The suffering and struggling man

Central to my painting and sculpture, especially in my work related to Greek mythology, are the concepts of "suffering" and "struggling". These concepts have gradually emerged in my work, at least in some of it. I wasn't out to theme them. Actually, I'm far too optimistic to accept these themes as a guideline in my work, I thought. It was the Dutch scientist, researcher, publicist, curator and art collector Dr. Lex van de Haterd, who made me aware of the central place of these concepts in my work. At first, I rejected his interpretation. Of course, my work deals with tragic figures in the literature of Homer and other Greek authors. I believed that it was not so much the tragedy that attracted me, but that I was mainly interested in the contemporary and aesthetic depiction of the myths and the people I found there. However, when I thought about it longer, I had to admit that the core of my work is indeed the suffering and struggle of man, in the desire for attention and prestige, in the fear of being overlooked, but also in the willingness to sacrifice and devotion. The suffering and struggle manifests itself particularly clearly in people's striving to go beyond the limits of human existence, to stretch the beginning and end of existence, to influence the human condition. In the myths, the boundaries between life and death are regularly crossed, and people are willing to do a lot to improve their otherworldly perspectives.

Hesiod, the compiler of the Theogony, a kind of family tree of the Greek gods who lived in the period from about 750-650 BC, writes about the suffering and misery that befalls people. He speaks of the children of the night. Night gave birth to the inescapable hour of death, fate, sleep, reproach and pain. Night also gave birth to the retribution, the deceit and the seduction, the devastatingly rising age and the filthy quarrel. Other children of the Night are the recurring troubles, the hunger, the heedlessness, the torments, the lies, and the slander. Yes, yes, Hesiod also wrote about beautiful things, such as about the children of the sea, about the shining moon, the sun and the dawn, and about the Muses of course. 

"Suffering" and "struggling" are not necessarily polar concepts. To suffer means to be in pain, to be sad, to be sick. In line with that is the struggle to get back on top, to become healthy and happy again. People's suffering and struggling is confronted with faith and doubt, with certainty and uncertainty, with values and dignity, but also, of course, with unreliability and subterfuge, with deceit and negligence, with contempt and hatred. Nothing human is alien to us, not even to Greek gods and heroes. Priam, the last king of Troy, is torn between his pride and humility. Kassandra, his daughter, prophetess and priestess of Apollo, despairs of the curse that prevents her prophecies from being believed, ultimately leading to the downfall of Troy. Odysseus is perhaps the most cunning warrior of Greek antiquity, at the same time he is above all other characteristics a suffering man, a man of sorrow who, despite successes, loses all his companions, and who at the end of his journey is relentlessly confronted with himself. Medea of Kolchis, daughter of Hekate, niece of Kirke, granddaughter of Helios, has been given the role of a repulsive person by Euripides. She struggled and suffered, and she got a bad reputation. However, the German writer Christa Wolf describes her as a victim of a patriarchal power structure, of slander and the spread of fake news. The observer's perspective is influential. Being attracted to a particular sculpture, painting or drawing, or reacting dismissively to it, is, in addition to the way in which it is made, mainly related to the biography of the observer.

In addition to the themes of "Suffering" and "Struggle", but also very related to them, I am concerned in my work with the duality of roles of being the victim and that of the cause of suffering. These roles can also unite in one and the same person. Greek mythology has many examples of these contradictions. The Minotaur is a tragic, and at the same time threatening figure: victim and perpetrator in one person, united by fate. For many artists, this dichotomy remains a challenge and an exciting motif even in the centuries after the heyday of Greek culture. Pablo Picasso's Minotauromachie, for example, is a famous and complex depiction of duality in the person of the bull man and also refers to the personal situation and experiences of this twentieth-century artist in visual components and narrative.

The protagonists in my work are defined by the names I have given them, taken from ancient myths, but they are not fixed in their original context. The concepts they represent are universal. War fanatics, such as Agamemnon, can be found everywhere in history, unfortunately also in the present day. They personify violence, ideology, and misbehavior. Andromache, another example, is Hector's suffering wife. She represents the tragedies of so many women through violence. In my portrait, she is a universal wife and mother, a victim of political intrigue and ideology. Yes, she could even be a Madonna. And Laertes, the former king of Ithaca, and father of Odysseus and Ktimene, personifies grief. The goddess Persephone represents the eternal processes of descent and ascent, rise and fall. In this case, it leads back to her abduction by Hades to the underworld (Kathodos) and the happy periodic return to her mother Demeter (Anodos). These are concepts – which are widely used in cult communities – that are closely related to the concepts of "flowering" and "dying", to the changing of the seasons as well. And what about Briseis, kidnapped by Achilles, after he killed her husband, father and brothers, to make her his concubine and slave. Briseïs is the personification of all women who are victims of brutal violence. In fact, she is the main character in Homer's drama of the Iliad about the battle for Troy.

"Troy" is a metaphor for "suffering and struggle", as well as for "romance and degeneracy". In the Iliad, Homer describes in an epic of 24 books, 51 days of the ten-year battle between Greeks and Trojans. The epic originated in the eighth or seventh century BC. The battle for Troy, on which it is based, was a few hundred years earlier. The battle was fought because, as the story goes, the Trojan king's son Paris kidnapped the wife of the Spartan king Menelaos. The various Greek kingdoms committed themselves to retrieve Helen and to punish Troy. Troy was a rich and powerful city, thanks to its position on the important trade route between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea.  The kidnapped woman was a romantic argument to give an act of war a semblance of justification. In fact the war between the Greek Allies and the Trojans arose because the Greeks wanted to eliminate the powerful and competitive trading position of the free state of Troy. Tragically, there is nothing new under the sun in the meantime. Terrible wars are still raging for economic and ideological reasons. Apparently justifiable motives are far-fetched. We are still confronted with descriptions of inhuman suffering. In wars, human dignity is often sidelined. Achilles - the great Greek hero - defeats Hektor, the idol of the Trojans. For Achilles, however, his death is not enough, Hektor is dishonored in front of his family and his people, tied behind Achilles' chariot, dragged through the dust, humiliated. The story of Helen turns the Iliad into a dramatic Hero Saga. The romantic aspects still appeal to us today. The Dutch poet Jean Pierre Rawie writes: "I have loved a woman who would deserve a second Troy,....". However, the inhumanity of wars silences romanticism, especially when one is confronted with the tragedies of current wars. The Iliad is above all a warning that no one wins in war, everyone loses, not only goods and chattels, for all human dignity. In my paintings and sculptures I have depicted Hektor several times, in different stages. In two sculptures I depict his transience, symbolizing the demise of a human being, the degeneration of humanity, and the downfall of a dynasty. It's not pretty, art isn't always beautiful. 

The following examples also show the dark sides of human existence. They are about two nearly equal situations regarding political opportunism, masculine preoccupations, patriarchal dominance and violence. It is about two couples who have many similarities in their tragedy: Iphigenia and her mother Klytaimnestra, and Persephone and her mother Demeter. Mothers and daughters, at the mercy of power strategies of husbands and fathers. Iphigenia is lured to Aulis by her father Agamemnon, the Greek army commander against Troy, under false pretenses, to be sacrificed to a goddess he had apparently insulted. The goddess, Artemis, punished Agamemnon by the absence of favorable winds. The grumbling mob of soldiers threatened to become a mutinous gang and the army commander gave in to that menacing mob. Persephone, the second example, was kidnapped by Hades, the god of the underworld and the brother of the powerful Zeus who was her father. Her distraught mother desperately searched the world for her abducted daughter. Here again the father played a despicable role. Both stories are steeped in sorrow.

Cultural craddle
In spite of all these misery, described above, Greek Ancient culture was a developed civilization in which all facets, good and bad, of being human and living together were developed, in which attempts were made to explain the incomprehensible, and in which systems were developed to regulate human coexistence. We still see this culture as a cradle of Western civilization. To the Ancient Greeks, and more specifically to the inhabitants of Athens, we owe the oldest known democracy. After a period in which Tyrants ruled, the Athenians ousted their last Tyrant around 510 BC. From then on, important political decisions in the city were made by an assembly, the Ekklèsia, consisting of male citizens from the age of eighteen and older. Women, slaves and immigrants were excluded. It is therefore only a very relative representation of a part of the inhabitants.  Moreover, the young democracy appears to be vulnerable, unbalanced and intolerant of freedom of opinion. For example, this democratic movement could not prevent the philosopher Socrates (470 – 399 BC) from being condemned to death and also from being executed. Pericles (495 – 429 BC) was the most influential and longest-serving democratic leader. Major influences on Athenian democracy included the poet and legislator Solon (636 – 558 BC) and the reformer Kleisthenes (570 – 507 BC). Democracy in Athens lasted until 322 BC and eventually collapsed at the hands of the Macedonians.  “Alles van waarde is weerloos” ("Everything of value is defenseless"), wrote the Dutch poet Lucebert in 1974 in his poem "The Very Old Sings," and democracy is not excluded from this.

Greek culture itself was influenced by Egyptian civilization. Many elements of Egyptian culture can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, who in turn were overtaken by Roman culture. The Romans had a long period of prosperity, which eventually gave way to an emerging Christian-oriented Western model of civilization that now also seems to have fallen into a state of decline. We seem to have once again entered a phase between cultural periods: a phase of transformation, an in-between period, in which a dominant group within a culture loses influence and meaning and clashes with emerging groups. 

Mythology is a system of transmitted stories and beliefs about essential aspects of being human. Through myths, man tries to make the world understandable. Myths are not static, they change with people and with their cultural environment. Culture is the way in which people organize their environment, in which they shape the variety of ways in which they interact with each other and the way in which they regulate and control their mutual behavior. Culture is determined by the norms and values of groups of people, by morality and by sanctions that punish and correct when things go wrong. Stability exists in societies when there is a largely shared culture. If there is a great deal of cultural diversity, with many partial interests, then confrontations arise between groups of representatives of those partial interests. The ancient Greeks showed us that, and also how things can go very wrong in a clash of interests. 

Decadence

In dominant cultures, we see a developmental course of emergence, great prosperity and a phase of decadence that announces the end, or the transition to another system. Decadence is a process of continuous refinement, until a limit is reached after which decay of values, norms and systems sets in. The developments that lead to cultural decline are influenced and strengthened internally and externally. Internally, due to extreme regulatory models, increasing polarization, deterioration of manners, hardening of the public and political debate, violence in society, intolerance, blackmail of governments by organized interest groups, overregulation and a self-reinforcing bureaucracy, the non-imposition of sanctions for transgressive behavior, exploding tax burden, a degenerating performance culture, increase in indulgence and entitlements without strings attached, and a tendency towards ochlocratically oriented deterioration of democracy.  Externally, the end of a great cultural period is influenced by epidemics, globalization, acts of war and natural disasters. This is often accompanied by the onset of population flows between countries and continents.

Western society is currently apparently entering a phase of social, cultural, economic, political and administrative change, along with a catastrophic and mainly self-inflicted process of wars and global climate change. All this, moreover, in a context in which it is possible to inflict devastating damage on the earth and humanity through the use of nuclear weapons. We seem to have passed the last frontier, in a phase of decline. The Dutch author Arnon Grunberg, in his essay "Friend and Enemy" (Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2019), defines decadence as the impossibility of crossing another border. 

Decadence is related to disconnection between responsibility and involvement, or lack of ownership. Conflicts that are no longer manageable arise. Greek mythology is full of such situations and could be considered as a signpost to prevent them, or at least: to understand them. With a nod to mythology you could speak about a phase of "Agamemnonization", if there is a disconnection between stakeholders at different layers of responsibility, or worser: if you could speak about arrogance  or helplessness. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the army commander in the war of the Greeks against Troy. Euripides described the dramatic fate of his daughter Iphigenia at Aulis, caused by her father. Homer also describes the dubious aspects of his character in the Iliad. Kalchas, the priest and prophet, is of course the basic cause of the sad fate of Iphigenia. Although he acts as a messenger of the elusive gods, his demand for retribution can also be seen as a power struggle between the commander-in-chief and the caste of priesthood. The priest Kalchas and Agamemnon are symbols of the eternal struggle for power between clergy and aristocracy. The representatives of religion, the priests, prophets, and seers consider it as their divine task to mediate between the upper and the lower world, between supposed and invented gods and common mankind. For that mediation they demand gifts, sacrifices and prestige. The perpetuation of their position of power presupposes doubtless faith, if necessary with means of power imposed. 

In our Western society, but not only there, relationships between people seem to drift apart. Politics is not always the solver of problems, unfortunately too often the cause of them. Greek mythology has shown us where human dignity ends, but also where it begins, or triumphs. Mythology is a mirror. Even if we hope to recognize gods and heroes in the reflection, the most beautiful thing is when we see traces of human dignity. We are ultimately responsible for our own actions, each for himself. You can take responsibility, you can share it, but you can never lay it down.

Myth as signifier

Artists, at least some of them, are Promethian activists. They are forward thinkers. They see what is still hidden and convert that into images. They are pointing in new directions. And among artists there are, as in any profession, afterwards thinkers: Epimethianes, those who embrace the usual without questioning it. It is a classic mental divergence. Prometheus, the Titan, stole the fire from the gods because he understood its necessity for the development of people. This in spite of the explicit prohibition of Zeus, accepting that he would be severely punished. All this in contrast to his brother Epimetheus, who accepted without any hesitation the beautiful Pandora as a bride bestowed by the gods, and with her the ailments and calamities of her dowry that would bring people considerable damage, suffering and despair. 

 Rob Riemen, Dutch essayist and founder-director of the Nexus Institute in Tilburg (NL) states in his collection of essays “Nobility of the spirit. A forgotten ideal”, published in 2009 by Atlas publishers in Amsterdam, that not fire is the gift of the gods for the development of humanity, but language. It is the language that allows us to name and know the world and through which we are also known. Every poet knows that, according to Riemen. 

Myths are the oldest traces of the human mind. Experiences of mankind are anchored in language and can be told. I do sympathize with Riemen on this issue and would like to go one step further. I believe Prometheus stole "the ability of meaning-making" and "Imagination" from the gods. Being able to give or derive meaning to and from something, is what makes human nearly divine. In a mythological sense you could say that the ability to imagine and to give meaning to something is what brings mankind as close as possible to the Olympic gods. Meaning-making and meaning acquisition become visible in art: through language, through images, through movement, through sound, through sculpture. Imagination is the driving force. That is why art is such an essential value in human existence. It makes us creators. That is why Zeus, the supreme god, was so terribly plagued that Prometheus gave the power of meaning-making and imagination to people. It enabled them to make their own gods, as magnifications of all the good and evil qualities of themselves. And Zeus knew what he was talking about, he too is a figment after all.

 
Myths are conceivable, often paradoxical representations of the unthinkable. They describe a supposed reality. Myths are about a continuous process of searching for an acceptable balance between reality and desire, between emotion and rationality, between transience and incorruption, even if this search is usually not based on logical arguments. However, the illogical is not necessarily unrealistic, certainly not in the imagination.

Reclaimed Mythology

Greek mythology is a cradle for many aspects of contemporary Western culture, at the same time it is a mirror that reflects achievements and depravities, past and present. In my work, I look at sleeping gods, heroes and mortals from ancient Greek culture and try to wake them up because the concepts they stand for are relevant to the times we live in now. I pause for a moment to look ahead. In myths, we experience deep human emotions. Myths take us straight to basic values. Perhaps we need that more than ever to realize what is happening to us now. Myths are eye-openers. They make the essential visible, transparent and hopefully therefore more manageable. Oleg Ferstein, drama director, photographer, performer and teacher argues (Instagram. Feedback on my sculpture: "Stages of Persephone", 10. May 2022): "I'm sure it's time to turn our attention to mythology and not just the Greek one. Mythology is a perfect mirror for humanity to look at itself. To recognize the origins of the depth of stupidity and obscurantism that we cannot get rid of for thousands of years."

 Another theatre director, Themis Moumoulidis, writes the following in the director's note on the performance of his version of Iphigenia at  Aulis in Epidaurus Greece in 2022 (https://europe-cities.com/2022/09/12/iphigenia-in-avlidis-three-last-performances-in-athens/): 

"After twenty years of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides seems to be asking: "is a paradigm shift possible"? Two and a half thousand years later, and as we experience the first symptoms of a dystopian future, which we have lost, we still wonder, "is a paradigm shift possible"? The question cannot be answered. Perhaps one day civilization will shed its inherent, deadly discomfort. Perhaps one day progress will cease to associate itself with barbarism. Maybe someday... Until then, we can only tell the same story over and over again, in all tones and in all ways, through the filter of our own time... " 

That's what I try to do: telling the story over and over again, with my possibilities, in sculpture, paintings, and poetry. Those who read back the old stories with a mild eye, those who are willing to place the roughness in the perspective of time, those who are receptive to the plasticity of the world of ideas and the imagination of our ancestors, can gain a better understanding of the development of our current coexistence. In this sense, after all these years, the stories and the iconography of Greek mythology are still a source or a reason for a better understanding of what is happening today. I try to look at possible mythological faces with different eyes, with memories, perspectives and expectations regarding the future and human development. I try to look back to see ahead. I believe that is the core of my work.