Don’t you often wonder about what museums keep in their store rooms, but rarely manage to display? The hidden, perhaps forgotten, treasures of “The Archive”

Last year, between March 2007 and April 2008, in a small gallery off the main stair well in our Cantor Arts Center at Stanford stood a locked steel cage full of art works … still in their protective storage boxes, half-opened to let you peek in.

a project in “animating the archive” – Archive 3.0

The artifacts were the main part of a collection I made from the store rooms of the Cantor — 52 artifacts, one for each week of the year, randomly selected from the museum’s vast database.

By the cage was a computer and an invitation to make a comment on the exhibition’s web site. To say something about what you could see in the cage, what you might imagine about the store rooms, what treasures lay down there, cared for, but unseen.

I had been asked by the Cantor to be part of their “Faculty Choice” program — to deliver a reaction to the collections, as a member of Stanford’s faculty. Others have given tours of the galleries or presented lectures on their interests in the rather marvelous holdings. I asked to be let into the basement, through the locked door into the store rooms, to see what lay within. I couldn’t expect to see everything, so I developed a simple way of making a random sample of the museum’s collection – random numbers taken from the radioactive decay of Caesium 137 applied to the museum’s digital data base. (OK this may sound wacky – but have a look here at my thinking [Link])

I wanted to share my fascination with museum store rooms. I love the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. I had spent many months exploring the depths of collections of Greek pottery across Europe and the Mediterranean in my 10 year study of ancient Corinthian perfume jars [Link]) So I built a web site, a wiki, that would let anyone view the artifacts dredged from the store rooms, alongside available information about them, and then add comment or reaction. I worked with a team of high school and college students who did just this and presented their own personal collection of art works, together with stories and researches.

This had worked well for an exhibition of the photography of Edward Burtynsky held in 2005. The accompanying wiki attracted over 70,000 interactions and delivered some very interesting discussions – [Link]

I planned a series of additions to the exhibition with the high school students — images and clippings in a collage on the gallery wall, and perhaps some more artifacts, everyday items, placed alongside the cage.

But the project stalled. After the first contributions from the students I let the web site rest. I have hesitated to share the reasons, but there are some very interesting dilemmas at the core of my experience.

What is to be done with collections in museums of artifacts about which we know very little?

Though the Cantor Art Center has developed a focus upon the arts over the last ten years and more, since the museum was redesigned after the ’89 earthquake, its storerooms are still dominated by the original Stanford Family collections and a cascade of donations made since. Jane and Leland junior were quite eclectic and even promiscuous in their buying. Other donations are very mixed in their character and quality. Most are not the kind of thing you would put in a conventional gallery exhibition.

My encounter with these collections in the store rooms was based upon an exploration of the database, though it was far more fascinating to simply open drawers at random to see what was within. The Cantor is a well-resourced and well-run establishment. Its storerooms are state of the art in their organization and protection offered to the artifacts.

Nevertheless, of the 52 artifacts chosen at random from the database, 5 were found to be missing. And none had any significant detailed information concerning where they came from. There were some beautiful items, and some quite strange. The old pistol in the cigar box was rather evocative. But all the information about the artifacts was circumstantial and incidental, usually concerning the donor.

I had anticipated this. The project was designed to evoke and provoke. The involvement of the students and the accompanying web site were designed to add context, of whatever kind, to the artifacts.

Here is how I put it:

Animating the archive

Archives – the collections at the heart of our experience of history – need to be brought alive. As well as looking after the remains of the past for the future, we might make something of the past in the present.

Opening up the importance of context

A crucial issue is context . Artifacts become tautologies if we don’t know where they came from, the circumstances of their making, use, exchange and discard, who cared for them, what became of them, their life history. Tautology – because we only confirm what we already know when we assign an artifact to a class simply on the basis of what its form tells us and through reference of form and attributes to a standard catalogue or art history. This Corinthian perfume jar is … a Corinthian perfume jar! Albeit a beautiful/ugly/different/regular one.

Connecting collection with storytelling

Collections and archives come to life when we tell stories about them. When we connect things to contexts in this way.

Revealing value

This project asks questions about the character of collection. Why do some things fascinate? What values lie behind collection?

Things are collected when they are seen to have some value. The art museum is often interested in aesthetic value, how an artifact is a testament to an artist’s skills, and to the taste of the collector in acquiring such a fine example.

How interesting is this? There are many different kinds of value – ways of finding interest in an artifact because of how it speaks to you, of its qualities and experiences, how these connect with your own.

This project encourages us to explore different kinds of value through the members of a collection.

Revealing the personal

Value always also has a personal dimension. It is how ”’you”’ connect with a thing, how ”’you”’ find it of value.

This project is about exploring such personal responses.

Richer accounts – challenging the standard stories

Much collection and exhibition starts and ends with familiar stories. The history of art; the story of an artist; the variety of a type of valued artifact; the history of a region.

This project begins with a random selection from items in store, not with a story or contribution to art history, nor with some intrinsic quality, though all of these may have originally led to an item joining the museum.

The project sets us the task of finding connections and weaving stories. Its emphasis is upon the process of building a collection.

This is quite a different basis to exhibition. We expect to generate richer experiences and stories.

Redeming the past

Think of all this as a kind of rescue or salvage archaeology, an animation of the cultural archive that is a museum, a redemption of the loss inherent in the ruin that is history, making good the gaps, the missing pieces.

So what went wrong?

Nothing really. Except that the responses revealed the inherent poverty of collections like this Or, more precisely, the complexity, the contradictions at the heart of notions of cultural value. The students struggled, quite appropriately, to reconcile the expectation that they would learn from the artifacts (about the ancient past, Asian arts, archaeology) with the reality that the collection only came to life when connected with quite subjective aspects of their own experience that actually said nothing much at all about the artifacts (the students produced some fascinating micro-narratives of their lives, hopes, interests).

Paradox – the poverty of such collections in terms of historical and archaeological value is only revealed through the attention and engagement of “collectors” – those fascinated with archives and museums. This runs deep into the values contested in the market for ancient art and antiquities. Collectors love the things for their qualities; for art historians and archaeologists and those of like mind, the things are located in much broader and richer contexts.

So the web site was showing conspicuously that the collection of a great and well-run museum such as that at Stanford is actually not all that rich as a resource for learning.

Perhaps this is not such a bad thing?

Tom Seligman, Director of the Cantor Arts Center, has pioneered the radical evolution from “museum” to “arts center”, emphasizing active and very explicit development of the university’s holdings of art, very conscious of these issues of value. This issue of the pedagogical and cultural value of collections needs airing. A university collection is a good place to start.

I do think also that people need to know about a connected scandal, little known to most. Well-organized and well-managed collections, such as that at Stanford, are the exception. I have seen vast collections of fabulous works lying rotting and undocumented in so many museum store rooms across the world.

More information – [Link]

Gallery – [Link]

On museum futures – [Link]

On Monday 22 January and Wednesday 24 January our experimental facility in the online world Second Life will host the première of Lynn Hershman’s new movie “Strange Culture” as part of the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2004 artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a [http://www.massmoca.org/ MASS MoCA] exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife’s body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison.

Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia.

We have chosen to screen the movie on our island in Second Life because SHL is committed to exploring the intersections of the arts, humanities, science and technology, reaching out beyond the academy to address such matters of common concern.

Guests will include Lynn Hershman, Steven Kurtz and Howard Rheingold.

[Sundance Festival Link]

[Lynn Hershman Leeson's web site]

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.

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:

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.

He is working at the fabulous site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, on different attitudes and understandings of the site – local and beyond. Teotihuacan has become emblematic of the Mexican state and Mexican heritage. I posted some comments last year from Meg Butler about the Wal-Mart controvery there – [Link]

Rather than study the site and people’s reception of it as a conventional anthropological object, he has set up a software network to enable the expression and publication of the different understandings. An active prompting and enabling.

He has done a great service in carefully outling one crucial context for this kind of work – a science that does not, as a guiding principle and premise, separate professional application of reason from vernacular understanding.

All this in pusuit of a way of holding on to different understandings of the past – the multivocality that is much discussed by more and more archaeologists.

Read more at Tim’s website – [Link]

Classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the “scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory”. Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.”

…

Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of “intelligent design” which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan – that is, a creator.

I regularly hold classes for incoming Stanford freshmen and in summer camps at Stanford for smart high school students. I usually use archaeological examples to explore the character of interdisciplinary science and cultural difference – the unfamiliarity of the archaeological past. In every class there is at least one student who raises an objection to archaeological accounts of prehistory on the grounds that they are based upon an unproven theory of evolution.

I have actually had one student tell me the world was created 6000 years ago. Another came out with the old one that we are not descended from monkeys, for why would they still be around today? (Once they get to Stanford I assume I no longer hear from these students because they avoid classes like archaeology that challenge their view of things.)

Australopithecus Afarensis: footprint left in the sand, Laetoli, east Africa, 3.6 million years ago. Or part of an archaeological record created to puzzle us with the rest of the universe 6000 years ago?

Intelligent design is another old theological idea meant originally as a proof of the existence of god. If you were to come across a complex mechanism, parsimony of explanation, the argument goes, would have you infer that it was made by a skilled and intelligent maker, rather than have you posit a long and involved process of mutation, selection and adaptation.

Life is complex. Evolutionary science cannot agree on the precise processes that govern the emergence and disappearance of life’s complexity. Surely a more parsimonious adherence to the wonder of the world is to believe in a skilled and intelligent maker?

The terms of the debate about evolution are changing. The argument is now about the character of science itself. And of the nature of humanity.

And there is much on the side of the creationists and intelligent designers – when the terms of the debate are no longer religious faith versus the supposed atheism of science.

I have mentioned in this blog a favorite thinker of mine – Daniel Dennett. [Link] His book “Freedom Evoloves” is a superb attempt to rethink determinism. Our history has a sense to it, involves causes and effects. This is nevertheless compatible with people being ethical beings who possess freedom of choice and are not determined by the impersonal forcesof nature and history. At the core of his thinking is an emphasis upon selection as the fundamental process that drives natural history. And though he does not emphasize it, his understanding of selection is that it is a process of design.

Last year in a class on the history of design that I ran with Barry Katz, we interviewed Ilan Kroo, who designs supersonic aircraft. He showed us the implications of genetic algorithms, processes of selection operating on random mutation, for the design of aircraft wings. Enabled by superior computer processing power NASA and Boeing engineers are generating many solutions to a particular design issue (a certain kind of lift, given constraints of certain materials and the purpose of the aircraft, for example), and repeating many times the process of constrained mutation and selection. They are coming up with some startling new designs that would not have come out of a traditional design process.

Just the other day I was talking about Agile Development, as employed in the software indusry, as a model of iterative design, analogous to these genetic algorithms. [Link]

No serious scientist is going to say that evolution is a fact. It is certainly the best way we have of rationally understanding natural history. But this does not make it a “fact”. There are problems with constructing a narrative of deep time – the fragmentary nature of the palaeontological and archaeologoical record is an argument for cladistics, a different kind of understanding of how the history of relationships between species might be understood. [Link]The mechnaisms of evolution are not fully understood.

The “truth” of “facts” is a matter for metaphysics, not science. So yes, this brings the truth of evolution into the same theological field as faith in creation.

Then there is the issue of human culture. Ideas of cultural evolution and the co-evolution of the human species and our social and cultural artifacts are rooted in seriously flawed nineteenth century ideas of how you classify people and stories of history that center upon economic success and measures of social complexity. I have always had serious misgivings about theories of cultural evolution, in spite of the tremendous archaeological reworking of ideas of cultural evolution in the 60s and 70s. And I am committed to the neo-Darwinian thinking found in the likes of Daniel Dennett.

What gets called postmodern relativism challenges ideas of absolute truth and reality. Whatever the excesses of some of this thinking, it is also now very clear from detailed historical and sociological studies of scientists that they are flawed humans like the rest of us, and science is something done in messy social circumstances. Real science is not some abstract confrontation of reason with the forces and forms of nature.

Creationists are smart and know science is flawed. But this is their argument for abandoning reason and taking us back to pre-enlightenment faith. They say – All science is flawed. We need universal truths. There can only be trust in faith and creation.

Is it as bad as this? Is it not just down to some wacky fundamentalists in the southern states of the US?

I wish I could invite you one of these classes when I confront smart young Americans who have had their minds closed by this very neat argument.

It is really about how we think of ourselves. This debate is all about human frailty, the desire to have some certainty when faced with the mess of history, the complexity of the world that threatens even our supremely successful science and technology. It is about how we get on with our world and with other species.

So much western economic success has been founded upon the notion that the world is god-given to be used by people, that societies who have not fully exploited what was there for the taking are in some way failures, or primitive and less complex, or less developed, or just non-western. People are in this way seen as a unique species that builds and develops. And possesses soul and consciousness.

To really tackle the creationists we need to stop saying that evolution is true and that science has the “answer”. That archaeologists can tell the story of “the real past”.

We need to accept that the world as we know it is messy. People have an imperfect hold on it, and much of history is lost. Science, history, evolutionary biology, archaeology are processes of dealing with these fundamental questions of what makes us who we are. Processes, not answers. And this smart reasoning that will change and adapt to the messiness of the world is the only hope we have.

Now this entry is going to sound very esoteric to many of you. But please persevere and watch the linked movie.

This is about the future of cross-disciplinary collaborative research.

In the Metamedia Lab here at Stanford, we make much of the facility of our social software (like the Metamedia pages or Traumwerk) to track every change made to its pages. You can watch a bunch of us edit a collaboratively authored page on symmetrical archaeology, for example.

So what? – you might well ask.

Think of the teamwork that is archaeology.

A bunch of esoteric specialists in genetics, art history, taphonomy, trowelling, ceramics, soil science … and all the rest, working together to make sense of the remains of the past.

Wouldn’t it be instructive to watch how they might co-author a study of an archaeological site – comparing evidence and inference?

Here is how it might look – Jon Udell’s screen cast of a study of a page in Wikipedia on the heavy metal umlaut. (What a great philological topic!)

[Blog page link]

Hundreds of biblical artefacts in museums all over the world could be fakes, it has emerged after Israeli investigators uncovered what they claim is a sophisticated forgery ring.

Four men have been charged with the faking of some of the most important biblical discoveries in recent years.

The artefacts in question include an ossuary which was believed to contain the bones of James, the brother of Jesus, and a tablet with a written inscription by a Jewish king in the ninth century before Christ.

The indictment against the men in Jerusalem says: “During the last 20 years many archaeological items were sold, or an attempt was made to sell them, in Israel and in the world, that were not actually antiques. These items, many of them of great scientific, religious, sentimental, political and economic value, were created specifically with intent to defraud.”

The forgers not only conned buyers out of of millions of dollars, said officials of the Israel Antiquities Authority, but also damaged the science of archaeology, casting doubt on the authenticity of every artefact not uncovered in an authorised dig.

…

Shuka Dorfman, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the forgery ring had been operating for more than 20 years and had been “trying to change history”. Scholars said the forgers were exploiting the deep emotional need of Jews and Christians to find physical evidence to reinforce their faith.

“This does not discredit the profession. It discredits unscrupulous dealers and collectors,” said Eric Myers, an archaeology professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

Other forgeries included an ivory pomegranate which scholars believed was the only remaining artefact from King Solomon’s Temple. The James ossuary, with the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”, was thought to be the only physical link in existence today to the life of Jesus 2000 years ago.

Here forgers were adding inscriptions to genuine artifacts to make them part of a biblical story. To make them decidable, in Derrida’s sense [Link]

It points to the overwhelming importance for ALL archaeology of meta-narrative – the essential grounding – emotional, intellectual, cultural – supplied by narrative.

As I keep saying -

It is the stories that matter!

Michael Herzfeld was talking today about ethnography, about the centrality of comparison. His latest work is to compare Greece with Italy with Thailand.

Michael Herzfeld at Stanford today

Many anthropologists have become anxious about the comparative method, because comparing one society with another with the aim of understanding each through general properties of society and culture has usually involved judgement – setting one over another – more and less advanced, whatever. The old opposition between a nomothetic and idiographic social science (anthropology versus history, for example) is between one that sets up laws (generalizations) and the other that writes about individual cases. The legal reference in the etymology is appropriate – judgement of truth, worth, and value is involved.

Michael’s “Anthropology through the Looking Glass” had greatly interested me when I was writing my book about Classical Archaeology. My focus was on how Classical archaeologists of Graeco-Roman antiquity operated in their excavations, surveys, travels, writing. It explains a lot about the stories they tell. His book compared the discipline of anthropology with the modern Greek state. Both were nineteenth century inventions and both were designed to deal with the boundaries between the western European nation states and other cultures – primitive and other compared with the European imperial powers, antecedent in the case of classical Greece, awkward Balkan hybrid of east and west in the case of the newly reconstructed Greek state. For me this was a very interesting way of thinking – setting a discipline alongside a state – because they both dealt with borders. My own point – what a refreshing way to think about ancient Greece – not so much an historical reality as something classicists have invented to deal with their own border issues.

While anthropological comparison may involve the old colonial obsession with us and them, comparison is clearly also a necessity – an epistemological necessity. You can’t just immerse yourself in another culture, efface yourself and get to know it in its own terms. Just as archaeologists cannot simply bury themselves in the past. There is always the anthropologist, having arrived from somewhere else, struggling to adapt and understand, translating – comparing. This was the essence of Michael’s point about ethnography. The anthropologist was there and can report and claim insight and knowledge, at least ask to be heard.

Though he didn’t put it this way, Michael was making an argument for the performative chracter of fieldwork – knowledge building through the body, communication, translation and expression of the anthropologist (see me just the other day on Mike Pearson – [Link]). The anthropologist owes it to the community being studied to stand up for them. Michael wants anthropologists to stand up for the weak against the strong.

I would add that it is the act of witnessing that implies an ethical responsibility to the people the anthropologist gets to know. An obligation to keep the record straight, especially as anthropologists and archaeologists do work at the margins, on the borders, where things can be awkward and unclear, where identities are often in doubt, negotiations occur, where conspiracies are made.

(See my comment in February on the Metropolitan in New York and some major collections of Graeco-Roman art – [Link])

CLEVELAND (AP) – Some archeologists say the Cleveland Museum of Art may encourage smuggling and the looting of ancient sites by acquiring a bronze Apollo sculpture with large gaps in its ownership history.

The museum proudly announced the purchase in June, saying the statue might be the only one among about 20 large bronzes in the world that can be linked to the ancient Greek masters.

Now some prominent archaeologists and other critics say the museum should not have bought the work because of the questionable history.

“The root cause of looting is collecting. It’s supply and demand,” Ricardo Elia, an associate professor of archaeology at Boston University, told The Plain Dealer for a story Sunday.

The museum’s director disagreed, saying sharing the work with the public was important and the sale was fair.

Malcolm Bell, University of Virginia art history professor and vice president of the Archaeological Institute of America, questioned the museum’s account that the artwork was discovered by a retired German lawyer on his family’s estate in the 1990s.

“It sounds like the kind of fabrication that is made frequently in the market,” he said.

Ernst-Ulrich Walter, the lawyer, declined through an interpreter to be interviewed by the newspaper.

Phoenix Ancient Art, the dealership that sold the Apollo to the museum, has run afoul of the law before, said Elia, Bell and others … [Link]

When you see the details of the piece you can understand the attraction to the art market – it has been attributed to Praxiteles and is claimed to be the statue mentioned by the Roman Pliny – it’s not just an anonymous bronze but can be associated with a legendary artist of antiquity – just what the market values most.

And it is rather beautiful!

Like Colin Renfrew [Link] I think there is a strong convergence of interest in materialities and time that brings together contemporary art and archaeology. Though this is not the only reason I love the job. Contemporary art, especially, is so fascinating because it raises questions about things that matter, and the best art offers not simple answers but ways of thinking about the big questions (and yes, this is what archaeology should do too – who else but artists, philosophers and archaeologists can ask – Where do we come from and what has brought us to where we are now?).

This year we have been working with Dennis Oppenheim to get a piece of his at Stanford.

It is part of Dennis’s exploration of the interface between architecture and sculpture. It is called “Device to root out evil”. It looks like an inverted New England church.

We thought it would be a wonderful way to provoke some discussion – at the minimum! It is what art does so well. We thought that a university like Stanford should be the place where such discussion can happen – creatively, freely. And to start the ball rolling we invited Stanford’s Dean of Religious Life, Scotty McLennan, to comment. He said he liked it as art, but that the world views of art and religion don’t mix, and “Device” would cause a lot of anxiety to different religious groups on campus because of what it seems to be saying.

We took the project to Stanford’s President John Hennessy and he decided to cancel on the grounds that the cost of the project outweighed its benefits.

Dennis issued a press release last week giving his reactions. And today it reached the front page of the Stanford Daily.

He joked that the title of the cancelled Stanford sculpture, Device to Root Out Evil, which caused him trouble with the University, has grown ironically appropriate.

“It really did root out evil in a strange, circuitous way,” Oppenheim mused. “The President and others have conservative views and are afraid of a work of art, and now we know about it. It really worked.”

Contemporary art is no stranger to controversy [Link]. What I think we are witnessing here too is how artifacts – artistic, architectural, archaeological – elicit reaction because of the way their materiality makes all sorts of connections, reaching into all sorts of issues through the way things engage people.

The aura of the Parthenon marbles, there in the gallery in London – far more than any statement or image could ever convey – far more provocative.

And particularly when things are monumental (which is not the same as big). Archaeologists have always been interested in the way monuments work on people.

And it’s not that an image or artifact is worth a thousand words – their matter works quite differently, cutting across words – not at all a substitute – [Link on the archaeological witness].

Active materiality.

Sam thought you would be interested in this:

Slashdot — this was their summary:

What would you do if you found someone’s digital media card from their camera in your taxi? One such individual has decided to provide the world with 227 days of entertainment. I Found Some Of Your Life will post a photo a day and accompanying fictional narrative for the next 227 days using the photos found on a digital media card left in a cab.

Is it pure genius or pure evil? Who cares? Just be thankful they’re not your photos.

[Link - with comments]

The book is well-written and a good read. But Jennifer, I complained, doesn’t indicate her sources and complementary discussion of her topic – the archaeological imagination.

Paul (Cartledge) in Cambridge says that this is just not the sort of book that has a scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliography. And also that it is a personal treatment – liking it or not is a matter of taste. Jennifer, in her comment, takes this line too, celebrating subjectivity and her personal response to matters archaeological. She decided to omit references and bibliography because she thinks a lot of the work in archaeology is difficult and technical and to introduce it would obstruct her author’s relationship with her audience.

Some questions come to mind.

Is the apparatus of scholarship (footnotes, citation etc) the same as scholarly work? Not necessarily. My point is that I am concerned, with many of my colleagues, that the link between the apparatus and the aspiration of scholarship to respect the work of others and build collective knowledge is often loose. Paul tells me that I am getting too much sun here in California! Maybe I am witnessing too much of the US academic rat race where establishing a personal profile is pursued at the expense of community and collegiality. This is what I put first – not the technology of academic writing, but the ideal of thoughtful work that takes the reader through the building of a case that is worth hearing. And this often involves others who should be included because it affects them, however firmly installed in an ivory tower they may be.

Should popular writing be absolved from standards of scholarship? Attention to audience and respect for their interests is important. Many readers will shy away from a book that requires them to have a PhD in the subject. But Jennifer’s book is not at the opposite extreme of a mass market pulp fiction paperback. There are many ways of writing that come between. It is not simply a question of either give all the background, or miss it out.

Is a personal treatment incompatible with the ideals of scholarship? For many who identify scholarship with its apparatus, it is. Certainly I have been many times criticized for using the first person in my academic writing.

Are there any examples that I like of personal treatments of topics that normally find their home within technical academic discussion? I am very impressed by much popular science writing. I think immediately of Stephen Jay Gould. In “Wonderful Life” he took the reader into some of the most esoteric of palaeontology, made a fascinating case for his neo-Darwinian stand, and all along told of the researchers on whose work he was basing the case. No dumbing down, no avoidance of the often difficult and technical world of the scholar. In fact a celebration of the fascination of thinking differently! Daniel Dennett is another favorite writer of mine – his “Freedom Evolves” again celebrates the collective and technical work of all sorts of philosophers, cognitive scientists, evolutionary psychologists in a very personal take on determinism and the question of human agency. Bruno Latour’s books all also discuss in depth very technical matters without dumbing down, making popular. He also seems to have an aversion (he would call it Gallic) to footnotes and any scholarly apparatus at all.

I don’t think there need to be a contradiction between a personal treatment and what I see as the principles of good scholarship.

Both the pictures and your comments remind me of a small town in Texas that I visited. My first impression was of a dying town. It isn’t on a main highway or interstate, it isn’t touristy in any way – the one thing the town actively “advertises” is that it is the birthplace of a famous country singer. The stores on the main street are empty (but still bearing the old signs painted on the windows), the hospital building is abandoned (but carefully locked), the movie theater, now closed, still has the signs up from the last film it showed, the streets and sidewalks when I visited were dead quiet, empty of people and of life, except the occasional car. The few residents I met were older people who had spent their whole lives there and, for sentimental reasons or financial reasons or because they were just to tired to manage, had decided not to move, even when the town emptied out of their relatives and all the young people and when their own generation began dying out. The town actually has a website with a calendar where town events can be listed, but as far back in time as you can search and as far forward as well, the only things listed are the standard American holidays.

There was a store on the main street (one of the two stores still open) that advertised itself as an antiques store. I can imagine where the store gets its merchandise, but I would love to know who the buying customers are. Nothing in the store was listed at more than fifty dollars. Old paperback mystery novels, plastic tea sets for having tea with dolls, American flag pins, used kitchen knives, bags of buttons, cookie jars in every shape and color imaginable, stuffed pigs … . Had I been alone in the store, I might have been “free” to laugh at certain items, sneer at others, or appreciate and examine the few objects that caught my fancy. But the store is owned and run by an elderly lady, a long-time resident of the town, and I felt embarrassed to be caught picking over the remnants of her hometown’s life, in spite of the fact that presumably this was what I was supposed to do as a customer in the store. Trying to evaluate and appreciate and understand a totally foreign object in front of someone who may know part or all of the object’s history is very unnerving. Initially I felt an overwhelming obligation to buy something as a gesture that I appreciated her merchandise. But in the end I was unable to buy anything. The objects for sale were disturbingly intimate in that they were part of “everyday” experience – an “everyday” with which I was familiar from visiting grandparents and elderly neighbors – and I couldn?t look at them, as I often look (though perhaps I shouldn?t) at objects in museums, without feeling awkward and intrusive. It was an entirely different experience of “viewing” than any I have ever known.

He had lived there since 1964. It looks as if he was preparing to leave – there were some things in boxes, and the place is a little to messy with junk. But all his things seem to be still there. He must have gone with very little.

So why did he leave? There are rumors locally that someone was after him. After he left, no one heard any more.

I took the cameras to record this personal archaeology and found it very disturbing. Yes the place will have to be cleared; but this everyday detritus seemed just too intimate …

Not intimate articles, but the lack of design and presentation, the way the stuff was just left lying, prepared for no one else …

The intimacy, ironically, heightened by absence and distance.

Maybe this is why I screwed up some of the film I was using.

How can anyone ever think that this kind of ethnography is somehow neutral? – the ethics of looking into someone’s life – of handling, even loking at their things – awkward matters for an anthropologist/archaeologist.

More to come …

Aboriginal artefacts, including two early bark etchings, have been seized in Australia while on loan from two British museums.

Members of the Dja Dja Wurrung tribe secured an emergency order preventing the items being returned to the British Museum and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

The two bark etchings and a Aboriginal ceremonial headdress were on loan to Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

Gary Murray, of the Dja Dja, accused the museums of “colonial arrogance”.

Bark etching of boomerangs – c1845

It looks as well as though the British Museum is continuing to take a hard line over the Parthenon Marbles – refusing to discuss moving them back to Athens. It will be quite something if the Acropolis Museum in Athens ever gets built and stays empty!

Previous posts – [Link - January 19 2004]

“We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello

[BBC link]

He is talking about 5000 Graeco-Roman artifacts, currently in store at the museum. A sacred duty because these items are seen as artistic treasures?

The gallery is to be named after Shelby White and the late Leon Levy – two of the world’s most voracious of private collectors af antiquities. This is just the latest in a series of links between private collectors, the art market and some major museums. The Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the J. Paul Getty Museum are regularly criticised for continuing to purchase and exhibit unprovenanced antiquities, and for refusing to uphold guidelines and initiatives that would stop their supply – it is clear that looting is almost always the source of antiquities that come with no information about their origin. They have also been the venues for several exhibitions of private collections of antiquities that clearly include looted items. Shelby White and Leon Levy exhibited their collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990; Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Mailbu and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1994-5; George Ortiz at the Royal Academy, London in 1994.

The connection between unprovenanced antiquities and looting is not in dispute. These museums are providing a cultural laundering service for the antiquities black market and for the collectors who depend upon it. And both, of course, make a lot of money out of it, while museums can self-righteously claim kudos for displaying art for the benefit of all humankind.

The titles of these exhibitions say a lot: Glories of the Past, A Passion for Antiquities, In Pursuit of the Absolute. Antiquities here belong to the world of the connoisseur who admires the object in itself for its artistic qualities of supposedly universal human value (absolute beauty, whatever). This high cultural value (these are the greatest achievements of civilization) is also, of course, a high monetary value. It is a matter of cultural capital – the high value associated with items of high cultural status.

It is a dangerous commonplace to think that it is good to admire the beauty of ancient works of art in themselves. This separates the artifact, however beautiful it is, from everything that tells us anything more about it. Hence it fuels an art market in looted antiquities because illegally looted antiquities come with little or no information about their origin – for obvious reason.

But these museums and collectors refuse to acknowledge this connection. Shelby White has even been implicated in politcal moves to weaken the agreements and legislation that came after the crucial 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property – see Nancy Wilkie, President of the Archaeological institute of America, on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Archaeology Magazine Nov/Dec 2000. Collectors want to buy and sell whatever they want, without archaeologists interfering. There is a line of argument promoted by Shelby White that collectors truly revere and preserve the past for posterity while archaeologists destroy it. This is what lies behind Philippe de Montebello’s conviction that it is the sacred duty of the Metropolitan Museum to display its antique works of art.

See also UK Parliament Committee considering portable antiquities – April 2000 [link]

See what I was saying about cultural property last month [link]

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco has finally found a resting place for the remains of nearly 100 Gold Rush-era residents unearthed three years ago during construction of the Asian Art Museum.

Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, a small city with 17 cemeteries just south of San Francisco, has offered to take the remains of 97 men, women and children who were originally buried in the city’s first public cemetery — now the site of City Hall, the museum and the new city library. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on the move next week.

Some city leaders are worried that museum visitors, especially those with Buddhist or Taoist beliefs, will stay away when they learn that the deceased still haven’t been properly buried. Over the past three years, the remains — mostly fragments of bones, clothing and jewelry — have been stored in boxes in the basement of the coroner’s office.

“I have never set foot in the museum. I’m uncomfortable because the dead haven’t been taken care of,” said Chinatown activist Rose Pak. “If people were told about it, I’m sure lots of people would have second thoughts about going in.”

The Civic Center area was home to the Yerba Buena Cemetery until the 1870s, when the city disinterred the graves to make room for the original City Hall. All the graves were supposed to be moved to a new cemetery near Twin Peaks, but for unknown reasons many were left behind.

After City Hall was destroyed by a 1906 earthquake and fire, the site became home to the city’s main library until 1999, when construction began on the Asian Art Museum. Museum officials anticipated the discovery of remains, so they hired an archaeologist to remove and document them.

Adorno and Horheimer – what is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of its hopes.

It is all in the relationship.