Laocoön and His Sons

“I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on” (Sebald, Austerlitz, p125)

This quote reflects on the ephemeral nature of memory and history. It highlights the idea that much of what has happened in the past is not remembered, and that the world is
constantly “draining itself” of its history. The speaker suggests that our individual capacity for memory is limited and that the history of many places and objects is lost with time.
The quote speaks to the importance of preserving and sharing the stories of the past to better understand and connect with our present and future.

The sculpture shown here is an amalgam of digital scans, drawings and photographs, made representing alternate stages in the development of what is frequently referred to as the most famous statue from antiquity (Boardman, 1993). It shows Laocoön and his sons being strangled by snakes sent by the goddess Athena to prevent them from disrupting the passage of the Trojan horse inside the walls of the town. It was excavated in 1506 CE and put on display in the Vatican. We have written descriptions of this piece dating back to Pliny the elder in the 1st century CE (Barkan, 2001). It was reportedly sculpted by Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus of Rhodes (The Elder Pliny, 2018). The statue itself can be used as a symbolic allegory for the
problems of approaches towards representation of heritage (Pliny’s Natural History in Thirty-seven Books).

In the first place the sculpture is presented as a marble copy of a much earlier work in bronze that has not survived. Here, it acts as a representative piece standing in for a no longer extant version. This begs the question of when the agency of a reproduction outstrips its connections to the original.

Secondly in the writings of Pliny it is presented as being carved from a singular block of marble, yet the current sculpture is made from multiple pieces leading to debate over the authenticity and origin of the work (Boardman,1993).

Thirdly, the piece itself has been reconfigured on multiple occasions to bring it in line with transitory notions of historical correctness. The positioning and arrangements of the
figures have changed substantially over time, which we can see documented in the drawings and reproductions of numerus artists (Barkan, 2001).

These three points are central to explaining my stance on the distance that lies between ideas of correct historical practice and their enactment. The work represented here was a response to these issues.