Claydon, Steven
Steven Claydon's film The Ancient Set takes found images of people dressing up as Greeks and Romans, overlaid with a soundtrack Claydon created by feeding a score using replica Roman instruments through the GarageBand computer programme. Claydon repeatedly turns to the notion of the Classical model as the 'backbone of Modern European idea of culture and art', bastardised through the successive misreadings of the Renaissance to the Victorian eras. The starting point for the work was an awareness of the way Classical culture is invoked to confer gravitas on contemporary society: 'This idea that we have in modern society, where we find it necessary to create a link between a bucolic or traditional past and a technological sophisticated present and try to wrap that up as a holistic nasty package like off-cuts from the butchers, is an odd belief'.
Caroline Douglas 2009
- Artwork Details: running time: 7 minutes 56seconds
- Edition: 1 of 6
- Material description: DVD
- Credit line: © the artist
- Theme:
- Medium: Film and Audio Visual
- Accession number: ACC33/2008