La novela de la Revolución

I begin this chapter by looking at a series of plaster casts made by Sarah Lucas. As we have already seen, Lucas came to prominence in the 1990s for works which were widely

considered abrasive, lewd, and indifferent to artistic tradition.¹¹ From the beginning of her career, she has confronted themes such as gender, sex and death in a bawdy and irreverent fashion – using found objects, or rough-and-ready casts. The previous chapter’s case-study,

10 The key Modernist analysis of the ‘original’ and reproduction (specifically photography) is Benjamin, 2002.

Cf. Benjamin, 1991, 143-154; Melberg, 2005. See also Krauss, 1986, especially 152-153; and Krauss, 1989.

11 See Chapter 3, n. 34-35 and n. 226.

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Cnut, was a cast made from concrete; but Lucas has also produced numerous works in plaster using throwaway moulds, often depicting parts of the body.¹² In 2015, she represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition centred on ten of these sculptures – a series she called the Muses (figs. 78-89).¹³

These works are a productive starting-point because they might appear, on initial

acquaintance, to have little or nothing to do, aesthetically at least, with classical antiquity.

Lucas’s plaster ‘figures’, if we can call them that, are not cast from statues in the Belvedere or Capitoline – they are not classical or classicizing in any traditional sense.¹⁴ Rather, they are cast from her own naked body and the bodies of her friends.¹⁵ Each of these ‘figures’ is in fact a disembodied pair of legs, truncated at the waist, and positioned so as to sit or sprawl on a different piece of furniture – an old desk, a freezer, a toilet bowl. Each has a cigarette tucked provocatively into one crevice or another. From this brief summary, it is clear that Lucas’s roughshod plasters are anything but ‘high art’.¹⁶ It is not simply that they are not typically classical in their subject-matter – being cast from real, ungainly bodies – but also that they are deliberately vulgar in their content and import. One of the more negative

appraisals of the Venice exhibition, by a critic from The Daily Mail, remarked that: “It’s as if a bunch of schoolboys have broken into John Lewis and had a field day chopping up

mannequins in the white goods department.”¹⁷

If at first sight Lucas’s plaster casts seem to have nothing to do with the classical, then the work of her close contemporary Mark Wallinger is marked by an explicit embrace.

Wallinger, whose work we saw in the chapter on realism, is probably best known for his life-size sculpture of Christ Ecce Homo (1999; fig. 90), the first work to be displayed on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth.¹⁸ As this marbleized resin figure demonstrated, Wallinger is an artist

12 Dziewior and Ruf, 2005, 128, 146, 153; Lucas, 2012, 12, 40-42, 49-67, 108-109; Blazwick and Bowers, 2013, 68-69; Malvern, 2010, 358.

13 ‘I SCREAM DADDIO’, British Pavilion, 56th Venice International Art Biennale, 9 May to 22 November 2015. See Lucas, 2015, 12-29, 100-107.

14 See Chapter 3, n. 125. On the Capitoline, see Paul, 2012; Wren Christian, 2010, 103-119; Haskell and Penny, 1981, 8-11, 15. On casts as emblems of Winckelmannian neoclassicism, see Connor, 1989, 206-207; Gallo, 2015, 163. On their changing status in post-Winckelmann Europe, see Settis, 2013.

15 See however Pliny, HN, 35.153, for an ancient account of life-casting. Cf. Frederiksen, 2010, 21; Konstam and Hoffmann, 2004. Cennino Cennini (c. 1360-1427) describes life-casting: ibid, 1960, 126-129. In 1568 Vasari records Verocchio’s use of the practice: ibid, 1987, 239. Cf. Fusco, 1982, 182-183; Warburg, 1999b, 207.

16 On ‘high art’ see Fisher, 2001; Sontag, 1966, 286-287. Cf. Chapter 3, n. 44.

17 Mount, 2015.

18 Herbert, 116-120, 134-139 ; Schuppli, 2007, 49-52; Rugoff, 2001; Bulgakov and Searle, 2000; Burrows, 2000.

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whose work is deeply invested in Art History, including the history of classical art.¹⁹ For an exhibition which he curated at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2009, he made this investment clear. This was called ‘The Russian Linesman’ (named after the linesman who allowed England a controversial goal against West Germany in the 1966 World Cup) and featured a number of the artist’s own works alongside a variety of artefacts and artworks, each exploring the ambiguities of perception and the threshold between reality and illusion.²⁰

As we have seen already in this thesis, such concepts are themselves rooted in ancient discourses. In its very format, moreover, ‘The Russian Linesman’ invoked a mode of

collecting and display – that of the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities – that was part of the rediscovery of the antique from the Renaissance onwards.²¹ Both the guiding premise and physical format of the show were indebted to the classical tradition. Against these

background elements of classicism, Wallinger presented a plaster cast of the Dying Gaul or Trumpeter (known in the Renaissance as The Dying Gladiator; figs. 91-93).²² The cast, borrowed from the Edinburgh College of Art,²³ reproduces a masterpiece of Hellenistic and Roman art (fig. 94), one which has been repeatedly replicated in plaster and bronze in palaces and academies.²⁴ In this example, the ‘supporting’ arm has been broken so that the figure seems to rest on thin air. In ‘The Russian Linesman’, Wallinger placed it close to a

nineteenth-century anatomical model, a plaster écorché, in the same pose, borrowed from the Royal Academy (figs. 95-96).²⁵ This pairing introduced the idea of a sequence, connecting classical art to humanity in its most literal instantiation – stripped back to muscle and sinew.

19 See e.g. Rugoff, 2014, 18; Moore Ede, 2013; Hunt, 2000, 29-30.

20 ‘The Russian Linesman’, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 February to 4 May 2009. Wallinger, 2009, especially 7 and 99-101.

21 On the Wunderkammer see MacGregor, 2007, 11-69; Grinke, 2006, 7-17; Pomian, 1990,especially 45-64;

Impey and MacGregor, 1985, passim; Kaufmann, 1979. On the association between the Kunst- and Wunderkammer, the seminal study is von Schlosser, 1908.

22 Dying Gaul, Haskell and Penny, 1981, no. 44, 224-227. Heinrich Brunn first linked the statue with Pergamene groups: Brunn, 1870, 292-293; cf. Stewart, 2004, 207; Smith, 1991, 100-102. On the statue and its putative prototype, see also Stewart, 2004, 14, 16, 147-148, 206-212; Marszal, 2000, 208-209, 221-222; Spivey, 1996, 211-212; Ridgway, 1990, 284-296. A possible textual record is Pliny’s description of the “battles of Attalus and Eumenes against the Gauls” (HN, 34.84), and Epigonos’s sculpture of a trumpeter (HN, 34.88); cf. Marszal, 2000, 192-193. Marvin, 2002, argues against a direct connection to Attalid monuments: ibid, 207-210, 218. On the statue’s origins in the Horti Sallustiani and entry into the Ludovisi Collection, see Marvin, 2002, 205-206.

23 MacGregor, 2007, 244.

24 It was first reproduced as an engraving: Perrier, 1638, plate 91. Cf. Howard, 1990, 190, n. 9. The first recorded plaster cast was made for Philip IV of Spain in 1650: Haskell and Penny, 1981, 225 and n. 17. The numerous casts in Britain include the 1773 bronze by Luigi Valadier at Syon House, Middlesex: MacGregor, 2007, 243; Coltman, 2006, 141-148; Haskell and Penny, 1981, 86-88.

25 Nicknamed ‘Smugglerius’, the Academy’s first écorché was made in 1776; the surviving version is a copy from 1834. The body of a hanged smuggler was flayed, arranged as the Dying Gaul, and cast by sculptor Agostino Carlini in collaboration with William Hunter, Professor of Anatomy. See the account of John Deare

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Wallinger has explained how the object of the plaster cast appealed in two significant ways, both as an emotive work of art and as a symbol of reproduction and reinvention:

I liked the fact that it expresses the whole relationship between Greek and Roman culture: something which might have started as a bronze has been re-rendered as a carving, and has then been cast. After that, some poor unfortunate has come down from the scaffold and been placed in the same pose for the benefit of students at the Royal Academy. It’s one of those key images of suffering and of pity. The particular version I used is from Edinburgh College of Art, where his leaning arm is missing.

You naturally, empathetically, fill in the missing limb: there’s a kind of instinct.²⁶

Wallinger’s statement reveals a multi-layered engagement with classical art. That

engagement focuses on a particular artwork (“one of those key images of suffering and of pity”), but it also extends to the broader historical condition of Greco-Roman art. Wallinger is fascinated by the way in which the Dying Gaul – already an example of an enduring

sculptural type²⁷ – became part of a culture of serial reproduction, both in casts and copies. In 1644 the diarist John Evelyn wrote of the Dying Gaul that “In the Palace [Villa Ludovisi] I must never forget that famous statue of the Gladiator, spoken of by Pliny, and so much followed by all the rare Artists, as the many Copies and statues testifie, now almost dispers’d through all Europ, both in stone & metall.”²⁸ For Wallinger, that pattern of replication is anticipated in the ‘original’ Roman statue, and compressed in the pairing of the plaster cast and matching écorché.

What we have seen, in the cases of Lucas and Wallinger, are two distinct examples of the plaster cast in contemporary art – one seemingly divorced from the classical, the other embracing the classical. They appear to be completely different entities, but over the

remainder of this chapter, I will argue that they are not as antithetical as they appear, and that

reported in Whitley, 1928, 277. See also Aymonino, 2015, 50-51; Hales, 2011, 161; Fenton, 2006, 77-81;

Valentine, 1991, 64-66; Richardson, 1987, especially 30-51 (see also ibid, 131-58, 93-215); Hutchison, 1986, 34. On intersections between anatomy and classical sculpture, see Aymonino, 2015, 41-52; Nichols, 2015, 63-64; Brooks and Rumsey, 2007.

26 Mark Wallinger, interview with James Cahill, 16 November 2015.

27 Brunn, 1870, 292-293; Marvin, 2002, 221; Howard, 1990, 30-31; Ridgway, 1990, 284-296. On the Ludovisi barbarians as stereotypes, see Marvin, 2002, 211-212 and 211, n. 35.

28 Evelyn, 1955, 235. Quoted in Haskell and Penny, 1981, 225.

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both projects benefit from being read as part of the same history. Simply by calling her installation of plaster figures Muses, Lucas demands that we do this. Following an examination of that history, I will return to Wallinger and Lucas to consider how their respective uses of the plaster cast exploit the object’s classical identity – both its status in antiquity, and its role in the transmission of classical art.