Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light by Peter Schjeldahl

Author:Peter Schjeldahl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2019-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

THE GREEKS

I never got Ancient Greek art in the way that the cradle-of-civilization pieties imply you’re supposed to. At the Acropolis in 1965, during my only Greek sojourn, the July sun hit me on the head like a transparent hammer, and I gazed lethargically at the bleached rubble. I was more stirred by the smelly, raucous Plaka, where in a restaurant an impromptu dancer gashed his hand slapping the floor littered with broken glass, grabbed a napkin to stanch the bleeding (in vain), and kept dancing. That was great. I wandered into a political riot at Syntagma Square and was introduced to tear gas, from which kindly Greek strangers helped me recover. I bought a black knit beret and worry beads and went native, in my dreams. I fell in love with Byzantine churches, which breathed kinship—as the Parthenon did not—to the life in the street. I was twenty-three and sided with the present.

I think a lot of people are ambivalent about the Greek thing, which has been subject to more solemn hype than anything else except Jesus. A Victorian sentimentality hangs especially heavy. The British liked old Greece so much, they took it home with them. OK, I had sensed, through literature, the greatness of a people who seemed, first and often forever best, to have thought everything thinkable and imagined everything imaginable. But it all felt so already-known, and encrusted with learnedness. In my pleasure-seeking self-education in art, I skipped Classicism.

Now the Metropolitan has the exhibition for me and anyone else ready to outgrow adolescent sulks. A greatest-hits sampler, it might be titled “It’s the Greeks, Stupid.” Anything would improve on The Greek Miracle, which sounds like a skin cream, and the subtitle that ends, the Dawn of Democracy. Some half dozen pieces made me intensely happy. It may have helped that I had just reviewed the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which proves that long indifference to formal fundamentals has lamed new art. That, more than the notorious emphasis on politics, is the biennial’s bad news.

The Greeks were plenty political. But only at a stretch does a city-state whose majority was voiceless women and slaves yield a present sense of democracy. The art at the Met speaks of theocracy and militarism even as it does tenderly celebrate individuals, including women, children, and at least one servant. What counts is how they did things, with apparently magical ease. Everything seems a falling-off-a-log snap for those people, though you know it wasn’t. It may be that they never considered doing anything except from, with, and for love.

Bodily nuances as subtly known as the nape of your lover’s neck deliver the goods, even in a battle piece. What remains of a marble naked warrior who may be Theseus—minus an arm, a hand, both feet, and his penis—is sword-fighting a lost enemy. His face has a slack-jawed, almost sleepy, contented expression. (War is fun for him.) He appears to lunge forward. But tell me which leg takes his weight. I swear that he is shifting between one and the other, and you can’t tell which.

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