QCA Art: Icarus

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a modern retelling of an ancient Greek myth! Renowned international photographer, Francois Rousseau has re-imagined the Greek myth in a modern dystopia in a shoot for Out.
If you recall the myth, Icarus and his renowned craftsman dad, Daedalus, were imprisoned in the very labyrinth Daedalus built. Apparently, daddy had pissed off King Minos by giving the king’s daughter a ball of string so her dumb boyfriend, Theseus, could find his way back through the maze after killing the minotaur (a badass half-bull half-man creature).
Anyway, Daedalus decides to fly the coop by building he and his son a pair of wax and feather wings. But he warned sonny boy “Fly too high and you’ll get burned.” Being the adventurous little scamp he is, Icarus flew too close to the sun and melted his wings. He flapped and flapped his bare arms like Wily Coyote in a Warner Brother’s cartoon and fell through the sky headfirst into the Icarian Sea where he died. Wow. Great story. Happy ending.
What does this have to do with the hot men in the photos above? Well, in this imaginative, modern-retelling of the myth (how very modernist), Icarus stands outside the physical confines of the labyrinth, the barely clad Icarus and lost among a distressed alienated brood who fit him with wings and lead him to the cliff’s edge— is Icarus their only hope for escape or is he a sacrificial outsider?
Everyone seems somber and worried. Icarus himself seems resigned to his fate. He flies and fails, as expected. But after his radiant wings melt onto his body, the men surround him in a sort of pieta. They all avert their eyes, too guilty to behold the beautiful, ruined boy or one another. Only one man on the right, fires a defiantly accusatory gaze directly at another.
The imagery stays archetypal but the modern twist raises interesting questions: Why all the well-dressed alienation? Why the nearly nude Icarus? Are his melted gold wings a comment on pop idolatry or materialism? Is Icarus a symbol of good-intentions gone wrong? No matter the answer, the photos above are beautiful and the men hot.
But it brings to mind other re-imaginings of the Icarus myth, namely Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and the poem it inspired from the gay writer W.H. Auden entitled, Musee des Beaux Arts. You can see the painting, the poem, and a very short behind-the-scenes look at the shoot all after the jump…

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