Life Squared [link], our installation in the online world Second Life, is currently part of the exhibition The Art of Participation 1950 - Now at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Life Squared - [web link] and [gallery].

More links - Linden Lab/Second Life and Wired magazine

The exhibition, curated by Rudolf Frieling, is a bold and inspiring collection of works of conceptual, performance and media arts. It tracks the theme of participation in contemporary art.

(Conventional artwork - on a wall in a gallery, to be contemplated. Interactive art - the museum visitor presses a button and something happens to the artwork. Participatory art - the involvement of the visitor/viewer/audience/witness is a key component of the work of the artist).

There is a catalogue from Thames and Hudson to accompany the show - good essays from Rudolf and Lev Manovich - [Link to Amazon]

Interview with Rudolf - [Link]

John Cage’s notorious 4′33″ - the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds and plays no notes. This is not about silence, but about musical interval and ambient noise that actually constitutes music - the gaps between the notes and the environmental noise against which a conventional musical composition stands out. 4′33″ directed the audience’s attention to the figure-ground relationships at the heart of music. (See my evolving notes on “figure and ground” - [Link])

Other notable works for me in the exhibition include Janet Cardiff’s “Telephone Call” - an immersive itinerary through the museum taken by a visitor with a camcorder prepared by Cardiff - literally a soundtrack, together with screened imagery, on the viewfinder. The visitor experiences the mismatch between what is before them and what is represented to them in the staging of Janet Cardiff’s absence from the walk she makes with them round SFMOMA.

Ant Farm - a series of related works from 1971 - “Media Van” 1971 - nomadic truckitecture as Ant Farm made their way across the US in a Chevy van, staging lectures and events along the way; “Citizens Time Capsule” 1975-2000 - burying a 1968 Oldsmobile Vistacruiser with a collection of community-donated artifacts in up-state New York; culminating now in “Ant Farm Media Van v.08″ - a 1972 Chevy C10 van converted again into a time capsule, this time containing analog and digital media, some from the original 1971 roadtrip, others, in the form of digital photos and music, donated by museum visitors to SFMOMA.

Rejecting a naturalistic aesthetic - extruding 3D from 2D (old photographs)

“Life Squared”, our work with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a major contemporary artist working in the Bay Area, is an installation in the online world Second Life. We have regenerated a work of hers in the Dante Hotel, San Francisco, 1972 on the basis of the records of the work, what remains of it and its locale. This is a project in what Henry Lowood and I call “Archive 3.0 - animating the archive”. Henry is a curator in Stanford Libraries and one of the world’s leading experts on new gaming technologies.

For me, it had started back in 2004 with the Presence Project. Lynn Hershman is one of the artists working with the project to explore and research liveness and mediation, presence and absence in new media and the arts. Lynn’s work, as part of a distinctive current in contemporary art, has been a consistent address to questions of how our identities and senses of self are so dispersed in our prosthetic world through all sorts of material forms and mediations: clothes, lifestyles, financial and legal information, imagery, medical history, personal memory …

From Henry I found out that Stanford had acquired 90 odd boxes of her archive: papers, photos, videos, reviews. Lynn didn’t want it all to sit in the Special Collections in the library and molder. She did indeed want to animate her archive.

This was music to my ears. And so began the project Life Squared, an archaeology of a work of Lynn’s — the installation made with Eleanor Coppola in a room in the Dante Hotel. In 2006 our team from Stanford Humanities Lab reworked the fragmentary remains of this event, experience, and performance as a facility and encounter in the online world Second Life.

Key members, other than Lynn and the SHL leadership, were Jeff Aldrich, Henrik Bennetsen, and Henry Segerman.

I said Lynn’s aspiration to animate her archive was music to my ears. Precisely because I am an archaeologist, fascinated by what’s left of the past, its presence with us now, and what we do with it. An aside: many think that archaeologists discover the past. They don’t. They work on what remains. Archaeology is another kind of memory practice, where past is turned into present. We are all archaeologists now - [Link].

One site where such work happens is the museum or archive. With Henry, I see us moving into a new archival era. Because we live in Silicon Valley, we thought this should be called Archive 3.0 - [Link].

Archive 3.0 — new prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of archival resources – the animated archive.

What is involved in bringing archives alive? What are signs of this shift?

Remix, rich engagement, co-creative regeneration

These signs are there in in the reterritorialization of information resources associated with a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 initiatives like Wikipedia and Flickr, with new institutional efforts of libraries and museums to diversify and reach out to users with vast information resources and intelligent customizable search facilities like Google Books. Clear in the vast and growing heritage industry of museums and sites for us to visit is a reemphasis on personal affective engagement with cultural memory. There is a recognition of the importance of developing rich modes of engagement with archival, historical and cultural resources. New interfaces involve processes of recollection, regeneration, reworking, remixing in sophisticated visualizations and customized interactive and participatory experiences. We visit Colonial Williamsburg or Jorvik Viking Center in the UK and the past speaks to us.

The Life Squared project, to animate part of the Hershman archive in the online world Second Life, is an address to the question of the future of the library and museum in the context associated with Archive 3.0 — when collections are no longer primarily of books on shelves, paintings on walls, objects in vitrines, but include immaterial forms, intangible experiences, mixed analog and digital forms. When collections are dynamically sensitive to the interests of audience, viewers, those engage with art works, and when curation becomes co-creation of new works through remixing of the components of collections and archives as they are given over to much more open access.

Avatar radars - tracking their movements and interactions

Life Squared has been a very rewarding experience, working with Lynn, truly collaborative, participatory - have a look at the documentation in our wiki and blog - [link].

See also various talks and links - [menu]

SFMOMA is changing its agenda, or rather augmenting the primary focus upon its collections Accompanying the exhibition is the inauguration of “D-Space” - a new facility in the museum and a program to reach out to the community. Dominic Willsdon has joined from Tate Modern, London, where he pioneered outreach through institutional alliances, between museums and cognate institutions, to share art-work, the work of cultural production associated with the world of the artist, art collector and museum. Dominic has precipitated an experiment involving SFMOMA, Stanford University and California College of the Arts (CCA) — developing a hybrid learning experience in the arts. It started with the idea of a kind of “summer school” for a diverse and permeable student and community group working with artists in and beyond the space of the museum. This term, Fall 2008, Peggy Phelan of Stanford and Brian Conley of CCA have been sharing a class between their institutions and devoted to the ways artists have treated their work as an educational or pedagogical project (think of Joseph Beuys’s political agenda).

With Jeffrey Schnapp , my co-director of Stanford Humanities Lab, I have outlined how such initiatives can be part of a radically new practice-oriented curriculum for arts and humanities education in the North American university. We started with our experience of practice/project/performance based research and teaching in Stanford Humanities Lab and my own Metamedia Lab in Stanford Archaeology Center.

Link - Artereality - rethinking art as craft in a knowledge economy

In the broadest way I see all this as a shift from a primarily custodial model for the art museum to a coproductive or cocreative model of designing and making culture. Conventionally, artworks are to be cherished and curated, their qualities and achievement to be broadcast in art museums, colleges and universities.

But we are also increasingly witnessing the vitality and power of popular participation and cultural creation, enabled by information technology, its ubiquity and low cost. All those videos on YouTube, all the blogs worldwide, all the self-publishing on the web.

Participation and co-creation, user-generated content - and a deep recognition of the creative energies inherent in even the most mundane of everyday experiences.

BUT …

You will have perhaps guessed that something like this was coming …

There is a colossal irony and contradiction at the heart of this exhibition devoted to participation in contemporary art.

Above all else, the exhibition celebrates the names of the artists that are attached to the works on show.

In spite of their essential presence to this exhibition, the other “participants” in this art are quite absent. They are at best the supplement to the artists. Let me explain.

There are no names, other than “artists”. Well, perhaps half a dozen.

There are not even any demographic categories. Who are the “participants”? Are they working class, African-American, middle-class, minority? At best we have “the public”, “people”, “audience”. Yet again, and it wearies me to point it out, we are presented with the crowd, the mass, as material for the artist to manipulate. Robert Atkins, in his essay in the catalog, comes across as an elitist critic sneering at popular “mass” culture, while telling us about participation in the arts (try page 63).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres has us picking up rather unexceptional monochrome posters, beautifully stacked, as our act of participation in his work. Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett, in an award winning artwork, have us bumped off an email list because we are one too many - [Link].

Who does all this enlighten? The catalogue does its utmost to connect Gonzales-Torres to reciprocity (the power of giving - Marcel Mauss’s great idea, though not cited here) and to trauma (Aids). Brucker-Cohen and Bennett are, we are told, reflecting on the dot com crash a few years back.

Do we really have to have this pointed out? Is it convincing? Who benefits from these associations?

We can easily and appropriately appreciate an artist’s critique of the anonymity of contemporary anomie. It might be called consciousness raising. Artists can be good at this kind of thing. Making us look critically at the way we live.

But this exhibition, for me, is so much more for the benefit of “the artists”, or rather their collecting patrons. Why? Because the kudos for dreaming up so-called participatory artwork is awarded entirely to the genius of the artists. They are the ones who dreamed all this up, we are told. There are no other names here, no real people.

The exhibition has the gall to claim that contemporary participatory culture has been anticipated by such a bunch of artists (main website - [Link]).

I am not a geek, but count many among my friends, living, as my family does, in Silicon Valley. It was their gorgeous engineering that brought about the participatory and cocreative web, Web 2.0 — and tied most often to utopian hope and vision.

Such vital hope and vision is NOT present in most of these works. They are much more gestural, incidental, even parasitic upon the work of others. Like Fred Turner, we can indeed trace the fascinating connections between the arts, new technology and libertarian political ideologies. Fred precisely tracks the subtle networks of association. We can indeed connect art and popular creativity and politics. But the connection is not one of inspired artistic geniuses precipitating cultural and political change (see Fred’s superbly nuanced research and beautifully written work on counter-culture and cyber-culture - [Link]).

And just stand back a couple of steps and consider where participation started. Participatory art, Web 2.0 and all the rest we hear so much of today are current manifestations of a long genealogy of participatory creative production stretching back millennia. Palaeolithic cave art and the medieval cathedrals of Europe were all about participation. No, more than this, I hold that it is the everyday actions of ordinary people that reproduce society as we know it, its highest achievements included. Innovation is far more than thinking up new ideas. New ideas are commonplace.

This exhibition seems to say that we need an elite to show and tell us what is actually at the heart of our everyday experience. At the heart of politics. Actually, most of us, who haven’t invested in this hype, don’t need this self-appointed elite.

Just ask - who does it benefit to hold that these are prescient singular individuals, these artists?

I am actually not really criticizing many of the artists, but rather the art world, the discourse, the business, the market, those who buy art for their collections. Have a look at the new edition of Howard Becker’s classic book “Art Worlds” - [Link].

I am a great supporter of contemporary art. I believe that creativity needs to be at the heart of our schools and colleges. Shared, and yes, participatory. I actually have a place in this exhibition. But I am feeling alienated and excluded. I do wonder then about the reaction of those who have no investment in this kind of work.

The art market needs “artists” because they are the supposed source of value — individual genius and creativity manifested in a distinctive body of work that is given significance by the way art historians and critics write the work into the history of art.

So what about those other than the moneyed collectors wishing to enhance the status of the artist in whose individual genius they have invested? I suggest the exhibition is as much a betrayal of the radical libertarian intention of some of the works on show, as it is a celebration of participation in the arts.

The great moneyed and institutional interests of the Italian renaissance reinvented the Graeco-Roman figure of the vates — the inspired artistic genius — the creative individual. The institutionalization of modern art has pursued this elitist individualism with fervor, because it fuels the investment prices of an art market.

Just what has changed since the days of the banking Medicis and the Borgias?

This is my weblog on all things archaeological.

It ran for a couple of years between June 2003 and October 2005. As well as a commentary on items in the archaeological news, it was a way I found to explore aspects of our contemporary archaeological way of thinking - a kind of archaeological sensibility we all share.

It will revive sometime in the future, albeit with different focus, I’m sure.

We are all archaeologists now - working on what remains of the past.

My home page is at michaelshanks.org

Fascinating website of photographs found undeveloped in old cameras - [Link - westfordcomp.com]

Camera c 1947.

(Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)

Press release from the Ministry of Culture in the UK

UK National Museums Get New Powers To Return Human Remains

Nine national UK museums, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, have this week acquired powers to move human remains out of their collections as the Government brought section 47 of the Human Tissue Act 2004 into force.

The nine national museums listed in section 47 now have the power to move out of their collections human remains which are reasonably believed to be under 1,000 years in age. This means that these national museums can respond to claims for the return of human remains by indigenous communities.

Culture Minister David Lammy said:

“This announcement is the right response to the claims of indigenous peoples, particularly in Australia, for the return of ancestral remains. It fulfils the terms of the joint declaration made by Tony Blair and John Howard.

“We have established a fair and equitable framework for the holding of human remains in UK museums, and for museums to consider claims for their repatriation. I hope that this will lead to renewed and mutually beneficial relations between our major institutions and claimant groups.”

The guidelines are sound on ethics and the responsibility owed to human remains.

The 1000 year guideline for when repatriation is supposed to become an issue got me thinking.

Saxon (?) - before the Normans arrived, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11th century

Back at the beginning of my career in 1980 I was an archaeological fieldworker in the NE of England. Our work at the Castle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne revealed for the first time the remains of the Roman fort and a pre-Norman community. I dug, drew and photographed scores of Christian graves. It was a much-used cemetery and many interments had been cut through by later. This was one skull that had lost the rest of its body. The policy was to focus on complete burials, and many fragmentary remains were discarded. I hung on to the remains of the skull and pieced them back together.

The community had been completely lost to history. Though we are very aware of the early medieval north of England, the building of the Norman castle in the wake of conquest had obliterated the earlier community and its church, buried under six feet of clay laid down as foundation.

I have been fascinated by this material trace of someone who was lost to history and has returned to look at us again. I felt I had rescued something, someone who had been lost.

But is it that simple?

In the last twenty years we have become much more sensitive to the associations and connections of human remains and I feel distinctly awkward about having this skull as part of a small teaching collection.

“Part of a collection”, to be taken as a memento of the loss at the heart of history, as a prompt to think of that community wiped away by history; its scientific value as an access to ancient demography, disease, whatever, is minimal. Should I be feeling so guilty about these uses of someone’s mortal remains?

And that it is 1000 years old seems irrelevant.

Abram (Stern) has put me on to the recent Boing Boing link to photos of the rotting Jesusland built by Jim Bakker.

Illicitohio.com spcializes in urban exploration in and around Ohio, photographing abandoned buildings and structures. They have a gallery devoted to “Heritage USA” and the PTL Club - 2000 acres of a Christian evangelist theme park in South Carolina.

Extraordinary.

Heritage USA - Fort Mill South Carolina

Based first in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the PTL Club was one of the most successful ventures in televangelism for much of the 1970s and 1980s. PTL stood for both “Praise The Lord” and “People That Love.” Jim Bakker (b. January 2, 1940) and his wife, Tammy Faye (b. March 7, 1942), used the popular program as a springboard to develop a Pentecostally-oriented resort, theme park, shopping mall, cable network, and entertainment center called Heritage USA in Fort Mill. The complex drew more than five million visitors annually by the mid-1980s.

Bakker, once affiliated with the Assemblies of God, began his career in religious television in 1966 working with Pat Robertson. After leaving Robertson’s employ in 1972, Bakker helped form the Trinity Broadcasting System in California. In January 1974, the PTL Club was launched in Charlotte. The Bakkers combined the traditional talk show format with lively religious entertainment, personal testimonies, and frequent pitches for financial support. Personal religious experience, usually of an emotional nature, was touted as the panacea for all problems.

The Bakker empire endured several run-ins with tax authorities, but when a sex scandal involving Bakker erupted in 1986 and 1987, he resigned in disgrace. Bakker turned over the PTL Club and Heritage USA to Jerry Falwell, who remained at the helm only briefly. Bakker later served a prison term for income tax evasion. His wife divorced him and married one of his associates. Parts of Heritage USA endure, but by the 1990s it had ceased to be a monument to televangelism and evangelical popular culture.

Fore, William F. Television and Religion. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1987.

Frankl, Razelle. Televangelism: The Marketing of Popular Religion. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

White, Cecile Holmes. “Jim and Tammy Bakker.” In Twentieth-Century Shapers of American Popular Religion, edited by Charles H. Lippy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1989.

(Charles H. Lippy)

[Link]

The Fort Mill site was over 2000 acres. To give you an idea of the size, you could fit the original Disneyland, UK’s Blackpoll Pleasure Beach, Six Flags Great America, and Universal Studio’s Florida all inside the grounds together, and still have enough room left over to add Cedar Point, Knott’s Berry Farm, and little old Geauga Lake Ohio… In other words, it’s big.

The size of Heritage was impressive, but the quality of the park was equally noteworthy. This wasn’t a thrown together mess of false facads on cheap little buildings like many parks, but instead, a well built, well planned, well landscaped, and well thought out resort. The quality was Disney like… and this was all done on a very fast paced schedule. The results reflected the time and effort put in to the build, and the attendance numbers were proving it to be worth while!

At one point during the ‘life’ of Heritage, over 6 million people were visiting the park during the year. If I’m not mistaken, a well known park like Cedar Point here in Ohio gets around 3 million. I think Disney gets more like 12 or 15 million, but obviously 6 million is a huge number for an upstart like Heritage.

While I’m only touching on the park’s history, the PTL was actually much much more. Without getting in to everything, there were TV shows, studios, a church, a theater, basically an entire city …

Steve Mithen of Reading University is in the news again about his forthcoming book - another on cognitive archaeology and evolution.

The BBC have picked up on his argument about neanderthals, language and symbolic behavior [Link]

Prof Mithen thinks the cave- dwellers would have enjoyed the rhythms and sounds made by rap artists.

He said: “People often portray Neanderthals as dull and grumpy but they had a strong sense of music.”

Their songs would have covered emotions such as embarrassment and happiness.

More than words

Prof Mithen told the BBC News website: “All people are musical in the sense that they appreciate it in some way. We all respond to it.

“Music and language developed together. The Neanderthals would have had set songs and phrases, which could not be broken down like modern language.

“They would have used singing, clapping and dancing to communicate their state of mind. They didn’t have words.

“In a sense they were more musical than we are.”

Neanderthals would have sounded rather “nasal” in their singing because of their larger noses, Prof Mithen said.

Their get-togethers in caves helped group bonding.

Prof Mithen said: “There would have been a lot of singing together. Music is still used for a bonding groups today. Just look at football crowds, church choirs or kids in the playground.

I love the picture of the neanderthal (looks as if he’s wearing a denim shirt though) :

Neanderthals - they sang their way through history (photo BBC)

Contrast my comment of another account of dumb neanderthals and this fascinating topic of the coevolution of biology and culture - [Link]

The touring exhibition of the wonderful photographs of Edward Burtynsky reaches the Cantor Arts Center today and runs till September 18.

Nickel tailings #30 - Sudbury, Ontario

Like Gursky, [Link] Burtynsky works in large format - the pictures are up to 5 feet across. His subjects are envrionmental impacts. Great holes in the ground like open cast mines and quarries, Wasted landscapes - his series of rivers running blood red polluted with toxic mineral waste is extraordinary. Landfill sites - urban mines as he calls them. Sites of epic industrial spectacle - the beach shipbreakers of Bangladesh, oil refineries.

There is plenty of environmental politics here. As well as simply awesome pictures of huge holes in the ground.

Susan Cameron, Phil Dhingra, Annie Wyman, Erica Simmons, Bill Rathje and myself have started an accompanying web site exploring what we see as the contemporary sublime in Burtynsky’s archaeography - [Link] We are using Mark Roseman’s fabulous software ProjectForum - the same social software that we have enthusiastically adopted in the Metamedia Lab at Stanford.

Burtynsky at Stanford

PS the exhibition ended in September - an archive of the site will be available soon.

Rome

Risonanze Oscure
Dark Resonances

We are at the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre - me, Nick (Kaye) and Gabriella (Giannachi). It is 10pm.

Across the street beneath the temple of Venus we have been looking at flickering images of what look to me like archaeological sediments projected into the foundation arches, behind the protective iron grills.

They are part of a new work by Gary Hill, the Seattle/New York based video and performance artist. It is a work of site specific theatre/archaeology. Gary is one of the artists of our new project - “Performing presence: from the live to the simulated”

Here is my archaeological “reading” of the event.

Location

A ruin - spectacular, yes, but the surface of much of the Colosseum has been stripped away over the centuries - all the seating and the floor of the arena - conspicuously revealing the skeletal sub- structure, the labyrinth of passages for managing crowds, gladiators, victims, the underside of the monument. And, of course, the Colosseum is emblem of all the underside of Rome - crowds, mass media, violence as entertainment, bread and circuses, the barbarism at the heart of imperial civilization.

We find the gate, they look for us on “the list” (there are three), and we get into the Colosseum.

Characters

Rome’s media and arts crowd are here as the audience tonight.
There are performers, sounds, projected images, lights, props. Ghosts - Persephone, Pan, the witch Kirke, invoked in the event. And, of course, the audiences, performers and victims from long ago - neither present nor absent - non-absent.

Episodes

One. Interference and resonance.
Within several of the great supporting arches of the Colosseum have been sited speakers and video projectors. Intermittently, randomly (?), they sound out horns across the auditorium filled with tourists as faint images appear projected up within the brickwork. Ghostly images - we spot an “angel” walking back and forth with a great curved brass horn.

Images almost invisible. Echoes across the ruin. Horns announcing what? That the past is still going on?

Two. Surface sediment.
Outside the Colosseum at the Temple of Venus - flickering indistinct images of what look to me like excavated surfaces, with spoken commentary. Shown in arches beneath a monument that now exists only as an indication of where the columns and walls once stood - traces in the thin grass of early summer.

The indeterminacy of the trace of the past.

Our contact with the past is all about translations - mediations, like these videos of surface sediment - passages forced back and forth. Forced, because the material resists - we have to dig away and work on what is left. And it is all so indeterminate - what was and is going on?

Three. A face in the underworld.
The audience stands on the second tier looking down into the depths of the arena, actually at the passages and voids beneath. It is dark but we can make out activity in the shadows. Something is going on. On the temporary stage that replaces part of the missing floor of the arena there is a dimly lit structure. It looks like a face staring upwards.

Four. Clapping/flapping.
It begins with clapping, or is it a flapping of wings, white noise. It grows louder.

Is this an echo of crowds? Clamoring for bread and entertainment. Nourishment and numbing narcotic (pharmakon).

Five. Dreams of escape.
The first of the videos projected onto the monument - within the arena and up the sides of the auditorium. A contraption. A radio mast? It looks more like one of Leonardo’s flying machines - magical inventions that never flew except in the imagination. A dream of an escape.

Video recordings replayed on these ancient walls - reflexive spaces of difference.

Six. Word magic.
Strings of vowels appear projected up above the arena. They are voiced over and over again on the sound system. More clamoring. And resonance. We can detect no message, except in the performed enunciation, like a magical incantation. Mesmerizing magic - disorienting and misdirecting.

A classical location of dark magic is Kirke’s island at the edge of the known world, its name a palindrome of vowels - Aiaia. Where Odysseus’s men were turned to farm beasts, where he countered the witch’s magic with a drug given to him by Hermes, the god of mediation and interpretation, where he found how to travel to the underworld to speak with the seer Teiresias, to find his way home.

The palindrome comes and goes, works, reads, cuts both ways.

Seven. Goat in a field.
Another projected image. Not a lion or exotic beast. The calmness of country life and farming? Where bread comes from. But the Goat is also Pan - not a divinity but a disrupting force, of chaos, from a time even before the gods. Whose shout brings panic.

Eight. The dis-invented wheel.
A carriage crosses the arena in a transect back to the stage. It is a struggle to get it there because the wheels are triangular.

The carriage carries goddess Persephone on her way from sunshine and agricultural fertility (her mother is Demeter, goddess of harvest) to the world of the dead, in her cyclical return to the underworld and Hades.

Time and the past here are not an arrow of no return, but symmetrically cut both ways.

As Odysseus found out in his search for a nostos (homecoming), the trick is not finding Hades, but getting back - that needs magic.

Nine. A lament.
Voiced over the sound system.

A lament of what is missing - what never happened, but should have done.

Ten. Flights of fantasy.
A model aeroplane flies quietly round the auditorium in the dark, lands on the stage, takes off again. It carries little fairy lights. Then model gliders are launched from above and crash into the audience. No escape, again.

Augury - to read the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Here mechanical inventions of our intellect.

Remember , with Herakleitos, that Apollo, the god whose oracle of the future is at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals the truth, but gives a sign.

Eleven. A ghost among us.
Persephone walks among the audience in a circuit around the auditorium, followed by a video cameraman.

Uncanny ghosts - with the uncanny as the return of the repressed, the return of what is no longer the same.

And a deparate attempt to record the unrecordable - how, on earth, is this all to be documented?

These encounters with the past are new to Gary Hill’s work. And though we are in the world of son-et-lumiere, this is no post-modern pastiche, but a circuit around the awkwardness of presence - a present past, more precisely non-absent.

No attempt is made to reconstruct a past - for what would that be other than superficiality of Hollywood CGI with its stock narratives like “Gladiator”, however spectacular.

There is a deep questioning here of the notion that sites like the Colosseum are somehow “sources”, somehow the origin of what is made of them, font of understanding the past. Instead the site, as a collocation of fragments, acts as a frame, parergon, supplement - an exterior that defines, has effect in its non-absence.

The site resists in its materiality and instead we deal in resonances and a geneaology of echoes and Chinese whispers through time.

Theatre/archaeology

PS I wrote this on the flight back home. Here are Gabriella’s outline and Charles Stein’s diary of the work’s creation.

It has taken me too long to get round to reading Charles Redman’s great book Human Impact on Ancient Environments - Arizona, 1999.

I came to the book because of the upcoming exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, of the photographs of Edward Burtynsky - they foreground massive environmental impacts. [Link]

We need a long term view to fully understand the growing environmental crisis. This requires an archaeological perspective. And the message the book delivers fully justifies a reliance on long-term large-scale archaeological evidence to get the right message about the shape of recent relationships with the environment.

Here are Redman’s main points:

The current environmental crisis is only the latest in what is the pattern of human inhabitation

The main difference today is scale

Virtually all societies have developed practices that degrade the environment

And, here is an awkward point, many native American and south American societies were out of harmony with the environment (the evidence is very clear in the American SW, Maya lowlands and, increasingly in Amazonia) - there was no pre-Columbian eden

We have no evidence of a golden age when people lived harmoniously with nature - no conservationist eden

There never has been a paradise of a truly natural wilderness

Modern society’s technology, lifestyle and politics are only part of the problem

The main issue is the character of human decision making, apparently rational decision making, over the last few thousand years

Rousseau’s noble savage is truly a myth. And the modern world is not a radical break with history. This is a modernist myth of our contemporary uniqueness.

Jared Diamond has covered some of the same arguments in his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Viking, 2004.

But I find Diamond’s archaeology is weak and he relies heavily on contemporary ethnographic and historical examples. Chuck Redman is far more convincing. But look at what Jared Diamond said to the Sierra Club (May/June issue 2005 page 45) (Thanks to Jonathan Greenberg for the reference):

Pat Joseph: Sierra Club Magazine - In “Collapse” you write that the world now finds itself in an “exponentially accelerating horse race” between environmental damage and environmental countermeasures. What gives you the hope that the race may turn out well?

Jared Diamond - Well, the main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia.

Also, we’ve got archaeologists. The Maya didn’t have archaeologists. We have at least the potential to learn from past societies. No other society in the world’s history has had that opportunity.

As I prepare for a month of fieldwork along Hadrian’s Wall in the UK and north into Walter Scott country, never mind the rock art and superbly preserved agricultural landscapes, I came across a new attraction at Alnwick Castle, the fabulous medieval border stronghold owned by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

There’s a 75 million dollar project underway to create a walled garden in the grand style, with massive cascade, labyrinth, 65,000 plants, and now, the biggest treehouse in the world!

Swiss Family Robinson meets Hogwarts

The garden is quite spectacular - I have visited with friends a couple of years ago. It now gets half a million visitors a year. The castle is regularly used as a film location - Harry Potter learned to fly his broomstick in the outer bailey doubling as the grounds of Hogwarts. Fun stuff.

As might be expected the whole Alnwick project is presented as a great thing for local tourism and the economic health of the region. The garden is a charitable trust, patron Prince Charles, and has received significant public subsidy.

The castle itself is presented to the visitor as a family home - photos of the kids alongside Turner’s gorgeous painting of the temple of Aegina.

Canaletto’s Alnwick - before (!) the Gothic remodelling

Am I too grumpy to be very suspicious of all this? Too much a republican for sure - I have an instinctive aversion to the European aristocracy.

Marion Shoard, in her classic book ‘This Land is Our Land’€, targeted criticism against the vast Alnwick estate, Hulne Park, as one of the largest tracts of land in England kept for purely private pleasure, in spite of public rights of way. She points out that 20% of land in the UK is still in the hands of the families who arrived with William of Normandy in the eleventh century and took all by right of conquest.

Since then the aristocracy have regularly re-invented themselves. The British monarchy have become a media side show, of course.

Here is Richard Davenport Hines on Alnwick and the Percy family (from his book ‘Gothic’€, page 83 and after) -

A more flippant border fortress than the Brampton Bryan project is the Northumbrian Castle at Alnwick. This had been owned continuously by the Percy family since William de Percy came to England as part of the Norman conquest before dying on the First Crusade in 1096. A descendant was summoned to Parliament as a baron in 1299, and the fourth baron was created Earl of Northumberland at the coronation of King Richard II in 1377. This earl’s son, Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, was a great military commander whose exploits were celebrated by Shakespeare in King Henry the Fourth, Part One. The male line of the family became extinct in 1670. The last earl’s heiress married the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as the Proud Duke. He was so inflated with rank and genealogy … that he insisted that his children always stand in his presence, and disinherited a daughter whom he discovered to have sat while he was asleep. The Proud Duke’s granddaughter married in 1740 Sir Hugh Smithson, a Yorkshire baronet, whose family had been ennobled as recently as 1660 on the basis of money originating from a haberdasher’s shop in Cheapside. Four years later her brother’s unexpected death transformed her into a great heiress. In 1749 the ancient Northumberland Earldom was revived for her father, with a special remainder so that it passed on his death in 1750 to Smithson, who took the name of Percy. In 1753 the reinvented Smithson became Lord-Lieutenant of Northumberland, and afterwards of Middlesex too; having been Viceroy of Ireland in 1763-65, he was created Duke of Northumberland in 1766.

…

The pretensions of these new Northumberlands as authentic Percys were much mocked. ‘That great vulgar Countess has been laid up with a hurt on her leg’, Horace Walpole gossiped in 1759: ‘The Duchess of Grafton asked if it were true that Lady Rebecca Poulett kicked her? - ‘Kicked me madam! When did you ever hear of a Percy that took a kick?’ … Lord March making them a visit this summer at Alnwick Castle, my Lord received him at the gate, and said, ‘I believe, my Lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a Percy met here in friendship’ - think of this from a Smithson to a true Douglas.’

The building of Northumberland Avenue connecting Whitehall to the Thames led to her being teased in some newspapers as the ‘Duchess of Charing Cross’

The new Northumberlands began restoring their medieval properties soon after acquiring them - the grounds were landscaped by local Capability Brown and the town improved with fine stone houses and market, a gothic bridge and a lion atop a column.

The castle itself was decked out in gothic style with Robert Adam interiors.

Lady Holland in 1798 reported

‘Alnwick, on the outside, revives the recollection of all one has heard of baronial splendour, battlements, towers, gateways, portcullis, etc., immense courts, thick walls, and everything demonstrative of savage solitary, brutal power and magnitude. The late Duchess built the present fabric upon the site of the primitive castle, but much is from a traditional guess. The inside corresponds but feebly with the outward promise; the whole is fitted up in a tinsel, gingerbread taste rether adapted to a theatrical representation.’

The interiors were redone at a cost of £250k by the fourth Duke after 1854 - more accurately medieval, supposedly.

The British aristocracy have always loved building projects.

This is the latest in turning power into entertainment.