Why Art History Is Full of People Taking Baths

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The figure of the bather is one of the most common visual tropes in Western art history. From ancient Athens to 1920s Paris and beyond, painters and sculptors have presented bathing in a variety of ways with myriad different aims, whether instructional, titillating, or allegorical.

Even today, the tradition continues to exert an imaginative hold on artists working beyond the frontiers of traditional, figurative representation. One such is the Hong Kong born, Brooklyn based artist Paul Chan, whose new exhibition “Odysseus and the Bathers” has recently opened at Athens’s Museum of Cycladic Art. Though its theme may be an ancient one, its preoccupations are nothing if not contemporary.

On entering, you are confronted by a transparent, seated figure bowing its torso up and down, as its legs knock together in rhythm with the rise and fall of its chest. Though its headless “body” is nothing more than an expertly tailored nylon sack and its artificial “breathing” apparatus—a fan system joined up by thick cables strewn spaghetti-like across the floor—is left pointedly unconcealed, something about this sculpture is uncannily human. Its movements are uncomfortable, neurotic even: It’s like glimpsing a stranger on the brink of an emotional breakdown.

This flailing figure is meant to represent Penelope (the wife of Odysseus). Furthering the Homeric associations, the other “bathers” loosely stand in for Telemachus, Penelope’s son, and a trio of the suitors who unsuccessfully attempted to woo her during her husband’s 20 year absence from his kingdom. A figure based on Odysseus himself appears in the form of a yellow, phallic column of billowing fabric encased in a cabinet, while Telemachus is rendered as a jet black figure bent over at the waist (“as though [he] was having an asthma attack”, said Chan). The suitors, fashioned from primary colored nylon, form a triangle around a patch of green carpet—a composition that makes a conscious nod to Matisse’s The Dance (1909).

Nevertheless, the tone of the show is distinctly less exuberant than that reference might suggest. Chan has approached his subject from a modern and not wholly celebratory point of view, acknowledging that the association we have with the figure of the bather today is a very different proposition from what it might have been historically.

“Some of the most affecting images of bathers that I’ve seen recently are photographs of beachgoers holidaying as refugees wash up on shore,” he said. “I wanted to renew the art historical tradition for the 21st century.” This, of course, is no small ambition - because, as we’ll see, the subject is one of the richest, most diverse and indeed problematic in cultural history.

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