Dear Jonathan, 28
Jan 2011
With all due respect, I
differ from your interpretation of the Kylie Minogue video. Even though I found
your selection and analysis of the video to be intriguing and provocative, I
think you�re off track in connecting it to the Castration of Ouranos. While the
video clearly opens with the suggestive spilling of liquids — coffee,
then milk — and then other white things — marshmallows, then a
briefcase�s contents — I don�t see anything there to bring to mind the
violence of Cronus� first violent act. I think you�re giving the video�s
creators too much credit for invoking this less obvious iconography into the
video. I think the coffee/milk spillage seems more like fluids of opposite
types spilling onto the ground and fertilizing it.
I may well be wrong. And you
may well be right. But, I don�t see any violence in the opening moments.
What we do certainly agree
on, though, is the association of this video with the iconography of the Birth
of Aphrodite. Since the song is from the new album �Aphrodite�, there�s no
great surprise that such imagery is used in the presentation for video of this
one song. What is surprising to me is
that the imagery of so sophisticated. I froze one moment from the video, just
as the singer emerges as Aphrodite from the thronging masses of lovers. It is
very much the birth of Aphrodite that�s depicted there: doves especially give
it away.
In the criticism that raged
in the late 19th century over increasingly licentious depictions of
Aphrodite at her birth, the critic Earl Shinn wrote (1877) that Alexandre
Cabanel�s �The Birth of Venus� manifested anatomical impossibility: �The form
of this personage suffers from bonelessness. [Venus has] delicate and seductive
as well as a rather uncelestial beauty.� Another critic in our day has written
�In presenting a supposedly classical theme –no less than the birth of a
powerful goddess – in a decidedly contemporary fashion, Cabanel had
broken new stylistic ground, as well as his model�s back.� (B.J. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford 1986) 101.
As Ms Minogue gets hoisted
above the crowd by all those lovers, she strikes the nearly clothed pose of
Cabanel�s Venus.
Addendum: I am sorry if it
made you uncomfortable to talk about this in class today. I am especially
sorry, upon reflection, that I kept the floor to myself and didn�t allow you to
respond afterwards. Do you agree with my overall assessment? � What is my
overall assessment, anyway? It boils down to this: If I were to have to assign
where the video goes in the Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, I
would taxonomize it as OGCMA0152NOTAphroditeBirth_Minogue,
and you would probably put it there, also; but, your paper seems to emphasize
the connection to the castration of Ouranos more than I believe we can give the
author credit for.
Thanks for writing a
thought-provoking paper!