Soldered brass, 11 x 34 x 13, 2021.
The title is a pun: spoken aloud, “attic wit” is “adequate.” The attic is where a household’s discarded objects end up, and the sculpture is made of them. Attic wit is the refined humour of Athens. Adequate is the verdict of faint praise. The pun sets the first two against the third, and the sculpture’s claim follows from it: the contents of the attic are adequate to Athenian sculpture, and the work asks for no more than sufficiency.
The profile is that of a pediment. The long, low triangle rises to a high centre and falls away toward the ends, as the sculpture of a Greek temple front does, with reclining figures filling the narrowing corners. The centre of the Parthenon’s east pediment, lost since antiquity, showed the birth of Athena. Here the centre is a gaping flower, a bawdy substitute for the origin, and a reminder that Attic comedy was frankly bawdy. The hollowed clock case carries a small pediment of its own, so the form recurs inside itself. The gods and river gods of the original are replaced by a putto, a pot-bellied jug, and a cheap brass bookend of Rodin’s Thinker in the corner.
The inventory is also that of a vanitas still life: a clock, a flower, emptied vessels. Clocks mark time, cut flowers the brevity of beauty, and emptied or overturned vessels pleasure used up. The clock is a case with no dial and no works, so time has been removed from it. Vanitas painting posts a skull to deliver the admonition, and here the bookend does so. Rodin conceived the Thinker for the tympanum of the Gates of Hell, so the figure was designed for a pediment before it was reduced to a bookend. The flower belongs to both registers, as vanitas emblem and as erotic one, and sex and mortality share a ledger.
The horizontal, pedimental format has a line of descent. Moore’s reclining figures draw, among other sources, on the Parthenon’s pediments. Caro, who worked under Moore, also took the classical Greek pediment as his source in After Olympia, a work of the late 1980s after the pediments of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Attic Wit circles back to the same source in soldered domestic brass, intimately scaled, in place of monumental marble.
