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…

Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Gay poet, W.H. Auden is perhaps best know for his poem Funeral Blues, recited as a eulogy for a gay lover in the film Four Weddings and A Funeral. However, the modernist British poet wrote lots of other poems about the alienated human condition in the modern age and his poem, Musee des Beaux Arts is no exception:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The artist that Auden mentions, Pieter Bruegel, is a bit of a moral and narrative painter. He did a lot of scenes of peasant life, portraying the peasants as awkward, lumbering folks who are playful yet animal-like. Their drunken cavorting cements their place as lower-class citizens tied to the earth. In Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, even the iconic Icarus is earth-bound, a fallen hero who no one has acknowledged or bothered trying to save.
The painter raises the disturbing thought that when something tragic occurs everyone is responsible— the victim, the perpetrator, and those who stand idly by. What value are martyred heroes? In failing our heroes, do we fail ourselves? Or do heroes only become heroes once we know of their human vulnerability? Icarus’ wings are a momentary prop, wax and feathers, a merely exceptional instance— the human underneath is the most amazing thing of all.
Thanks for that. Now here’s a 10-second video of the Icarus shoot.