Thursday, August 23, 2012

Raft of references


(Better late than never... well that's our story anyway) In the past we'd have simply assumed this poster was another lookalike of Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa but this time we figured it was more likely to have come via Louis J. Steele and Charles F. Goldie’s effort in the Auckland Art Gallery The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand. It turns out that the choreographer Neil Ieremia of Black Grace was in fact inspired by something else. A 2004 Bill Viola work called The Raft but of course that was itself inspired by the G Théodore Géricault’s painting along with the Steele Goldie version.
You can see an excerpt from Viola’s work here and some other stuff that sprang out of Géricault’s original here.
Image: Top the Black Grace poster and bottom a scene from Bill Viola’s video The Raft