Blog 4 Anticleia
Last November I took part in a performance workshop in
London funded by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) for its Old Dears
series of workshops and performances by and about older women. I was in a group of 10 British artists
invited to work with the Mexican artist Rocio Boliver (below), who had been
brought over to perform, lecture and devise the workshop, culminating in a
collaborative performance at the Chelsea Theatre on 28 November.
‘Rocio described her workshop, Between Menopause and Old
Age, Alternative Beauty, as “demystifying the horror of old age, inventing my
own deranged aesthetic and moral solutions for the problem of age”. (1)
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| Rocio Boliver 2014 |
For my piece in our final collaboration I made a performance about Anticleia’s struggle to embody herself in the underworld. Anticleia has become part of everything I am currently doing in my practice. I took a while to write about it because I needed time to reflect on the workshop, which was quite a profound and challenging experience for me.
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| Anticleia: Between Menopause and Old Age: Alterntive Beauty. Photograph Alex Eisenberg 2015 |
As I mentioned before, in Fuseli’s painting Anticleia is
within a spiral of energy made up of ghosts.
She has become a symbol for overlooked older women to me, and I have
invested her with my own desires. She is
my mascot, and in a way I am inventing her just as much as Homer did, except
that I am not using her to fill some narrative gaps but trying to envisage her
as a creative event, a site for possibilities.
I am fantasizing about her energy continuing until today and further,
her struggle for recognition, admittedly not obvious in her brief lifetime
(which barely merits its mythical status) but as imagined and projected by me.
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| Anticleia: Between Menopause and Old Age: Alterntive Beauty. Photograph Alex Eisenberg 2015 |
The performance took place in a black theatre where we were
spaced out like a gallery installation, performing in pairs or alone. The fact that human blood was flowing in two
of the nearest corners of the space I was occupying, in the celebratory and
sacrificial performances of Rocio Boliver, Sheree Rose and Pascale Ciapp, gave
a literal sense to the re-awakening of Anticleia in the Chelsea Theatre. In Homer’s poem Odesseus uses sheep’s blood
to embody the ghosts, but this was London in 2015.
I was feeling my way into an awakening, inside the skin of
my sculpture, and breaking out of it.
The sculpture was part of the form of the performance, and also a
chrysalis for a metaphorical transformation, with my body as still forming
matter tentatively emerging, at least that was how I saw it. This was the first time I had used my naked
body in a live performance. It had never
seemed necessary to me before, I think it was a combination of influences from
the workshop with Rocio Boliver, and the subject of the performance.
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| Anticleia: Between Menopause and Old Age: Alterntive Beauty. Photograph Alex Eisenberg 2015 |
I realized through discussions at the workshop with Rocio
that I am very much part of my sculptural work in a material way. I had thought that I was giving them
movement, but they are also giving me movement, the relationship is closer than
I realized, we are indivisible.
The workshop made me re-evaluate what the performance
element of my practice means to me, but it is still too recent for me to reach
any conclusions, or even more considered questions. Initially I began using performance in my art
practice because of a desire to make my sculptures move, particularly the ones
made of rubber. The medium is so malleable and constantly changing shape. I considered using mechanical means, but did
not have the technical skills so decided to move them with my body, but trying
not to suggest the body within the sculpture; I wanted to move the sculptures
in the way that I thought they would move themselves.
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| Anticleia: Between Menopause and Od Age: Alternative Beauty. Photograph Alex Eisenberg 2015 |
The performance Anticleia: Between Menopause and Old Age was
an assemblage of the two states, sculptural and bodily performance, a hybrid
performance of inside and outside.
I continue
to draw, and am halfway through two large maquettes or small sculptures (more
on these later). Some drawings are near
to the original, some are moving away visually, but not conceptually. I am concentrating on Anticleia, the mother
of Odysseus.
Anticleia
(2015)
Anticleia
has become a symbol of the older woman to me.
I see her as a neglected source of untapped energy, and she has entered
my imaginative life. I make stories
about her.
Anticleia
begs Sisyphus (distracted by a Harpy) to leave her alone (2015)
Because
there is so little written about Anticleia I can make her up.
Anticleia
feels lonely in her bath (2015)
I feel
defensive for her, I think she has been treated unfairly, killed off early just
so that she can fulfil a narrative requirement for Homer, and tell Odysseus
what’s been going on back home. And the
rest of her short story isn’t much better.
Anticleia
resents her role in mythology (2015)
I made a
sculpture shown at this year’s River
Ogwen Festival which shows the spiralling energy of Anticleia, confined for
so long in Hades, making her way through to the surface by following the
windings of the Ogwen.
I wonder if
the spirit of Tiresias, in his female form, is with her.
Llif/Flow (2015) photo by Lindsey Colbourne
Studio with
drawings of Anticleia (2015) photo by Toni Dewhurst
Studio with
drawings of Anticleia, Odysseus and Tiresias (2015 photo by Toni Dewhurst
10.6.15
I am
allowed to put the original in the blog as it is past copyright date so here it
is.
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Henry Fuseli. Teiresias Foretells the Future to Odysseus c.1800
Oil on canvas, 91 x 77.8 cm Collection: Amgueddfa Cymru –National Museum Wales |
The painting has hooked me; I find myself delighted that it is suitable
for my purpose. I need a copy of the painting to put on the wall so that I can
look at it all the time and absorb it.
Different things occur at different times.
I begin to make drawings from it, to take apart and analyze the
composition in a playful way, and continue to think about it three
dimensionally. I consider isolating shapes and movements from the painting,
such as the spiral of ghosts that Anticleia is part of.
Initially
I am working fairly closely from the original, in that I am looking at it while
I draw. I am not looking at what I am
drawing, except occasionally to place things and find a starting place, and
also for washes and tones. I am using a drawing
system I call ‘semi-automatic’. It
derives from Surrealist automatic drawing, but can involve a conscious subject
and consideration of composition. This Anticleia
series is about as far away from the idea of automatic drawing as I can get,
the only thing left is not looking at the page.
The one
above is not semi-automatic; I was playing with graphite powder and looking at
what I was doing. I haven’t worked out
how to fix it to the paper.
More
semi-automatic drawings followed, in these I was not looking at the original,
it is in my head, more or less. I am
just trying to get to know it.
I am
becoming very interested in Tiresias.
One of the reasons he is embodied and stands out from the coil of
spirits is that he has special powers; he is able to embody himself (the others
must drink blood from a sacrifice). His connection to the material world is
perhaps due to the fact that he spent 7 years as a woman. Once, while walking, he saw two snakes
copulating and hit them with his stick.
This enraged Hera who turned him into a woman as a punishment (!). Whilst a woman he became a priestess of Hera and gave birth to a daughter. During this time he was
probably also a prostitute. After 7 years he was allowed to return to being a
man.
On the first visit
on 12 December 2015 I went looking to see what is on the walls of the public
galleries. I am making work about the
representation of older women, and I wanted to see how many and what sort there
might be in public, not hidden in the vaults. There weren’t many; a few portraits of wives,
opera singers and one of the Davies sisters from Gregynog, Margaret (described
as ‘a profoundly sympathetic image of a
woman at the onset of old age’, I’m not sure why), and that was about
it, apart from a satirical cartoon of Lloyd George as a ‘Welsh old lady’ and a Frenchman, seen as equally
dreadful things by the cartoonist Edward Tennyson Reed , who was ageist, sexist
and racist all in one. The caption
underneath reads:
‘Cer-taine lee! I am altogezzer vat you call a French!! Voyez-vous, I just put on ze ‘at of ze Velsh old La-dy and it make a vairy nice top-at of ze boulevardier, n’est ce pas?!!”
The painting that
most interested me is by Fuseli, taken from Greek mythology; Teiresias
foretells the future to Odysseus, 1780-85. A grey, wraithlike woman wilts
between two men. Too etiolated to have
many distinguishing features, her age is uncertain, but the label said that she
was Odysseus’s mother. Although also dead, Tiresias
is depicted in as corporeal a way as Odysseus, but his mother is almost
invisible, in monochrome, her arms still crossed over her chest as if she is
still in the coffin and has no energy even to move.
Thinking about it
on the long drive home with Andrew and Noelle I still wasn’t sure if I had finally chosen my work, but now I know it
is right. The more I find out about it
the more I am charged by my choice.
Anticleia
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| Anticleia, maquette, February 2015 |
Further research
told me that the woman’s
name was Anticleia (literally ‘without fame’). She was the
daughter of Autolycus and Amphithea and mother of
Odysseus by Laertes
(though some say by Sisyphus, who seduced or raped her because her father had
stolen his sheep). She was the
granddaughter of the god Hermes who was the father of her father. She is defined by her family relationships,
mostly masculine, and only appears in this section of the Odyssey as a cypher
to let Odysseus know what is going on at home with his wife and son.
I hadn’t expected many examples of older women, perhaps a few
crones, and I was right. Anticleia is perfect for my purpose, as a suitable
representative of invisible, underestimated and overlooked older women (like
me).
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| Anticlea Elegans |
There is a single
flower named after her, Anticlea Elegans, or Mountain Death Camas, a small
white lily whose flowers are extremely poisonous.
I have made a
drawing of the whole painting and 4 maquettes, 3 of Anticleia on her own, and
one of the group of three.
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| Tiresias Foretells the Furture to Odesseus, maquette. March 2015 |
I will go back to
the museum and draw the original, which might be a bit difficult as it hangs in
a sort of corridor. I want to spend more
time there, to get more of a feel for the place. It was lovely visiting the museum with the
others and going into the vaults and closed rooms. I love the way a place feels different when I
am visiting it in a different role than the usual one. I feel more involved
with it, more curious about it and more noticing. This engagement with the
place is important to me. It is the connections I make, real and imagined,
between my own practice and the chosen art work, its history and the concepts
it embodies, the people and the building that will feed my work.
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