A Contest for the Symbolic Order

description

This illustrative painting questions the idea of “man-as-centre” by narrating a pathos-laden classical myth about a martyred satyr named Marsyas.

  In the myth, Marsyas finds a set of double pipes (Auloi) invented but cast aside by the goddess Athena who did not like the way the pipes disfigured her face when played. Enchanted by the sound and not too concerned with looking good, Marsyas takes up the pipes and becomes so accomplished a piper that he eventually challenges the divine Apollo, a harper, to a competition of music. Marsyas wins the competition in a short-lived victory for sylvan alterity.  Apollo suggests another go round  but one where the rules are craftily changed to insure victory for a harpist. Unaware that the rules of the game now favour Apollo, Marsyas loses the contest, his skin and his life.

The painting syncretizes a number of more contemporary texts, notably Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” and his distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian  (Marsyas), Freud’s Oedipal theory and castration anxiety (hence the cast aside pipes), and various Classical myths considering the  hypostatic union of  a man-god duality into one nature. Marsyas, however, it should be noted, was both fully man and beast. The visual form of the painting references pictures from Western esoterica where a figure is often in the centre of geometric configurations exemplifying the idea  that “man” is the measure of all things (Vitruvian Man). In the case of this painting, Marsyas is enslaved and fractured by geometry and its idealism. The meta-narrative, one might concede, implies a contest for the symbolic order (the phallus) with both Marsyas and Athena being tricked by Apollo who still holds all power now hidden off-centre and not so clearly phallic.