Anonymous Fragments: Timothy Hull
Like many museums, the Michael C. Carlos Museum has a large collection of fragments of ancient Greek vases. Such collections have traditionally been used to study style and technique to make artist attributions and identify matching fragments in other collections; that is, to restore a name to the otherwise anonymous fragment and return it to an original whole. In a series of new paintings and drawings inspired by the Carlos’ collection, Timothy Hull (American, b. 1979) subverts this scholarly convention, embracing instead the potential of the anonymous fragment to propose new narratives.
Piecing together histories of collecting, antiquities trafficking, and desire for Greek vases with images of same-sex lovers and Dionysian revelry excerpted from the vase fragments themselves, Anonymous Fragments (re)constructs a queer art history, grounded in antiquity, that offers a world in which bodies, identities, and desires are fluid, expansive, and playful. At the same time, examining the controversies of the trade in ancient Greek vases, Hull reminds us that all museum objects—the licit and the illicit—are out of context, and in this sense offer endless opportunities to be re-viewed and re-interpreted, accruing meaning across time and with every act of looking.
Read the exhibition's zine here
