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Travis Scott

Travis Scott is a graduate student in the History of Art department, where he works on Classical art with an emphasis on religion, cult, ritual, and community formation in the Greek world. Supported by interests in critical theory and archaeology and with a background in studio art, his work investigates alternatives modes of looking at objects that have been under surveillance for centuries.

Recently, he was awarded support from the Iles Fund for the Study of Myth to travel to Delphi, Greece in order to present at the conference "The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual," organized by Stanford University and Radboud University on behalf of the Network for the Study of Archaic and Classical Greek Song. The conference broadly addressed the interrelationship between art and text, with multidisciplinary approaches from Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, the History of Art, and Philosophy. Over the course of the three-day conference, dozens of papers addressed themes such as the sensuous spectacle of the symposium, the gaze of the poet against/as the gaze of the visual artist, the role of reperformance in (re)visioning culture, and the interpenetration of verbal and visual iconography. The conference was attended by top scholars in the field of Greek literature, religion and art.

Travis' paper, "Singing, Seeing, Saying: A Performative Context for Pindar's Paean 6," developed out of a seminar on the relationship between myth and its ritualualized performance directed by Sarah Iles Johnston earlier this year. In it, he re-reads both the 5th-century song, the site of Delphi, and the image programs of its most prominent monuments in search of correspondences between space, text, politics, and ritual. His re-reading challenges the conventional understanding of space at Delphi, which has been reinforced by a few widely-circulated plans of the site as it stood in the 2nd century CE. After centuries of continuous remodeling, he argues, the spatial dynamics of a performance would also be dramatically altered. Since there are no plans that coherently show how the site of Delphi developed, he excavated the primary and secondary sources to reorganize the site and re-imagine what it may have looked like to Pindar's 5th-century audience. Striking relationships develop between the handful of major monuments available for view, Pindar's many-layered verses that allude to rituals and narrate myths, and the histories of the site itself. Such relationships allow us to realign movement and gesture with the performative context, and ultimately to restore not only a third spatial dimension, but also how Pindar may have rooted a particular vision for post-Marathon Greece in the postures of performance. The opportunity to attend the conference and to compare archival research with on-site investigation has proven invaluable, and he is currently preparing the paper for publication.