Untitled & Tablet with Greek transcription of a letter from Emperor Hadrian

Untitled, 2022

Opal Lambert

paper collage

What purpose does a bureaucratic tablet in a language most people do not know, no one speaks natively, and even the majority of those who do know it cannot read—what purpose does it have in an art museum? Is it accessible? The tablet is a product of imperialism, too—its inaccessibility already upholds the exclusionary nature of Classics as a field; what does it further say to hang up in an art museum a decree from an emperor onto a subject state without acknowledging that is what the tablet is?

My piece is an inversion of my object — its guts, if you will. It flips the marble tablet and finds it empty, with scraps of paper glued to its back. The paper is junk mail from my apartment—and almost entirely advertisements. Underneath these scraps of paper I have written a nonsense alphabet twice, a snippet of the lorem ipsum passage (nonsensical Latin), and a snippet of the actual inscription. I’ve drawn Duchamp’s urinal twice, one of which I have ripped into two. One of my urinals, instead of having holes, says “Caesar” in Greek. Instead of asking “what if things that we don’t think of as art can be art?” I want to encourage the viewer to ask “what if things we think of as art are not?”

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Tablet with Greek transcription of letter from Emperor Hadrian to Common Assembly of Macedonians, 136 - 1367 CE

Roman

Marble

RISD Museum, Mary B. Jackson Fund 1988.060

Inscribed on this marble slab is a transcription of Emperor Hadrian’ letter to the Macedonian Koinon, the common assembly of Macedonians. The letter asks officials intending to nominate successors to inform those successors thirty days in advance. The first letter of each paragraph is larger and there are ivy leaves demarcating sentences, except for when space doesn’t allow in line 17.

The translation of the inscription is as follows: “Imperator Caesar, son of the divine Trajan Parthicus, grandson of the divine Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian Augustus, chief priest, with tribunician power for the twenty-first time, imperator for second time, consul for the third time, father of his country, (bids) greetings to the Common Assembly of the Macedonians.

As you thought fit, let those who are nominating others for office at the end of their own terms of office send word within thirty days to those very men whom they will nominate for office. Fabius Paternianus, Iulius Cassandrus, Attianus Alexandrus, Aelius Artemon (and) Ulpius Lucianus served as envoys. Farewell. While those around Theodas, son of Theodas, were serving as politarchs. In the year 169 of Augustus.”