹

The result is the establishment of a ‘range of similarities between the world of the poem and the world – or rather worlds – of its audiences. The similes act as a kind of conduit to the similarities’¹⁰ (for more on Homeric similes see Chapter 6).

Systems of representation can conform to and confirm the belief that a specific way of perceiving and representing the world is the most logical and appropriate. Deeply entrenched ways of seeing reflect equally engrained ways of thinking, while imagery not only reflects thinking, but can shape it too. Noting the surreptitious influence of the canonical, but inaccurate, illustration of the evolution of species as progressively sequential, Steven Jay Gould warns that when ‘an iconographic tradition persists for a full century in the face of such disparate ideologies expressed in accompanying text, then we truly grasp the power of pictures and the hidebound character of assumptions that go unchallenged because they are unrecognized in icons rather than explicit in texts’.¹¹ The values associated with one form of representation can obscure and even devalue other ways of seeing, to the extent that an observer’s expectations of what does and does not constitute meaningful representation can inform their understanding of related phenomena. For example, while attributes such as flexibility, openness and adaptability are often ascribed to modern art-forms, they can also be characteristic of so-called ‘traditional’ art-forms. The latter are commonly regarded as rigid and inward-looking, contributing to unacknowledged perceptions of forms of cultural expression that can significantly inform how artefacts are understood. One such example is an inscribed object from eighth century Greece. Interpretations of the ‘Nestor cup’ from Pithecusae largely assume that of the multiple visual elements on the cup, only the inscribed letters convey meaning (see Chapter 2). This oversight is understandable given the historical association between the Homeric epics and Classical art (see Chapter 4). However, as the South African examples below will show, oral poetics exist and develop alongside visual art-forms and share core attributes. While Homeric scholarship has long been rooted in an environment where illusionistic naturalism is the predominant representational system, the Homeric poems originated in a context where such a way of seeing and showing the world would have been wholly alien.

Illusionistic naturalism

By the nineteenth century, European academies of art had been instrumental in codifying a very specialized visual representational system characterized by the construction of illusions of the physical world, achieved by means of such scientific approaches as geometry, anatomy, botany, optics, etc. Though stylistically varied, it was based on the depiction of recognizable scenarios, derived from actual exemplars, and was inherently illustrative, a ‘frozen theatre’ with actors dressed in costume, placed in a fitting environment, with thought and emotion conveyed through gesture and expression. The focus of this approach was the idealized human body, an idea that was developed during the Renaissance, derived from the combination of close anatomical observation and notions of harmonious proportion as supposedly exemplified in ancient Greek art. The history of Western art has long been premised on the idea that the art of the Renaissance represents a continuation of ancient Greek and Roman art after the hiatus of the Middle Ages. Michael Squire argues that in terms of how the body is represented, the aims and strategies of Renaissance art differ significantly from the Classical. Writing of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Seeing Differently
• 2 A Homeric Object
• 3 Sculptural Assemblage and the Composite Object Portrait
• 4 Homeric Iconographies
• 5 A Catalogue of Shapes 2010–13: Descriptive Catalogue of Artworks
• 6 A Composite Object Portrait of an Oral-Formulaic Homer
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright