LIQUID

ANTIQUITY:

CONVERSATIONS

Classics scholar Brooke Holmes describes the premise of her 2017 book, Liquid Antiquity, as “an experiment in channeling Greek antiquity as an unpredictably generative resource for the present while resisting the petrifying powers of classicism at its most iconic. The idea of ‘liquid antiquity’ demands that we rethink the very forms in which antiquity travels within and across different communities.”

Holmes’s text is a critical reflection on more than twenty-five hundred years of art history and its fluid and open-ended relationship with contemporary art. The installation Liquid Antiquity: Conversations, mounted in the classical antiquities galleries of the Benaki Museum, in Athens, both complements the publication and engages it in dialogue.

The distributed installation presents interviews between Holmes and six artists featured in the book who speak about their work in relation to the legacy of classicism: Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Asad Raza, Matthew Barney, Kaari Upson, and Paul Chan. The interviews were conducted in the studios of the artists. Each interview is presented through an ensemble of parts. A video monitor features the artist, at 1:1 scale, speaking to Holmes; Holmes’s voice emanates from a digital speaker implanted in an adjacent chair. A second, empty chair is left for any museum visitor who wants to sit down and listen in. The Benaki Museum’s antiquities galleries are both the backdrop for the conversations and their subject matter—spaces in which ancient artifacts interact with contemporary artists in a dialogue between past and present. In viewing the installation, the book, and the classical artifacts in the museum, the visitor is immersed in the shifting scales and contours of antiquity as liquid and heterogeneous rather than fixed and monocultural.

Liquid Antiquity: Conversations was curated by Brooke Holmes and commissioned by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.