Have you ever been raped by a swan? It's unlikely but though they are, undoubtedly, handsome beasts they're also known to have quite an aggressive side and being raped by one wouldn't be that pleasant. Do swans not even understand the concept of consent? We all know ducks don't.
Cesare de Sesto (after Leonardo da Vinci) - Leda and the Swan (1505-1510)
Poor Leda - a Spartan queen in Greek mythology - is probably the most famous person in history (or mythology) to have a swan sexually force themselves on to them. But this swan was not just a swan. It was the Greek god Zeus - the sky and thunder god - disguised as a swan who raped her as she innocently bathed on the banks of the Eurotas river.
Like rapists throughout history, Zeus blamed the victim. It was her "great beauty" that he simply couldn't resist. I mean, he was only a mere mortal. Except he wasn't. He was a God. The ancient Greeks chose some very strange characters to become deities.
Anyway, Leda had already slept with her husband, Tyndareus, that evening so once Zeus (in the form of a swan) had had his way with her she ended up pregnant with twins - two sets of twins! Helen (of Troy) and Pollux by Zeus, Castor and Clytemnestra by Tyndareus. The confusion continued. Two of the children, Clytemnestra and Castor, were born mortal and the other two, Helen and Pollux were born immortal, the divine progeny of Zeus. Zeus the divine rapist, just so you don't forget.
Apparently, this story - which would be shocking if it happened now - didn't upset the ancients. They understood, seemingly, that divine power often came in the form of a bird and that winged creatures were seen as intermediaries between the spirit world and our own. The story has proved quite popular with artists throughout the ages. Perhaps it's the sheer level of transgression involved, maybe it's just because it's a bit weird, or, possibly, it's just an excuse to paint some erotica or soft porn.
After Michelangelo - Leda and the Swan (after 1530)
The Victoria Miro Gallery on Wharf Road in London, like the ancients, don't get bogged down in the morality of the tale and simply present a series of artistic responses to the story. A story that, quite frankly, sounds like utter bullshit.
They start with a couple of introductory Renaissance pieces (not the full paintings - they're in other galleries - but very small copies) before taking in a series of contemporary responses, the vast majority of which were made just last year. According to the curators, Leonardo and Michelangelo both delighted in the sensual nature of the subject (again, is rape 'sensual'?). Leonardo liked it because it gave him an opportunity to investigate the origins of human life and Michelangelo because it allowed him to explore Neoplatonic ideas about our union with the divine.
So many questions! Many of which iconoclasts of the 17th & 18th centuries answered in their own way by smashing the original paintings up. Because, I read, the "erotic figments" within were "too potent to bear". Some balance is given with an information board that alerts us to feminist writers like Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Higgins, and Bethany Hughes and their own take on the myth of Leda and the Swan and there's also some stuff about the story being analogous to the birth of Christ by the Virgin Mary. Which puts God in the frame, along with Zeus, as a fellow rapist.
The London artist Saskia Colwell doesn't mess around when it comes to showing what went on. Her charcoal drawings leave very little to the imagination while, at the same time, clearly consisting of purely imagined happenings. The swan/god/rapist is here is fully enjoying his act of bestial violation. Wrapping its long, and predictably phallic, neck around Leda's boobs and then going in for a bit of the ol' cunnilingus.
What woman can honestly say they've never fantasised about having a large waterfowl licking the mango? We don't even get to find out if the swan is a whooper, a trumpeter, or a mute. Perhaps it's all down to the technique employed when playing the rusty trombone.
Saskia Colwell - Her Eyes Were Full of Feathers (2023)
Saskia Colwell - Slither (2023)
Saskia Colwell - Lick of the Lips (2023)
I'm being silly - because a story about being forcibly licked out by a swan is very silly. Still, good drawings. Lots of detail. The American writer and academic Audrey Niffenegger sees Zeus's act not as a sexual one, or as a physically violent one, as much as she sees it as a surgical procedure! Having undergone recent sugery herself, perhaps this was - inevitably - on Niffenegger's mind. She's even written a little story/poem to go with the artwork:-
The swan was not a god, he was only a disease.
Leda was just a girl, made of ordinary things:
blood and guts, night terrors, bright ideas in abandoned notebooks.
She didn't know she was being ravished until it was too late.
She was constructed to be invaded, she was taken over cell by cell.
The swan said "is this love?"
"No", Leda said, "you are a stranger"
The swan said, "if you won't love me, at least let me warm myself with your dreams"
"I need my dreams - use your own", Leda replied
"I have no dreams, my sleep is made of black water", said the swan. "Let me in. I want to be you"
"No", said Leda. "You can't dream, so you can never be me"
The swan practised dreaming but forgot every morning and had to begin again.
Leda dreamt she gave birth to two large eggs, and absentmindedly left them on a park bench without discovering what might hatch.
She dreamt of enormous wings and flexed her fingers in her sleep, anticipating flight.
Audrey Niffenegger - Black Swan Inflitration (2023)
The story/poem is quite powerful (I think more so than the artwork it accompanies) and at least goes some way towards addressing the horrific act at the centre of the story, an act that elsewhere has been described as 'erotic' and 'sensual'. The sort of excuse even Andrew Tate might draw a line at.
Birmingham's Barbara Walker was inspired by this story, this commission even, to make her first self-portrait for two decades. "Just because something looks beautiful, it doesn't mean it's a good thing" Walker observes, a past relationship in mind. As Walker stares confidently out to the viewer, her foot holding a swan feather in place, we can see she has conquered both the swan, the (perhaps painful) memory of this past relationship, and her own demons. No swan, and no man, is gonna fuck up Barbara Walker's life.
Barbara Walker - End of the Affair (2023)
Mark Wallinger - Castor and Pollux (2023)
At least that's my amateur reading of the piece. It's less straightforward trying to work my head around
Mark Wallinger's Castor and Pollux.
Wallinger has recast the boys as astronauts/cosmonauts and has juxtaposed footage of the American Ed White and the Russian Alexei Leonov taking their first steps in space back in 1965.
We can watch Leonov and White getting out of their crafts (Voskhod 2 and Gemini 4 - another twins reference there) and going for spacewalks that lasted for ten (Leonov) and twenty-three (White) minutes. Leonov's spacesuit inflated during his spacewalk and he struggled to get back into Voskhod 2 which would have been an unfortunate, if dramatic, way to die. But, on the plus side, he did manage to draw a small sketch of an oriental sunrise which became the first ever work of art made in outer space.
The film is set to the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1737 opera Castor et Pollux but, nice though it looks, what it actually tells us about Leda and the Swan (or Wallinger's thoughts on that story) is precisely nothing. Something of an outlier.
Annie Morris's Stacks harks back to Leonardo's approach and explores the mystery of the origins of life. Morris had lost her first child to stillbirth and her stacks of precariously balanced spheres are intended to represent the delicate nature of, and the vulnerability, of life - especially new life - as well as its defiance. It's a piece of work that is made more poignant once you understand what it's all about.
Annie Morris - Stacks (2023)
Kiki Smith - Curious Me (2023)
Kiki Smith's Curious Me imagines Leda as a child (there are no known visual or written records of Leda at this period of her life - possibly because she wasn't real) having what appears to be a far more innocent interaction with a swan though is she, er, quite well developed for a child.
Things got a little confusing, and a little bit interesting, at this point. There was some kind of VR headset available for visitors to use and, after asking nicely, I put it on thinking it was something to do with
Conrad Shawcross and Marina Warner's Threshold (below). But it wasn't. A kindly invigilator (who asked me if I was an artist - which I took to be a compliment but may have been intended as an insult) came over to help me and once I put the headset on I started seeing classical,
Renaissance style, images of Leda and the Swan everywhere. By moving my hands around I could make information boards come off the walls and move - though, rarely, to where I wanted them to go.
It was all good fun, and I managed not to fall over, but it means I never got to reading about Threshold so have a look at it yourself and see if you can work out what it's all about. It looks like the sort of clock someone painfully caught up in trying to keep up with the latest trends would have on their wall. A clock for wankers who don't use clocks for telling the time as they're intended.
Conrad Shawcross and Marina Warner - Threshold (2023)
Flora Yukhnovich - Double-Yolker (2023)
Flora Yukhnovich - Sunny Side Up (2023)
The satisfyingly monikered
Flora Yukhnovich considered the story of Leda and the Swan and decided it's all about .... the eggs! As such, she's made some vaguely abstract, and eggy, paintings that are pretty to look at (they'd look good on a church roof, you could lie on the floor looking up at them and drift off into a reverie, maybe somebody could play a mournful dirge on the church organ) but that's about it.
Yukhnovich, herself, describes the paintings as "an exploration of creation in a religious or mythological sense, in all its strangeness and grandeur" (she would, she's worked hard on them) and the curators suggest that they're reminiscent of the 18c rococo painter
Giovanna Battista Tiepolo's paintings. Paintings that were designed to give the illusion that the ceiling was open to the sky above. I didn't copy that. I thought of ceilings and trompe l-oeils before I even read that. Honest!
Tom Hunter keeps things earthier. His London Mythologies, Part I relocates Leda from the Eurotas (a real river on the Pelopennese peninsula) to the Islington canal (a real canal about two hundred metres from
the Victoria Miro gallery). Leda is emerging from lush green woodland - though if she was really in the Islington canal she'd be emerging from between abandoned shopping trolleys with a spent johnny on her head - and it is she, not Zeus - this time not in his preferred swan form - that instigates their sexual union.
I mean, she's wearing a leopard skin bikini so obviously she's gagging for it, right? Plus, Zeus is old and bald and he can't afford to be picky. I'm not quite sure what Hunter is trying to say here, certainly any sense of morality has been upended - not unusual it seems when considering this particular story - but the painting looks pretty good. Maybe best not to read too much into it.
There's a Kim Brandstup film, Leda and the Swan (2014), that employs
William Butler Yeats's sonnet of the same name (from 1923) to show that the swan/Zeus is, indeed, raping Leda and that that isn't okay:-
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
Which is correct. Although I found the video of the dance uninspiring and pretty much impossible to get a photo of (so there's none here). But, good on
WB Yeats - as usual.
The show ends with Robin Friend's idiosyncratic, and politicised, take on the myth. In Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History the artist expands the concept of rape to include environmental rape of the landscape as perpetuated by companies like Amazon.
I'm not a fan of Amazon (I've never bought a single thing from them) and I'm not a fan of companies that damage the environment in the sake of profit (while, at the same time, rendering our high streets as ghost towns full of boarded up shops and nail parlours) but I think comparing other crimes to rape diminishes the crime of actual rape so I'd probably not go down that route. Except in the last sentence of this article in which I will contradict myself and go exactly down that route.
That't not say that Friend's work isn't strong, it is - look at that swan lurking around outside Amazon's distribution centre in Milton Keynes - many of these places are surrounded by manmade nature reserves as if to pay some kind of recompense to the countryside their glass and steel behemoths have violently corrupted - but just to say that, in many respects, this wasn't quite the exhibition for it.
The corporate greed, the arrogance, the terrible way they treat their staff, and the sheer fucking ubiquity of Amazon deserves to be criticised and critiqued regularly and strongly but this show was about a Spartan queen being raped by a Greek god who had disguised himself as a swan and it felt almost inappropriate for a consideration of the real world of capitalism and commerce to impinge on such an obviously ludicrous, and yet grimly depressing, story. Even if Amazon act like God now and are, as Friend would have it, raping the planet as surely as that swan raped Leda.
Robin Friend - Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History (2023)
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