Collectors' Rights and Ancient Art

.
"First she crushes the glass with a meat axe. Then she penetrates the canvas with a sharp object. First a short slash, then long slashes placed with extreme precision. This new artistic strategy is a settlement of accounts with the tradition that has dominated painting since the Renaissance, in which illusion or trompe l'oeil is used to create spatiality. Mary Richardson does not wish to paint the illusion of space but to create real spaces. By shattering its framework she has given painting a third dimension".

Further to my comments on Ai Weiwei's "artistic" vandalism of ancient artefacts, Peter Tompa disapproves my expression of my opinion ("Archaeoblogger Paul Barford has now become an art critic"). Tompa seems to see this vandalism of ancient artefacts as part of "a long artistic tradition of transforming the old into the new", and apparently disapproves that "Barford will have no part of it".

How oddly this sits with the coiney mantras that if they did not buy dugup coins no-questions-asked, they'd all be melted down into tourist trinkets. Is that not "transforming the old into new"? How about heavily tooled coins, collectors are very disapproving of this, but again, its "transforming the old into new". Perhaps we could see some 'hobo-denarii' moder coin-toolers carving imperial portraits into amusing caricatures - "transforming the old into new" (like putting a fez-like hat on an emperor on a contextless coin). Then there is the wearable ancient coin jewellery ( "transforming the old into new" - there is an ACCG board member who has a family business doing just that). What about an Authentic Third Intermediate Period Mummy cases turned into drink cabinets for a Beverly Hills mansion ("transforming the old into new"), or the lopped off foot of a mummified human cadaver from an Egyptian tomb transformed into scary something to frighten the neighbour's kids with?

Then there's transforming a Roman cameo glass vase into a pile of glass sherds, but the British Museum did not see this as an artistic act and reconstructed the Portland Vase. Michaelangelo's Pieta has its nose back after an artist hammered it off, those Papal stiffs at the Vatican simply do not respect artistic expression. The Rokeby Venus has had the transformative slashing repaired - obscuring the artistic expression of suffragette Mary Richardson . More recently Rembrandt's "Night Watch" has had traces of attempts to artistically "transform old into new", once by slashing with a bread knife, a second time by spraying with acid, removed. Then there was the simultaneous slashing and acid attack on another Rembrandt, his Danae, a foiled attempt at transforming the "old into a new". Or if we are talking of 'ready mades', we could dwell on what happened to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which perhaps Tompa would prefer to remain as seen in Nimes in 1993 after an act of expression involving the item's original function? Tompa thinks this sort of thing is not vandalism but "art". Most museum curators tend to disagree with this "collectors' rights" advocate on that point, as do I.

I thought collectors prided themselves with being mere custodians, looking after the past, stewards? That by collecting them they are "protecting" the objects? Is that not what they say? And yet "collector's rights" activist Tompa considers the smashing and defacing of artefacts merely as part of "a long artistic tradition of transforming the old into the new".

Tompa asks (I think he means it to be rhetorical):

isn't Ai Weiwei's transformation of the old artifacts in some ways better than letting such common artifacts gradually turn to dust in some forgotten storage facility?

He asserts that pottery "in the supposed care of the archaeological community" in excavation archives and museum storerooms "turns to dust" anyway, so better let Ai Weiwei have it to create "art" with. Tompa seems unaware that thermally fused silicate material such as ceramic is extraordinarily stable in normal (and even abnormal) storage conditions. Not only is it not turning into dust, but very little material in the care of the museum community will be getting dunked in brightly coloured enamel paint, or ground up into dust packed into IKEA jars just for the shock value of it. But of course we can assume that Ai Weiwei did not obtain these pots on loan from a state museum, instead we assume he'd have bought them on the antiquities market and presumably therefore they come from the looting of archaeological sites (the complete pots coming probably from cemeteries and tombs). It is notable that US antiquity collector Tompa has absolutely no qualms about this "property" from the antiquities market being treated by its "owner" in this way, after all, he says these are "such common artifacts" which presumably means that it simply does not matter.

So not only do I find myself in disagreement with dugup collectors about what is "ancient art" but now what is "art" generally in a modern context (or is this Tompaism more related to the post-modernist excesses we see expressed in other areas of coineydom?) .

Photo: The Rokeby Venus' back "transformed into something new". I am not as sophisticated an art critic as Peter Tompa and his Washington socialite buddies, it is true, but to me this is not the right way to treat a precious survival from the past.

"Artist" Ai Weiwei and the Damage Caused by Antiquity Collectors

.
Ai Weiwei (born 1957) is a controversial Chinese "artist, social commentator, and activist". Several times now US lawyer Peter Tompa has castigated archaeological preservationists that they do not react to the Chinese government's treatment of this person (he's under arrest) - though I do not really see the connection or why we should. Looking up the background to a comment by Larry Rothfield however leads me to the conclusion that I would like to see him arrested if that's the only way he can be prevented from wantonly damaging ancient artefacts as a means of drawing draw attention to himself. A blog post by Yanda on the "Artist and his model" blog is sufficient justification.

Many of Ai Weiwei’s works from the past decade, for example, are made of local materials and of antique Chinese objects: tables and chairs from the Ming and Qing Dynasties, wood, doors and windows from demolished temples and traditional houses, freshwater pearls, tea, marble, stone, bamboo etc. – ‘ready-mades’ translated into a conceptual, post-minimalist idiom. Alternatively, for his colored vase series, he takes Neolithic vases (5000 – 3000 B.C.) and paints them careless with bright industrial colors. Then he places them in an Allan McCollum style. The vases are authentic antique vases which could just as easily have stood in a collection in a historical museum in China. It is argued that it "is not contempt for China’s history and tradition that lies behind this harsh treatment of the fine old antiques – on the contrary. His use of the vases should rather be seen as a Dadaistic gesture, as black humour and as a political comment [...].
Ai Weiwei points to the loss of culture by transforming the historical objects into something new".

Yeah, right.

Painted Vases, 2009

Dunking complete authentic ancient pots into enamel paint is not "art". It is cultural vandalism, pure and simple.

Then we have his 1995 "work" Dropping a Han dynasty urn, 1995:

The destruction does not stop there:

In his ‘Dust to dust’ series he first crushed Neolithic-age pottery to powder and stored the gritty remains in a clear IKEA glass jar. Here, the funereal act of memorializing an old urn in a modern urn coupled with the implied violence of the grinding gives the work cerebral and visceral force.

Dust to Dust, 2008

Stuff and nonsense, there is no 'memorialisation' going on here, any more than driving a bulldozer through a graveyard smashing the headstones would be. Thus is sheer provocation.

As is this treatment of a vase from the Tang dynasty (618-907)

Coca Cola Vase, 1997
Another one (not, I think, Tang but older):

"Urns of this vintage are usually cherished for their anthropological importance. By employing them as readymades, Ai strips them of their aura of preciousness only to reapply it according to a different system of valuation. However, this is not the well-worn strategy of the readymade famously applied by Duchamp to his urinal Fountain, wherein the object lacked cultural gravitas until placed in an art context. Instead, Ai’s chosen readymades already have significance. Working in this manner, Ai transforms precious artifacts—treating them as base and valueless by painting, dropping, grinding, or slapping with a logo—into contemporary fine art. The substitution of one kind of value for another occurs when he displays the transformed urns in a museum vitrine, reinstilling value but replacing historical significance with a newer cultural one".

So in a way Ai Weiwei is treating "anthropological" objects in the same way as private antiquity collectors, applying their own notions of value on objects which as a result are stripped of other kinds (e.g, archaeological). By asserting private ownership over these items, collectors deny the rights of other stakeholders to determine what should happen to them, and affirm their right to do whatever they like to their "property". That is even to the extent of altering in whatever way takes their fancy or destroying them should they so wish. Which is what Ai Weiwei is doing to the antiquities that fall into his hands.

I really do not accept that "causing destruction to bring attention to destruction to stop destruction" is a useful way to protest (which is what the guy claims to be doing here) the destruction of the cultural heritage. That seems like protesting the threat to polar bears by filming them being fed with exploding fish and capturing the image of blood and guts on the virgin snow.

Pictures from here and here.
.

Starting 2011 the Way they Mean to Go On

.
There is the most disturbing non-discussion developing on between two blogs (Cultural Property Objector and Looting Matters) about how academic discussions are organized precipitated by the stubborn refusal of a US coiney conspiracy theorist to listen to what people are telling him (more detailed comments here).


But there is a reason for this unreasonableness isn't there?
- The "coineys" (e.g., Ancient Coin Collectors' Guild) are for the so-called "internationalisation" of cultural property, i.e., basically, freeing it all for sale to US collectors by US dealers.

- In order to achieve this, they present (without detailed discussion and reference to the facts) the PAS as the "only way" for a country to "protect their heritage" and argue that the US government should refuse to co-operate (within the framework of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property) over illegally exported artefacts with countries that do not have a PAS (ie just about any coin-producing country in the world). [of course forgetting the US has no PAS]. This is the Witschonke Argument which I discussed here last year.

- Since the PAS is, they say, a "perfect system", any criticism of the Scheme has to be seen as the work of a small "radical" minority who are the convenient but invented scapegoats for a number of their problems.

- The PIA forum in which there were six independent articles discussing the PAS has to be presented ("exposed") to coineys as the dastardly work two of the worst radicals they know of (Gill and Barford) in secret collusion, working as agents of influence of unknown "foreign governments" - who are of course "nationalists" and "corrupt".

That's what this silly fracas is about. It's not about the facts, it is about creating an impression of a conspiracy of which the collector of dugup artefacts is - once again - the unwitting and guiltless victim.

[Note that I suggested that in order to facilitate the following of the exchange of views, Tompa enables the backlinks feature of his blog, a request that he has ignored. I think he is more interested in sniping than open discussion - which is why in 2011 if his opinions are discussed at all, he will find himself increasingly on the metal detectorists nonsense ghetto blog where that sort of stuff belongs].


Vignette: One of the Elders of Archaeon, a secret brotherhood, architects of the alleged conspiracy against collectors. Are David Gill and Paul Barford members? Do they meet with the others in a Prague cemetery?

.

Why no Light? Who is Keeping the PAS Under a Bushel?

.

"Gill obviously drove the agenda: some faint praise for the system combined with much rehashing of various (mostly old) complaints about it"

opines a Washington lawyer about the Papers from the Institute of Archaeology forum I discussed earlier. If the PAS was doing its job (and doing what the Hawkshead Review specifically told it to do - which was to engage with the archaeological milieu over issues like these) then there would long ago have been discussion of these "old" queries about its precise role in the protection and preservation of the archaeological heritage of England and Wales.

In fact some of these "old" points were specifically noted in the 2004 "Hawkshead Review" of the Scheme (pp 33, 45, 48, 54-5, 60-1) and the PAS urged to address some of the concerns even then being expressed by those in the archaeological and heritage management communities (pp 34, 45-6, 56, 60-1). The report urges the PAS to make "protecting the public interest in safeguarding the historic environment" a key aim (p. 61). Gill's discussion six years on raises the question of to what degree the PAS heeded the specific recommendations of the report in these regards.

As it is, what happened was that some texts were published in an archaeological peer-reviewed academic publication in which the voice of the PAS is missing. This is not because anyone "organized" it this way, my understanding is that the PAS refused to engage in this discussion. One may speculate as to the reasons why that is.

The lawyer seeks shock-horror scandal even in an academic publication, but seems to be unaware of even the basic features of how formal round table debates of this type are organized by the editors of academic publications. Brian Hole should be given the credit for all his work to make this happen.

CPO: Gill Inspired Papers Provide More Heat than Light on Benefits of PAS