Postmodern Petrification

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Homage to Arnold Böcklin and Giorgio de Chirico

Photography and text: Luca Idrobo

Assistant: Angelica Idrobo

This project derives from my on-going PhD research “Die Erscheinung des Weggehens – Abwesenheit und Zeit in den Wandererdarstellungen des 19. Jahrhunderts” {The appearance of wandering away – Absence and Time in the wanderer’s renditions of the 19th-Century}, a project financed with a scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (Düsseldorf).

(April 2014)

“For mortals, nothing is worse than wandering” (Odyssey 15.343), says Homer’s Odysseus, a figure that ever since has become the highest image of the wanderer. The Ancient Greeks understood that to become a wanderer was to be driven astray by an outside force, which in some cases was to become mad or possessed or punished by the gods, or to become an exile, walking about outside the polis and into the very ends of earth, sailing away from home, being at risk every time for not finding a safe haven. Hence the relationship to another dreadful and fearsome place: the sea, the ideal means for wandering, whose many disappearing paths that go in every direction defy our own control over the movements we do. As Silvia Montiglio writes: “The sea baffles a basic aspiration of man, to find fixity.” (Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture, 2005)

Some of the ancient philosophers decided to become Odysseus, choosing a wandering life, roaming in every possible direction in order to find knowledge, confront themselves with other cultures and way of thinking, and to never remain fixed on a single position, which is also a way of saying that thinking should remain in a perpetual flux, never tying itself to a so-called ultimate truth. Romantic artists understood this too and they became wanderers in their own right, going about to discover nature anew and break with some old traditions. The whole 19th-Century is full of remarkable renditions of the figure of the wanderer: from Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and Franz Schubert (1797-1828) to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901).

One of the most remarkable renditions of Odysseus is Böcklin’s painting “Odysseus und Kalypso” (1883).

Arnold Böcklin

Odysseus und Kalypso, 1882

Oil on wood, 104 x 150 cm, Kunstmuseum Basel

Odysseus’s many wanderings let him to Calypso’s island, where the nymph offered him the immortality as long as he stayed with her. Forgotten by the gods, Odysseus is an absent wanderer during the first four books of the Odyssey. Böcklin’s painting may not be a proper description of the Homerian landscape, but it presents like no other artwork and in a synecdoquic way the character of what is at stake in this scene: Calypso places Odysseus at a point of decision making and forces nothing upon him. Odysseus needs to decide whether he is a mortal man who does not forget he is a husband, a father and a king, or to be an immortal devoid from the human world on an island that is almost completely disconnected from everything, which is to say that he will disappear for good. In other words, Böcklin’s painting is nothing but a depiction of the greatest absence of all, the disappearance of existence itself, for he is at this point neither a living nor a dead. He is somehow petrified within this decision making.

Giorgio de Chirico (1878-1978), who profoundly admired Böcklin and read Nietzsche with great enthusiasm, painted “L'enigma dell'oracolo” (1910) as a reflection on this petrification of the wanderer and the risks of disappearing. The wanderer is now petrified, he was become a symbolic statue… Time itself has changed for him. He will survive until little by little all his fissures will reveal themselves and he starts cracking all over. Soon after that he will become a ruin.

Giorgio de Chirico

L'enigma dell'oracolo, 1910)

Oil on canvas, 42 x 61 cm, Private Collection

In these two photos I am paying a tribute to these two remarkable painters and their renditions of Odysseus. My beloved sister Angelica assisted me at staging these scenes, following my instructions on how to frame and where to stand, while I myself was performing Odysseus. Some small elements where digitally removed. I had to borrow a smart phone for this, since I do not own one.

As for the postmodern petrification there is the small but rather important detail of the smart phone (which you can see on a bigger print). The figure is now petrified before a beautiful landscape, which she cannot see anymore. We all know by now how our current technology has brought us into a particular stage of petrification, our body posture is different – even while walking – since the horizon has disappear in front of our eyes. We changed the sea for a virtual one in which we surf but where we leave an enormous amount of traces that are collected in order to find ways of keeping us petrified on the other side of the line, on the far away shore of consumption and alienation.

Our virtual traces are certainly going to outlive us, transforming us into some kind of immortals. But most of these traces are going to be the testimony of how you were once petrified in this world without any relationship to the person who was near to you, beautiful, with warm skin and open arms. Please, do not bother to look up; she has been gone a long time now, while you were looking at a screen.