Nice remark from Jack (Mitchell) about the Taliban’s art criticism:

I quite agree with these remarks on the Taliban & their Stinger missiles (the instruments of their art criticism, if I recall correctly).

The fact remains, however, that if the Taliban genuinely believed in iconoclasm, and it seems they did believe in it, the one thing they can’t be accused of is not taking Buddhist sculpture seriously. Who is more engaged with a piece of art, the historian who approaches it with an objectivity that amounts to nihilism or the barbarian who smashes it for the thrill of smashing an important object?

I don’t mean this as a Futurist argument for burning the Louvre, but *both* the nihilist and barbarian motives seem (albeit unequally) to miss the mark, the barbarian’s because it’s barbaric and the nihilist’s because it results in an even greater detachment from beauty/reverence/etc. than that of the iconoclast.

The Cantor Arts Center celebration last Staurday [Link] made it to the San Jose Mercury today - [Link]

There are details here of who was involved.

Doug Bailey has finished his study of neolithic figurines from south east Europe - a fascinating treatment that ranges from early farmers to Barbi Dolls - a superb comparative work in visual culture. He presents a much needed correction to Maria Gimbutas’s fantasy treatment. It will be published by Routledge very soon. The way archaeology needs to go.

Here are a couple of its photographs. Wonderful.

A thoughtful piece in the New York Times today by Roberta Smith Critic’s Notebook: Why Attack Art? Its Role Is to Be Helpful (Thanks to Tom Seligman for the link)

In 2001 an international outcry met the Taliban’s destruction of two colossal Buddhas at Bamian in Afghanistan. The Buddhas were nearly 1,500 years old, large and revered. Their cultural importance was beyond dispute, and to most people they were visibly about love, forgiveness and spirituality. The Taliban were increasingly viewed as villains intent upon wiping out all signs of the Buddhist faith and culture in their region. It was a no-brainer.

The outcry isn’t nearly as large when one person, acting alone and often on impulse, damages or destroys a new artwork. But in many ways the violation is the same.

Last Thursday evening Franco de Benetetto, a 42-year-old Italian construction worker, more or less destroyed a temporary public sculpture by the internationally known artist Maurizio Cattelan. The work, unveiled at noon the day before, consisted of three life-size, lifelike sculptures of cherubic barefoot boys hanging by their necks from nooses on a branch of an oak tree in the venerable Piazza XXIV Maggio in Milan …

This vandalism echoed a case in Sweden early this year. While attending an opening at a museum in Stockholm in January, Zvi Mazel, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, damaged an artwork that he felt glorified Palestinian suicide bombers …

Some people are incensed when art appears to make an argument rather than stand in itself as an icon of beauty. But the key archaeological point, implied by the article, is that all artifacts are located within arguments, interests and statements.

They are places to entertain new thoughts and try out opposing viewpoints and to practice tolerance and flexibility. Real life needs all of these things as much as it ever has, if not more.

©CNN [Link] ©Maurizio Cattelan [Link]

Chris (Witmore) made a comment very relevant to this issue the other day on collecting culture [Link]

Here we are straying into what is unique about the archaeological and why it can no longer be subsumed under either anthropology or history. The abililty to articulate connections and links through time irrespective of what came in between and to do so on a deeply intimate and material level brings us closer to Serres’ chaotic notion of time. Traces of the past still connect and have relevance, even though like god moderns some collectors choose to shut the past up behind the glass doors of the cabinet.

Artifacts (past and present, art or mundane, collected or discarded) engage us - another no brainer, I think, to echo the sentiment of the NYT on Bamiyan.

Saturday - a fine afternoon at the Cantor Arts Center, celebrating 50 years of membership (currently at 3500). [Link]

A tent on the lawn by the Rodins and the Oldenberg pink thing (which I far prefer to the Rodins - never mind the lovely chilled sherry and Sam Smith’s in the “Cool Cafe”).

It is an impressive part of Stanford. The current exhibition of modernist pieces - “From Picasso to Thiebaud”, drawn from the Center’s own collections and those of Stanford alumni, is beautifully curated and full of wonderful juxtapositions. Tom Seligman is a phenomenal director.

I talked about a favorite topic of mine - collecting. A celebration of collecting (done right - I made an appropriate attack on the trade in illicit antiquities - see my remarks last year on the looting of the Baghdad Museum [Link]).

© Ron O’Donnell

Main point - collecting things blows history apart and enhances our humanity, not least beacuse we are so bound up with the world of things.

Porte de Clignancourt, Paris 1992

Real collecting that is. When the connections between the things that fascinate the collector take over, when the organization of the collection runs off in all sorts of unexpected directions, when it gets quirky and weird, surreal (the surrealists’ favorite experience of the flea market or of the shopping mall). Dreamwork - traumwerk [Link]

Irony - the passion of collecion subverts all systems of classification, collection itself, because the intimate knowledge of the collector of the things collected overruns all attempts at containing them within a coherent system. When you know your collection, the stories - about it, its origins, the things and their qualities, where they came from and were associated with - the stories proliferate. The stories engendered in collection fascinate. Of course, a true collection is never simply this came first then this then this then this. There is always more to find out and say.

And we are all collectors. Even if we only collect memories.

And this is what museums should be doing - subverting their own collections with a proliferation of different stories. [Link to the importance of stories]

Fabulous piece of writing from Gordon Burn today in the Guardian about a particular, and very familiar, relationship with the past - The ‘English disease’

See also Gordon Burn in my blog entry on murder, the domestic and the uncanny - [Link]

So good I have to quote quite a bit …

Bob Dylan hated nostalgia. Dennis Potter called it dangerous. Yet the charts show that we can’t stop looking back. Gordon Burn wonders whether it’s time we gave up fighting our attachment to the past.

…

Forty years ago, “new” was a word to conjure with, and Dylan was new all the time. This was part of the phenomenon of Bob Dylan. He tried not to be in the same place twice artistically - and to the bewilderment (and frustration, then unbridled rage) of many, he made it work. “I’m not interested in myself as a performer,” he told Playboy in 1966. “It doesn’t matter what kind of audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on the stage is straight. It doesn’t expect any rewards or fines … It’s ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody was looking or not.”

By 1966, he had already rattled the cages of his core supporters by refusing to go on being a neo-Woody Guthrie with whom the civil rights marchers and anti-war protesters could identify. He had stopped singing talking blues and songs about “causes”. He had thrown away his dungarees and denim jacket, and had desecrated the purity and authenticity of folk music by appearing with a rock’n'roll drummer and amplified guitars. The crowd booed and jeered at the Newport folk festival in 1965. He was slow-hand-clapped and called a “sellout” at the Forest Hills Stadium later that summer. And then came the fabled “Albert Hall concert”, which, as the whole world now knows, actually took place at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on May 17 1966.

The resulting album, Live 1966, is possibly the most collected, dissected, analysed, categorised and scrutinised 100 minutes 24 seconds of music ever recorded. Even the heckler who yelled out “Judas!” was tracked down 30 years after the event, and when he died, aged 56, in 2002, he was obituarised by papers across the world: “Keith Butler, rock legend.” Butler said about the gig: “I think what really sent me over the top was when he did those lovely songs - Baby Let Me Follow You Down and One Too Many Mornings. I was emotional, and I think my anger just welled up inside of me.”

But what was it really that Butler and the many members of the audience who cheered and applauded his “Judas!” intervention were so worked up about? Part of the answer is to be found in Dylan’s introduction to the new, electrified version of one of his old acoustic songs: “It used to be like that, and now it goes like this!” Cue Robbie Robertson’s sawtoothed guitar, Garth Hudson’s jabbing Hammond, Dylan’s insolent, taunting harmonica, his belligerent vocal. It is the clearest articulation of a message that has been implicit in all his work since his first dabbling in amplified music on the Bringing It All Back Home album early in 1965: nostalgia sucks.

…

Frederic Jameson’s conclusion (in one of his ruminations on the postmodern present), which is presumably one that would have been shared by Dylan at the time, is that “nostalgia for the present” represents a loss of faith in the future. This loss of faith has produced a culture that can only look backwards and re-examine key moments of its own recent history with a sentimental gloss and a Vaselined lens. Angela McRobbie has summarised Jameson’s position thus: “Society is now incapable of producing serious images, or texts which give people meaning and direction. The gap opened up by this absence is filled instead with cultural bric-a-brac and with old images recycled and reintroduced into circulation as pastiche.” Steps, in other words. Kylie. The retread of Starsky and Hutch. The plague of tribute bands to Abba, Queen, the Beatles and others.

But the truth is, it can get wearisome making everything new all the time. Around the time of The Singing Detective (1986), Dennis Potter, scourge of the sentimentalist reactionaries, admitted that there is a place for nostalgia as long as nostalgia is firmly kept in its place. “You can almost lick them, they are so sweet,” Potter said of the 1930s records that his characters mime to in the series, “and yet they have this tremendous evocative power, a power which is much more than nostalgia. Nostalgia is a second-order emotion. A nostalgiac looks at the past and keeps it there - ‘Oh those dear dead days.’ Which is what is dangerous about nostalgia. And what makes it a very English disease. I use the immediate past to intrude upon the present. If you don’t have an alert awareness of the past, then what you’re actually doing is being complicit with the orthodoxy of the present - totally.”

At a stroke, though, Apple iTunes, the jukebox software that allows you to build a selection of tunes for your iPod, has changed all that. The random shuffle option short-circuits the tendency to listen only to what you already know. In this way I suddenly discovered the Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs after owning the three-album box set for years. Also Bonnie “Prince” Billy. The Smiths (!). Smog. Yo La Tengo. Ms Dynamite. Four Tet. Jim O’Rourke. Each one a reminder that the past is not dead, as William Faulkner once put it; it is not even past.

There is proof of this every Saturday morning on Radio 2, when a voice from my childhood can be heard introducing the same records in the same way he introduced them more than 40 years ago. The only difference now is that the Searchers and Rory Storm and Jefferson Airplane are being played as requests for silver weddings and “grandad’s birthday”.

Brian Matthew’s voice, still occasionally to be heard “joshing” with the lovable mop-tops in what it is tempting to see as a safer, simpler time, is the main vehicle for this journey down a tunnel into the past. Every Saturday at 10, I have to be there for the sign-off. “This is your old mate Brian Matthew saying that’s your lot for this week, seeeeee you next week!” It takes you back even if you were never there originally.

Sha Xin Wei visited our New Media group (Mellon funding) yesterday - Wednesday.

He is an old friend of many of the group - did his PhD at Stanford. Is now a part of the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech.

He was talking about his work on “responsive media”. Particularly with the performance group tgarden.

Begin with a gesture. Gather information about the gesture using sensors (motion detectors, accelerometers, whatever) acting on the bodies of the performers. Filter and transform this information concurrently with the gesture and feed it back to performer as sound and visual patterning (synthesised sound, projected imagery). To which they respond with further gesture.

People jump around a dance floor to music, reacting to the grids projected on the floor and computed from sensors taped to their bodies. And they are wearing strange garments that constrict and direct movement.

You are looking at a video camera. The video screen, monitoring what the video sees, shows your arm melt into red vapor as you wave.

It is the Photohop paradigm. Treat the source (it is an image of course in Photoshop) abstractly as information (ignore any mimetic function, that it may “represent” something). Perform operations upon the image (computation, “filters”). View the result as a representation, an image carrying meaning and significance.

But what is the mode of signification in the photoshopped images? It is that quandry of trust I mentioned last week in connection with faked pictures from Iraq. [Link] Raised are all sorts of questions about representation and authenticity (in the digital image who or what is the witness of that which is depicted).

I liked so much of this.

Neosemy - how new signifying gestures might be produced. People conspicuously play in these set-ups, playing around in order to manipulate the feedback of sound and vision. Exploring how they affect things - and get a response. Gesture - that which evokes response. This is a phenomenology of learning. No words. Pre-expressive creativity.

Material synaesthesia - gesture becomes sound, becomes texture, becomes image.

The refusal of a mimetic understanding of gesture - that it signifies something, in analogy with some kind of language or grammar.

A primary focus on (abstract) materiality (the gestures and the feedback of images, sounds, altered environments), rather than signifying systems.

That this materiality forms a continuous field that is only secondarily interpreted (individuated) as discrete gestures, individuals in a room jumping among sounds and colors.

And this is “play”, “experiment”, and almost pre-expressive, as I said.

In theatre/archaeology, my project with Mike Pearson (book 2001 from Routledge), we tried to tackle some related fields.

Mike Pearson and Peter Brˆtzmann [Link]

We asked - what comes after an event (of performance, whatever)? This was our generic way of posing the question - how do you document a piece of performance art? Especially when there is no dramatic text that might be taken as the origin of the performance. The archaeologists faces the analogous question of what comes after the past has happened, or, more specifically, how you archaeologically document the past, in the absence of textual sources. Mike and I share with Xin Wei a refusal to treat this as primarily a problem of representation. We refuse to treat the remains of the past as somehow a representation of the past, or its expression (I aclled it the expressive fallacy” in my book Art and the early Greek State). Performance refuses reduction to any single signifying system. Videoing a performance just raises questions of viewpoint and all the qualities of the medium, before you see through to what it purports to represent. At best such media only evoke what some think they represent. When revisiting the performances of his early career Mike would point to the scar on his forehead and tell the story of his bad knee, sharing memories with members of the audience who had been witness thirty years ago. As Schechner says of performance somewhere, there is only ever re-performance. Reiteration.

So too the (material/archaeological) past refuses reduction to any signifying system. There is only ever reiteration and remediation, circling around the remains of the past, reworking the remains into new presents. We cannot say what the past was.

Corollary. We think archaeologists dig up ancient sites and artifacts. These are but secondary crystallizations of the flows of sediment, decay and ruin that is the past, in the dispersal of what the past never was. A life becomes shattered vessel on a floor that becomes silt, a home that becomes rubble that becomes sand, a mirror that is passed on as cherished heirloom.

Corollary. There are no origins, of humanity, of agriculture, of cities and civilization, of the state, of the west or of Europe, of modernity. Only genealogies, tracks back and back through generation after generation of reiteration after reiteration.

A new take on our Classical heritage from The Yes Men.

Louise, Mike, and Andy decide to attend the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting at the Renaissance hotel in Chicago, April 29-30, 2004.

Heritage is the biggest free-market think tank - in fact the biggest think tank period - in Washington. It has a budget of $25 million and provides “talking points” to conservative Congressmen who don’t have time to do their own research. Heritage is a kind of “grey eminence” behind Congress, and very actively helps direct U.S. politics.

And what a bunch of radicals these folks are! Like the rare ultra-anarchist, they basically want to “smash the state” - but unlike such anarchists, they’re rich, not so rare, and succeeding.

Heritage is very up-front about these goals. Paul Krugman and others have pointed out that the goal of the Bush administration seems to be to bankrupt the federal government; the Heritage Foundation indeed announces this vision up front: “Too many conservatives lose hope,” writes Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner. “They doubt that the liberal welfare state can be brought to collapse…. In short, they doubt that The Heritage Foundation’s Vision for America can be achieved.” (By “liberal welfare state” he means Social Security, the Dept. of Education, and so on.)

Thursday, April 29

In order to register (free) for the Heritage conference , we’ve formed a right-wing think tank ($12 for the domain name). We’ve also registered for (free) table space, so when we arrive at the hotel we immediately go looking for an open table to display our wares: a foot-long Roman warship ($30) and some insane “position papers.” We eventually find an empty spot, next to the Cato Institute and not far from a table featuring books like Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death and How Union Bosses Have Hijacked Our Government.

The event teems with 650 smiling, friendly and blandly-dressed people hired by well-endowed think tanks fighting “socialistic” ideas: the Jesse Helms Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Atlas Foundation (based on the books of Ayn Rand), the Society for the Economic Study of Religion (which, a young representative tells us, has determined that Pentecostalism is the best religion for a free market, and so sends missionaries to Africa), and so on.

Guardian UK - Chicago’s Oriental Institute woos Iran with return of ancient tablets

Three hundred ancient clay tablets which helped to provide information on the languages and daily life in the Persian empire 2,500 years ago are on their way back to Iran.

The tablets are being returned by the oriental institute of the University of Chicago, which is trying to re-establish relations with Iranian scholars and archaeological sites.

It says this is the first time lent Iranian artefacts have been returned since the Islamic revolution. Its director, Gil Stein, and several other officials will escort the tablets to Iran this week.

While they are there Dr Stein hopes to negotiate an agreement for new excavation work, joint publications and the training of Iranian students in conserving antiquities.

The tablets would help “establish good faith”, he said.

Tens of thousands of tablets were found in Persepolis, the ancient Persian capital, by Chicago archaeologists in 1933. They vary in size from a dishtowel to a packet of chewing gum and in colour from peachy beige to reddish brown.

The close relationship between the institute and Iran ended with the revolution in 1979, when the US broke off diplomatic relations.

The university had to get permission to return the tablets from the office of foreign assets control in the US treasury. The treasury could not confirm that this was the first return of Iranian artifacts.

I recall lunching at Harvard Faculty Club late in 1992. At the next table several distinguished members of the Peabody Museum were entertaining a party of archaeologists from what had been, until 1989, one of the southern states of the Soviet Union. The conversation was quite candid - how much Harvard was willing to pay to excavate one of the early neolithic sites to the north of Mesopotamia and considered to be of key importance in understanding the origins of agriculture.

All in the service of archaeological science.

Beltane at Butser Ancient Farm, UK

It is May 1 - Beltane.

Beltain is the spring festival of the Celtic religion and, like other major Celtic events, was a fire festival: the ‘good fire’ was burnt for purification, for healing, for light, for growth. According to Caesar, the Iron Age Britons would construct huge wicker containers in human form which were filled with men and animals, and then set alight as a sacrifice.

What we produce this evening is not a religious ceremony, nor does it have any significance apart from being a piece of theatre. Elements of the evening might bear some resemblance to Beltain as it was celebrated 2,000 years ago.

The evening starts at 6.30pm with an entertainment at 7pm. The Wicker Man will be fired at 8pm-ish. There will be a licensed bar and refreshments will be on sale. Tickets - £5 per adult, £3 per child - available from Butser Ancient Farm, Nexus House, Gravel Hill, Waterlooville, Hants. PO8 0QE. Please make cheques payable to ‘Butser Ancient Farm’ and include a stamped self-addressed envelope.

I look forward to seeing the pictures. Here is last year.

Wickerman was a classic 1970s cult horror movie - Robin Hardy directed 1973, British Lion Films, recently rereleased as a collectors double DVD - [Link - IMDb]

Police Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward), of the Scottish mainland, receives an anonymous letter from the offshore community of Summerisle, asking him to investigate the disappearance of a young girl there. He travels to the remote isle and discovers a secretive, tightly knit neo-pagan society. Being a devout (and rather self-righteous) Christian, he is shocked by the islanders’ open sexuality and ritualistic devotion to the “old gods.” As the mystery of the missing girl unravels, he begins to suspect that she is a victim of human sacrifice. In the film’s chilling final sequence, the truth is revealed when Sgt. Howie meets the “wicker man.

A theme of deep cultural continuity again - see my recent post on the uncanny.

The movie was filmed at Plockton - a picturesque nineteenth century laird’s village in the west highlands of Scotland - hardly a deep history - but it looks appropriately remote.

Beltane is one of the festivals connected with the vernal and midsummer (summer solstice) equinoxes. Euan Mackie, a senior curator at the Hunterian in Glasgow, now retired, once told me of an excavation of his of a Scottish stone circle (early bronze age date - second millennium BC). He proposed the circle was aligned on astronomical events associated with the equinoxes, and duly found two previously unknown outlying stones used for sighting. More than 3500 years of calendrical continuity.