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About the cover image: Cora Gilroy-Ware
I first saw John Gibson’s Hylas Surprised by the Naiades during a trip to Tate Stores. At the time, I was halfway through the first year of my doctoral studies and had spent the last few months researching Gibson and looking closely at images of this marble group, and other works by the artist, on a laptop screen….
Confronting an object that you are familiar with only through photographs and the verbal perceptions of others can be exhilarating, but I think that we ought not to be ashamed to admit that it can sometimes be an anticlimactic experience. What made mechanical, in particular photographic reproductions of art such a thrilling notion for Walter Benjamin was precisely their capacity to challenge the authority of the so-called original object, threatening what he described as its “unique existence” (einmaligen Vorkommens). Even in the aura-negating conditions of a storage site however, Hylas Surprised by the Naiades did not disappoint. It is a work whose physical presence struggles to be accommodated by the camera and grasped in two dimensions, even when captured from multiple points of view. Immediately, the unusual pose of nymph to the left of Hylas struck me in a new way. Only by seeing the work in the flesh, as it were, did I perceive of the weight
of this nymph’s cheek against the top of Hylas’s head, the sense of her pressing down onto him in a gesture of quiet coercion. In addition to making them appear unequivocally older than the boy who—in the ancient myth re-told by several Greek authors—is the object of their desire, Gibson’s choice to make the two nymphs considerably taller than Hylas gives the group its distinctive outline: a soft, sepulchral triangle formed by the two enclosing female forms. The tip of this shape is sealed by the pressing action of the nymph’s cheek. Looking at the sculpture, this detail seemed to suggest that the nymph is smelling Hylas. The degree to which her head is tilted disengages her eyes from the central action of the scene, conjuring the way we tend to look away from an object when smelling it in order to activate our olfactory sense in full. While the nymph on the right makes direct contact with Hylas with her eyes and with her hand, her accomplice appears distracted, or rather focused elsewhere, transfixed by the scent of the boy’s hair. In Gibson’s writings, he himself rhapsodises more than once on the “ambrosial locks” of certain male figures from classical mythology.
Drawing on ways that perfumes have been both rigorously gendered and radically un-gendered, social anthropologist Mark Graham asks if “the olfactory is the queerest of the senses?” Unusual in classicising art let alone marble sculpture, the portrayal of one body smelling another is in accordance with the intense, layered queerness of Gibson’s sculpture, its theatrical staging of sexual deviance: bisexual, polyamorous, incestuous, paedophilic. Hylas himself was the lover of Heracles. Following the boy’s abduction by the nymphs during an overnight stop-over in Mysia (present-day Turkey), the divine hero is left heartbroken, branded a deserter and a coward by his shipmates aboard the Argo, which sets sail without him. While other British artists, including John William Waterhouse, adapted the myth in such a way as to reinscribe it with heteronormative values (as testified by the debate on the misogyny and objectification at play in Waterhouse’s picture at Manchester City Art Gallery in 2018 led by Sonia Boyce), Gibson embraces aspects of the story that render it an affront to such values, aspects that make it, in the words of bell hooks, “queer—past gay.” Even the amphora held by Hylas—a seemingly innocuous detail that permits us to identify the figure as the boy who went to fetch water for the Argonauts’ evening meal—becomes a sign of penetration. Brushing against his upper thigh, its hole connects to his fig leaf in a diagonal line.
Yet to me, the most striking thing about Gibson’s sculpture remains way in which such complexities are masked. Coupled with the rarefied status of all GrecoRoman literature, the “pure” connotations of the work’s obstinately classical form have a sanitising effect on this representation of unconventional desire, if not rape. A case in point: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, a plaster version of the sculpture was displayed at Blackburne House, an all-girls school in Liverpool. Around the time Hylas Surprised by the Naiades was on view
at Bodies of Nature, the BP Spotlight Display I curated at Tate Britain, I myself had no qualms about teaching my 8-year-old neighbour about the sculpture after she was asked to present about a subject from Greek mythology as homework. Her family did not own a computer and nobody was around to help, so we spent some time looking at images of the work and talking about nymphs. I wish she could have seen the real thing.
