Understanding Medea through ancient Greek epigrams

To many traditional video programmers, new services like Hulu and YouTube are chaotic and unprofessional.  Hulu allows viewers to see what they want, when they want to see it.  YouTube allows viewers to become creators, who can project their own video in the place of highly artful work.  Services like Hulu and YouTube threaten to destroy media as we know it.

Some classical epigrams foster understanding of traditional mass media:

This is a sketch of Medea.  Observe how she lifts one eye in anger,
and softens the other with pity for her children.[1]

The first sentence provides objective information.  It indicates a famous, unfinished painting located in Rome about 2000 years ago. The second sentence imposes the narrative of Euripides’ play Medea to guide what the viewer sees in the painting.

The painter, Timomachus, did not depict Medea’s ultimate choice of action:

Timomachus’ art mingled Medea’s love with her jealousy
as her children are dragged to their fate.
Just then she consented to the sword but now refuses,
wishing to save her children and also to slay them.

Timomachus made the painting with great skill. It was a recognized masterpiece [2]:

Look here at a child-killer in portrait; see here a masterpiece,
Timomachus’ Medea shaped with his hand.
A sword in hand, great wrath, a wild eye are there,
and tears falling for most pitiable children.
He poured it all together, uniting into one even the unmixable,
yet spared to redden any hand with blood.

But the painting’s high artistic status did not prevent viewers from bloodily re-imagining it:

Who, lawless Media, wrote your rage into the image?
Who made you barbarian even in replica?
Always you thirst for your children’s blood. Do you claim
some other lover or winning rival as excuse?
Be gone, you who murder children, even in print. Even the stylus
perceives your jealous urge to fulfill your desires.

A twittering swallow shows a much different model of communication:

How, twittering swallow, did you dare to make as nurse
for your children the Media who takes vengeance
at the cost of her offspring? Her bloodshot eyes flash
murderous fire, and her jaws drip white foam.
Still wet with blood is her sword. Flee the destructive mother,
still murdering her children even in print.

The twittering swallow is totally misunderstood within the narrative imposed on the painting. To the twitterer, the painting simply is present as a material and institutional reality that means nothing.[3] The swallow has neither reason nor feasible opportunity to flee.

Mass media has been a bloody business from the beginning.  Perhaps a recognition and reversal will follow this:

The reason all three networks have taken a controlling interest in Hulu is because they are going to build it up and then kill it!  Brilliant!  Eat your young.  Who said there wasn’t a place for cannibalization?

Never underestimate the tragic effects of anger at threats to deeply valued, immaterial status.

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Notes:

[1] These and the other quoted epigrams above are translations that I have adapted mainly from Gutzwiller (2004), but also with some contribution from the translations in Gurd (2007).  The epigrams are from the Greek Anthology.

[2] Gutzwiller (2004) p. 344, notes that Julius Caesar purchased a Medea and an Ajax by Timomachus for 80 talents.  That’s a huge amount of money, roughly equivalent to $1.6 million in U.S. dollars in 2004. Both paintings were placed in the Roman temple of Venus Genetrix, which was dedicated in 46 BGC.  The painting of Medea was destroyed by fire in 80 GC.  See Gurd (2007) pp. 308-9, which incorrectly reports the price of the paintings.

[3]  The epigram imagines a swallow that has made a nest about the painting. Drawing upon Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s work on presence, Gurd (2007) provides an insightful analysis of the painting’s presence in the epigrams.

References:

Gurd, Sean Alexander (2007).  “Meaning and Material Presence: Four Epigrams on Timomachus’s Unfinished Medea.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 137, pp. 305-331.

Gutzwiller, Kathryn (2004).  “Seeing Thought: Timomachus’ Medea and Ecphrastic Epigram.” American Journal of Philology 124, pp. 339-386.

communication drove civilization

Symbolic innovation and special forms of communication apparently spurred the earliest, enduring gatherings of large groups of humans.  The city at Tell Brak (Nagar) in northern Mesopotamia grew starting about 7,000 years ago to a resident population of about 10,000 persons 5,600 years ago.  Tell Brak grew mainly through the communicative process of population agglomeration, not internal growth through fitness advantages of economic specialization and political power.  In China from about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, the invention and monopolization of technologies for communicating with ancestors was the basis for early states.

Large human groups closely associated with hunting and gathering behavior also seem to have been symbolically united.  In Çatalhöyük in southern Anatolia from 9,400 to 7,700 years ago, 3,000 to 8,000 persons lived together in closely packed, similarly sized houses that they entered from above.  Households were little differentiated socially and economically, and the same was true for women and men.  Hunting wild game was an important source of food for residents. Along with these social and economic characteristics similar to those of hunter-gathers, the residents of Çatalhöyük had a rich culture — the dead were buried beneath particular locations in the floors of the residences, the walls were richly decorated with murals, and a variety of figurines have been found throughout the settlement.

An even more remarkable hunter-gather symbolic life existed at Gobekli Tepe in southern Anatolia about 11,000 years ago.  Groups of perhaps 500 hunter-gatherers worked together for many years at Gobekli Tepe to construct a monumental complex.  It was not a fortified living space and not a center for craft work or commodity trading.  It seems to have been built before the development of agriculture, and hence it could not have been supported through the extraction of surplus from farmers.  Gobekli Tepe apparently was the site of a temple that somehow early humans were motivated to work together to create.

Music and dance probably were a central aspect of early human group formation.  Participating in music and dance provides neurological experience of group synchronization.  Singing and dancing for long periods to the point of physical exhaustion and psychological breakdown is common in the rituals of preliterate tribes.  That sort of experience can produce lasting neurological changes that foster group identity and within-group trust.[*]  What seems to have first brought humans together in large groups was not political power or economic advantage, but particular symbolic innovations and communicative practices.

Cross-species comparisons of non-human primates indicates that communication evolved with sociality.  Over a much shorter evolutionary time horizon, symbolic innovation and particular communication practices supported the rise of human civilization.  Expect the Internet to change everything.

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[*]  William Benzon has described music as producing neurological synchronization without symbolic communication.  Cognitive neuroscientist Walter Freeman calls music and dance “biotechnology of group formation.”  Hebbian learning — summarized as “neurons that fire together, wire together” — describes enduring effects of sensory experience.

Note:  Thanks to Catalhoyuk for sharing a large number of photos.  In accordance with the license for the above photo, this post includes a share-alike provision in its Creative Commons license.

Systematic Landscapes transforms public space

With Systematic Landscapes, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through July 12, 2009, Maya Lin brings landscapes into an art gallery.  This one, generative, earthly reality is an unsought gift to every human being. Systematic Landscapes presents works that make visible within the Corcoran Gallery unseeable forms of this gift.

The works build upon familiar models of the natural world.  Prior to cheap maps, many persons living around the Chesapeake Bay probably would not recognize what most persons now understand to be the shape of the Bay.  The poured-silver map-shape of the Chesapeake Bay in Systematic Landscapes builds upon that new understanding.  Water Line is a room-sized line-contour sculpture of an underwater landmass that, according to the exhibition brochure, is located in the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica.  To a native of South America a millennium ago, it probably would look like a fishing net.  Blue Lake Pass models “an actual mountain range near the artist’s Colorado home.”  If one of the Bodies of Water Series (Caspian Sea, Red Sea, and Black Sea) was turned over, enlarged, and cubed, it would look a lot like Blue Lake Pass, except for a significant difference in the direction of movement of the contours.  What stabilizes and informs the works are common knowledge of the map-shapes of seas and the conventions of topological representations.

The representational characteristics of digital technology strongly shapes Systematic Landscapes.  Digital works are composed from a large number of discrete, uniformly organized, sharply bounded bits.  2×4 Landscape, which has a steeply rising protrusion in the midst of a room-sized base, is made from more than 50,000 2×4’s arranged in a tight, regular grid in two dimensions.  Blue Lake Pass and Bodies of Water Series are composed from equal-width wooden slices. Pins are the bits in Pin River — Volga. A topologically square grid of wire forms the fabric for Water Line.  Compared to mosaics, works in this exhibition more insistently highlight regularity in their constituting bits.

The exhibition encourages viewer engagement and consideration of new computer technologies.  The exhibition brochure explains:

Each [large-scale sculptural installation] offers a different means for viewers to engage with and comprehend a schematic representation of landscape forms.  In this exhibition, Lin examines how our modern relationships to the land we inhabit are extended, condensed, distorted, and interpreted through new computer technologies.  She translates a series of dramatic landscape environments, selected for their inspiring beauty and connection to life-supporting habitats, into spatial environments with which viewers can engage in an art gallery setting.

When I took out my digital camera to make an image of 2×4 Landscape, the guard ordered me to stop.  While Maya Lin has even encouraged the Corcoran to allow visitors to walk on this work, photographing the landscapes is prohibited.  Whether the source of this prohibition is the artist, the artist’s gallery, or the Corcoran exhibition director, isn’t clear.  In the brochure, every photograph is tagged, “Courtesy of PaceWildenstein.”  Why not courtesy of wind, water, and time?  PaceWildenstein is a New York Gallery that represents Maya Lin. Economic reality is part of the total earthly landscape. But economic landscapes, like physical landscapes, can be seen in different ways. Prohibiting viewers from using digital cameras to engage with Systematic Landscapes seems to me disappointingly inconsistent with the exhibition’s spirit.

This September, Maya Lin is planning to premiere a work entitled What is Missing? This work will focus on the loss of habitats and the extinction of species.  Her website describes this work as involving a multi-site video project, an Internet site, and a book.  I hope What is Missing? will allow user engagement using modern digital technology and foster a variety of new creations.  Human beings can add to our common gifts.