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‘Being with Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance?’ (C. Lowthian,  2020 –2021) 10m x 1.80m (approx.)  

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The final outcome of a year of research, this work is a collage including sculptural and installation elements.  Found images, re-purposed metal items, re-cycled fabric and IT waste. Natural materials processed from the environment: charcoal, clay.  Mod-roc, alginate, sawdust. Fennel seeds, loft board, ply wood, paper, foil, haberdashery notions, yarn, chain, cable ties, plumbing and electrical fixings, various adhesives, hand-crafted, painted and printed elements.

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The myth of Prometheus provides a rich resource for a visual exploration of oppositions ambiguities and uncertainty regarding the relationship between the past present and future of homo sapiens entangled creatively within the world.

The Prometheus project developed around topical research about the myth in history, contemporary culture, art and philosophy conducted in parallel with aesthetic enquiry directed towards understanding and employing collage as an aesthetic language to articulate the research and embody a critique of the appropriation of the myth across time.

The Titan trickster, Prometheus, steals fire from the Olympian Zeus, hiding it in a fennel stalk and giving it to mankind who he had formed from water and clay.  To punish him, Zeus commands that Prometheus is chained to Mt. Caucasus for eternity where every day, his liver is pecked out by an eagle (but it grows back at night).   Simply put, the gift of fire becomes a symbol for human creativity, progress, and the arts and sciences set among themes of foresight, hubris, rebellion, fate, freedom and bondage. Ambiguities arising from these themes have allowed the myth to be appropriated to different purposes and by a range of different ideologies across time as it has been embraced by Christianity, Humanism, The Enlightenment, Marxism (Franssen, 2014) and recently, in Accelerationist speculations (Brassier, 2014), (Dupuy, 2007). A range of moral, epistemological and ontological approaches to the understanding of human nature, imperfection and limitation can be discovered in Literature featuring the myth (Franssen, 2014) and for Bernstock (1993) it is the most inspirational Classical myth for modern Artists. Jameson mentions the ‘excitement of machine energy for a Promethean reconstruction of human society as a whole, being featured in the work of Fernand Leger and Diego Rivera.’ (Jameson, 1984, p.79) And, drawing back the Iron Curtain, research reveals monumental and propagandist artworks embracing the Titan in the service of the Communist project, particularly in celebration of energy projects such as, the statues of Prometheus at Chernobyl, Ukraine or the Vidraru Dam, Romania.

Although the myth itself is malleable and contains a great deal of ambiguity, what appeared from the survey of artworks and texts was an appropriation to one purpose/meaning or another in which event the sense of ‘ambiguity’ in the myth’s re-presentation is largely lost.

The aim for the practice-based research was to articulate  the breadth of themes and motifs associated with the myth but yet, retain the ambiguity - re-opening the space between various didactic (disambiguating) appropriations of the myth and in this space, create the opportunity for a broader discourse around questions about creativity and its limits or consequences in terms of what being human or human being becomes as we orientate ourselves to the future.

Bernstock, J. E. (1993) Classical Mythology in Twentieth-Century Art: An Overview of a Humanistic Approach Artibus et Historiae ,1993, Vol. 14, No. 27 (1993), pp. 153-183 Published by: URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1483450 (accessed 12th May, 2021)

Brassier, R. (2014) Prometheanism and Its Critics. #Accelerate p469 -p487 The Accelerationist Reader Robin Mackay Armen Avanessian (Editors) Urbanomic MIT Press

Dupuy, J-P (2007) Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 32:3, 237-261

Franssen,T. (2014) Prometheus through the Ages From Ancient Trickster to Future Human Ph.D. Thesis. University of Exeter.

Jameson, F. (1984) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New-Left-Review-146-Jul-Aug-1984.pdf

Roco, M.C. & Bainbridge, W.S. (2002). Converging Technologies for Human Performance. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.

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A titanic hand passes fire in the form of collagraph-printed, torn paper and found images of fire in the environment. They are singed and stuck on with clay refined from the artist's allotment.  Prometheus made human from clay to whom he gave fire stolen from Zeus, hidden in a fennel stalk. A human hand receives the fennel and seeds fall and grow in the earth. Fire is harnessed into cooking food, making charcoal and firing bricks  - technologies for sustenance and shelter— human artifice celebrated but perhaps, troubled by the images of desertification and forest fire collaged into the tableau. Prometheus is tethered to Mt. Caucasus but bound into the materiality of the panel (natural materials) with plastic cable ties at a point where the 'fire' of human artifice approaches enlightenment.

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The eagle - a symbol of foresight that aligns with the name 'Prometheus' - pecks at the Titan's liver by day and the wounds heal by night in an endless repetition.
What might be foretold by the haruspex observing the cycle of damage and repair in the organ scarred with the repeating fennel motif?
Art povera type materials are juxtaposed with a glossy modern image of the (controversial) Citroen C5 eagle-of-cars advert in the style of the Reichsadler.  Here in the Eyrie on Mt. Caucasus natural meets technological, poverty meets wealth, craft meets the car industry and creative concepts collide.

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Rubbed and hand-printed primitive mark making ( clay, iron-oxide) signal the emergence of language and the prospect of mathematics and code. A Promethean hand worked from tool junk and biscuit tin, humorously sparks fire again—imagined as an electric current that is captured by a human hand in a lightening strike magic trick while a nano image of a fennel flower is displayed among cyanotype fennel pictures and photographs.

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Corner Cadence Two: Excitement of The Machine Age

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The corner between panels 2 and 3, features a collage of Eduardo Paolozzi  (1924—2005) works, smoky printed fennel motifs and the scrapping –in of metal sheets. The collage appropriates into the work, Paolozzi ‘s interest in a conception of man as machine portrayed in his  1950 ‘Man Holds The Key’ series and develops the imagery through the inclusion of a peculiar copper-pipe sculpture. Wiring from the Promethean gift of fire (as lightening/electricity) links the metal fennel sculpture that partners the tools and biscuit tin, Promethean metalwork hand.  ‘Robert the Robot’(1971) looks back at this with awe and wonder perhaps asking ‘Is this what it feels like to be human?’  Robert looks around the corner to the future of humanity. The Eagle re-appears in the form of the re-branded Barclays Bank eagle - geometry effecting new semiotics. We are reminded of the C5 Eagle. Another bird with oil slicked wings hovers over Robert.  Is it with awe and wonder or incredulity that the boy looks towards the future? The theme of fore-sight is re-capitulated. The gift of fire as a symbol for creativity is presented here in an array of modes— technology, mathematics, science and art all jumbled together. There is an uncomfortable sense of unease effected in this corner - a ‘darker’ mood enforced by the limited palette of muted colours establishes a contrast with the colourful contemporary technology that follows.

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Paolozzi’s Robert the Robot looks to the future of bionics and the merging of man with machine, an enterprise that ends in a collaged chaos of data cables, electrical wire, audio wires, images of human enhancement soldered together in connections with computer circuit boards, audio speakers and lights etc.
The cute-ness of the image of a baby boy benefiting from bionic hearing implants resonates with ambiguity about our understanding of ‘human’ now and for future generations.  His innocent look, the expression in his eyes, the reflection of his eyes in the collage and the suggestion that he is perhaps exchanging childhood dreams with Robert where their gaze meets re-capitulates themes about foresight and 'sight as a paradigm of knowledge' that are embedded in the work. Their gaze is exchanged around the human conceived as a kit of bits and pieces to be disassembled or re-assembled for fun (another Paolozzi reference) and here a sense of the uncanny troubles a sense of optimism for the future.  The skeleton toy-kit ‘gift-box’ may be a sinister suggestion that the ‘human’ that we are ‘playing with’ is dead or more optimistically, a set of promising bones upon which the next generations may fashion the transhuman flesh?

The joyful colour scheme of the first panel is recalled but in a minor key -  the work begins to reach a crescendo as so many conflicting possibilities are collaged together articulating the possibility that,

'human creative activity and the conquest of knowledge may be a double-edged sword … it is not that we do not know whether the use of such a sword is a good or a bad thing—it is that it is good and bad at once.’

(Dupuy, 2007, p.241)

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Corner Cadence Three: Entangled Towards The Future

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At the third corner, an armless (handless) woman is  hooked-up to a wiring loom that becomes a weaving loom and introduces the hands of the quilting bee section that follows. The loom of wires entangles with a weaving loom in the space behind which hangs a second haruspex suspended with a meshwork of tubes. At once it is both an ancient fortune-telling device and a pastiche of a modern medical science model.  There is a painful tension between the metal wires and yarns and fabrics enmeshed in the warp and weft of the corner loom and past and present are wrangled together through the traditional rag-rug craft technique and wires are tamed into some sort of productive relationship with soft fabrics and yarns.  This contextualises the final quilt panel not as a nostalgic throw-back but as a space referencing ideas about the reconciliation of  modernity and tradition in a balanced relationship as a possible antidote to limitless acceleration.

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The creative progress that has been illustrated thus far is thrown into contrast with ‘softer’ traditional feminine crafts.  The first affect might be a sense of nostalgia, alternatively this section of the work may be seen an invitation to evaluate the dominant ideologies embodied in the  ‘creativities’ explored so far—those of enlightened western humanism and science and, where the re-cycled aesthetic combines with the bright modern colours and appliqued flames in the quilt, a feminist challenge is being made— contemporary slow movement ideology, rather than nostalgia, being suggested as an antithesis to accelerationism.

Not supported by a frame, as with the other corners, the quilt drapes across the final corner. It marries up with the beginning of the work and marks the completion of ‘Being With Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance’. The circularity leaves ‘conclusion’ uncertain and the piece ‘ends’ with a final articulation of the intention to leave meaning making open-ended and re-ambiguate the myth in order to articulate

“The idea of the incompleteness of the human as such … and the ever recurring and never resolved concepts of the essentially ambiguous human nature in Promethean history.” (Franssen, 2014, p237)

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'Being with Prometheus: Twin Flame or Bad Romance?'

Tidy the garden shed. In the corner never before considered to have anything to do with each other- suddenly, 'vibrant, calling, bristling' (Bennett, 2010) - a piece of rusty iron and a bit of chain join up with each other and call out

"PROMETHEUS"

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Tidy the garden shed. In the corner never before considered to have anything to do with each other- suddenly, 'vibrant, calling, bristling' (Bennett, 2010) - a piece of rusty iron and a bit of chain join up with each other and call out "PROMETHEUS"