Reverse Archaeology And The Metaphoric Flexibility of the Gods

On my last trip to Melbourne, I saw an exhibition at the Hellenic Museum called Reverse Archaeology: The Metamorphosis of Aphrodite. It was excellent. It -I may even say she- has lived in my head rent-free ever since.

In this site-specific work, Marco Luccio began his artistic journey with a single, on-site charcoal sketch of the Hellenic Museum's cast statue of Aphrodite. After reworking this onto a large copper plate using his renowned Drypoint technique, the artist subjected this single plate to a series of bold transformations. The resulting prints capture each stage of metamorphosis, producing a stunning narrative collection of creation and destruction. The series unfolds as a dynamic interplay of layers, where each new stage of the copper plate reveals traces of its predecessors-a process akin to the pentimento technique seen in Renaissance painting.

Luccio's Aphrodite emerges from this exploration, at times vibrant with red hues reminiscent of passion, love and lust, and at others cloaked in melancholic shades of blue, invoking sorrow and haunting beauty. The same plate, reused and reworked, creates a striking visual archaeology; stratigraphic layers of love and loss.

Created amidst his own struggles with love-love for oneself and for others- the exhibition invites visitors to examine their notions of beauty, fragility, and power. It explores the impact of love for the past on the present, the anxiety of future love, and the cyclical nature of love lost and found. Luccio's words encapsulate this passionate exploration: "Love is as intense as our last breath. It asks us to stop everything when it kisses us softly, when it surprises us over time, when it smashes us in the heart with all its love-at-first-sight might."

Reverse Archaeology offers a profound journey through emotional and artistic landscapes, where the creative process itself becomes a powerful element of the artistic narrative. With this bold new series of works, Luccio searches for the beauty in broken things, questioning how we value art, love, beauty and ultimately ourselves.

Usually, my eyes get narrower and narrower until they are little slits when I read artist statements or exhibition descriptions. It has been my experience that the more an exhibition needs an explanation -or the longer it is- the less I will enjoy the actual artwork. That was not the case here.

Here is a story for you:

A statue of Aphrodite is carved from the very rock of Greece itself by a Grecian artist. Time and the collapse of empires bury her in the earth. Until one day, she returns to humans and speaks of that time. What is lost, and what is remembered, what persists, and what doesn’t. This incompleteness -a story that never begins and never ends- is evident in her reduced form. This reduced form is itself so beautiful that it inspires replica statues all over the planet. It actually becomes the visual expression most closely related to the archetypal form of the goddess of love. (Photo finish with the clamshell, of course.)

A replica of this form (what does it mean for a statue to have an exact replica) makes it to almost the polar opposite point of the planet from where it was housed, embedded in a diaspora community in a building once known for imprinting and pressing identical things -a mint.

Here, it is encountered by an artist best known for… I guess you could say replication-as-technique:

What has stayed with me over the past couple of months is just how accommodating these archetypal forms really are -and especially Aphrodite herself, I suppose.

One of my go-to definitions of what actually constitutes an archetype is that it is a font of infinite emanation. You can never exhaust it like you can an oil well. (Although I’m not sure about them, either. Story for another time.) Aphrodite graciously submitted to Luccio’s process of co-expansion, co-exploration. It’s called Reverse Archaeology presumably because it is a layering onto rather than uncovering but -and I said this to the actual archaeologist who accompanied me to the exhibition- ‘true’ or ‘normal’ archaeology -at least on its best day- might be described as an uncovering of those infinite fonts.

There is something specifically generous, specifically eerie about the Olympians in particular with regards to this infinite archetypal behaviour. And it feels like they are ‘back’ in a way that is more like the Romantic era or perhaps the Renaissance than their historic heyday. Obviously, there was that Jeff Goldblum show on Netflix recently. But also, one of the premium member courses we went through earlier in the year was Grimoires: Your Greek Inheritance (The Jake Edit). With a name like that, as you might expect, I spent a lot of time trying to impress this ‘stuff’, these thought beings, these ideas, are all yours. If you speak a European language, you are downstream from these beings. They are available to you as they are to Luccio in any way, on any level of reality, that you want to meet them on.

Psychological? Whatever that means? Sure. Mythological? Whatever that means. Sure. Otherwise real? Whatever that means? Sure. Lower fidelity names for things we now call love and war and joy and motherhood and so on? I like that one less, but sure.

One of the most interesting ways the gods have returned to me in an enfolded loop this year is via one of the best books I have read (actually listened to) in 2024: David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods, which I first heard about on the Rune Soup Premium Member Mighty Network.

It’s a beautiful polemic against the absurdity of materialism, of mind-equals-brain and so on, delivered in the form of a Platonic dialogue between the gods Psyche, Hephaestus, Eros and Hermes.

As you might expect, Psyche takes point for ‘our’ team. But what really struck me is just how generously Hephaestus holds the ‘other’ team’s position. It can be so tempting with works like this to make the opposing -and I will just say wrong- position dumb and mean and obviously the ‘bad’ guys. Hephaestus deserves better than that, and is indeed treated better by Hart. It’s another example of the generosity I am really struck by.

Aphrodite will submit, almost-Babalon-like, to naked and humiliating palimpsests so as to reveal the depth, glory, pain and beauty of the totality of her domain: Fresh love, lust, heartbreak, loneliness, betrayal, delight, widowhood, old love. Similarly, Hephaestus showed me something -if not different then more expansive- in All Things Are Full of Gods: There is the pride and sanctity in artifice -in the creating of things- but there is also an albeit-accidental hubris. As Leonard Cohen sang: “Guided by the beauty of our weapons”. The gods of making things submitted himself to a smaller role so that the net effect of these four thought beings builds something greater in your mind and soul.

For more than a decade now, I have been using Professor Tim Ingold’s term “thinking with” rather than, say, thinking about something. I do not think about love. I think with Aphrodite. Communalising the activity taps that infinite font of richness that she both governs and is. Same for Hephaestus and Psyche and Eros and Hermes and all the rest of them.

For almost exactly the same amount of time, I have been trying to get people to see that metaphors are spells. You have something over here that stands for an imaginal concept over there. When you re-credit the imaginal with some form of actual reality, you see that definitionally, you are dimension-shifting; you are either moving things forwards and backwards between here and the spirit world, or you are moving things around in the spirit world from here. Either way… spells.

And the best spells are performed with the relevant presiding Gods. You can summon the goddess of love to an upstairs room of an old mint in Melbourne, Australia. Or, you can have Psyche herself melt your mind in one of my favourite books of the year. Or inside that book you can have Hephaestus hold a ‘wrong’ position, lovingly, like a guide or a parent, so that you have the room, the tension, the energy and the time to work out a more fruitful, inspiring and accurate theory of mind for yourself.

That’s quite generous for beings most people don’t think exist!

I will borrow their generosity and leave you with a holiday gift of my own: The absolute reality of these beings, in whatever form you can conceive of them in, as millennia-old companions on the long journey back home.