In October 2008, the British Museum found itself host to a curious new installation—a statue by Marc Quinn, topped with the recognizable portrait of Kate Moss (Figure 11.14). It is a remarkable composition, with the supermodel’s bust protruding from a pretzel of arms and limbs. No less remarkable is the glistening material: the life-size figure is cast from 18-carat gold, weighing in at around 50 kilograms (some 110 pounds).
But what was this self-styled Siren doing amid a gallery of Greek and Roman antiquities? The underlying assumption was that modern sculptures help to make sense of ancient objects, and vice versa. Placed next to a marble statue of the Crouching Aphrodite (Figure 11.15), Kate Moss emerges as a latter-day “goddess of love,” just as the ancient statue is recontextualized as a contemporary celebrity pin-up. Curators of the exhibition (Statuephilia) explained the rationale explicitly: to “encourage us to look afresh at both modern and ancient art—to explore the similarities as well as differences between eras and cultures, and to remind ourselves of the perennial power of sculpture.”
The Statuephilia exhibition, therefore, found a different “place for art” than the book in hand. In their recourse to ancient objects like the Crouching Aphrodite, many contributors to this volume have tended to privilege questions of historical and archaeological context—questions about where, when and how objects were used (“urban spaces,” “cult and ritual,” “the creation and expression of identity,” etc.). By prioritizing objects, and claiming that objects have a presence rather than simply a past, the organizers of Statuephilia saw things otherwise. Provenance, use, purpose, function, display setting: these are only part of what make objects intelligible. In the museum, at least, it is the experience of looking that matters. Who goes to a
Classical Archaeology, Second Edition. Edited by Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Figure 11.14 Marc Quinn, Siren, installed in the British Museum as part of the 2008 Statuephilia exhibition. Photo: author.
Figure 11.15 Marble statue of a naked Aphrodite crouching at her bath, displayed alongside Marc Quinn’s Siren. Roman, second century A. D. GR 1963.10-29.1AN34840001, © Trustees of the British Museum.
Museum to learn solely about regional settlement patterns, trade patterns or field survey?
Like museum exhibits the western world over, Statuephilia consequently made a problem of delineating contexts along archaeological lines alone. While historical contexts are important, other contexts transcend time. The late Michael Camille nicely captured the point when he wrote that objects from the past serve as “actual apparitions” of history, “blurring the line between the past and the present. . . where the gazes of both can meet” (Camille 1996:7). Camille was talking about all images, addressing (what he deemed) an essential quality about historical objects: their ability to travel through time, to inhabit our world, to “eyewitness” us just as we “eyewitness” them. But Camille’s maxim holds particularly true of objects from Graeco-Roman antiquity. The very language used to describe this material since the eighteenth century confirms as much. Classical art is “Classical” because it is not simply done and dusted, rooted in the past, but rather part of an ongoing western tradition. Classical objects can appear especially timeless because they remain part of our contexts today.
These are gigantic themes, and my opening has already raised a host of associated questions. What do we mean by “art”? Do some objects work more “artistically” than others? Indeed, are we right to assume a category of “art” in the first place, or is “aesthetics” itself a peculiarity of modern western thinking—an anachronism invented only in the “Enlightened” eighteenth-century (cf., e. g., Kristeller 1990:163-227; Shiner 2001)? Instead of addressing these questions in the abstract, the second half of this chapter sets out to excavate them archaeologically. I focus on just three museum objects: a statue group of the Trojan priest Laocoon in the Vatican, a standing male kouros in New York, and an Attic red-figure vase in the British Museum. With each example, my aim is to show what we stand to gain by finding a place for art, and by extension what classical archaeology would lose were it to leave “art” out of the fray.
This chapter does not lay claim to any single method or approach. Indeed, part of my remit will be historiographic in scope: to survey the different ways in which different traditions have found different places for art within classical archaeology. In so far as I do advance a common thesis, though, it is that reconstructing “original contexts” is not enough. As we shall see, objects have infinitely many “contexts,” and those contexts necessarily shufle and shift. At the same time, my suggestion is that an object’s form and style provide contexts which enhance all others. Objects can prove transformative: rather than having their meaning determined by external circumstance, they can themselves do the contextualizing. Finding a place for art therefore means rethinking the dichotomy between “form” and “context” in the first place. Images imply contexts—and contexts that can transcend the purely archaeological.
My first object is a case in point: a marble statue group displayed in the Belvedere Courtyard of Rome’s Vatican Museums (Figure 11.16). Ever since its discovery and prompt restoration in the early sixteenth century, this group has been one of the most iconic of all Graeco-Roman sculptures, with an extensive bibliography to match (Muth 2005 provides the best introduction; cf. Simon 1992; Brilliant 2000; Ridgway 2000:87-90; Decultot et al. 2003; Buranelli et al. 2006; Gall and Wolken-hauer 2009). The statue has been subject to countless imitations, quotations and
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