Apoteosi di Omero, 1970-71

The chief components of Apotheosis of Homer are a typescript with a list of forty-five characters from the news and history played by theatrical or film actors,1 with a commentary by the artist written in Italian, French and English,2 and thirty-two photographs (two of which in colour) of some of the figures/actors cited. Up until the spring of 1972 the work was presented with these elements collected in an album and/or arranged on a table, added to which was a tape recording in a loop that reproduced the reading of the list of figures/actors and of the typescript in three languages. On the opening day of the exhibitions, a man and a woman would also recite the texts live. On 17 May 1972, at the Modern Art Agency in Naples, Paolini instead staged the work in the form of an installation for the first time, with each of the photographs placed on the right side of an open white folder and arranged on music stands spread out in the room and facing different ways. A tape recording reproduced the live reading from the previous exhibition in Bari.3 Since then, this presentation of a deliberately theatrical nature has remained the usual set-up for the work (the number of music stands and the use of the recording both depend on the exhibition space itself.
Apoteosi di Omero represents a full-fledged "apotheosis" of the theme of identity and the switching of roles analysed by the artist over the course of 1970. In analogy with the musical score (alluded to by the music stands) which can always be interpreted from the start, the photographs offer the changing interpretations of a specific character, to which we ourselves can add new versions, as suggested by the blank side of the white folders. The artist explains: “As there is no connection between the characters, the representation could paradoxically never end and the number of characters could grow endlessly, proceeding ad infinitum”.4
“Apotheosis of Homer is a tribute to Ingres’ painting, but it overturns the work’s substance. Ingres depicted an assembly of historical figures in an allegorical scene. Here, according to the same screenplay, I have chosen every historical period, with characters interpreted by modern actors: Socrates, Leonardo, Alexander the Great, Rimbaud, in their theatrical or cinematographic representations. In order to underscore the discordance between the times, places and stories, the music stands (which invite us to become further interpreters) are neither univocal nor unidirectional: they are arranged without a centre, without a particular point of reference."5, Paolini remarks.

The list of characters/actors includes, in this order: Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier/Antonio Pierfederici; Beatrice d’Este/Ottavia Piccolo; Joan of Arc/Teresa Martin; Lev Trotsky/Richard Münch; Paul Verlaine/Jean-Claude Brialy; Lawrence of Arabia/Peter O’Toole; Paul the Apostle/Edoardo Torricella; Raphael/Giuseppe Scarcella; Oliver Cromwell/Richard Harris; Camille Desmoulins/Paolo Graziosi; Socrates/Jean Sylver; Socrates as a child/Jaime Moraleda; Paolo Casaroli/Renato Salvatori; John the Evangelist/Mohamed Kouka; Alexander the Great/Alfredo Bianchini; Isabella the Catholic/Aurora Bautista; Perugino/Diego Della Valle; Nikolai Lenin/Kurt Beck; Marquis Joseph de La Fayette/Dario Penne; Leonardo da Vinci/Philippe Leroy; Leonardo da Vinci as a child/Gianluca Cicalè; Leonardo da Vinci as a young man/Arduino Paolini; Marquis de Posa/Massimo De Francovich; Julius Caesar/Rino Sudano; Isabella of Naples/Martha Fischer; Atahualpa/Christopher Plummer; Vladimir Mayakovsky/Dmitrij Cerkasov; Louis XIV/Jean-Marie Patte; Girolamo Savonarola/Antonio Battistella; Francisco Pizarro/Robert Shaw; Sophia Scholl/Nicoletta Rizzi; Elizabeth I/Flora Robson; Attila the Hun/Jack Palance; Isabella d’Este/Bianca Toccafondi; Caligula/Carmelo Bene; Jesus Christ/Giacomo Balla; Arthur Rimbaud/Terence Stamp; Emiliano Zapata/Marlon Brando; Henry Van Meegeren/Riccardo Cucciolla; Maria Walewska/Greta Garbo; Enrico Mattei/Gian Maria Volonté; Bernadette Soubirous/Jennifer Jones; Blaise Pascal/Pierre Arditi; Victor Emmanuel III/Giulio Girola; George Christine Jorgensen/John Hansen.
2 The commentary that accompanies the work reads as follows: ““The scene is classical, or it would be if it didn’t appear as such to the avid and darkened eye of he who in fact ‘sees’ it as being classical. It is not, nevertheless, modern as a judgement devoted to the classical might simulate to understand it. I would say that the scene, rather, seems conceived by the same characters and corresponds to a rigorously theatrical point of view. Theatrical, classical, modern are three incongruous data for as long as we don’t know the value of the unknown: the interpreters are those characters, they arrest real time, they do not take place, they upset – for an instant that they alone can identify (outside the scene?) – the habitual references (theirs, our own identities), they celebrate a blinding fiction. Before and after this illusion of eternity, little is left to observation, nothing to analysis. Within these pages I have gathered and arranged the visible traces of these hypotheses”.
3 For the opening of the solo show Paolini had invited a man and a woman in ceremonial dress to continuously recite the text in the typescript in Italian, French, and English in a laconic and unexpressive way.
4 G. Paolini, Quattro passi. Nel museo senza muse (Turin: Giulio Einaudi editore, 2006), p. 91. Originally, Paolini thought he could constantly add to the list the names of people covered in the news. As concerns the idea of the hypothetically unlimited growth of a work, see also the print edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica (Fourteenth Edition, vol. 12) (GPE-0008) made during the same period.
5 G. Paolini interviewed by A. Di Genova, in Il manifesto (Rome), 10 March 1996, p. 21 (version slightly revised by the artist, June 2003).