4. Postclassical Marble: Reclaiming Flux in the Reception of Marble in Contemporary Art

In this chapter, Maarten De Pourcq takes marble as his starting point for his inquiry into the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity. Concentrating on Kara Walker's installation Fons Americanus (2019), his chapter takes a materials-based postclassical stance, first, on the way in which white marble became a central element of the art-historical paradigm of classicism and, second, on the role played by white marble in contemporary artworks that question classicist paradigms by calling attention to their materials and the contingency of their presence, monumentality, and social use.