Marsyas and The Venetian Mirror
The ancient Greek myth of the flaying of Marsyas has many variations. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis (8 BCE) the satyr Marsyas challenges the god of music, Apollo, to a musical duel. The winner’s prize is to determine the fate of the loser. Apollo wins and his punishment is to have Marsyas flayed alive. While there are many possible interpretations of this myth, the most prevalent might serve as a warning against the inevitable fall resulting from the hubris of a mortal being challenging the divinity of a god—or possibly, by extension, the fate of the artist challenging the act of creation.
In many ways, this current cycle of work can be seen as an act of reflection, looking back and extending forward the exhibition of my work which was presented in Chiesa di San Samuele during the 2017 Venice Biennial.
From the catalog produced for the exhibition, I have found the essay by Alexander Nagel, Why Do You Peel Me From Myself?, particularly helpful in articulating many of my concerns and my modus operandi. I have relied on it, in part, to help propel this next phase of work forward. I would urge anyone who might be interested in gaining further insight into the work to read his essay. Short of that, here are a few quotes from the essay that I find particularly helpful in distilling some of the thoughts that have propelled the work:
Evan Penny calls his work “a flaying of realism.” Until now, he has tampered with the procedures of mimetic representation through experiments with existing bodies, bodies reproduced in photographs and in three dimensions, one medium intersecting the other. In the more recent phase of work represented by this exhibition, he has extended these experiments through an engagement with historic works of arts.
Penny’s signature method is to send one medium’s effects into the conditions of another medium[…].
Artifacts of one technology surface inside of another, as when Photoshop blurring is reproduced in silicone. Marble sculptures grow hair, even while retaining the appearance of being hewn from marble—two orders of realism layered one on top of the other.
Penny’s logic of supercharging continuously threatens to leave the category of art behind. But this reaching beyond the boundaries of art, too, is part of the nature of art. As Robert Filliou said “Art is what makes life more interesting than art.” Art is always drawn to what lies beyond art, and in breaking down the boundaries of art, reorganizes the premises of art-making itself.
Why do you peel me from myself?
Marsyas’s words to Apollo while being flayed alive,“Why do you peel me from myself?” struck me as remarkable for its critical self-awareness, given that self composure is precisely what is being undone through the act of flaying. Beyond that, I was struck by the idea that Marsyas was able to see this other, externalized, version of himself—the me separate from myself. There are now two versions of Marsyas, the one behind his eyes, and the one his eyes behold.
I realized I could link this moment to the corresponding contemporary relationship we have to the photographic image and its progressively de-stabilizing and dis-embodying effects. This externalized identity is progressively fractured, or flayed, as we move from analog to digital and by extension through smart phones, social media and AI. The question of “who am I now?” needs to be asked with ever greater frequency but with responses that are ever less certain. We, like Marsyas, also have two selves; the one behind our eyes, occupying a body, navigating physical time and space, and the other dis-embodied, ever-shifting unresolvable, image-driven version of ourselves. A signifier of this disconnect and ensuing anxiety is the obsessive need to locate and reassure ourselves with a constant stream of selfies.
The Sculpture of Marsyas
For this exhibition, Marsyas is depicted hanging with wrists tied as if suspended from a tree. This version, with horns and cloven hooves, is covered with goat-like body hair. The one arm, left unfinished in the original clay, gives the impression of being without skin, flayed.
The ensuing challenge with this developing project was, how to make the link between this archaic myth of Marsyas and our contemporary technological challenge with image.
The Venetian Mirror
One of the elements in the Venice exhibition was an antique 19th century Venetian mirror, placed at the entrance of the exhibition. A viewer would catch a glimpse of themselves as they entered Chiesa San Samuel and engaged with the artworks in the exhibition Ask Your Body.
I realized that I could use the idea of the Venetian mirror as the conceptual device, allowing the backward and forward gaze, linking the Marsyas myth to its contemporary counterpart. I could also look back into my early work and bring forward some of those ideas as connective tissue.
The Photographs
Bringing the sculpture of Marsyas as well as other elements—such as the 19th century Venetian mirror, the flaying knife and the iPhone—into close proximity with the Body Mirror, Marsyas is able to see his “undoing”. The undulating surface of the Body Mirror warps his reflection into a cascade of distorted, disjointed and nightmarish visions. Here, the mirror has the effect of flaying his image and capturing it as a selfie.
The Relief (The Flaying of Marsyas)
One of the dynamic ways I engaged the idea of image in my previous portrait works of the 2000s and early 2010s was to evoke the effects and artifacts of photography and the 2D image (blur, black and white, multiple exposure, misregistration, etc.) and ask, is it possible to, and what would happen if, I rendered that resulting image in three dimensions? The result is an object that transgresses the boundaries between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, between body and image.
Employing that same tactic, I have produced a large scale 3D silicone relief version of one of the photographs and placed it in an enlarged, purpose-built version of the 19th century Venetian frame used in the Venice exhibition. Here I am also referencing Renaissance Venetian painting and the colour palette of Veronese or Tiepolo. Some of the forms are painted, others are pigmented silicone with implanted hair and resin-glass eyes. The cascade of effects and associations creates a hybrid object where the effects of painting, sculpture, photography, realism, abstraction, expressionism and surrealism all compete within the same space.
Artificial Intelligence
While working on the photographic suite with Dimitri Levanoff of Image Foundry he introduced me to the AI platform Stable Diffusion. We submitted three prompts: ‘the flaying of marsyas’, ‘evan penny sculpture’, and ‘the venetian mirror.’ AI responded with a stream of wildly disfigured Venetian frame images containing equally deformed figurative elements. I realized that the AI’s response was perfectly echoing the challenge and paradox of representation in its efforts to bring together these three seemingly incongruous prompts. Moving from the unformed toward the formed, from the margins to the centre, from the body to the figure. My immediate response was to generate a number of sculptural versions of those images to co-exist with the photographs.
Why do you peel me from myself?
Marsyas’s dismay at his moment of undoing is bound up with the act of creation. However, his folly at the hands of his own creative aspiration also implies the possibility of renewal. Moving from the “familiar” towards the “unknown” involves a kind of peeling away from oneself—a willingness to lose oneself. It is an opportunity to abandon the reflected image of oneself. Paradoxically, it can be understood as an invitation to go back into one’s own experience and history—which really means going back into oneself to find and pull out those necessary threads that allow one to move forward. By reclaiming those elements it is possible to come back into a relationship with the new, and with what one can do next.
Marsyas’s retrospect as it turns out, is also mine.
Evan Penny 2024
Acknowledgements:
Thank you to Alexander Nagel for the inspiration I have gained
from your essay. Thank you to Dimitri Levanoff and Image Foundry for
your assistance with the photographic components of this exhibition.
Venice exhibition
