Andrew Hazewinkel

The material subject of Warrior A Warrior B are two of the most important bronze male nudes that have survived from classical Western antiquity. The psychological subject of the video is one manifestation of the condition of vulnerability. 

The Riace Bronzes (art-historically known as Warrior A and Warrior B), typically stand proudly erect in purpose-built spaces at the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria in Italy. However, I captured the images used to create this video as the figures, undergoing material analysis and conservation processes, lay side by side in provisional structures that to me resembled hospital gurneys.

The setting in which these images were made was a temporary laboratory that had been set up in the foyer of the  Municipal Government’s regional headquarters in Reggio Calabria. The setting echoed hospital Emergency Room qualities.

Separated from the gaze of the public by a wall of glass, the examination and treatment of bronze bodies, as well as my photographic activities, were on public display, giving the whole operation a sense of the intimate being made public, or perhaps pornographic. The horizontality of the figures and the urgent triage like qualities of the setting coalesced in my mind to imbue these two heroic figures with a sense of exposed vulnerability. Considering their designated names, Warrior A and Warrior B, it is not difficult to imagine them as soldiers of a contemporary conflict injured and awaiting treatment in a makeshift field hospital.

Created in Greece during the mid 400’s BCE, these figures are art-historically significant not only because they have survived (most ancient bronzes have not), but because between them we witness a loosening of the Archaic approach to representing human form and the emergence of the Classical style.

Much of my work that takes ancient figurative sculpture as its point of departure tends focus on damage, intentional or not, that is evidenced by ancient bodies. I am interested in drawing out experiential tensions between the broken bodies of remote pasts and our own soft ephemeral bodies. Warrior A and Warrior B offer a counter possibilty. These figures differ from most of the others that that I have worked with in that these two remain almost physically complete. It is a remarkable fact that after approximately 2500 years laying on the seabed (at a depth of approximately 50m) only half of Warrior A’s right index finger, and both of their shields and weapons are missing. As I spent time photographing them, I had the sense that the slow passage of time had erased their capacity for injuring others and for defending themselves.

There is another perhaps surprising dimension to these emergently Classical male nudes, and that is their bodily hybridity and the living physical impossibilities that they embody. Ancient sculptors applied distortion and contortion strategies to help usher the beholder of ancient statues into their own inner worlds. Western antiquity, like many other antiquities, teemed with chimera. These were usually fantastic combinations of the human animal and the non-human animal. Here however, as is the case with many classical male nudes, we see the emergence of a different type of hybridity. In most Classical male nudes different periods of male physical development are combined. For example, many Classical male nudes  blend the the fully developed musculature of a young man's torso and limbs with the genitalia of a pre-pubescent boy, it is hard to ignore. One way of thinking about this is that these figures are temporal mashups, representing simultaneously physically distinct developmental stages of a male body. Simply put, they represent boyhood and young adulthood in a single figure. They conflate age classes in a single body. Considered in this way these figures defy realism in an utterly pre-photographic manner. They do not represent a realist frozen moment in a lifetime, as the camera does, rather they describe passages of a lifespan woven together through a body.

Warrior A and Warrior B example another anatomical distortion deployed by creators of Classical male nudes that is sometimes called the ‘athlete’s girdle’. The athlete’s girdle is a physically impossible continuous line linking the iliac crest and the inguinal ligament at the meeting of the thigh and the torso. While achieving it is a common pursuit in contemporary gymnasia, it cannot be physically achieved.

Perhaps the most dramatic and effective strategies of distorting and contorting the human figure to elicit an internal effect in the beholder are those characterised by structural (skeletal) impossibility. Common manifestations include the hyper extension of limbs and the impossible roatation of joints. Looking closely at Warrior A we can see that his right forearm faces toward us, yet his right hand faces inward toward his thigh, a skeletal impossibility without bone breakage. When we consider Classical male nudes through the prism of distortion and contortion, it becomes clear that they do not conform with realism or idealism, rather, for me at least, they resonate with a sense of individualism, that  in some instances suggest, the experience of bodily injury.

Some scholars suggest that Warriors A and B were made using casts taken from living models. Others advise that the strategic distortions explained above suggest otherwise. These scholarly disagreements hold little interest for me. As a maker of objects that represent the human form, whether an object’s creation involves direct physical transfer from a living body is of little relevance, the result is always a hybrid of inner and outer worlds, wherein the scratches, scrapes and ruptures of embodied pasts are enacted again and again in present. This way of thinking finds agreement with R. Neer when in writing about Warrior A and Warrior B in his book The Emergence of The Classical Style in Greek Sculpture, he states -

“There seems to be a felt need that artworks of such magnificence should, somehow, body forth truth. If it was a characteristic of an earlier age to identify this truth with the sensuous manifestation of an Idea, so it is characteristic of current scholarship to define the truth in sculpture as an indexical relation to real bodies, mediated in and through technology. But evidence points to the contrary. Classical sculpture is not more realistic or natural than it’s predecessors in any absolute sense; indeed, it is not clear what absolute realism or naturalism might be. It combines a new and, in some ways, more thoroughgoing notation of what we, today, are prepared to recognise as the real with an equally new distortion of it.”



^{Photographic permissions provided courtesy Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali Soperintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Calabria.}