Ainalaiyn Space Meteora Residency
15th August 2022
Belinda Martin
Embracing the Monstrous: Monsters and Contexts of Alterity in Early Greece
Most classical archaeological accounts of monstrous images only analyse monsters through the myths and texts that narrate their stories. As such, monsters are mainly treated as symbols of evil, foes to be defeated by a virtuous Greek hero or god, creating a sharp dichotomy between monsters and humans. But this rationalistic, logocentric approach ignores the other side of the coin: that monsters are material embodiments, capable of not only inflicting terror and danger on viewers, but also attraction. As Martin hopes to demonstrate, monsters were powerful multivalent visual and material symbols operating within different social contexts in Archaic Greece. Attending to certain formal features which are transculturally understood as monstrous and which appear prominently in Archaic Greek art (e.g. corporeal hybridity, frontality, monumentality or exaggerated facial traits and expressions), Martin contends that monstrous images produced a double and contradictory effect on viewers. On the one hand, a push, a sense of peril, respect and repulsion; on the other hand, a pull, for monsters produced attraction, too. This cognitive dissonance afforded by Archaic monsters has more to do with drawing the beholder in and inviting them to engage phenomenologically with them than solely with inspiring terror. Images of monsters function in more complex ways than the ‘apotropaic’ purpose so often attributed to them by modern classical archaeological scholarship. Martin suggests that monsters are themselves ‘good to think with’, especially for exploring the complexities of contexts of alterity in Archaic Greece, most notably religion, initiation rites and funerary rituals.
This lecture was recorded as part of the Ainalaiyn Space Meteora Residency Learning Programme on 15th August 2022. The research in this lecture belongs to Belinda Martin. We kindly ask that no parts of this research or recording are used or shared without written permission by Ainalaiyn Space and Belinda Martin. For more information, please contact info@ainalaiynspace.com
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