Η Κιβωτός και το Έθνος (iii)

Η αρχή του «φυσικού αττικού φωτός»
Η, επίσης νεορομαντικών καταβολών, προσδοκία της βίωσης του αυθεντικού – στη συγκεκριμένη περίπτωση, της αρχαίας εμπειρίας της τέχνης – κρύβεται και πίσω από την απόφαση του Tschumi να εκθέσει τα ευρήματα της Ακρόπολης στο «φυσικό αττικό φως». Η ανασύσταση του παρελθόντος ως αυθεντικής αισθητικής εμπειρίας για την επίτευξη της restitutio in integrum της εθνικής λάμψης προσλαμβάνει μυστικιστικό χαρακτήρα. «Είναι η αιωνιότητα του βλέμματος αντί του αντικειμένου», όπως παρατηρούσε ο Βασίλης Γκουρογιάννης (στη Βέβηλη Πτήση του) σχετικά με τις διαδοχικές αναστηλώσεις, αναπαλαιώσεις και λοιπές «ταριχεύσεις» που έχει υποστεί ο Παρθενώνας. Αναπάντεχα, ο Tschumi συναντά τον Περικλή Γιαννόπουλο μέσω ενδεχομένως του Le Corbusier: «Το αττικό φως διαφέρει από το φως οποιουδήποτε άλλου τόπου στον κόσμο, είχε σχολιάσει ο Ελβετός αρχιτέκτονας», μας ενημερώνει η Ελεάνα Κολοβού στην Καθημερινή της 26ης Ιουλίου 2009, και συνεχίζει υπερθεματίζοντας: «Κι είναι αυτό ακριβώς το φως, υποστήριζε [ενν.: ο B. Tschumi] που χρειάζονται τα Μάρμαρα για να αναδειχθούν. Πράγματι [...] βλέπει κανείς και τα μάρμαρα αλλιώς – όπως ακριβώς θα τα έβλεπε, δηλαδή, αν ήταν ακόμα ακέραια πάνω στον Παρθενώνα». Η αφελής αυτή μουσειολογική πρόταση (προορισμένη να ικανοποιήσει την συναισθηματική ανάγκη «κοινού» και «ειδικών» να βιώσουν το παρελθόν στο παρόν) δημιουργεί, κατά τη γνώμη μου, ανυπέρβλητα προβλήματα στην έκθεση των παρθενώνειων και των άλλων γλυπτών του νέου μουσείου.

Αφ’ ενός, είναι προφανές ότι η «αρχαία εμπειρία» της θέασης της γλυπτικής δεν περιοριζόταν στο φως και μόνον. Τα γλυπτά είναι φορείς ιδεών και πολιτισμικών αναφορών που δεν αναπαράγονται αυτόματα με την έκθεσή τους στο φυσικό φως – της Αττικής ή όποιας άλλης περιοχής. Η περιβόητη πλέον πολυχρωμία της αρχαιοελληνικής πλαστικής, εξάλλου, – για την οποία, σημειωτέον, πολύ λίγος λόγος γίνεται στο νέο μουσείο – καθιστά τα σωζόμενα έργα πλαστικής, υπόλευκα πλέον από το πέρασμα του χρόνου, ουσιαστικά ξένα για τους πρωταρχικούς δημιουργούς τους, οι οποίοι δύσκολα θα τα αναγνώριζαν στο μουσείο του κ. Tschumi – ή σε όποιο άλλο προφανώς. Αντίστοιχα, η εκλεκτική συγγένεια την οποία έχει καλλιεργήσει ο νεωτερικός άνθρωπος προς την αρχαία πλαστική βασίζεται κυρίως στην αποσπασματική της διατήρηση και τη (συμπτωματική) λευκότητά της, κάτι που μας απομακρύνει, ως θεατές, από την «αρχική εμπειρία» που υποτίθεται ότι καλλιεργεί το μουσείο.


Αφ’ ετέρου, το φως στις αχανείς αίθουσες του νέου μουσείου δεν είναι ούτε «φυσικό» ούτε «αττικό», τουλάχιστον όχι όπως το φαντάζεται ένας μοντέρνος αρχαιόφιλος: διαθλάται και διαχέεται, αντανακλάται και απορροφάται από τις γιγάντιες επιφάνειες του αρχιτεκτονήματος, από υλικά ανοίκεια και μη φιλικά προς τα μαρμάρινα γλυπτά. Ο επισκέπτης ταλαιπωρείται από το διάχυτο φως που του αποσπά την προσοχή πίσω από τα ελεύθερα γλυπτά, στις πολύχρωμες όψεις των συγχρόνων πολυκατοικιών που εισβάλλουν στο χώρο ως αυτοσχέδια εκθέματα. Αν τα παλαιότερα ελληνικά μουσεία επιχειρούσαν να καταλήξουν σε μια προσομοίωση του αρχαίου περιβάλλοντος των εκθεμάτων τους (κάτι που το κατόρθωναν, εμπειρικά, κυρίως με το χρώμα των τοίχων ή άλλα αρχιτεκτονικά στοιχεία) το Μουσείο Ακροπόλεως φαίνεται να αρέσκεται στο να συνθλίβει τα γλυπτά με τους τσιμεντένιους και χαλύβδινους όγκους του οι οποίοι κάθε άλλο παρά φιλικοί μοιάζουν προς το θεατή και τα αντικείμενα. Μπροστά τους, τα αφώτιστα γλυπτά φαίνονται άχρωμα και επίπεδα, οι λεπτομέρειές τους απαλύνονται κάτω από το ουδέτερο φως και ο θεατής καταλήγει στο σημείο κυριολεκτικά να αναρωτιέται πού έγκειται η μοναδικότητά τους που να δικαιολογεί το χαρακτηρισμό τους ως «αριστουργημάτων». Αν τα συγκρίνει κανείς με τις φωτογραφίες τους – προσεκτικά φωτισμένες, ακριβώς με σκοπό την ανάδειξη της τεχνοτροπίας και της τεχνικής δεξιότητας που τα διακρίνει – αντιλαμβάνεται πόσο τα αδικεί η νέα έκθεση. (Είναι χαρακτηριστικό το ότι τη νύχτα, όταν τίθενται σε λειτουργία τα ηλεκτρικά φώτα του μουσείου, η εντύπωση αλλάζει).

Η Κιβωτός και το Έθνος (ii)

Η αρχή του «οπτικού διαλόγου» με την Ακρόπολη
Η απαίτηση της οπτικής επαφής του μουσείου με την Ακρόπολη αποτελούσε στοιχείο του διεθνούς αρχιτεκτονικού διαγωνισμού για την κατασκευή του, αλλά και σαφή αναγκαιότητα, δεδομένου του χώρου ανέγερσής του. Ως εκ τούτου, η αίθουσα που στεγάζει τα παρθενώνεια γλυπτά, με τον πολυδιαφημισμένο προσανατολισμό της συντονισμένο με αυτόν του Παρθενώνα, εντυπωσιάζει με τις αδρές της γραμμές και, ομολογουμένως, την οπτική επαφή τόσο με την Ακρόπολη όσο και άλλες αρχαιότητες της περιοχής, όπως το μνημείο του Φιλοπάππου δυτικότερα. Είναι ίσως το μόνο πλήρως σχεδιασμένο κομμάτι του κτιρίου, και το μόνο που επιτελεί τον σκοπό του: να εντάξει τα μνημεία σε ένα εκθεσιολογικό – μουσειολογικό πρόγραμμα, το οποίο όμως μένει ημιτελές. Θαμπωμένοι, υποθέτω, από την επιβλητική παρουσία των «ιερών» εκθεμάτων (για την ποικιλόμορφη «ιερότητα» χώρου και μνημείων θα μιλήσω παρακάτω), οι δημιουργοί του μουσείου αισθάνθηκαν την ανάγκη να μείνουν βουβοί, αφήνοντας, και πάλι, μουσείο και εκθέματα να μιλήσουν «από μόνα τους». Πρόκειται για μια ιδιότυπη, αλλά ιδεολογικά σαφή και πολιτικά μάλλον επικίνδυνη άποψη, νεο-ρομαντικών καταβολών, σύμφωνα με την οποία ο ελληνικός πολιτισμός διακρίνεται, εκτός των άλλων, και από το γεγονός ότι αποτελεί αυτόχθον στοιχείο της ελληνικής γης («βράχος» και «Ακρόπολη» αποτελούν πλέον ταυτόσημες έννοιες), επομένως κάθε επεξήγηση καθίσταται περιττή.

Η αρχική έμπνευση για τον σχεδιασμό του συγκεκριμένου μουσείου – η ανάδειξη της ζωφόρου του Παρθενώνα σε σχέση με το ορατό μνημείο για το οποίο κατασκευάστηκε – καθίσταται έτσι τροχοπέδη για τη λειτουργία του (όποιου) μουσειολογικού προγράμματος του ίδιου του μουσείου: ενώ η ζωφόρος δεσπόζει σε προνομιακή θέση, προσφέροντας τις χαρισματικές της αναλογίες στην αίθουσα που σχεδιάστηκε ειδικά γι’ αυτήν, τα αετώματα εκτίθενται, παραπλανητικά, στο ύψος σχεδόν του δαπέδου και οι μετόπες – λες και κάποιος τις μέμφεται για την μάλλον συντηρητική τεχνοτροπία και συχνά άνιση τεχνική τους σε σχέση με την σαφώς ανώτερη ζωφόρο και τα όντως επιβλητικά αετώματα – «εξορίζονται» ψηλά στην οροφή. Διαταράσσεται έτσι η εσωτερική αλληλουχία του γλυπτού διακόσμου του κτιρίου, και μάλιστα από μια έκθεση η οποία ομνύει στην αποκατάσταση της αρχικής οπτικής λειτουργίας των μνημείων.

(Βλ. σχετικά και τις παρατηρήσεις της μουσειολόγου Μ. Σκαλτσά, Τα Νέα, 27 Ιουν. 2009: Μ. Αδαμοπούλου, «Το Νέο Μουσείο στο μικροσκόπιο»).

Η Κιβωτός και το Έθνος: ένα σχόλιο για την υποδοχή του νέου Μουσείου Ακροπόλεως

Με ένα αμήχανο χαμόγελο, ο τότε Υπουργός Πολιτισμού κ. Αντώνης Σαμαράς «αποκατέστησε», το βράδυ της 20ής Ιουνίου 2009, ένα σπάραγμα της ζωφόρου του Παρθενώνα, κηρύσσοντας έτσι την έναρξη της λειτουργίας του νέου Μουσείου Ακροπόλεως. Προσποιούμενος τον αρχαιολόγο – συντηρητή της έκθεσης (φορούσε ακόμη και τα ειδικά λευκά γάντια που είναι απαραίτητα για τέτοιες εργασίες) ο κ. Υπουργός προσέφερε στο τηλεοπτικό κοινό της βραδυάς μια νέα υπόμνηση για τον ρόλο του επίσημου ελληνικού κράτους ως «αρχαιολόγου – θεματοφύλακα» της εθνικής ιστορίας. Η συμβολική αυτή κίνηση του υπουργού, όπως και πολλές παρόμοιες που συνόδευσαν την έλευση του νέου μουσείου, ήταν προφανώς σχεδιασμένη ως μία ακόμη επισήμανση της απουσίας των ελγινείων μαρμάρων από ένα κτίριο που μοιάζει να σχεδιάστηκε για να στεγάσει κάποια απόντα εκθέματα μάλλον παρά τα υπάρχοντα. Ως τέτοια, βρήκε ομόθυμα θετική ανταπόκριση από το σύνολο του ελληνικού τύπου – και από μερίδα του διεθνούς – αλλά και από το ελληνικό κοινό γενικότερα, το οποίο μοιάζει να συμμερίζεται την άποψη ότι το νέο μουσείο, εκτός του έργου της προστασίας και ανάδειξης μιας συγκεκριμένης συλλογής αρχαιοτήτων που του έχει ανατεθεί εξ ορισμού, αποτελεί και μοχλό για νέες διεκδικήσεις «εθνικής» σημασίας. Όπως υποστηρίχτηκε δε και από κάποιους, διαθέτει μια σαφή «πολιτική διάσταση».

«Έργα αρχαίας και σύγχρονης περηφάνιας»: το κτίριο και η έκθεση
Από την πρώτη δημοσιοποίηση των σχεδίων του B. Tschumi, το νέο Μουσείο Ακροπόλεως δέχτηκε σφοδρή κριτική για το μέγεθος και τον όγκο του – δυσανάλογο με τον διαθέσιμο χώρο στο ... πολύπαθο οικόπεδο της Οδού Μακρυγιάννη, αλλά και για την ψυχρότητα που απέπνεε: αδρό σκυρόδεμα και τεράστιες μεταλλικές επιφάνειες με δυσοίωνα εξάρματα και απειλητικές εξοχές, καθώς και μια μάλλον αδέξια πρόβολο που προοριζόταν να στεγάσει το εστιατόριο του μουσείου με θέα προς τον «ιερό βράχο». Η αποκάλυψη αρχαιοτήτων κατά τις πρώτες εκσκαφές κατέστησε αναγκαία την τροποποίηση των σχεδίων, με αποτέλεσμα το κτίριο να εμφανίζεται πλέον να υπερίπταται πάνω από τα διατηρημένα στα θεμέλιά του ευρήματα, αλλοιώνοντας – σε βαθμό ανατροπής – την εντύπωση στιβαρότητας και δυναμισμού που ενδεχομένως επεδίωκε ο σχεδιαστής του.

Σκοπός του παρόντος άρθρου δεν είναι – δεν θα μπορούσε άλλωστε – να προτείνει μια κριτική ανάγνωση του μουσείου ως αρχιτεκτονήματος, αξιολογώντας δηλαδή την όποια συμβολή του στην εξέλιξη της μοντέρνας αρχιτεκτονικής. Θα πρέπει όμως να επισημανθεί ότι ούτε η φόρμα του ούτε το μέγεθός του φαίνονται να προσθέτουν κάτι στην επιβαρυμένη εικόνα της περιοχής όπου το κτίριο εντάχθηκε – βεβιασμένα είναι αλήθεια, και χωρίς αυτή η επιλογή να χρεώνεται, φυσικά, στον ίδιο τον διεθνούς αναγνώρισης αρχιτέκτονα. Αντίθετα, σκοπός μου στο παρόν κείμενο είναι να σχολιάσω την υποδοχή του νέου μουσείου από το ελληνικό κοινό, μια υποδοχή φορτισμένη από συναισθηματισμό, ιδεολογικά προσδιορισμένη και προσανατολισμένη πολιτικά, μια αντίδραση που λέει περισσότερα για την ελληνική κοινωνία του 2009 παρά για το ίδιο το μουσείο και τον τρόπο που επιτελεί την αποστολή του. Και είναι χαρακτηριστικό ότι, τουλάχιστον όσον αφορά τον τύπο, με την ολοκλήρωση του μουσείου αναπτύχθηκε ένα απλοϊκό, αλλά και εμφατικό στρατήγημα, σύμφωνα με το οποίο οι επικριτές του Tschumi και του αρχιτεκτονήματός του καλούνταν πλέον ... να σωπάσουν, καθώς υποστηρίχτηκε ευρύτατα πως «λιτό, ανοιχτόκαρδο και μοντέρνο, το νέο μουσείο απαντά στους επικριτές του», προφανώς με την παρουσία του και μόνον!

Είναι όμως ενδιαφέρον να παρακολουθήσει κανείς, έστω και σχηματικά, τις αρχές που φαίνεται να διέπουν τον σχεδιασμό του κτιρίου, καθώς από αυτές προκύπτουν σημαντικές παρατηρήσεις για τον τρόπο με τον οποίο το νέο μουσείο δείχνει να αντιλαμβάνεται τη σχέση του με το παρελθόν και τα υλικά του κατάλοιπα, αλλά και τον τρόπο που η νεοελληνική κοινωνία προσλαμβάνει το ρόλο της ως «φύλακα» και διαχειριστή ενός πολιτισμικού αγαθού αναγνωρισμένης παγκόσμιας εμβέλειας. Θα έλεγα ότι, μπαίνοντας στο νέο Μουσείο Ακροπόλεως, ο θεατής αντιλαμβάνεται πως ο δημιουργός του εργάστηκε βασισμένος σε μια σειρά τέτοιων αξιωματικών παραδοχών, που θα εκτεθούν στη συνέχεια...

Αναδημοσίευση του ομότιτλου άρθρου μου που δημοσιεύτηκε στα Σύγχρονα Θέματα (τ. 106).

displaying modernity vii

Greek prehistory has thus been tamed by modernity to fit its notions. Its obscure signs give way to interpretations splendidly familiar: through the eyes of Modigliani, even an eyeless triangular head can be beautiful and – furthermore – look meaningful; and Cycladic art has been stretched to accommodate both the subscription – mostly western, detached and scientific – to the rigour of modernity and Greece’s belief – chiefly metaphysical, romanticized and emotive – in its cultural singularity.

For the Greek nationalist imagination, the silent, featureless, poignantly blind faces of the Cycladic figurines functioned (they still do) as double-faced mirrors reflecting the country’s “antiquity” and its “modernity” at the same time.

As far Christian Zervos and his fellow Greek modernists were concerned, Cycladic art would be the perfect exponent of Classical Greek values at a time when the art of that period was falling from grace, overburdened by the damning accusations of academism and stagnation. Though this kind of archaeology may be criticized (and indeed it has been) as severely handicapped by internal incoherence, this is mainly due to the way (western) historians have been taught to treat cultural expressions of nationalism. What Greek archaeologists and intellectuals were aiming at, was to compromise the “objective” modernity of their culture, as it was produced by the scientific rigour of archaeology, with the “subjective” antiquity of their homeland, as it was brought into existence by their collective national imagination. As the historian Benedict Anderson has acutely pointed out, it is such kinds of paradoxical situations, inherent in the structure of nationalist thought yet unable to be remedied by it, that help us identify the nation as a “political community” imagined by its members. In Greece, this process of imagining the nation was subject to an instinctive urge to embrace modernity (which for many may have simply meant “modernization”), while at the same time placing an emphasis on the nation’s Hellenic identity (in the hope that Greece’s glorious past was to guarantee it a splendid future). For Greek intellectuals, the West had to be counter-attacked and conquered; therefore they strove to construct a national artistic idiom which would be modern and un-Western at the same time. In this, predictably, they emulated ideological developments elsewhere, namely in new states in Asia and Africa emerging after a long anti-colonialist strife. As a nation-state of the “second generation”, Greece was bound to structure its national identity on an antithesis to occidental orthodoxy, even though Greek intellectuals themselves thought of their nation (and the state accommodating it) as genuinely “European”. As it has been observed by a Greek historian, “in case [post-colonial nations] did not wish to view themselves through the eyes of the West, they had no other choice but to view themselves as a reaction against the gaze of the West.”

Cycladic archaeology served as a powerful tool in Greek nationalist discourse of an eternally Hellenic past, and afforded ample imagery for the nation’s appealing representation by applying its modern aspect to Hellenic antiquity.

Most, if not all, national projects in the field of archaeological research or cultural management subscribe to this goal, often including in their official rhetoric statements to that effect; the Benaki Museum is one such good example, as well as the Museum of Cycladic Art, attracting fierce critique by many by whom it is seen to promote ‘modern national self-esteem and identity’.

Lamenting lost archaeological context, since the Museum houses artefacts from the market, hence of dubious provenance, many take a rather firm stance, suggesting that despite efforts on behalf of the Greek state to keep Cycladic art in Greece – or achieve the return of stolen artefacts – ‘one may doubt if Athens, Greece, really is a more natural resting place for a Cycladic figure than Athens, Georgia’, as was claimed in a paper 15 years ago or so.

This assessment is, of course, accurate: The Museum of Cycladic Art, inaugurated in 1986 by none other than Melina Merkouri herself – the fabulous actress-turned-politician who counted Manos Hadjidakis and Yannis Tsarouchis among her personal friends –, pays fitting homage to one of modernity’s most central fixations: collecting. At the same time, it eagerly subscribes to the ideas of continuity and singularity of Greek art from antiquity to the present.

The Greek authorities, ‘on behalf of the Greek nation’, encouraged Dolly Goulandris to start her Collection in the 1960s, hoping to ‘repatriate’ illicitly exported antiquities. The Museum’s charter from 1986 outlines, the way the Benaki Museum’s one did in 1930, as its main goal ‘the promotion of prehistoric, classical, and modern Greek art’, with a particular reference to the Aegean Sea. In this, the Museum of Cycladic Art, and the official Greek approach to Cycladic art in general, is found by its critics in violation of the code of practice acceptable by scientific archaeology: it is nationalist rather than scientific, its approach is metaphysical rather than rationalist, in other words such projects are thought to violate the very modernity they appear promoting.

I fear that in our attempts to rescue archaeology from the perils of its cultural and ideological appropriation (or misappropriation, as some would argue), we tend to forget archaeology’s debt to one of modernity’s main – albeit often underestimated – components, namely Romanticism, to whom nationalism, empiricism, and individualism, all can be shown to be related. All these components have shaped Cycladic archaeology as we know it: a discipline inspired by the conviction that, as with the rest of Greek archaeology, rigorous methodology and positivist discourse is bound to lead to valid, objective results; that comprehensive analysis of the material remains reveals the national character of the people that produced them; that, finally, this character is masterfully and authoritatively expressed by a single man, their creator. Cycladic archaeology as a twentieth-century phenomenon shared the fortunes, blessings, and tribulations of modernity itself; and the rift created between the ‘metaphysical’ and the ‘positivist’ discourses in its study, is yet another battle in the post-colonial wars.

Championing scientific reason and rational, detached, approach to Cycladic (or any other “national” art for that matter) is in fact a good way to claim modernity from the hands of its non-western appropriators. Rationality has long been identified (by Edward Said and others) as a key intellectual issue raised by Orientalist discourse in an attempt to define, isolate, study, and therefore control the Orient on behalf of Western episteme. It is also a useful discriminatory tool between ‘them’ and ‘us’, the subjects of study and its agents, especially when the former refuse to keep quiet. Said has of course been rightly criticised of upholding a simplistic duality between an oppressor-West and an oppressed-East, the latter still keeping remarkably silent. Like Anderson, Said seems to believe that non-western imagination was colonized by the West, a thesis deconstructed by many, mostly scholars from non-metropolitan academic centres. They, rightly, resent the notion that the post-colonial world is bound to a ‘perpetual consumption of modernity’, arguing that, in fact, nationalism in communities outside the geographical area of the West (but still within its colonialist influence) fashions a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western. This is a remarkably multi-dimensional and highly unpredictable discourse (I doubt, though, whether Said would be surprised to hear that): if Greece as a nation is an imagined community, it is brought into being precisely at the moment when the Cycladic figurines shed their colourful aspect, lose their original aesthetics and are isolated from their anthropological contexts in order to become “abstract” and “modern”. And, it should be noted, the nation is already sovereign, even when the state is under the political or economic control of the West (be they the European Union or the International Monetary Fund), even under the cultural supremacy of such metropolitan centres as London, Paris, or New York.

I feel that those critics wishing to rescue Cycladic art from the hands of Greek nationalism behave like a bunch of grumpy-old materialists: too busy trying to contextualize all things ancient, they miss textuality in the very epoch when it is at its strongest: our own. We have by now learnt to accept that the archaeologies we produce are generated in the mill of controversy, rebellion, and shared fantasy and that, far from dealing with ‘reality’, they are meant to help their audience deal with their own experiences of culture, time, and mortality.Projects such as archaeology are meant to confirm identities and re-enforce national ties, inscribing the nation’s locality onto the bodies of its subjects (a process we could refer to as ‘the production of natives’).

In other words, if culture is ideological, then ideology is cultural: it becomes an integral part of our object of study, rather than acting like a contagious virus jeopardising its scientific integrity. As Jean Baudrillard once observed, “things discover us at the same time that we discover them. At the moment when the subject discovers the object, the object makes a reversible, but never innocent, discovery of the subject. More – it is actually a sort of invention of the subject by the invented object”.

displaying modernity: i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii.

displaying modernity vi

So this is how Cycladic art has today has acquired a Hellenic identity and a modern façade. It has now become familiar to the public and scholars alike, and this seems to have influenced the way it is studied, as part of the Greek continuity discourse. Renfrew’s processualist approach in The Emergence of Civilization (1972) gave way to a freehand assessment of Cycladic art in his Cycladic Spirit (1991), commissioned by the Museum of Cycladic Art, where Cycladic figurines are compared in terms of technique, style, and aesthetic outlook to Archaic korai and Byzantine icons, in apparent agreement with the views of Hellenic continuity presented here (remember how various aspects of the “primitive” had so much pleased modernist aesthetes in the 1920s and 1930s). Renfrew may sincerely believe (as he actually claims) this comparison to be ‘a processual one’, nevertheless it should be pointed out that Cycladic Aegean on the one hand and the Byzantine Empire on the other have very few, if at all, structural or systemic features in common; they are simply both labelled ‘Greek’, and are strategically placed on the same linear sequence – one as the distant forefather of the other. Can ‘art’ exist in a vacuum?

And this even though the Mediterranean of the fourth, third and second millennia BC has produced many other forms of small-scale sculpture, figurines, predominantly female, which might provide a better processual comparandum for their Cycladic counterparts.

Discarding, moreover, the magnifying lens of modernist aesthetics, could we not argue that the persistence of certain types in Cycladic art (some stuck around for five or six hundred years if we are to believe standard typological chronology), far from suggesting a ‘careful adherence’ to some mystic canon or law of proportion surviving over the ages is in fact a symptom of stagnation and insularity?

Our readings of antiquity are open to a multitude of imperceptible notions, a fact that makes our business much more complicated. By accepting Cycladic artefacts as a priori ‘beautiful’, we implicitly recognise the authority of modern aesthetics on the subject; similarly, emphasizing the role of the Aegean as a timeless factor in the creation of Hellenic culture might betray our subconscious exposure to romantic notions of environmental determinism and its racist implications. A touch of aestheticism seems quite appropriate in most cases: as in the straightforward catalogue of the Cycladic antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, subtitled The Captive Spirit. Is this a comment to smuggling and illicit trading of Cycladic antiquities? If so, where is the ‘Free’ Spirit supposed to reside?

Colour, in the form of red and blue pigments added onto the surface of the statuettes and other marble Cycladic artefacts, naturally posed a serious threat to their reading as objects of pristine simplicity and virginal clarity, as their modernist enthusiasts would very much like to view them. Known to archaeology since the days of Tsountas, added pigments were always somewhat ignored in the studies of the figurines.

Recently, however, detailed chemical analysis of once painted and now washed-out surfaces has produced considerable results and the promise for a breakthrough in the near future. Even though the general consensus seems to remain that colour was meant to increase the naturalist aspect of the statuettes, by adding facial and other anatomical features or enhancing their lines and contours, while a discussion of pigment-enhancement is virtually absent from many other accounts, some convincingly maintain that the overall impression of a fully-fledged Cycladic figurine would be even more abstract, certainly less naturalistic than what they now look like, having lost their original pigments.

I feel that it is exactly by the negation of this stereotype – simplicity of form, clarity of line and so on – that we may gain a point of entrance into the Cycladic pictorial realm. As many cultural historians have suggested, the way to begin to understand an alien culture is to look for instances where its messages are most opaque, ignoring indications – often misleading – of superficial familiarity. I would think that this type of investigation, employing methodology of related, albeit hitherto ignored by archaeology, disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology and Sociology is bound to be more fruitful. During the most part of the twentieth century archaeologists proceeded to scrutinize Cycladic art in the light of modern science, producing scholarly accounts under different schools of thought: empiricist, functionalist, processualist. A positivist assessment was essential to the hellenocentric narrative (as it provided the necessary element of ‘proof’) as well as the ‘modern-archaeology-as-science’ one, as it legitimized the discourse and confirmed the authority of the scholar undertaking it; inevitably, such discourses tell us more about their authors rather than their supposed subjects. This approach, applying its standard taxonomic devices, excelled in a particular field which I propose to discuss next: the invention of the Cycladic ‘author’ the genius behind the spirit, an import from Classical archaeology, which – despite its lukewarm reception by many of the leading figures in archaeology – seems tempting for many students of Greek prehistory even beyond the Cyclades.

As a modern concept, Cycladic art is in dire need of the artist: the author, the creator-genius to whom we can attribute not only works, but concepts and ideologies as well. Modern art-criticism, starting off some time in the nineteenth century, proceeded to establish ‘the author’ as a central figure to our understanding of art and culture, contemporary or ancient. An anthropocentric reading of the past has thus being developing, based on the study of creations (artefacts, works of art, literature) and their creators. Ostensibly rooted in rationalism, this new approach was emphatically empiricist.

The persistence of connoisseurship in the second half of the century, aided by a general reluctance of historians of ancient art and classical archaeologists to engage in theoretical discussion, threatened to monopolize classical-archaeological studies; more to the point, it was exported to less ‘art-historical’ subjects, such as art or craft produced by provincial workshops in the Greek and the Roman world, or even Prehistoric archaeology which has been subjected to the same art-historical approach. Cycladic art was, of course, the main beneficiary of this trend, which helped shape its ‘modern’ profile – hence the need to discuss this problem here. An emphatic plea in favour of the individual in Greek prehistory was made by Christine Morris in 1993, strongly – though not quite convincingly – arguing that personal styles are discernible in prehistoric arts, based on art-historical observations. Earlier, [in 1977 and 1987], an American scholar (Pat Getz-Preziosi) had proposed a similar approach to the study of Early Cycladic sculpture (including the rather less diagnostic collared jars nicknamed Kandilas!), an arrangement accepted by many, including Renfrew, who also spoke of ‘Masters’ in prehistoric Aegean.

This, seemingly systematic study of what are perceived as ‘individual hands’ in Early Cycladic sculpture, based on measurements and stylistic peculiarities diagnosed on the statuettes themselves, to be attributed to their sculptors’ individual idiosyncrasies is continued to the present day (blatantly ignoring, at its demise, the risks imposed by the possibility of fakes among the largely unprovenanced pieces it “classifies”). Although connoisseurship in Cycladic art has been criticised by many, and in various degrees of severity, two main arguments seem so far to have been employed: one sees the whole approach as a ploy on behalf of the international art market in an effort to enhance ‘artistic’ significance of the surfacing pieces (all, by definition, products of illicit digging, and thus permanently lost to their archaeological context) and, as a result, to multiply their monetary value. Needless to say, international market practices afford a great support to this accusation, since such attributions to ‘masters’ and ‘workshops’, presented in auction catalogues as a matter of fact in most cases, are routinely treated as part of the piece’s ‘history’, and used to justify the ridiculously high estimates quoted. These critics thus insist that artistic merit (in any way we might define it) ought to be eliminated from this equation.

Another, rather more moderate, line of thought questions the ‘feasibility’ of attribution studies, and places a strong emphasis on the subjective character of stylistic analysis, preventing the scholar from exercising archaeology as an ‘objective episteme’. This rather instinctive reaction to a tremendously popular scholarly exercise betrays a somewhat narrow-minded, empiricist reluctance to accept somebody else’s equally empiricist findings. Some dismiss aesthetic appreciation of Cycladic sculpture as a trope of contemporary ‘sensibilities’, and are of course right to do so, they even miss, however, the essential modernity of this very project. Many archaeologists seem to believe that ‘the archaeology of the islands’ is cleanly detached from the discourses of experience – be that ancient, modern, or post-modern. Aesthetic appreciation was the raison d’être behind the invention of Cycladic Culture, and the stylistic approach is not a mere trope in Cycladic studies; through both its attractive potential and its grave shortcomings, it expresses the wish, inherent in modern scholarship, for the imposition of control and order over vast quantities of ‘silent’ material. The desire to establish an overall rational ethos, in its Weberian sense, is evident in archaeology’s claims to ‘scientific objectivity’: coherence, consistency, and effectiveness have long been identified as the ambitions of modern episteme, in an effort to establish long, linear, and assuring historical narratives that ‘make sense’.

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Organic continuity in Greek art – pre-classical, classical, byzantine – is thus taken for granted, and used to redeem Classical Greece in view of its prehistoric self. Only implicitly does Zervos, in his Art in Greece, give a reason behind the singular (if not uniform) grandeur of Greek art: it would have to be the natural spectre, the landscape. No other factor determined the Greek spirit more poignantly than the landscape, the plains, the mountains, the sea, and above all the light, the light of Greece. Continuity of landscape is all we need to establish the uninterrupted sequence of Greek art-history, even if we cannot really argue that it was the same “collective consciousness” of the Greek city-state that actually produced the spirituality of Cycladic sculpture.

This strongly emotive language evokes the enthusiasm of Greek intellectuals over the potency of the Greek landscape and its mystical powers. Through their politically unstable, and in parts quite shallow rhetoric, monotonously repeated for the benefit of anyone who would care to listen, Greek intellectuals and their fellow-Hellenists attempted to develop a bi-focal strategy: on the one hand, to prove – or merely state – that Greek art was still valid as a stimulus to modernity, that the “Greek miracle had not yet outlived its life-cycle”; and on the other to claim the Greekness of what had recently come to be highly valued by European modernists: Greek prehistory.

This is a conscious effort on behalf of Greek thinkers, at home and abroad, to claim the ethnic origin of prehistoric Hellas, in order to consolidate its (and theirs) European identity. As the international avant-garde was appropriating Cycladic art, in particular, it was fitting to remind them that what they treasured so much was actually Hellenic, therefore they had Greece to thank for it.

Modernity had espoused Greek Neolithic and Cycladic art because it was not Greek; Zervos was now arguing that the Europeans should learn to love it because of its Greekness – its hellenicity to be exact; and with it, restore Classical Greece to its former glory. Since archaeology was being claimed by modernity, as one of the modern sciences par excellence, Greek modernists had to come up with an archaeology of their own.

Greek modernist intellectuals, like their fellow-compatriot painters and poets, constructed their vital space allowing for the ample presence of Greece’s past. Rather than a symptom of the nation’s embarrassing parochialism, its devotion to antiquity could pass as the main trait of its singularly modern nature – idiosyncratic but admirable nonetheless.

Christian Zervos maintained close contacts with the avant-garde painters in Greece, enabling them to communicate with the ideas developed abroad. His ideas on the singular essence of Hellenic art – Cycladic to Byzantine – are well within the ideological framework emerging in Greece in the 1930s. Greek painters in particular were heavily influenced by the discussion on hellenicity in the 1930s and 1940s. Sensitive to tradition, they turned to the past, resurrecting techniques and motifs from ancient and medieval Greek art and trying to pick up the thread with folk culture in the post-Byzantine period. Eclectic and cosmopolitan, these painters (most of whom also designed for the stage, including performances of ancient drama) created their own version of hellenicity in their art, faithful to the concept of continuity in the Greek tradition from antiquity to the present. Tsarouchis, Moralis, Nikolaou, and the afore mentioned Ghika became the main exponents of this movement, combining their cosmopolitan outlook with their idiosyncratic approaches on the Hellenic (ancient, modern, timeless).

Yannis Tsarouchis, in particular, perfected an idiom based on Byzantine and traditional Greek painting, which he however applied to motifs borrowed from ancient Greek art.

His characteristic homoerotic images of naked or semi-naked sailors and soldiers converse with the erotes of Greek reliefs and vases. Major and minor artists, of progressive or conservative disposition, seemed now more and more often to be making the obligatory stop at Greek antiquity at least once in their career. Others perfected a more persistent and authentic rapport with (their own perceptions of) Greek antiquity, notably Moralis or Nikolaou.

Nikos Nikolaou actually dwelled on Cycladic art, especially the figurines. His many essays on the monochromatic, stony-faced versions of a contemporary Hellenic face betray a sincere intellectual as well as aesthetic interest.

He also produced an extensive series of stones painted with facial features, in an idiosyncratic rendering of one’s impression of a finished Cycladic head.

At the same time Greece was gradually regaining its prehistory, as the frank efforts of Greek and international archaeologists were finally bearing fruit, and Greek prehistory was becoming a fully-fledged scholarly subject – built as a proper scientific discourse. Cycladic artefacts were excavated, catalogued and published, and were now scientifically interpreted as remnants of a pre- (or proto-) Hellenic Aegean culture.

Thus, (as stipulated by Christos Doumas in 1991), ‘by the early 1960s Cycladic culture had firmly staked its claim to a place among the major civilizations and its study became increasingly thorough’. This study endeavoured to arm Cycladic archaeology with a system cemented in rationalist (hence heavily empirical) archaeological discourse, a self-evident narrative which would “make sense”. Sophisticated taxonomies were introduced to the study of the figurines, providing us with elaborate genealogical trees spanning across the millennia – though ignoring anything that was created beyond the Aegean, anything that did not ooze this vibrant hellenicity I just spoke about.

These genealogies are based primarily on stylistic criteria empirically employed onto a disparate mass of material largely produced through pillaging, thus leave little room for results based on archaeological data. The widespread faking of Cycladic figurines (the more we like them the more we collect them and the more we collect them the less we are likely to come across legitimate specimens in the market, not to mention unquestionably authentic ones) has caused a severe handicap in our attempts for scientific study. Still, these art-historical, quasi scientific and blatantly empirical classifications persist to the present day, forming the basis of our museum displays. The National Museum in Athens, for example, offers in its recently refurbished Cycladic gallery a mix of aestheticised displays and others based on taxonomical systems, including a complete “taxonomy case” illustrating a typological genealogy produced through macroscopic observation and stylistic analysis.

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Hellenicity was to be espoused by artists such as the painter Nikos Hatzikyriakos Ghikas who – though his work may look superficially cubist – repeatedly claimed that Hellenic continuity remained his artistic reality: Greek light, landscape (turning every stone into a piece of sculpture), the precedence of light over colour and geometry over contour, proportion and spirituality, all eternal gifts of the land of Greece to its inhabitants. For some critics, Ghika’s work constitutes “a metaphysics of Greek nature”.

Greek modernists had nonetheless been quite successful in establishing connections with the West – mostly the vibrant Parisian circles – through the good services of a number of Greek ex-patriots who were active there. In 1934, Christian Zervos, the Greek émigré who established himself in France in order to become one of the leading art critics of his time, had published his L’Art en Grèce, an eclectic album of photos of Greek artefacts from the third millennium to the fourth century BC, published on the occasion of the IVth International Congress for Modern Architecture, which was organized in Athens in July 1933.

In the book’s polemic introduction, Zervos argues that Greek art is a single phenomenon, spanning from the depths of Aegean prehistory to the present day, and expresses his anger at ‘those historians of art who never showed some sincere affection towards the radiant youthfulness of Greek art’. A loving turn towards this art, he continues, would assure those art historians a grand advantage in view of what he calls ‘their illusions of the library’. In this and his later texts, Zervos is thus channelling into the heart of modernist Paris the angst of his fellow-Greek intellectuals who saw Hellenic prehistory, especially the by then much-admired Cycladic art, being usurped by international modernism as an anti-Classical, thoroughly un-Greek phenomenon. According to Zervos, it was the land itself that generated Greek art, it was the landscape that formulated ‘the Greek spirit’. A Cycladic figurine, he claims, a vase, a bronze artefact from the Geometric period, an Archaic statue, all anticipate those elements essential to the style of the Parthenon. The subsequent publication of L’Art des Cyclades in 1957, dedicated to Christos Tsountas, establishes scientific knowledge regarding the culture and its figurines, which he styled ‘poems in marble’.

And this is how, as treasured possessions of mankind at large, as splendid “poems in marble” and as the majestic prequel to Classical art, that these artefacts are exhibited today in the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, the world’s largest Cycladic collection in private hands. You can watch a virtual tour of the Cycladic Gallery, showing at the Museum’s own website (click on the image above for a link to the page), starting in the depths of time – it would seem – to place the viewer in a sea of calm waters and playful dolphins, and then inside the museum’s ostentatious Cycladic Gallery, where the figurines are shown detached from any archaeological or anthropological context (which at any rate would be admittedly difficult to produce since all artefacts must be assumed to come from illicit excavations), but are, instead, projected against dark backgrounds, imposingly lit, as if beamed down from an extra-terrestrial world dedicated to aesthetic perfection.

This is precisely the reading for Cycladic art that Christian Zervos had so strongly supported: abstract though beautiful, un-Greek though ever so Classical and positively “Hellenic”.

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Cycladic art appealed to the modernist desire for the 'primitive', seen of course from a western perspective. The Cycladic figurines portrayed mortal or divine beings of strikingly human form, and well within the human scale (we estimate that the largest among the figurines come pretty close to what at the time must have been life size). They portrayed social functions and attitudes, not specific individuals, but they may have stood en lieu of people, in the same way voodoo-dolls are thought in some cultures to encapsulate a person's 'aura'.

At any rate, Modern artists, who - it should be noted - missed vital information, for example the extent to which colour was part of a figurine's appearance, turned to the abstract form of Cycladic figurines in their effort to create a new means of expression.

Prehistoric art, as well as 'primitive' art of their time (African, Oceanic, Native American) interested the Modernists, so much so that several frequented Museums or Auction Houses where such artefacts were exhibited or offered for sale; in fact Modigliani, Giacometti and Picasso are known to have owned African works of art, and Moore was famously photographed handling a Cycladic figurine at the British Museum. They took Cycladic sculptors to have mastered natural form through their intellect, thus identifying the essence, not the superficiality of their prototype. The essential was what Modernists sought to express through their art. Though the result of a slight misapprehension, and construed on the basis of a westerner's pre-conceived notions, modernist appreciation of Cycladic art was nevertheless deep, so much so as to become meaningful.

For them – for us – this was (and is) the “new beauty”, to replace the by then conventional, over-abused, and trivialised models of Renaissance art, itself based on the Graeco-Roman tradition (usually taken for solely “Greek”). Centuries of over-abuse had trivialised the Graeco-Roman artistic ideal, which now looked conventional and overtly graphic; Greece had now become ‘the enemy’ (a phrase I am borrowing from Henry Moore).

In 1926 the pioneer ethnologist Georges-Henri Rivière had published his polemic archaeologisms, where he celebrated the death of ‘the Greek miracle’; intriguingly, the final blow had been dealt, according to him, by that ‘parricidal daughter of humanism’, archaeology herself. Archaeology, claimed Rivière, had finally woken the korai with Khmer smiles that lay sleeping under the foundations of the Parthenon; excavation had uncovered pre-Pyramid Egypt, pre-Columbian Americas, China’s empires; and he concluded: ‘we have joined to this broader knowledge the disgrace of artistic liberalism: enough of worthless eclecticism!’ This manifesto was political as well as aesthetic; it expressed a frustrated call for a break with tradition, a demand to contemporary culture to change the way it views itself through its perceived past. For those critics and artists Cycladic art was inspiring because it was not Greek – as a matter of fact it stood as a negation of the Greek norm.

In the meantime, Greek intellectuals were striving to establish a new cultural and political identity for a new nation-state, anxious to broadcast what I have called elsewhere its own “singular antiquity”.

Prehistory was, on the other hand, a very different case altogether. Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, archaeology had been uncovering traces of Greece’s prehistoric past, including the cultures that flourished in the Aegean. In the 1870s Heinrich Schliemann had shown that Homer’s Troy was not merely a myth, and proceeded to do the same with Agamemnon’s Mycenae, this time on Greek soil. Greek intellectuals were initially indifferent, if not hostile to Schliemann’s cavalier attitude and enthusiastic conviction that he had “gazed upon the face of Agamemnon”, Mycenaean civilization however was to be attached to the Greek sequence very soon, and so were its Minoan and Aegean counterparts. Following Schliemann’s discoveries, Greek archaeologists set off to investigate Greek history through systematic excavation and thorough publication of finds. Their reaction to widespread orientalist attitudes of the time led to the concept of a timeless ‘Greek spirit’, running across Greek history from the depths of time to the present day, and the notion of Greece being the cradle of European civilization.

So, by the 1930s, when Greek intellectuals were embarking on a self-confessed route to a “new humanism”, Greek nationalist rhetoric had produced a very strong narrative for Greece’s historical and cultural physiognomy: it was based on the nation’s antiquity, its natural and uninterrupted continuity, and above all its very ... Greekness, untouched by time and remaining untainted through the ages. Greek intellectuals in the 1930s regressed easily to hellenocentric radicalism, actually reviving the environmental determinism of the beginning of the century.

It was now somehow becoming obligatory for Greek intellectuals or artists to declare their fascination with the landscapes of Attica, the colours of Greek nature and, above all, the sea. The Aegean becomes at this time – and remains to this day – the new point of reference for the Greek consciousness; it is given primacy of place in poetry, significantly in the works of Odysseus Elytis, whom one of the strongest theorists of this generation, called “a mystic dawn over the Aegean”. A new mythology emerges from the waves of the Aegean and the rocks of its islands, a new Hellenic physiognomy, to be credited with all the precious qualities of a vibrant – and quickly idolized – spirit, usually referred to as Hellenicity.

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This stress on continuity, from Cycladic to Classical art, and from then on to Byzantium and Modern Greece, has been essential to the construction of Greek national identity in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, and remains in use with no signs of subsiding. Greek culture (as monitored through its expression in art) and history (as evidenced by its declaration through culture) are emphatically poised to begin in the depths of prehistory and culminate with us, modern Greeks, ambivalent as we might be when we come to face challenges such as the end of modernity, or perceived threats such as globalization.

Clearly, however, Cycladic art was not always readily accepted into the Greek sequence. Cycladic figurines have been known since the 18th century, when they were viewed as obscure artefacts of uncertain significance.

It was only later, by the end of the 19th century, that research undertaken by such pioneers of Aegean Archaeology as Theodore Bent and Christos Tsountas established their true identity (as Cycladic antiquities from the Bronze Age), and date (the 3rd millennium BC). Even then, Cycladic figurines failed to attract the interest of scholars (or collectors for that matter). Until as late as the 1920s or so, antiquity was still viewed through the looking glass of neo-classicism: compared to later Greek art, Cycladic culture seemed primitive, and its art was dismissed as barbaric. New views on art, professed by the artists of the time, and further research, now undertaken on more scientific grounds, established Cycladic Art as a truly remarkable cultural phenomenon, of historical as well as aesthetic value.

What archaeologists term the 'Early Cycladic Culture', flourished on the islands of the Cyclades from about 3200 to 2000 BC. According to archaeological evidence, during the 3rd millennium BC the Cyclades were relatively well populated, organised in small communities. The islanders were good sea-men, and communication between the islands was frequent. The islands' mineral resources allowed to the people of the Cyclades the production of tools and weapons, while the abundance of white, good-quality marble encouraged its wide use for the creation of artefacts and implements of functional or symbolic nature. Among these, the figurines are – to us, today, – by far the most distinctive Cycladic creation because of the great numbers in which they are found, the variety of sizes and types and the significance we may assume they held for their owners.

Although the marble statuettes obviously represent human, mostly female, figures, we may not be certain as to whether they represent mortals or immortals. The figures are nude and, though schematic, are marked by an idiosyncratic realism. The torso is complete, bearing the crucial parts of the human anatomy. An emphasis is often placed on genitalia and facial features, notably a long, triangular nose.

Other examples can opt for a sometimes striking realism. Eventually, then, archaeology helped establish Early Cycladic Culture as one of the main stages in Aegean prehistory. It took, however, a much more circumspect way before Cycladic craft was accepted as “art” in the twentieth century. Specifically, it had to be discovered by some of the leading exponents of the modernist movement in art, such as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Amedeo Modigliani or Henry Moore, who saw in it what they had already found in other “tribal” or “primitive” arts, past and present: it was abstract, lucid, and essential.

What is beautiful about Cycladic art? To the eyes of a 5th-century Athenian, a Cycladic head may have looked absurd. 18th- or 19th-century aesthetes judged them simply “unsightly”, “repulsive”, “appalling”. Our established understanding of the culture that created these artefacts enables us, today, to grasp their importance as material remains of a flourishing civilisation. What attracted Modernists to Cycladic art, however, was not their appreciation of archaeological or anthropological data (and as a matter of fact these have been considerably revised since the days of Picasso and Modigliani).

Photos of Cycladic artefacts taken from C. Renfrew C.: The Cycladic Spirit; Masterpieces from the Nicholas P. Goulandris Collection (New York).

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Παγκοσμιοποίηση & Εθνική Κουλτούρα

Η ημερίδα «Πολιτισμός, Παγκοσμιοποίηση, και Εθνικές Κουλτούρες» που διοργάνωσε ο Σύνδεσμος Υποτρόφων Α.Γ. Λεβέντη (Ελλάδας) στις 4 Φεβρουαρίου του 2008 έδωσε την αφορμή να συγκεντρωθούν τα κείμενα που παρουσιάζονται εδώ. Στις τοποθετήσεις των ομιλητών εκείνης της ημέρας προστίθενται και νέα κείμενα, ώστε το ολοκληρωμένο, πλέον, βιβλίο να επιχειρήσει μια – πρώτη – απάντηση στο ερώτημα: κινδυνεύει αυτό που ορίζουμε ως «εθνική κουλτούρα» από την επικράτηση της Παγκοσμιοποίησης;

Πρόκειται για ένα θέμα αιχμής, που απασχολεί ευρύτατες ομάδες του ελληνόφωνου κοινού. Πέρα από τους εμπλεκόμενους επιστημονικούς κλάδους (ιστορικοί, αρχαιολόγοι, ανθρωπολόγοι, πολιτικοί επιστήμονες, κοινωνιολόγοι), ο διάλογος περί παγκοσμιοποίησης προσελκύει το ενδιαφέρον των Μέσων Μαζικής Ενημέρωσης και των «μη ειδικών».

Δεν είμαι σίγουρος ότι οι απαντήσεις σε τόσο ρευστά ζητήματα είναι δεδομένες ή εύκολο να δοθούν∙ ελπίζω όμως ότι τα κείμενα που ακολουθούν προσφέρουν ένα πρώτο δείγμα διαλόγου για ένα θέμα που ενώ συζητείται συνεχώς, δεν προσεγγίζεται με την ψυχραιμία και την εγκυρότητα που απαιτείται. Κεντρική θέση στη διαμάχη, ως βασικά επιχειρήματα των αντικρουόμενων πλευρών, όσο και τελικά διακυβεύματα της ίδιας της διαμάχης αυτής, αποτελούν αφενός το παρελθόν, ως συλλογικό κτήμα και ιδεολογικό έρεισμα, και αφετέρου η μνήμη, ως συγκρουσιακός τόπος μεταξύ των «ιδιοκτητών» του παρελθόντος και των διεκδικητών του.

Οι εργασίες του τόμου κινούνται γύρω από αυτούς τους δύο άξονες:

Ο Σ. Πεσμαζόγλου μιλά για την «αντι-παγκοσμιοποίηση», την προβολή δηλαδή των εθνικών στοιχείων από τους εγχώριους παράγοντες, με τις πολιτιστικές, πολιτικές και κοινωνικές συνέπειες που αυτό έχει για την περίπτωση της Ελλάδας.

Ο Γ. Χαμηλάκης απαντά στο ερώτημα κατά πόσο απειλείται η εθνική κουλτούρα και μνήμη, καταλήγοντας στο συμπέρασμα ότι οι ίδιοι οι όροι της παγκοσμιοποίησης (για παράδειγμα οι ηλεκτρονικές επικοινωνίες και το Ίντερνετ) ενισχύουν το εθνικό φαντασιακό.

Η Α. Τηλιγάδα στρέφεται προς το – πολυπλοκότερο – παράδειγμα της Κύπρου επιχειρώντας να διερευνήσει τις διεργασίες για τη «διάσωση» της εθνικής ταυτότητας από την απειλή του (παγκοσμιοποιημένου) Άλλου στον χώρο του Πανεπιστημίου.

Ο γράφων πραγματεύεται τις προκλήσεις που δέχεται το οικοδόμημα του κλασικού πολιτισμού, αλλά και το επιστημολογικό πρόγραμμα της Αρχαιολογίας, υπό το βάρος των πιέσεων της αγοράς πολιτισμικών αγαθών (τουριστική βιομηχανία, προβολή πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς κοκ).

Τέλος, ο Δ. Παπανικολάου γράφει για τον τρόπο που η ρητορική περί εθνικής «ιδιομορφίας» εφαρμόζεται στη δημιουργία και την σχηματοποίηση της εθνικής κουλτούρας από την οποία στη συνέχεια και αναπαράγεται, κοινότοπα, είτε – σήμερα – ως όπλο κατά της παγκοσμιοποίησης είτε έναντι άλλων απειλών όπως, παλαιότερα, η αφομοίωση από τον δυτικό τρόπο ζωής.

displaying modernity i

Here is the first part of my lecture "Displaying Modernity: Cycladic Art as a 20th c. (Cultural) Phenomenon" which was co-sponsored by the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the Modern Greek Program, and delivered at the University of Michigan on October 28 (Greece's National - OXI - Day nonetheless!). I'm grateful to Vasilis Lambropoulos, Artemis Leontis, Laurie Talalay and everybody in Ann Arbor for their warm welcome).

Aesthetics was essential in forging the concepts of the “classical”, the “Greek”, or indeed the “Hellenic”, and Classical art – the glistening torsos, the half-ruined temples, the whimsically coloured vases – became powerful tools in an intensive exercise in cultural symbolism. Besides these, however, the Greek nationalist imagination sought to appropriate other forms of Greek art, not actually Hellenic as such, but powerful enough in order to convey the messages it wished to promote. Furthermore, by extending its hegemony over the art of the Minoans, for example, and the Mycenaeans, or indeed the earlier art of the Cycladic islands, Greece claimed a suitably significant and aesthetically pleasing prelude to its classical self.

My topic is Cycladic art, its appropriation by Greek nationalism and modernist aesthetics at the same time: seen through the filters of the highly romanticized Greek rhetoric in the 20th c., it comes out as thoroughly “Hellenic”, though if we are to believe its modernist enthusiasts, it is anything but. These opposing claims have resulted, I would argue, in Cycladic art’s re-emergence – as a matter of fact in its outright creation – as a full-blown 20th c. cultural phenomenon, both in Greece and the modern world at large.

Cycladic art as an archaeological, historical, as well as an artistic phenomenon, has long now been used as the first milestone in the long and fascinating saga of Greek (Hellenic) Culture, as this has been constructed by the modern Greek state in the last couple of centuries or so. In this continuum, [Cycladic] plays counterpart to [Modern], by standing at the far end of a sequence of arts and ideas, as well as the men who expressed the latter through the former.

The conviction that life speaks through art permeates Greek archaeology, surreptitiously having acquired the status of a self evident truth:

One of the most popular Greek museums, the Benaki, maintains in its most recent guidebook that, starting off with the Prehistoric room (including a small number of Cycladic figurines and other third-millennium artefacts), ‘the visitor will follow, step by step, the historical development of Hellenism as it unfolds through the millennia’. Talking as it does of an ‘exciting journey’ and a ‘true epic’ this idiosyncratic statement offers an eloquent description of the way modern Greece undertakes its own archaeology, as an exercise – often painstaking but ultimately rewarding – in deep soul-searching and courageous self-cognition.

And it is the Benaki Museum, the Hellenic museum par excellence, which – in its own words – strives to illustrate ‘the character of the Greek world through a spectacular historical panorama’, as advertised by its own website. The blurb goes on to specify the time span covered: ‘from antiquity and the age of Roman domination to the medieval Byzantine period, from the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the centuries of Frankish and Ottoman occupation to the outbreak of the struggle for independence in 1821, and from the formation of the modern state of Greece (1830) down to 1922, the year in which the Asia Minor disaster took place’. It is clear from this text that, throughout Greek history, only the contributions of the Hellenes to Greek culture and art are legitimate; all others are conquerors waiting to be charmed by the Greek spirit rather than likely to advance it.

The recently refurbished permanent exhibit at the Benaki Museum spans from Cycladic art to the two Nobel and the one Lenin prize won by Greeks, all for poetry, and ends with a Karagioz screen and figures looming in the background, a spectre, as its Cycladic counterpart, of another culture familiarized by the Greeks through tradition, translation, and inertia.

displaying modernity continued: ii, iii, iv, v, vi, vii.

spooked!

Several months since my last post, I thought I might resume my blogging, after a busy spring semester and an even busier summer (having started a dig up in Argos Orestikon didn’t help much either).

Can’t say I’m here to stay, but we’ll see…

I spent last week in Ann Arbor (while preparations for Halloween were well under way), as a guest of the University of Michigan Modern Greek Program in order to give a paper on “Cycladic Art as a 20th c. Phenomenon”. My lecture, co-hosted by the University’s just re-fitted splendid little Kelsey Museum, discussed – according to the blurb (they call it “blah” over there) – “ways in which Cycladic art has been rehabilitated, re-evaluated and in effect constructed by scholars and museum curators throughout the 20th century, both in and out of Greece, as a truly ‘Hellenic’, ‘European’, and ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon”.

In the next couple of weeks I will post most of my text here – based on some work I published before (mostly here) and on work I might develop further and publish in the future.

Why Cycladic Art? For one, because I’ve spent a few years of my life working in the “world’s greatest small museum”, the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens, a post that opened my eyes to the power of ancient imagery for modernity, as well as the ways in which the past may be invented through “tradition, translation, and inertia”, as I will be arguing in the posts to come.


So take a look at pages 6 & 7 of my passport: what’s wrong with this picture?

First and foremost, the fact that a citizen of Greece, a member-state of the European Union since the early 1980s, is still required to apply for a visa in order to visit the United States.

Then that, unlike most other state documents, which tend to look frightfully boring, Greek passports have been vamped up to look like museum catalogues: page after page of images from Greece’s glorious past, complete with legends (“Κυκλαδικά Ειδώλια”, “Αθηναϊκή Τριήρης”, “Παρθενώνας” – or as the case might be Greece’s invented traditions: “Αφή Ολυμπιακής Φλόγας”).

To be fair, the visa document is also well illustrated: the Lincoln memorial (dedicated: 1922), the US Capitol (built between 1793-1829), a few Corinthian columns here and there, and a tiny reference to the “Liberty Bell” (famously used to summon citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the Declaration of Independence on July 8, 1776). History illustrated, yes, but these are “American” images, put together to suggest what is so great about the country you are taking such pains in order to gain entry to. In the Greek passport (absurdly designed for foreigners’ eyes even though it is meant to be had by Greeks and Greeks alone) the past is so overwhelming it makes you wonder whether the country is still inhabited.

What is Greek about Cycladic Art? What is Cycladic about Modern Greece? Fear not – I know the answers to these questions, as will be revealed soon enough.

Welcome back then, and read on!

Displaying Modernity i
Displaying Modernity ii
Displaying Modernity iii
Displaying Modernity iv

Whose Culture? Indeed.

Cultural heritage has increasingly become the focus of fierce controversy and the question “who owns antiquity” a hotly debated one. Here, and elsewhere, I have been dealing with nationalist claims to cultural patrimony (in Greece or elsewhere) trying to argue that these very claims have shaped the world we know – or at least have certainly forged the identities under which we get to know it.

Nationalism is of course a four letter world by the book of “advanced” societies or interested parties, such as those dealing in antiques trade (which, of course, involves looting, and destruction of archaeological sites, designated or not). On the other hand, ethics of study, publication and promotion are a great bone of contention when it comes to illicitly excavated and exported antiquities; international trade of antiquities has become a lucrative business, compared by some to the trade of arms or drugs. As many other such fields of illicit action, dealing in antiques has been involved in entrepreneurial initiatives such as money laundering. It is admittedly a murky business, often entailing – further to the destruction of sites and loss of archaeological contexts – the exploitation of people. As I am quietly contemplating the hypocrisy lurking behind the politically correct frenzy of castigating any scholar or artefact suspect of “contamination” with the un-pure (any artefact not properly provenienced for almost a century) I can’t help noticing that “the other side” have managed to retaliate with some highly hypocritical arguments of their own.

The book Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (ed. J. Cuno, Princeton University Press 2009) appears to be making “the strongest case yet for an internationalist approach to the protection and ownership of ancient cultural heritage, and against its nationalization by modern states on political and ideological grounds”. In fact, it is a blatant attempt to reiterate claims put forward by colonialism, which one would have hoped could be rehearsed only within the confines of university seminars in 2009.

First, I must say I was shocked to find someone like John Boardman in the list of contributors, but then relieved to realise that he is the John Boardman I know – his text, on “archaeologists, collectors, and museums” is elegantly poised on the angle of the archaeologist / researcher who points out (as we all must) that we cannot “punish” antiquities – as tainted products of illicit trade – when we are unable to punish their traders, or better still prevent their illicit excavation altogether. In that he utters harsh, but well-placed words against the philistinism of those who have opted for such a hard-core stance, which they indeed seem to be exploiting politically in the last ten years or so. But this is only a small part of the whole argument, and – regrettably – the book has a lot to “offer”.

The rest of the book is pretty much a dishonourable attempt to convince the reader that “nationalism” is the opposite of “enlightenment” and that in the world of cultural management there are those (nations?) who know how it’s done and “such nations [which] may lack the additional physical (i.e. museums and storage facilities) and human (i.e. professional registrars, curators, and conservators) resources needed to acquire and care for the large quantities of objects held by collectors and dealers.” (Merryman, p. 184-5). I guess the solution in order to redress this horrible inequality would be to colonize (again?) those poor nations with an army of “professional registrars, curators, and conservators”... (If that were to be the fate of my country, I would be happy for the BM to keep the sodded Elgin Marbles; what am I saying? I would take the rest of it back to England myself). Truth of the matter though, Mr Merryman, is that “such nations” have been given the blessing of such an army of “professional registrars, curators, and conservators”, duly serving as the founding fathers of (their) nation as we speak.

As usual, rhetoric is indicative of the book’s intentions: the same Mr Merryman contrasts “Cultural Nationalism” (which he claims to be the source of “nation-oriented policies”) to “Preservation, Truth, Access” (the ideals behind an “object-oriented policy” he champions). I cannot be bothered to comment on the despicable – yet diaphanous – ideological games behind the distinction introduced here (and on chapter-headings nonetheless: pp. 186-7).

Elsewhere, such innocent (or are they?) slips of the tongue are simply funny: as with Mr M.F. Brown who, arguing that the modern museum is far from being a colonialist outpost, contends that “museums [...] played a key role in convincing citizens of the metropole that far-flung peoples possessed admirable qualities – tenacity, creativity, deep histories of self-governance, perhaps even an aesthetic or spiritual genius” (my emphasis). Well, guess what Mr Brown: they can even read!

What emerges as the book’s underlying principle – in fact it is its barely disguised gimmick – is the belief in the “encyclopaedic” museum, vowing to shape “the citizens of the world” (though strictly of the First World, and there only the citizens of a few select cities in it. Ah, and tourists, of course). Long now understood as “spaces of observation and regulation” (by T. Bennett, and others) museums cannot escape their deeply un-humanist agenda despite efforts to change their rhetoric (changing their politics might help, however). But the good authors of Whose Culture would have none of that – the turn towards on extrovert museum would be the end of civilization as they know it (or at least the end of cavalier archaeology, imperialist-born and colonialist-trained, in favour of disciplines such as cultural studies, perhaps, which they of course detest).

I’ll end this with Phlippe de Montebello of the MMA, who argues (again) that it is the object, not the context that matters. For this, he enlists a text from 1870 (the book’s cultural age and place, indeed) on the “encyclopaedic” museum: “true art is cosmopolitan. It knows no country. It knows no age. Homer sang not for the Greeks alone but for all nations, and for all time.” The idea that the past belongs to “us” is as strong today as it was in 1870 (or in 1770 for that matter). Pity that some of us cannot realise the processes under which this collective “we”s have come to be forged. Instead they babble on about “true art” and the “encyclopaedic museum”.

Pretty sad, really.

athens street art (con'd)

More athenian street art, all from a little street down-town called "Avramiotou". It's packed with tiny bars, very lively at night but quite different during the day featuring not much else than abandoned property and a few derelict buildings (plus the vacant shells of the afore mentioned bars, waiting for the next night):