weepy rain-nymphs
Hyas, in Greek mythology, was a son of the Titan Atlas by Aethra (one of the Oceanides). He was a notable archer who was killed by his intended prey. Some stories have him dying after attempting to rob a lion of its cubs. Some have him killed by a serpent, but most commonly he is said to have been gored by a wild boar. His sisters, the Hyades, mourned his death with so much vehemence and dedication that they died of grief. Zeus, in recognition of their familial love, took pity upon them and changed them into stars—the constellation Hyades—and placed them in the head of Taurus, where their annual rising and setting are accompanied by plentiful rain.
Or so the story goes. The mythological use of Hyas is simply to provide a male figure to consort with the archaic rain-nymphs, the Hyades, a chaperone reponsible for their behavior, as all the archaic sisterhoods— even the Muses—needed to be controlled under the Olympian world-picture. And also to give these weepy rain-nymphs something to be weeping about, mourning for a male being an acceptably passive female role in the patriarchal culture of the Hellenes. Hyas has no separate existence, even the alternative accounts of his demise being somewhat conventional and interchangeable— except as progenitor of the Hyantes.
- "Hyas" entry, wikipedia
posted March 23, 2004 in printChalk is white
[olafur eliasson] has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally). And in Bregenz, Austria, he transformed a museum into a greenhouse of mossy pools, footbridges, fog, dirt, wood, fungus and duckweed. Fascinated by the effects of disorienting optics and eccentric geometry, he also removed the windows of the ironwork skylight in the gallery of his New York dealer, Tanya Bonakdar, a few years ago and installed mirrors to create a dizzy walk-in outdoor-indoor kaleidoscope.
"We have a desire to assume that certain things, like our reactions to the weather, are natural, but they are in fact cultural, and the end result of this can be entrenched ideologies, which we take to be inevitable. This is the path toward totalitarianism."
He rethinks that remark after a moment. "I shouldn't have insisted that everything is cultural and not natural, because that is as dogmatic as the reverse. I should have said that the line separating nature and culture changes through history, and this is what we should be aware of."
Mr. Eliasson cites the ubiquity of white walls in art galleries: "Chalk is white and chalk was used as a disinfectant and so early modernists decided on white walls as symbols of purification, clean spaces. But if chalk had been yellow maybe all our galleries would be yellow today, and we would interpret yellow as a neutral color."
- MICHAEL KIMMELMAN, "The Sun Sets at the Tate Modern," new york times March 21, 2004
posted March 23, 2004 in art, politics, print