Shaping the past: sculpture and archaeology pot

They were especially keen on receiving papers that attempted to identify those historical moments when there seems to have been an intense crossover between sculpture and archaeological

Andrew Jones and Paul Bonaventura

Background to the volume

This publication derives from a three-day conference whose theme was the

historic and ongoing dialogue between sculpture and archaeology Object– Excavation–Intervention was organized by the Henry Moore Institute in June

2004 and took place at leeds Art Gallery The Henry Moore Institute is a centre for the study of sculpture, and it organizes ‘open call’ conferences

on manifold topics that endeavour to explore historical and contemporary sculpture and consider it within a wider cultural context These conferences clearly improve our understanding of the history and practice of sculpture, but they also have the effect of returning the favour to whichever subject is selected to share the stage The growth of interdisciplinarity as a respected methodology has shown us that most things can benefit from being located within a wider context

In his opening address to the conference, Jon wood, who coordinates the research programme at the Institute, traced the origins of the conference to a series of exploratory conversations on the relationship between archaeology and contemporary art with independent curator Katy rochester From the outset, wood, rochester and their colleagues in leeds sought proposals from archaeologists who were interested in sculpture and in sharing new ideas with sculpture historians They were especially keen on receiving papers that attempted to identify those historical moments when there seems to have been an intense crossover between sculpture and archaeological discovery, when the ways in which objects and ideas about sculpture and archaeology have circulated in tandem

The organisers canvassed opinion on a wide range of related themes, including the similarities and differences between sculpture and archaeological

material, and between sculptors and archaeologists; archaeology as a metaphor in modernity and psychoanalysis; myths of origins and the ways in which the archaeological dig, the cave and the quarry have been variously appropriated; and the philosophy of place and the ways in which questions of site-specificity are significant to both sculpture and archaeology in urban, rural and industrial environments The fact that the original call for papers generated more than sixty responses is a testimony

to the fertility of thought in this area, and twenty-five papers were finally selected for presentation These were aggregated into five discrete sessions

on models and metaphors; excavation, site and place; excavation, myth and modernity; the status of the fragment; and the politics of archaeology and sculpture

The contributors to the conference comprised a mixture of art historians, curators, museum studies lecturers, anthropologists, archaeologists and artists, and the conference timetable positioned established academics alongside scholars at an earlier stage in their research and writing careers dana Arnold, Barbara Bender, Thomas dowson, Anna wagner and Jon wood chaired the various sessions, and the speakers included Jonathan Black, Fred Bohrer, Stephanie Brown, Simon Callery, Nicholas Cullinan, Mark dion, Thomas dowson, Eugene dwyer, Christopher Evans, Margaret Garlake, Talinn Grigor, Cornelius Holtorf, Andrew Jones, Sian Jones, Claudine Mitchell, Fred Orton, Sven Ouzman, will rea, Helen rees leahy, Fay Stevens, Frances Stracey, Julian Thomas, Flora Vilches and robert wallis

In the aftermath of the conference, the Henry Moore Institute approached the four chairs to request their feedback on the event prior to any publication

of the proceedings This elicited a clutch of interesting responses, none more so than Barbara Bender’s questioning of how the archaeological and art history papers ‘spoke’ to each other ‘I suppose it would be fair to say that they didn’t entirely,’ she admitted ‘There were some that tried, but my feeling was that much of the time each discipline laid out their wares – and very interesting they were too – and it was up to the other side to see what felt familiar, where there were overlaps, where they would want to find out more and so on In the end, of course, the two disciplines have their own agendas/questions etc., [but] what is important is to know what’s going on across the divide, and to recognize that there are always things in the air that are taken up across the disciplines – for example, metaphor, identity, context, reflexivity, gender.’

Given Bender’s insightful comments, the present introductory section seeks to chart a course from an interdisciplinarity in which the two disciplines

in effect glide past each other, to a form of intradisciplinarity in which a space for cohesive comprehension and dialogue is created This introductory chapter will then discuss some of the key problems raised by juxtaposing

the two disciplines The paramount issues here are the twin problems of romanticism and primitivism The topics of site-specificity and materiality are then discussed in an attempt to provide a positive rehabilitation of the intradisciplinary links between the two subjects

Envisioning archaeology

In itself the discipline of archaeology is decidedly undisciplined It focuses upon both the nature of objecthood and subjecthood, materialism and idealism The discipline is at once objective and empirical in methodology, while acknowledging the subjectivity and indeterminacy of interpretation

It is a hybrid discipline, with connections which span the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities.1 In Europe, the discipline emerges with the mapping impulse correlated with the emerging nation-state; it thereby emerges alongside cognate disciplines concerned with the mapping of state and empire, such as geography and anthropology Archaeology has always been a predominantly visual discipline, unlike, say, the textually dominated

anthropology The imperative to record was always to record visually Many of

the convergences between imperial expansion, recording and the development

of visual technologies are nicely caught in Fred Bohrer’s essay dealing with the early use of photography by colonialist archaeologists in nineteenth-century Egypt parallel cases of the convergence between visualization and colonial imperatives, such as those of ancient Greece and rome, also prove this point.2

In his essay Eugene dwyer likewise discusses the intersection between technology and visualization, in the unique context of plaster casts produced

of the victims of pompeii plaster casts produced by the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli in 1863 provided a mode of scientific exploration for archaeologists and offered a unique sense of visualization for sculptors Just as photography produces an indexical sign, so too – in the pompeian context – an indexical sign is produced from the remains of ancient bodies Once figured as signs, the casts are read in two alternate ways, as sculptures based upon the body, and

as scientific artefacts or documents The case discussed by dwyer is unusual: however, it serves to underline the co-emergence of practices of visualization and practices of documentation

Indeed, in the figure of O.G.S Crawford, the early development of the discipline in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s also saw a convergence with the mapping imperative of geography, and the adoption of new military technologies of visualization – aerial photography – as a critical development in archaeological recording and discovery A key figure in the professionalization

of the discipline, Crawford’s early career was in the Geography department

of the University of Oxford, and much of his professional life was at the Ordnance Survey After his field experience in the Great war he was

instrumental in advancing aerial photography, and continued to champion the use of photography of all kinds as a methodological tool in archaeology.3

As his biographer, Kitty Hauser, points out, the convergence of photography and archaeology offers a sense of the oracular, seeing things that are hidden from sight, reminding us of walter Benjamin’s remark that photographers are all the descendants of ‘augurers and haruspices’.4 This point is underlined by archaeologist Helen wickstead who observes that archaeological illustration

is likewise a project of discovery; the relationships between strata are teased out in order to depict them.5 These methodologies are not so much ways of

visualizing archaeology as of envisioning the past; a project embodying not

only a positivist sense of accurate recording, but also a speculative sense of reconstruction

The parallels and convergences in practices of envisioning the past are also witnessed by the interest in British antiquity, and particularly prehistory,

by artists during the 1930s, such as paul Nash.6 Nevertheless, the artist– antiquarian nexus has a long pedigree – as the art historian Sam Smiles observes – in the figure of Thomas Guest of Salisbury (1754–1818), whose oil-on-canvas depiction of the Bronze Age and Saxon grave groups excavated at winterslow, wiltshire, in 1814 perhaps provides one of the earlier examples

of the dialogue between artist and archaeologist.7 This dialogue continues, with many examples of artists turned field archaeologists.8 A parallel case

of this dialogue is presented by Jonathan Black as he discusses the way in which British sculptors of the early years of the twentieth century drew on a selection of archaeological sources – British, Egyptian and Middle Eastern – for their inspiration

In the present context, it has become common practice for large research and commercial field projects to work alongside a variety of visual artists

I [pB] discuss Simon Callery’s involvement with the projects at Segsbury, Alfred’s Castle and Marcham-Frilford – excavations of Iron Age hillfort complexes by Chris Gosden and Gary lock (both of Oxford University) – and his collaboration with Oxford Archaeology (a commercial excavation unit)

on the Thames Gateway Similarly, the Art+Archaeology project, under the coordination of Helen wickstead, has been involved in excavation projects at Shovel down, devon and Stonehenge, wiltshire In my own [AJ] excavations

in the Kilmartin region of Argyll in Scotland, I have also collaborated with several generations of artists based at winchester School of Art, as well as the independent artist-archaeologist Aaron watson One of the key problems with many of these artistic collaborations is that they remain curiously directionless what is the status and purpose of the artist to the archaeology, and why do archaeologists have an interest in art practice?

Artists have tested the associations between visual art and archaeology many times likewise, archaeologists have long been interested in creativity and the artistic imagination In his essay ‘Archaeology: The loss of Nerve’

archaeologist richard Bradley9 observes that without creativity archaeologists will be left with nothing new to say ‘Unless we nurture the creative imagination,’ he insists, ‘there is no point in teaching archaeology at any level, and little pleasure in practising it at all But we are strangely innocent about the creative process itself.’ Notwithstanding, Bradley goes on to explain that novelists have sometimes turned to archaeology as it provides them with a metaphor for their own experience as writers: ‘rightly or wrongly, they sense

an affinity between their creative processes and the ways in which we work

we all engage in acts of intuition, in pattern recognition, in linking previously unrelated observations and ideas: the very processes that are fundamental to imaginative thought.’ As for writers, so for visual artists

It is possible from the foregoing that the relationship between artist and archaeologist will remain intuitive in character; however, a more productive path may be followed by the sociologist John law’s argument for developing novel methods less upon positivist or empiricist lines and more upon aesthetic motives.10 In the case of the art–archaeology relationship we might predict that the eye of visual artists might be closely integrated with other archaeological techniques to develop another way of recording, another

‘way of seeing’ we also suggest that the growing integration of the visual arts with archaeology may relate to both abiding interests in documentation, alongside contemporary concerns over subjectivity and reflexivity and an increasing interest in materiality In addition, the visual nature of archaeology

is undergoing a process of re-evaluation; archaeologists are slowly beginning

to appreciate the characteristically visual nature of their discipline, as evinced

by the growing importance of the subject of archaeological representation and current research projects concerned with visualization in archaeology.11

Art history and archaeology

Art history is situated amongst a network of intercutting institutions and practices, with an overall aim and function of fabricating a historical past which it is possible to systematically observe in the present Amongst these allied institutions are art criticism, philosophy (of aesthetics), art practice, the art market, museology, connoisseurship and the heritage industry professionally, however, we can discern similarities of practice and method

in the academic disciplines of philosophy, literature, history and archaeology, alongside aspects of the natural sciences, such as chemistry

donald preziosi argues that art history took causality as its central problem

of concern, with its objects of study being construed as evidential in nature

A guiding principle is the hypothesis that artworks are emblematic or representative of their original time, place and circumstance of production In this sense artworks come to have the status of historical documents.12 In many

ways the discipline of art history has similar origins and guiding principles

to archaeology, with the figure of Johann Joachim winckelmann (1717–68) encapsulating the twin origins of the two disciplines winckelmann’s systematic history refined the organic and developmental model common to art history and archaeology (and all histories), as he postulated a sequence

of clearly delineated steps or periods in the development of ancient Greek art This notion of phasing is implicit both to art historical practice and to the continuing practice of archaeology paraphrasing preziosi, both disciplines are concerned with making the past synoptically visible so that it may function upon the present This is in order that the present may be seen as the demonstrable product of a particular past, and that the past may be framed

as an object of historical desire: the place from which a modern citizen might desire descent.13 This is surely the impulse for national histories of art, and for the co-emergence of archaeology with the nation state

we have described areas of intellectual convergence between the two disciplines Yet, there are important points of divergence while the discipline

of art history is situated amongst a network of institutions and disciplines which necessitate a loose and flexible adaptability between institutions, one of the outcomes of this convergence of institutions is the validation and naturalization of the idea of art as a universal human phenomenon; here we see the result of the intersection between the discipline of art history, the dealer–critic system, the art market and connoisseurship

Archaeology, similarly situated in a network of institutions and disciplines,

is also adaptable in outlook However, an outcome of this is a critical questioning of human universals, the idea of art amongst them which is the result of the intersection between the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and ethnography, post-colonial studies, and the heritage industry; this then involves concern over the international market in illicit antiquities, and the growing indigenous call for freedom of expression In what follows we will discuss the divergent approaches of art history and archaeology with regard

to art by focusing on the issues of romanticism and primitivism

The spectre of the Primitive

Art historians and archaeologists, while having much in common, also diverge in their approach to art In the opening chapter of this volume, will rea discusses this precise point in relation to rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay

‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ rea argues that Krauss ‘places sculpture and archaeological artefacts at arm’s length’, arguing against art historical moves to place them together, a practice firmly associated with the mirror of primitivism Emphasizing Krauss’s formalist and structuralist approach, rea notes the way in which the archaeology-as-art-practice approaches of Tilley,

Bender and Hamilton in the leskernick project, while drawing on the logic

of structuralism, can be simultaneously read as a counterclaim to Krauss’s argument rea argues that the genealogy of Krauss’s work lies in the critique

of judgement, while the genealogy of the leskernick project lies in the critique

of pure reason Against Krauss, rea goes on to argue positively for sculpture and archaeology as practices in a field of interaction This is a useful point that

we shall take up towards the end of this introductory chapter

Krauss is particularly concerned over moves to construct genealogies of sculpture, arguing for the non-universality and historical boundedness of sculpture as an art historical category She argues this through a formalist framework and explains stylistic changes as a series of strategies made up

of artistic options at particular moments we will discuss the framework of her argument below; here we wish to focus on the motivation behind that argument – the retention of the historical specificity of the art historical category of sculpture

One of the issues that exercises Krauss is the role of the primitive in the construction of genealogies ‘out of the data of millennia rather than decades Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, the Toltec ballcourts, Indian burial mounds – anything at all could be hauled into court to bear witness to this work’s connection to history and thereby to legitimate its status as sculpture’ She goes on to argue that this trick is somewhat suspect Nevertheless, ‘the trick can still be done by calling upon a variety of primitivizing work from the

earlier part of the century – Brancusi’s Endless Column will do ….’14

This strategy of genealogical comparison is perhaps most apparent in lucy

lippard’s Overlay volume, which juxtaposes land-art, performance art etc with

the art of prehistory, and quite consciously draws parallels between them:

As I wrote this book, I found that the bits and pieces of individual and communal beliefs I was weaving together applied unexpectedly often to my own life

and work like the artists and perhaps like the ancient peoples I was writing

about, I found the cumulative powers of myth entered my daily round … 15

The sites and monuments of prehistory serve as synonyms for contemporary art practice

we can contrast lippard’s approach with that of Colin renfrew The

latter’s Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists seeks to

emphasize the central importance of process in art and archaeology during his tenure as disney professor of Archaeology, director of the Mcdonald Institute for Archaeological research and Master of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge, he worked with many of the leading names in British sculpture, including Barry Flanagan, Antony Gormley, richard long, Eduardo paolozzi and william Turnbull In the book he states his desire to investigate ‘the ways in which the insights and the critical questions of the contemporary sculptor, painter, performance artist and others can feed back

into our own project of studying and understanding the early human past’, which is at once romantic and instrumentalist in character Taken as a pair, lippard and renfrew illustrate some of the problems and pitfalls of engaging debates between artist and archaeologist As an artist or art critic lippard evokes the primitive, the natural, and her argument is essentialist in form, while as an archaeologist renfrew evokes the romantic, the artist as creative genius, as shaper of worlds Neither approach is satisfactory

The concept of the primitive has been a central trope or figure of difference, for numerous twentieth-century European and North American art movements primitivism has had a profound influence on the relationship between art, archaeology and anthropology The encounter, around 1905, between artists such as pablo picasso and African and Melanesian sculpture

in the anthropology museums of the Trocadero, in paris, figure as one of the founding myths of modern art.16 For many anthropologists this relationship

culminated in the exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984

The show presented the audience with a series of formal similarities, such as those between masks from Africa and Oceania (particularly Kota reliquary

figures) and picasso’s painting Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) The staging of

this show produced an enormous critical enquiry by anthropologists, and we find this literature particularly instructive

The issue turns around the question of the universality of the art historical category of ‘art’ As anthropologists well know, many societies simply have

no conceptual category that parallels the western definition of art Therefore,

is it possible to exhibit and categorize the product of such societies as art? In considering the case of the Yolungu of Arnhemland (in north-east Australia), Howard Morphy boldly states, ‘Yolungu have always produced art, but Yolungu art has only recently been recognized as art To make sense of this paradox we have to acknowledge that there are two implicit definitions of art at play.’17 Shelly Errington similarly observes that a series of categorical gymnastics are performed when dealing with anthropological art; art that was once housed in natural history collections or ethnographic museums shifts from becoming the product of nature; it then reappears in the art museum

as a product of culture Such artworks are easily distinguished from those

of the western artists they are exhibited alongside; while the art of western artists is typically attributed to individuals, the art of indigenous artists is often attributed to a collective group.18

How do we categorize ethnographic art? How do we go about negotiating the tricky relationship between the contemporary and ancient art or ethnographic art? It is obviously insufficient on the basis of many examples

of ethnographic art to employ Kantian aesthetic criteria to define them as art, just as it may be difficult to employ aesthetics as a means of distinguishing many examples of contemporary western art Ethnographic art is often

simply unattractive in form An alternative may lie in assigning the category

of ‘art’ to those objects associated with a complex concept, a conceptualist

or interpretative definition of art More radically, could art be understood as

an institutional category, in the manner of Arthur danto or George dickie? Anthropologists and archaeologists have been particularly attentive to the way in which the transglobal art market intersects with institutional practices

of categorization.19 Institutional theories of art are therefore also fraught with problems The anthropologist Alfred Gell seeks to overcome these categorical problems in his analysis of the Zande net exhibited at the ArT/ArTIFACT show at the Center for African Art, New York, in 1988 Gell discusses the opposing strategies of the exhibition’s curator and catalogue essayist Susan Vogel, the curator, wished to suggest that African objects were worthy of study in a more expanded perspective Arthur danto, the essayist, resisted this move, as he was not persuaded that the hunting net could ever be art danto’s position is that art objects are such by virtue of their interpretation, and that interpretation is historically well grounded In this he cleaves to a Hegelian

view of art distinguishing the Geist, or spirit, of art is tricky at best, leaving

it difficult to distinguish between artefact and art on the basis of appearances alone To overcome these problems, Gell’s strategy is to examine artefact and art on the basis of their cognitive complexity He argues that art functions as

a ‘technology of enchantment’; it draws in and holds the viewer’s attention due to its cognitive complexity In this sense, we can consider artworks and artefacts as species of visual traps He avers that the anthropology of art ought to be about ‘the provision of a critical context that would enfranchise

“artefacts” and allow for their circulation as artworks, displaying them as embodiments or residues of complex intentionalities’.20 He develops this

argument in a later work, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory,21 in which

he breaks out of the restricted interest in ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ art characteristic

of the anthropology of art, and offers a theory of art which can effectively analyse west African nail fetishes alongside works such as Marcel duchamp’s

Network of Stoppages In eschewing aesthetic and semiotic theories of art he is

able to offer a novel way of looking at art, proposing artworks as instantiations

of cognitive complexity and intentionality

At a stroke then, we shift away from categorical confusions over art Instead, contemporary and ethnographic art can be considered in the same framework In this framework the ethnographic or tribal is not freighted with the same intellectual and cultural baggage as previously; if we apply the same intellectual criteria and framework to the analysis of ‘primitive’ art and contemporary art, we are evaluating both in the same way; there is equality of analysis we are not attributing mystical or essentialist qualities to ethnographic art, and then importing these ideas to our analysis of western

art à la lippard Instead, in this perspective we are simply analysing how

artworks function in relation to the viewer

The idea of the primitive is, of course, a practice of othering associated with modernity; the other always being defined in relation to the centre As the anthropologist Johannes Fabian indicates, the anthropological other is always located at a geographical distance, far from the metropolitan centres

in which the ethnographic monograph is written For the anthropologist, time

is elided with geographic distance, making the other appear antediluvian

or primitive in aspect, as well as far away.22 In a sense, a similar strategy occurs when, for example, art historians seek genealogical relationships with prehistoric sculpture while emphasizing an essentialized commonality, the temporally distant is held in abeyance, and reflected against the modern As the sociologist of science, Bruno latour, demonstrates, modernity consists of

an assemblage of practices which enable the moderns to create and maintain

a set of distinctions between binary opposites, such as nature and society, primitive and modern.23 In this sense both primitiveness and modernity are illusions bound up with sets of intellectual and methodological practices The concept of the primitive is a construct developed to point up the other against our perceived modernity As disciplines borne of modernity, art history and archaeology are bound up with these practices of othering

we might best consider the ideas of the primitive and the romantic to intersect with networks of contextual associations we might imagine art history and archaeology/anthropology as two poles of linked practices, each associated with distinctive (and dense) individual networks of contextual associations Questions of the primitive and the tribal have been thoroughly critiqued by anthropologists and archaeologists It is hard to imagine an anthropologist or archaeologist working today who is unaware of the problems of social evolutionary categories such as primitive or Tribal.24

with close contextual analysis, the problem of the primitive recedes, and as the anthropologist or archaeologist views the subject of art, the idea of the romantic emerges, associated with Kantian notions of genius and beauty In the opposite case, for the art historian familiar with a close contextual analysis

of the arts, notions of the romantic recede, and when viewing ethnographic or ancient material culture/art from a distance, notions of the primitive emerge

In each case art history and archaeology/anthropology produce the other as they view each discipline through a prism of their own practices and methods

of analysis

There are, of course, other modes of analysis we might think of certain forms of appropriation as mimetic in character These are well illustrated by Flora Vilches in her essay in this collection through her analysis of practices

of fieldwork and site location in the artwork of robert Smithson For Vilches the practices are similar, but do not necessarily draw on one another Smithson does not evoke the primitive, and indeed his artistic practice is

a disruption of conventional archaeological practice, leaving no obvious material traces They perform, or mime, archaeological practices, playing