Andrew Hazewinkel

While the material subjects of Warrior A Warrior B are two of the most important bronze male nudes that have survived from classical Western antiquity, the emotional subjects of the work are the conditions of vulnerability and desire. 

The Riace Bronzes (art-historically known as Warrior A and Warrior B), typically stand proudly upright 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 two figures lay side by side on provisional trolleys, that resembled hospital gurneys, while undergoing material analysis and conservation processes in a triage like setting.

The setting in which these images were made was a temporary laboratory set up in the foyer of the  Municipal Government’s regional headquarters in Reggio Calabria. Separated from the gaze of the public by a wall of glass, the examination and treatment of the 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 sense of urgency of the setting imbued these 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 the unnamed soldiers of a contemporary theatre of war, 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 representations of 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 its damage, inflicted either intentionally or not. One of the recurring themes in my work is exploring the experiential tensions that reside between the broken stone and bronze bodies of remote pasts and our own soft ephemeral bodies.

Warrior A and Warrior B offers a different way in to the same phenomenological exploration. 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 the idea surfaced that their longue durée had erased their capacity for injuring others and for defending themselves.

There is another dimension to these male nudes, and that is their physical bodily hybridity, and the physical bodily impossibilities that they embody.

Ancient sculptors applied strategies of distortion and contortion  to help usher the beholder of ancient statues into their own private inner worlds.

Western antiquity like many other antiquities, teemed with chimera. These were usually fantastic combinations of the human and the non-human animal, however here, as is the case with many classical male nudes, we see the emergence of a different type of physical hybridity.

In most Classical male nudes it is representations of different periods of physical development that 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 can be considered to 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. They do not represent a realist moment in a lifetime, as the camera does, rather they describe passages of a lifespan woven together through a body.

Perhaps the most dramatic and effective strategies of distorting the human figure to elicit an internal effect in the beholder are those characterised by skeletal impossibility. Some common examples are the hyper extension of limbs and the impossible rotation 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.

There are scholars that suggest that Warriors A and B were made using casts taken from living models, others disagree. Scholarly disagreements of this nature 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 his 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.}