I'm not sure I entirely understand this one, but here's some pictures of tennis greats re-imagined as terracotta warriors. Above, Nadal. Below, Federer. But which is me, and which is mini-me?!?
Apparently this has been done twice: once for the 2007 Masters Cup in Shanghai, and another round in 2010 for the Rolex Masters Shanghai. The final lineup: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Nikolay Davydenko, Andy Roddick, David Ferrer, Fernando Gonzalez and Richard Gasquet.
Tomb of the McMummies: an exhibit by artist Beneverywhere, featuring a life-sized mummy and other weird stuff made out of McDonalds food. (hat tip to Patrick Crowley for this one!)
SI: Why McDonald's and not, say, In-N-Out? BC: McDonald's is more iconic and has a rich lexicon of
symbols, kind of like hieroglyphs in a way. It could really be about any
fast food place. I personally doubt the food is much different from
place to place. SI: Can you describe the mummy construction process? BC: The food was dried out first, then run through a blender,
mixed with resin, packed into rubber molds that I made beforehand, and
finally the cast pieces were bonded together with more of the mixture
and cleaned up. SI: Where does a person keep this sort of thing -- and what are you planning on doing with it exactly? BC: Right now it's in storage covered with air hoses and
other tools. For now I'm going to display it as part of a larger art
show about McDonald's and Egypt. Eventually though, I'd like to find a
buyer for it -- like Ripley's, Charlie Sheen, or somebody who might
enjoy it.
I’m sure that anywhere between 3,000 BC and 2,000 BC, the
constructors of Stonehenge definitely didn’t envision it as a bouncy
playground for adults and kids alike! This inflatable version of
Stonehenge, entitled Sacrilege, is the vision of British artist
Jeremy Deller. "It's something for people to interact with, it's a big
public sculpture," says Deller. "It is also a way of interacting with
history and archaeology and culture in a wider sense."
The installation, placed in Glasgow Green for the Glasgow
International Festival of Visual Arts, is Deller’s first major public
project in Scotland. The festival website explains, “Visual art happens
all year round in Glasgow but for two weeks every two years, [the
Festival] puts it firmly in the spotlight. From artists’ studios through
to major museums, by way of a vast range of venues new and old, the
Festival is the perfect moment to get to know more about contemporary
art and how and where it takes place in Glasgow.”
It takes just minutes to deflate the bouncy Stonehenge every evening
and re-inflate it every morning, just in time for participants to toss
their shoes aside and climb onto the fun and playful public
installation. Sacrilege will be at Glasgow Green for 18 days of
the festival and then will be shipped off to ultimately arrive in
London for the Olympic Games.
Pigs' ears, smoked udders, veal lungs and other assorted offal tidbits left over from the luncheon are under the scrutiny of a team of French archaeologists working hand-in-hand with anthropologists, art historians and the organiser of the banquet himself.
On April 23, 1983, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, a key figure of post-war European art and inventor of the Eat-Art concept, invited artists, gallery-owners and critics for a lunch-cum-performance where guests buried the remains of the banquet underground.
"My wife didn't eat a thing," said Peter Knapp, a Swiss photographer of 79 celebrated for his work at Elle magazine who was one of the 80 there. "He wanted it to be different and probably hoped people would feel sick just looking at the menu."
This week, with 80-year-old Spoerri looking on, a team of diggers led by prominent French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule excavated part of the artsy site -- "to see what the remains tell us about artistic circles in the 1980s", said Demoule.
The lunch leftovers, or the work now known as "Lunch Under The Grass" -- a play on the famed Manet oil painting "Lunch On The Grass" ("Dejeuner sur l'Herbe) -- were buried in a 40-metre (-yard) long trench in sumptuous gardens south of Paris.
The project reminds me immediately of Chris Tilley's observation that excavation is an artform in itself, where the real drama and excitement are quite separated from the academic data that results. The project has a deep conceptual stratigraphy:
The excavation of the recreation three decades later
The recording of the excavation
Spoerri's work, which deals a lot with mapping the spatial relationship between objects, has a quite archaeological flavor to it, mixed with a playful midcentury dadaism. I love the transformation the concept into radically different media. Excavation is literally treated as an art medium here, I love it. (AFP)
That said, the project also affirms why archaeology is more than just an adventure sport or a pretentious art project:
In the case of the offal banquet, Demoule added, surviving witnesses of the luncheon had totally mistaken where the trench was dug and offered false and often contradictory information on the event.
"Archaeological techniques and scientific methods have set the wrongs right," Demoule said. "Historians will often rely solely on written testimony but archaeology can confirm or add to existing information."
There's an interesting philosophical question in there, something like 'does the way you remember an experience mean more than the precise facts?' A rhetorical question, of course - WHY memory differs from what happened is what's really interesting. Archaeology is our only way to ground-truth history: we need it to answer questions about how we remember as people and as societies.
(AFP)
The project will be ongoing: they only excavated part of the meal, and reburied it after excavation so that the site could be revisited in future decades with different technology.
Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press reports a multilayered story that says a lot about the contemporary attitude to art and, indirectly, heritage (h/t to Jon DeVore for the tip!). British street artist Banksy has been on an American tour, doing pieces here in there. (One suspects there's a tie-in to the new documentary about his work, now showing in the US.) He stopped at the Packard factory in Detroit, a huge, sprawling, abandoned car factory with a romantic, run down air that's a ton of fun to wander around in if you have any love at all for ruins. Yours truly at the plant last year. Somehow I picked up a case of poison ivy!
So Banksy left this piece on his visit to Packard. I like his work but I don't think this is one of his best I think this one is weak as hell (it feels a little oversentimental to me, and a little bit mistimed since trees are in fact growing everywhere inside the factory, and parts of the city itself are reverting to forest): (Jason H. Matthews/Detroit Free Press)
The interesting bit is not the piece but what happened next, and what it says about attitudes to art and heritage. The owners of the 555 Gallery, a notprofit gallery and studio space, took it on themselves to "save" the work and take it to their gallery. Check it out:
Naturally, the act was controversial, a sort of 'privatization' of public art. It's also a classic case of starf•cking in a city full of great graffiti art. (I have this image of the 555 guys muttering 'the precious, the precious' as they scurry toward West Vernor with their new treasure.) At the end of the article there's a shocking quote that made me want to laugh and cry at the same time:
Staff member Eric Froh said that while the painting’s meaning has shifted outside of the Packard plant, it retains an expressive power akin to Renaissance religious artifacts or antiquities uncovered by archeologists and now seen in museums. He also noted that the controversy has already become part of its accumulated meaning.“The work can now live on for many years,” said Froh.
I was really flabbergasted by this statement, and it's taken me a week to sort out what I think it means. First the laughable part: people need to stop kissing Banksy’s ass with such slobbery abandon. I like his work, much of it is at a very high level and achieves poetry - but it’s the first sign of irrelevance as an artist when you stop being controversial and start being revered. The beauty of his work comes from its engagement with a urban space and the things going on in it. It's intended to be temporary and site-specific. Putting Banksy in a gallery destroys much of the point, or rather transforms it into something totally different. (Click here for the full irony of putting Banksy in a gallery setting.) I think the 555 guys' choice to take the piece demonstrates either that they really have no idea what his art is about, or that they care more about owning a relic than an artwork.
Which brings us to an important question: is Banksy's work holy? In archaeology, as in art, there is a great battle between two ways of understanding, two epistemologies if you will. On the one hand, there’s the idea that art is part of society and serves a social function, that it fits into your daily life. Then there’s the idea that art or artifacts express Universal Truth, which is basically saying that Art is God. (After modernism, I suppose, that was all the religion one was allowed to feel.)
For archaeologists, old stuff is interesting because it gives us a window into everyday experiences of people in the past and how the human world once was. Most of us would rather not find gold, which is just a distraction. Everyone’s happy to find an attractive artifact, of course, but the meaning of archaeological artifacts is in their context and their relationship to each other. Taking them out of that context takes away almost all of their meaning except whatever 'prettiness' something has. This is why it’s such a tragedy when people buy looted artifacts – no one begrudges people for wanting to touch the past, but the whole process of looting robs us all of knowledge that could add so much richness to our understanding. Hey Banksy - all this IS trees, bro. Come back in the 20th century.
A lot of collectors justify buying looted artifacts by saying that they have a kind of eternal truth of their own, or represent some cosmic aesthetic ideal. It's basically a religious attitude. And it’s that religious attitude to art in itself is something I’ve never understood, and makes it hard for me to take museums seriously sometimes. The things that David Froh of 555 parallels to the Banksy piece - archaeological artifacts or renaissance Jesus paintings - were created to serve a social purpose, not to be contemplated as aesthetic icons in themselves. A Greek vase without the context of funerary customs or the symposium might be pretty but bores me to tears. And a Christian icon without religious feeling is nonsense, even blasphemy. Maybe you want a bloody Christ on the wall if you're into the aesthetics of torture or something, but I think mostly it's just pretentiousness - unless you really understand it in a spiritual sense.
I feel like, if you want a religious feeling, you should get a religion. What can you even say about people who are too ‘sophisticated’ or ‘postmodern’ for a religious practice, but then go looking for spiritual fulfillment and eternal truth in abstract paintings, performance art, or Banksy pieces? I'm not saying one has to be religious, but I wish people would be self-aware about the spiritual impulse that is common to almost everyone, and direct it accordingly.
Unfortunately the rhetoric of ‘preservation’ and 'conservation' of artworks or artifacts leans pretty heavily on religious-emotional arguments. Which makes it hard to make obvious observations, like: not every archaeological artifact needs to be in a museum. Not all art is worth saving. Not everything old can or should be preserved. For all its wonderful aspects, the preservation impulse also has the aroma of fear hanging around it - the fear of death. In a western society which has only the most vague and ephemeral expectations for the afterlife, preserving the past seems like a way to hold on to the present and not let it slip away.
But trying to save everything can become a pathology that keeps us from engaging with our lives right now. And an ephemeral work in an ephemeral media, put intentionally on a structure that so eloquently expresses the ephemerality of an industrial empire that once seemed permanent? Trying to save such a thing verges on the pathetic.
Endnote: This rant is more or less friendly - I was a patron of 555 in its Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Detroit locations. I've had fun there, and I appreciate the hard work that has gone into keeping the space alive in an extremely rough economic and artistic climate.
‘Building Rome in a Day’ was part of the New Museum's ‘The Generational: Younger than Jesus’ exhibition in spring 2009. The exhibit, conceived and organized by LA-based artist Liz Glynn, had groups of volunteers constructing and destroy the city of Rome, tracing its architectural history from its founding by Romulus in 753 BC to Alaric’s conquest of the city in 410 CE. NYT has the time-lapse video here.Liz was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about the project back in April. (That’s forever in blog time, but no time at all in archaeology, so it averages out!)
Dan: For starters: how did the 'Building Rome in a Day' project come about?
Liz: I was making a lot of works based on language at the time, and I tend to have a lot of fragmentary but iconic bits of text bouncing around in my head at any given time. I was also working with ideas of utopia. But whenever I was working directly with utopia, all anyone wanted to talk about was futility. but I wanted to talk about possibility, and what can be done. So I decided "building Rome in a day" was a good way to refute the idea of the insurmountable challenge.
Dan: I love puns and contradictions, so the idea of refuting a proverb (“Rome was not built in a day”) tickles me. It's wonderfully contrarian.
Liz: Yes. I like things that are little blunt, verging on stupid. But so stupid, you've got to try them.
Dan: It’s interesting that you mention optimism. the project has a very modernist feel to it somehow – that technological optimist attitude - the sense of 'we can do it!', no matter how absurd or ambitious the project.
Liz: hmmm... there's a sense of that, but then there's also the destructive aspects of the closing [of the exhibit, where the city is destroyed], which I think people in the high modern era were in denial about. I think the rise of modern technology was a little blind perhaps.
Dan: So is it more a rejection of that postmodern cynicism that you're aiming for? A post-postmodernism?
Liz: I don't know if I’d classify it relative to the modern/postmodern dichotomy; it's more of a reaction against the post-60s-apathy. I think a lot of people in our generation are bewildered by the complexity of the problems facing them. Part of the Rome piece is reducing the scale to make an enormous, complex thing accessible in a hands-on way.
Dan: On that note, I want to detour into some of the practical stuff for a moment. My readers are going to want to know some of the nerdy details, like, what did you do about the hills? Is everything in scale? What were your sources? Did you really make it from Romulus to Alaric in 24 hours?
Liz: We started with the 7 hills stenciled (just their names) on the cardboard. We don't have much in the way of topography, however, simply as a practical matter. The scale is relative to the buildings already built. We began with the hut of Romulus, and I think the last building is St. John Lateran. But very little is built near the end. And yes, we covered 753BC to 410AD, about 1.238 years per minute. The Hut of Romulus (Zack Sultan, via Archaeology Magazine)
Dan: You used cardboard and plastic – not your usual archaeological materials. I love the aesthetic contradiction of representing these 'eternal' monuments in ephemeral, disposable, very modern media.
Liz: Ah, all of the materials are recycled from the museum's waste stream - nothing comes from nothing. We use cardboard as an analog for brick, and wood for marble (we switch when we hit the era of Augustus).
Dan: Nice!
Liz: Yes, even marble was "recycled" or at least refashioned in ancient Rome. There's a great bust in the Getty Villa that used to be one emperor, and now is another carved from his unpopular predecessor’s head!
Dan: It's true - the great irony of archaeological conservation was that the ancient practice was to recycle building materials.
Liz: Yes. Our idea of the eternal monument is very much a modern construct. In the case of Rome, there was a point in the nineteenth century when they decided what ruins were iconic enough to preserve, and leveled everything else to build apartments.
Dan: How literally did you reenact things like fires and invasions?
Liz: The big invasions - the Gauls and the Visigoths - are musical. Dan Friel, of the band Parts and Labor, played the Gauls, and those present acted out a vicious battle scene. Shahzad Ismaily played an accompaniment to the Visigoth destruction. As for the fires... for the version I did in LA, we used small fireworks and matches, with lots of water handy. For the New York version, at one point we brought a building outside and burnt it on the Bowery (which was not necessarily sanctioned). But otherwise, we dumped red paint on it, improvised, stomped, and then, restored! We used lots of white paint.
Dan: Got a favorite moment from the day?
Liz: The morning was lovely, when Joshua Beckman was reading from Catullus and Edgar Saltus around the era of Caesar, and a number of people were getting into some great buildings - including Nero's Golden House, my personal favorite. Also, it was nice gathering with everyone who had been working on the piece and deciding to become the Visigoths. There were all these people swarming outside for the opening, but we huddled together, tried to decide how it would work, then took to the perimeter, and went for it.
Dan: Roman history is usually taught in such a lopsided way, so it must have been interesting to have all centuries get equal time. Any unexpected results from that?
Liz: I think it's interesting to see how little gets built during the Republican era. In fact, most of the buildings that are instantly recognizable came out of periods that were less democratic than those that we idealize the Romans for. It was, in fact, the overly ambitious and somewhat corrupt emperors who produced great buildings. (Perhaps Trajan is an exception, but anyhow…)
Dan: Did you find Augustus' conceit about 'finding brick and leaving marble' to be true?
Liz: Well, yes. The era of Augustus is CRAZY, because so much is meant to be built, and we really can't keep up. But I wonder if he was just better at documenting, or prominently dedicating, all of the buildings. We also have the Res Gestae to thank.
Dan: I was meaning to ask about that. How did you deal with the unevenness in the archaeological record? Is this a picture of Rome as it was, or Rome as it was recorded?
Liz: Well, we work from what is documented, or at least, what is left. So, with the archaic material, there is a lot of improvisation – as in "there are 27 sacrificial altars, but we don't know what they looked like". Or in some cases, we have images, like the early drawings of the temple of Jupiter, which are merely a few lines on paper. In other cases, we don't have a drawing, just a mention in the topographical dictionary. One starts to think differently about the authority of these drawings after trying to recreate them in three dimensions.
The Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Photo Litdrift)
Dan: To return to some of the conceptual aspects: I thought it was interesting that you bill yourself as the ‘organizer’ rather than the ‘artist’.
Liz: I’m an instigator, but the piece doesn't exist without a lot of helping hands. The funny thing is, a lot of work is like that, but it's not usually acknowledged. I’m sort of at the mercy of the participants in a sense.... I couldn't do it without them. At any given point in the room, if someone asks a question, it's likely I can answer it, but usually someone else can answer it better. The span of knowledge tends to be striking. Some volunteers are great builders, others have lots of history, some have favorite emperors, and some are just super creative and crafty.
Dan: How many people showed up? And how well did they work together?
Liz: I think about 100. They were great; some made new friends, other kept to themselves. I have an old friend who is very charming, and she was there in the middle of the night and really kept the energy up.
Liz: Of course! And a delicious feast around noon. A roast, lots of fruit and grapes, and slightly anachronistic champagne gelatin.
Dan: ‘Coalition of the willing’is my favorite phrase to come out of the Bush years, so I love that you describe your assistants/volunteers that way.
Liz: Ah yes, going to Bush. I had this huge frustration after the flood in New Orleans (another inspiration for the piece), where I felt like everyone wanted to help so much. If they had organized all Americans taking a week off work and volunteering to build or clean up - instead of subcontracting it all - we would be much better off.
Dan: Part of the tragedy there was the squandering of good will, which could have been productive.
Liz: I never discount willingness. I’m kind of creature of faith, not in the religious sense, but as a believer in human good will.
Dan: For your volunteers, what was behind their willingness? did they get the experience they expected?
Liz: I can't speak to everyone's motivation, and I do think they vary a bit. Generally, people seemed to enjoy it, and I think once people are building, they get pretty wrapped in. A number of those from the middle of the night returned to check in the next day.
Dan: It's a nice change from a lot of people's experience of archaeology, which is very passive - watching television, reading interpretative signs. I see people craving a more immersive experience of the past.
Liz: Yes, a lot of the participants who have been involved with academia, including a woman who has a comparative literature PhD on the Sabines, said similar things. It comes much more out of the pleasure of getting one’s hands dirty, and figuring things out in a hands-on way.
Dan: I’m struck by how the view of Rome that you created is something that would have been impossible for the ancients themselves to perceive or construct. how does that affect the meaning of the project?
Liz: I’m not sure if affects the meaning, but I do think it's interesting; hindsight is 20/20, and we can never really get a birds eye view on anything while we're in medias res, so to speak.
Dan: So how much of this project is about ancient Rome itself, and how much of it is about how we see Rome today?
Liz: I think it's more about Rome, actually, but as a metaphor for our contemporary empire. The parallels only become apparent after digging in and looking at the historical trajectory through the built environment. These parallels, by the way, are quite eerie.
Dan: Which ones were most striking to you?
Liz: The proximity of the flowering of the empire to the decline. How long it took for the empire rise, and how quickly, and precipitously it fell... I mean, look at Italy today. Their attitude about art is very telling: "all of the great work has already been made". But for me, there is so much left to do.
Dan: now I have to ask you what 'great work' means to you! Or what the great tasks are.
Liz: There's a Thomas Hirschorn quote I like, which is "Down with quality - only energy counts." It's not true across the board, but I think it's a good place to start.
I can't get this painting out of my head. It is saying something important. I mean it. Go to the Flickr page and look at it for as long as you can.
Many of the contents of Neverland Ranch were put up for auction in February, then returned to Michael. (The photo is from Paul Scheer's great photoset of the auction, via Boing Boing.) It seems clear, though, that Michael won't return to his ranch. As my friend Sean observed, Neverland should have been preserved like Graceland, a shrine to a great American and his legend. It's a tragedy for all of us that it's being disassembled and sold off, whether by Michael or someone else.
It is, really, some kind of achievement. It is the bad painting to end all bad paintings — and I want it. Thus it is one of the most American things I have ever seen. It is beyond description. It should be turned into a poster and given for free to every household. It speaks for itself.
He's right. This painting contains important lessons about the meaning of fame, the uses of history, and the way we can only read the past through the lens of the present. It is the most totally honest work of art I've seen in a long time.
The shades and the gloves: Mona, George, Albert, Abe and E.T. all pay homage to the man that has eclipsed them. They look GOOD in the gloves and shades, too. You can see it as a conceit, but honestly? Michael Jackson has affected more lives than any of them did. Billions of people know his music. He lives inside my mind, and your mind, and everyone's mind, and has made us feel it and shake it and beat it. At his white-glove peak, he was more important than the other five put together. He may still be.
The painting states something obvious and true: that Michael has entered history, and colored all of American culture with his music. The mind that takes in the Mona Lisa is also a mind that is hardwired with the bassline of 'Smooth Criminal'. We can never again understand them separately.
This is not simply because Michael Jackson is great (he is), but because as time passes, it changes how we are able to perceive it. Each historical moment has its mix of ideas, sounds, colors, concepts, and feelings through which we see the past. The past doesn't exist outside of the lens we see it through. Michael came crashing like a tsunami into popular culture and changed the shape of the lens. He bends light.
Michael understands that he is a transcendant figure. He doesn't do humble. He knows he has mythical powers and historical importance, and lives accordingly. He transformed himself into a white man. In Neverland, he created his own realm where he was benevolent king. He wants to be remembered for his mythical essence: a kindly god of music, a Dionysus stripped of his wildness, a patron saint of children. Michael tried to literally live insidethis myth of himself. This painting, and all the other weird stuff in Neverland, are reflections of fact. Michael has tried to live as an historical figure, as a mythical man, while he was still alive.
People treat this as comedy, but it is his tragic flaw. If Michael was dead, we could write his hagiography, and translate the inconvenient truths of his mortal life into the safety of myth. He could be what he is - larger than life, a musical genius, a towering figure of American culture - without his human struggles getting in the way.
Michael sees himself very clearly. But sometimes self-knowledge is a route to destruction. For some reason he reminds me of Aeschylus' Cassandra: she has the gift of prophecy, and uses it to warn those around her of what is to come. But it doesn't change anything. For being true to herself and her supernatural gifts, she is rewarded with mockery, suffering, and death. Like Cassandra, Michael understands the transcendent parts of himself, and has tried to live them out, only to be met with hatred, mockery, and disgust.
What Aeschylus shows us - and what Michael doesn't understand - is that having the gods among us only makes life worse for the living. When the supernatural takes mortal form we instinctively see it as something destructive. This is why we demand celebrity gossip: we need to know that the people who control our psyches are even worse fuckups than we are. In other words, they have to remain human and fallible and fragile. If they refuse, they have to be destroyed.
The painting remains great. While Michael is alive, it will be seen as a work of high camp, outrageous hubris, amazing comedy. When he dies, and takes his place with Elvis in the pantheon of departed heroes, the reception of this painting will change. It will be seen for what it is: an honest and prescient assessment of his influence on American life.
Archaeopop is a blog by Daniel Shoup about archaeology and popular culture. I like the strange ways the past gets recycled into the present as art, economics, politics, and straight-up trash. I'm a researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy. Follow me on Twitter (@archaeopop) or get in touch at archaeopop@gmail.com.
