Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor's Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work

Abstract

This paper examines the relation between visual and acoustic monstrosity as articulated in the myth of the musical contest waged between Apollo and Marsyas. Drawing upon Jean-Pierre Vernant's writing on the gorgon, the paper notes how Marsyas' playing of the instrument is positioned within a mimetics of monstrosity that leads back to Medusa. The paper demonstrates how the punishment of flaying subsequently exacted by the god upon the vanquished satyr has stood as a kind of limit condition of what sight can bear, a thematic that returns us to Medusa herself. Citing Zbigniew Herbert's poem “Apollo and Marsyas” (1961), in which the petrifying visual effect of the gorgon becomes transferred onto Marsyas' howl, a new reading of Anish Kapoor's installation Marsyas (2002) is developed, which reads it—in its overwhelming visual phonicity—as a silent sound work.