The Classical Testicle

"Marbles", a new series by photographer Ingrid Berthon-Moine, explores the aesthetic of the testicle in Classical sculpture.

Ingrid Berthon-Moine

Hrag Vartanian interviewed her for Hyperallergic, where she explains

I like to look at men … the way they look at women. There is no better place than a museum to look at perfect bodies (or a stadium during athletics competitions and football matches.) 

I wanted to go back to the birth of the representation of the human body perfection and it happened during the Classical Greek period when sculptors’ skills drastically increased and they took great care in their attention to anatomical details. I could have worked with the penis but I preferred focusing on these often neglected parts which secrete hormones, make and store sperm...

For some male viewers, exposing the most sensitive part of the male anatomy (although in rock solid marble) to the gaze, trigger a sense of vulnerability which until now was mainly reserved to the female body, an uncomfortable role reversal.
There is also a hint of irony in Marbles, it could suggest that a shift in masculine identity is happening and that the splendour of the past erodes. I leave it to the viewer to decipher what he/she wants to read in there and to take it seriously… or not.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Dirtying the waters: Archaeopop in Macao

A version of this article first appeared in Pork #10. Get it here.


Macao. This former Portuguese colony off the coast of China's Guangdong province is packed with baroque churches, old forts, and gritty 20th century apartment buildings dyed gray and black by the ever-present pall of air pollution. Since Portugal washed its hands of the place in 1999 the city has been transformed into Asia’s largest casino destination: the Cotai Strip, a giant landfill between two islands, was created about 5 years ago and now boasts the full complement of Vegas hotels (Venetian, Sands, MGM) along with some Asian chains like the Galaxy or the Waldo. Of course gambling on anything and everything is as Chinese as dragons or jade. The Macao Museum even has an exhibit about Macanese cricket fighting, which drew huge crowds of bettors to watch the celebrity insects fight to the death – some of the past champs are actually preserved in the museum!

Champion Macanese Fighting Crickets, 1960s

So gambling is not a new thing: but creating a whole new landscape lets the casino developers indulge their rich fantasy lives, which in Macao has a strong archaeopop flavor.

Entrance to the 'G.M. Casino', where Poseidon is your greeter.

Exhibit 1: the Greek Mythology Casino. Outside, a hideous pastel Poseidon lounges in a huge fountain with some wild-eyed pastel horses. Walking into the atrium, you find yourself staring up a staircase at a giant statue of Zeus, holding thunderbolts. The big guy is flanked by hideous stucco murals of centaurs getting sexy time with Lapith women, and bulbous naked hoplites with chariots going into battle. (Low quality, high relief.) Behind Zeus the kitsch ends, and you step into a elegant warren of VIP baccarat and blackjack tables with eye-bleeding minimum bets ranging from US$150-$2000.

Having some Starbucks with my homie Zeus.

The Greek Mythology atrium. The Chinese New Year Decorations kinda clash with the caryatids.

I wish I had something deep to say about how this casino relates to Chinese culture, but honestly I'm just kind of baffled by this place.

Centaurs get jiggy with Lapith women. There's about 40 meters of this.

Exhibit 2: the Venetian. You probably heard about the one in Vegas, this one is a copy of that, which is a loose interpretation of the real thing. It’s Venice reimagined as an indoor shopping mall. The stinky green water of the real Venetian canals is swapped out for a glowing sapphire blue liquid. You can take a gondola ride, but all the gondoliers are Chinese women.




The lighting and fake sky gives everything a creepy twilight feel, like it’s always about to get dark.

"Piazza San Marco" in the eerie permanent twilight

We ended up at the food court and I got some spicy soba noodles for my oncoming head cold, then went downstairs – under St. Mark’s square – to the giant gambling cavern. I had wanted to play some blackjack, but even here the minimum bets were US$40 and none of the dealers spoke English. I contented myself with losing some Hong Kong dollars on the slots and called it good.

The gates of 'Babylon', Macao Fisherman's Wharf

Exhibit 3: Fisherman’s Wharf. This is not a casino, rather a baffling free amusement park with miniature districts that look like Amsterdam, a Tibetan temple, the Colosseum, Babylon, and a Tang Dynasty fortress. There’s also an interactive volcano (it erupts!) and an incredibly non-PC paintball zone designed to look like an Iraqi village so you can play ‘Marines in Fallujah’.

Black Hawk down!!!!!

Real estate in Macao being insanely expensive, all these things are visually piled on top of each other in a totally loopy juxtaposition. The colosseum has a shopping mall inside – big surprise – and some kind of performance venue on the inside, but looked deserted.


Oh, and did I mention the new year’s decorations? Everything was tricked out in red to usher in the year of the snake. Zeus was flanked by giant strings of firecrackers, St. Mark’s square had a giant red gong, And the Largo do Senado - the old government center of the colony - was crammed with snake decorations.

The Largo do Senado dressed up for the new year

I was not sorry to leave Macao, between the terrible air pollution and the dirty feeling that flourescent lights and gambling leave on your skin. We had a 20th-floor hotel suite with a glorious view… of dirt barges and half-finished landfills.

That is to say, Macao is very ‘inauthentic’, but no one seems to care and I think that’s fine. The romantic old Macao of Portuguese churches, fighting crickets, and fireworks factories was inauthentic too – but in a way that made white European visitors feel comfortable. The focus on historical reconstruction IS part of a fascinating recent Chinese obsession with replicating European stuff. On the mainland there’s tons of new housing developments that try to look like little British towns. Somewhere in tropical Guangdong there’s now an exact copy of the Austrian alpine village of Halstatt, a World Heritage Site.

Austrian Halstatt vs Chinese Halstatt (Gizmodo)

The ‘European lifestyle’ in general is hot for aspiring Chinese plutocrats: China consumes 25% of the world’s luxury goods and there’s so many Italian stores (Balenciaga, Gucci, Pucci, Versace, Armani, Tumi, Ferragamo, etc.) that when I first went to Milan it reminded me of… Hong Kong. The historical stuff is largely an offshoot of this kind of richy-rich Europhilia. But on the other hand it’s not weird for rising powers to associate themselves with older civilizations. The Romans pretended to be Greeks, the British pretended to be Romans, the Americans pretended to be Greeks and Romans, and now the Chinese are pretending to be Americans pretending to be Europeans. These Chinese visions of Greece, Rome, Babylon, and Austria are filtered through Walt Disney’s ghost and the misdeeds of American real estate developers.

The results are pretty entertaining. But I’m disturbed for the Chinese. For the Americans to look elsewhere for history kind of makes sense: since we killed or drove out all the native inhabitants, it was easy to pretend that the whole country was a blank slate. The results of importing Greco-Roman civilization are still weird, though – there’s an exact replica of the Parthenon in Nashville! But given China’s badass 5000 year civilization it’s disturbing that they’re looking elsewhere for inspiration. It seems like a sign of decadence, as if the insane boom of the last 20 years has lost steam and is beginning to veer into unreality.

Must Read: How Europe Hawks its Monuments

In the midst of its worst crisis in generations, Greece is trying to make more money from heritage, stirring up a hornets' nest of protest. But is commercializing heritage really something new? Dieter Baretzko in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung puts it in context (h/t Elginism).

Greece pimps its ancient monuments to bring in the tourists, lovers of cultural heritage are up in arms. But the country is only doing openly what the whole of Europe is: looting historic sites to drum up more ready cash. 

Disparaging comments went to press practically before the Greek government spokesman had even reached the end of his declaration that the country’s ancient monuments would be used in future for commercial purposes. The Acropolis is thus to become a stage for advertisements and action movies; the Athens’ Agora, birthplace of parliamentary democracy, a playground for fashion shows and 007 stunts; and the Kerameikos, the nearly three-thousand-year-old cemetery, will become the backdrop for commercials featured perfumed sex maniacs touching themselves in their sleep. That’s more or less the future for Greece’s ancient cultural heritage in the looming shadow of the European financial crisis, as cultural pessimists paint it.

One could believe that almost overnight the impending bankruptcy of Greece has turned the country from the cradle of European culture and democracy into a whore ready for anything. But Greece’s negligence towards its ancient world heritage is not a new phenomenon. During the preparations for the Olympic Games in 2004 famous ancient sites such as Marathon were crudely worked up into competition venues and prettified with questionable reproductions of vanished monuments from antiquity. Even the decades-long reconstruction of the Parthenon, which not only wishes to rebuild damaged parts but also missing ones as well, has been grounded as deeply in tourism’s taste for pristine intact sites as in a taste archaeological knowledge. 

If one were to look for an event that may have sparked this, then the discovery of the tomb of Philip II of Macedonia in 1977 – in Vergina (Aigai in antiquity) in northern Greece – might spring to mind. It was a sensational discovery: the very tomb of the father of Alexander the Great, with untold wealth in gold and silver treasure, and the ashes of the ruler wrapped in a gold-embroidered purple cloth. 

Delphi and the Palace of Knossos – open-air studios
Everyone involved grasped that tourists woul queue all night to see the exhibit and got busy straight away preparing a spectacular exhibition. Inquiries to specialists in antique fabrics, however, revealed that unfolding and preserving the purple fabric would take years. One restorer, though, spoke of months – on condition that only one part of the cloth would be saved. The offer was accepted, and the exhibit opened on schedule in Thessaloniki. Record crowds streamed through. 

Decades of neglect had prepared the terrain for this opening of the floodgates. The Greek parliament now intends that Delphi and the Palace of Knossos on Crete be rented out as open-air studios, for good money – and not at intervals of four years, like the Olympics, but as often as possible. 

Is that really any reason, though, to point an accusing finger at Greece? Was anyone offended in 2010 when Italy’s cultural authorities allowed Pompeii’s ancient theatre to be crammed with new seats and clunky containers for stage technicians and sanitary needs to allow lucrative concerts to be held there again – concerts that had been banned in 1976 after audiences caused immense damage? Does anyone still recall the recent scandal that shocked Rome when stones tumbled down off the Coliseum, which has been trampled across for decades by the tourist trade? 

“Dracula’s Wedding – a delicious dinner show with bite”
The laws of the free market have applied to monuments too, for a long time now. All European countries have polished up their historic sites to bring in money. From Vienna’s Museum Quarter, which since 1998 has seen the Baroque court stables converted into the “eighth largest cultural area in the world” thanks to an eccentric new museum, to Germany’s tiny town of Xanten whose ancient Roman core has been enlarged into an open-air museum where waiters in antique costume serve visitors ancient cuisine in reconstructed baths and taverns, ancient sites across Europe are turning into “location factors” that open up new sources of revenue for economically ailing communities.
Germany, formerly resistant to the crisis, is no exception. Take Dresden, which likes to boast of itself as the crown of the Baroque era. There, in 2010, after an endless and futile search for investors, the ravishingly beautiful Kurlander Palace, bombed out in February 1945, was rebuilt. Not as a museum, concert hall or other place of culture, but as an “event location”. One could, so the operators promise on the internet, “rediscover a fairy-tale palace brought back to life,” including its “magic, which is still pervasive.” The main attraction in the former ballroom of the Kurlander Palace is described as “Dracula’s Wedding – a delicious dinner show with bite.” 

What is the difference here with the culture-peddlers in Greece? In the shadow of the euro crisis, everywhere greed and lack of money are going hand in hand. In Athens, with their backs to the wall, the Greeks are just doing publicly what others have been practicing under the cover of relative stability. The victims are always the monuments – and lovers of culture too, who in place of historical sites are more and more frequently being offered “event locations”. At a good price, of course. 

Translated from the German by Anton Baer

Greek archaeology under fire: support heritage against the Troika and IMF

Greece's new role as Europe's impoverished debt slaves has serious implications for archaeology and museums. In 2010, 10% of staff at the Ministry of Culture were laid off, followed by a 35% cut in wages in archaeological service in late 2011. A new hire now makes just €670 ($900) a month after taxes. On top of this, the parliament this week is proposing further cuts of 30-50% across the Ministry of Culture. Cuts in things like museum security have consequences: last month armed robbers stole over 60 artifacts from the museum at Olympia, and we can expect such things to become more common as the whole country descends further into poverty.

On Wednesday the Greek Association of Archaeologists launched an appeal for support in the face of these draconian cuts:

If monuments had a voice of their own, they would tell us what has been going on in Greece in the past two years. In the name of the global economic crisis and with the IMF acting as a Trojan Horse, austerity measures have been undermining public services, welfare State and social cohesion. Democracy and national dignity are under attack.

Monuments have no voice, they have us
We, the 950 Greek Archaeologists, civil servants working in the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, are fighting against the destruction of both our country and our cultural heritage, because of the policies dictated by the IMF and the Troika.

The Greek Archaeological Service is not overstuffed, nor are we being overpaid. We serve in order to protect our cultural heritage and monuments, all over Greece, facing constant lack of funding and personnel, dedicated to the pursuit of scientific knowledge and to access to culture as a public good. Our scientific work has won international recognition. For more than 170 years we have been organizing excavations, studying Greek civilization, organizing Museums not with stolen antiquities but with well-documented exhibits, restoring monuments, organizing educational programs and helping bringing together Ancient culture and modern art.

As civil servants we have neither sought after luxury or over-spending, nor have we been accused of corruption, in sharp contrast the practices of the government and the political system that today promises to “save our country”.

As archaeologists in the land that inherited democracy to the world we are perfectly aware of the dangers associated with the suppression of democracy. We are struggling to preserve the memory and the material traces of the past, because we know that a people without memory are condemned to repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Monuments have no voice. They must have yours!
We are making an urgent appeal to our colleagues, to scholars and citizens all over Europe and the whole world, all the people expressing their solidarity and support to the Greek people, to defend cultural heritage and historical memory. The peoples of Europe share the same destiny. The same austerity packages and authoritarian measures, that are currently tearing apart Greece and its monuments, are going to be imposed across Europe.

They're asking people to spread the word and add support at their Facebook group. Reuters has video. "Greek museums today, tomorrow the Louvre."

Reuters, via Global Post

The appeal includes some important figures about the infrastructure for archaeology and museums in Greece. There are:

• 66 Ephorates (local departments) of Antiquities.
• 210 museums and collections of pre-historic, classical and Byzantine antiquities 
• 250 organized archaeological sites
• 19.000 declared archaeological sites and historical monuments (http://listedmonuments.culture.gr/search_declarations.php)
• 366 projects co-funded with the European Union, with a budget of €498 million
• Hundreds of excavations that are currently in progress

To deal with this there are: "7000 employees of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism which include 950 archaeologists, civil servants, and 2000 guards and night-guards" plus 3500 seasonal employees. That's already grim math. 460 sites and museums open to the public plus 19,000 listed sites and monuments, with only 2000 guards for the lot. 2000 guards is barely enough for the stuff open to the public. And research? Only 950 archaeologists on staff in the whole country! We're talking about Greece here!

So, what happens if they cut another 30-50%? As Despina Koutsoumba says in the video above, further cuts will mean widespread closures, with museums and sites turned into nothing more than guarded warehouses. It will certainly mean an increase in looting and theft, since there will be no one to prevent it - or so few guards that a couple robbers can easily overpower them, as at Olympia.

Koutsoumba is right: destroying wages, living standards, and the public sector is the IMF's plan for Europe as a whole. With European politics captured by the unelected mandarins from Goldman Sachs, reducing the population to slaves the banks' balance sheets is the only policy courseCulture, heritage, and museums are unnecessary luxuries that distract people from their duty to fatten the bankers' pockets, so they have to go.

Austerity, privatization, and budget cuts has failed to create growth everywhere it's been tried (think Latin America in the 1980s or Russia in the 1990s). It leads to low growth and high poverty. (See also this superb report about Europe's future in austerity.) But lets be frank: behind the bankers' propaganda this is a feature of the system, not a bug. Weak governments, fire-sale privatizations, and the destruction of civil society create an criminogenic environment where corporate crime, crony capitalism, and looting public assets is much easier. Looting antiquities is just one of the depressing implications

Gaming: Let's Play Ancient Greek Punishment!

From perverse game designer Pippin Barr comes the game you've all been waiting for: Ancient Greek Punishment! Choose from Prometheus, Tantalus, Sisyphus, the Danaids, or Zeno, and relive their thrilling punishments. This is a game you could literally play forever. Makes me feel nostalgic for playing some games on my Apple IIc. Click here to get started!

My boy Prometheus, punished for his mantic pretensions.

Our boy Sisyphus. Only a few more feet to go!

Greeks Beseige Acropolis

Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (via NY Times)

AOL News has the archaeopop headline of the day: "Greeks Beseige Acropolis". Some Communist protesters against the Greek government's austerity plan decided to get themselves some unforgettable media via a banner drop below the Parthenon. Reactions were mixed:

ATHENS, Greece (May 4) -- As thousands of workers spilled onto the streets of the Greek capital to protest new austerity measures, some 200 communist supporters swarmed the Acropolis, Greece's most sacrosanct archaeological site, and unfurled banners reading: "People of Europe -- Rise up."

The scene at the most important symbol of ancient Athenian democracy didn't leave just onlooking tourists aghast. "I'm a communist, but this is a disgrace," said Aliki Rizopoulou, phoning in to a radio talk show early today. "There's nothing catchy about having foreigners seeing us as wacky on top of being considered liars and cheaters."

Minutes after protesters lined up along the defensive walls of the Acropolis, they began picketing before the Parthenon, wielding red flags and shouting anti-government slogans for more than three hours before a state prosecutor ordered them to leave and riot police escorted them off the grounds.

Interesting reactions - the Parthenon has such a religious character in contemporary Greek identity that even some Communists are uncomfortable with the gesture. Happily, no tourists were interfered with. The AP has a short video with more on the context of the protests, with lots of loving closeups of booze, cigarettes, and gasoline!