In Bethany Collins’s The Odyssey (2018–ongoing), the artist charges the modernist conceptual act of erasure with a direct physicality by using her own spit to erase monumental hand-written renderings of passages taken from the ancient epic. She first came to the work after the 2017 election—coincidentally the same year Dr. Emily Wilson became the first woman to publish a translation of the Odyssey into English—feeling an immediate connection with Odysseus’s narrative of longing for home only to find the place virtually unrecognizable. Her act of erasure represents a literal insertion of her body into Homer’s epic—and, by extension, the Western canon—while also rendering nearly everything illegible. The few evocative preserved phrases—representing variations in the text across different translations—collapse past and present, focusing on the parallels between Odysseus’s perilous journey and the United States’ current political climate while also bringing to light the inherent instability of language. “I’m interested in this [political] moment and thinking about Odysseus and the Odyssey as a metaphor for this moment,” Collins explains, “but more broadly of the way that language will forever fail, right? Because we made it. It is an extension of us, it is a very human endeavor, and it has infinite capacity, and it is also bound to fail. And that contradiction is endlessly fascinating to me.”
