TMI?

What is too much information? More importantly what is not enough information? The balance between an object driven museum and one that provides ample cultural context is an issue that is not easily resolved. The issue, I feel, lies within how we give objects the respect they deserve when being displayed in a museum that is not their natural home, and for a purpose that was not the reason for their creation.

In 1984, MoMA put on an exhibition entitled “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern where juxtapositions were made between modern art and non-western art with no context ever given. This show earned widespread critique and illustrated the point I am trying to make. Anthropologist James Clifford wrote one of the most pointed critiques of the exhibition in his essay, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern." In his review, he pointed out that before Picasso and his predecessors in the early 20th century, no one popularly recognized these that "primitive" objects as in fact powerful "art." At MoMA, Clifford perceived the museum as showing tribal objects as art while excluding the original cultural context. He stated, “We are firmly told at the exhibition's entrance, cultural context is the business of anthropologists. Cultural background is not essential to correct aesthetic appreciation and analysis: good art is universally recognizable. The pioneer modernists themselves knew little or nothing of these objects' ethnographic meaning. What was good enough for Picasso is good enough for MoMA. Indeed an ignorance of cultural context seems almost a precondition for artistic appreciation. In this object system a tribal piece is detached from one environment in order to circulate freely in another, a world of museums, markets, and connoisseurship.” This exhibition was presented thirty years ago and it is true at that time the we did not have the resources for presentation and research that we have today. Today more efforts are being made to provide context and information that help round out a visitor's understanding of the objects on display.

“Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, MoMA gallery Shot 1984

“People are talking about: The man from MoMA”
by Barbara Rose in Vogue, August, 1984. Vol. 174 (8), page 35.

An example of this is the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art entitled Kongo: Power and Majesty, which opened in fall of 2015. This show provided an aesthetic tribute as well as a history in which, one critic said, “Curator Alisa LaGamma…has fused aesthetics, history, ethnography and spectacle into an exhibition that is at once entertaining and serious, shocking and deeply satisfying.” Despite this success, it is true that in museums most non-western objects are not given the consideration deserved and the balance of aesthetic object driven work and cultural context needs improving.

Kongo: Power and Majesty, The Met, gallery shot 2015

Kongo: Power and Majesty, The Met, gallery shot 2015

My goal in writing this is to simply bring up the point that the most responsible way to display objects needs to be taken seriously. By definition public museums are theoretically accessible to all. We like to see them as great places of education and the sharing of cultures from around the world with the general public. But in contrast, what’s the purpose of objects and art works taken from their natural homes and placed halfway across the world when we can’t even display them in the context they were created for. How do you display a dance, or a chant, or the life altering artifact? I believe it’s important to objectively inform the visitor on the objects background, because every work in some way or another may have a facets of its history we may find controversial. That’s why I think it is paramount to understand that displaying objects come with political implications; I am not saying I don’t think these works shouldn’t be viewed, I do, but they also should be presented as more than just aesthetic objects of curiosity, or that a balance needs to be created between their objecthood and their context. If these treasures aren’t shown with research and respect then I believe they might lose their value when displayed in a museum, and therefore it is all of our responsibility to make sure that doesn’t happen.  -Emily White

The Feast of the Bean King and Social Codes

Have you ever thought about social status? What is the correct way to act? Or should sometimes people let loose, like at a party? Does this apply to your office Christmas party? In The Feast of the Bean King (1640/1645), Jacob Jordaens paints a comical presentation of middle-class partygoers in an attempt to provoke the noble classes who are trying to keep the classes separate. Richly colored and including a wealth of detail, The Feast of The Bean King is a painting of men and women at a party celebrating a holiday very much like what happens on Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras). In the Bean Feast—the Feast of Epiphany—the person who finds the bean baked into the cake is crowned king. And, the middle class shames the noble class by acting like royalty. 

The older man in the center who wears the crown is the bean king. He holds a pitcher of wine and wears a long bib. Beside him is a beautiful woman dressed in finery. She stares out at the viewer, perhaps wishing the party will soon end. The bare breasted woman above the king may be a prostitute. And, to the far left we see a man kneeling down and vomiting on the floor. Others raise their glasses, laughing, singing, and creating a commotion.  

                                                                 Jacob Jordaens, The Feast of the Bean King, 1640/45
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

In The Book of the Cities of Ladies (c. 1405), writer Christine de Pizan discusses how a person should act based on his or her social class. No one of a lower rank should present oneself as royalty and that men and women should dress and act according to their position. Noblewomen would never eat with their servants, nor would they appear with immoral women. But here, for the period of the feast, nothing is as it should be; the social order has collapsed. Through his representation of chaos and excess, Jordaens may be offering a warning about what may happen when social morés are abandoned. But, he may too be offering a critique of Flemish society and its strict class divisions. 

What makes a noble man different from a merchant? Are the nobility really the virtuous? How do the middle and lower classes provide for society? Should we be judged by our actions? And, given the opportunity, we can all fall to folly. So during this holiday, have fun, but don’t act like an animal, and be safe! -Kristin Davis

An Interdisciplinary Look at the Relationship between Early Christian and Hindu Art

Jesus alongside Ganesha, the son of Shiva and the Hindu "remover of obstacles"

Something that I have always heard as an undergraduate at UAB is that art is related to a variety of subjects and that the humanities do not exist in a vacuum. So, I was not shocked when I found links between art and sociology while studying sociologist Pitrim Sorokin; however, I was pleasantly surprised when I found culturally-based connections between Early Christian and Hindu art in my study of him, having been surrounded by a Christian society my entire life and being interested in Hindu art as my area of focus for art history.

Pitrim Sorokin

In his work Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937), Pitrim Sorokin proposed the classification of societies based on their cultural mentalities, which he saw as being manifested in the art and architecture of cultures throughout time. A society, at any given time, could have a primarily sensate culture, which is defined by its characteristic belief that true reality is material and the pursuit of science, technology, and hedonistic achievements; an ideational culture, which is defined by its characteristic belief that true reality is transcendent and the pursuit of supersensory philosophies; and an idealistic or integral society that merges the two cultures’ principle beliefs and assumes true reality to be a mixture of both the tangible and supersensory. With these categories in mind, I found that Early Christian and Hindu art share similarities that are rooted in their common adherence to the “ideal type” (a concept that derives from sociologist Max Weber’s research) of an ideational cultural mentality. By this I mean that they similarly correspond to typical “courses of conduct” of what is designated as the ideal type of a particular categorization – in this case, the ideational cultural mentality. This correspondence to the ideal type is particularly evident in their manner of decorating, their effort to immerse the viewer in the supersensory, and their endeavor to diverge from reality in their attempt, as Sorkin claimed, to “represent things more nearly as they are in God, or nearer to their source."

The mentalities that these two cultures share is what Sorokin deems “ascetic ideationalism,” in which individuals seek to satisfy themselves by minimizing carnal needs and by supplementing themselves with a complete detachment from the sensate, “illusory” world and themselves. Here are some examples of how this mentality is similarly revealed through art:

Above and below: Illustrations from the Book of Kells (c. 800 CE)

My first example is an Irish manuscript (keep in mind that Ireland and India are about 8,000 km apart) produced in the ninth century by Early Christian artists. The “Book of Kells,” a religious tome that that contained the four Gospels of the New Testament alongside dense, complex geometric patterning and interlacing, swirling motifs that submerge figures of humans and animals throughout the manuscript, appears to attempt to immerse the reader in its abstracted illustrations and dissolve the self. The density of decoration, when juxtaposed with Christian symbolism, removes the viewer-reader from his or her physical space in the sensate world through encouraging meditation on the complicated ornamentation over anything else. As the figures in the images are swallowed up by the decoration, so too is the observer. The abstraction of “reality” renounces the physical world for the “true reality” of the spiritual “realm” that the “Book of Kells” depicts, something conveyed as complicated and luxurious, but not something tangible or even three-dimensional. The figures of people and religious entities in the manuscript are similarly flattened and non-human as evidence of their separation from the sensate world.

An example of a copper Sri Yantra

Though not as overtly complicated, Hindu yantras accomplish similar ends. These images, typically composed of multiple concentric forms within a square with clear demarcations of the cardinal directions, are related to the typical floor plan of a Hindu temple due to their association with the divine. The geometric shapes that appear within yantras emanating from the central point (or bindu) signify unity between all forms. Though used for a variety of purposes, the primary goal of the yantra is for the user to meditate and thus achieve a greater understanding of the metaphysical by letting one’s self go within the process. In particular, the Sri Chakra, which includes a representation of Shiva, is intended to show the totality of the chronology of existence, along with the user's own unity with the cosmos. The usage of abstract forms within all yantras encourages viewers not to dwell on the physical reality but rather on what is beyond the illusion. By following the patterns with one’s eyes, and thus one’s thoughts, individual consciousness is believed to attune itself to the consciousness of the universe – a belief that was adapted to later Buddhist thought and endured in relation to their mandalas. In this unity, the self is dissolved into the ultimate reality.

Carvings along the walls of the Sun Temple of Modhera (1026 CE)

Yantras sometimes also serve as representations of Hindu deities – notably Kali or Shiva, as mentioned previously. Through representing these divine beings as non-figural, yantras separate the entities from the illusory, physical realm. In a similar fashion, the Sun Temple of Modhera also contains sculptures that do not reflect physical reality. While the sculptures of the temple appear fleshly and are articulated in a way that reflects the mastery of the artisans, the faces and body shapes of all the figures are uniform and abstracted. Their smooth forms and simplified facial features are unattainable by human standards and are posed in a limited number of stances that are repeated throughout both the exterior and the interior of the buildings at the temple. Per hierarchical proportion, the more significant figures of ādityas (sun deities) and vedi (goddesses,) set off in niches throughout the sabha mandapa (assembly hall) building, are larger than the human figures, which are so densely packed together that they appear to dissolve into patterning. This unrealistic state of being that the sculptural figures are in is complimented by the unnatural setting that they exist in. While they protrude into the landscape surrounding the temple, they occupy a space that does not reflect reality. The figures are placed against blank backgrounds in bands of related sculptures, which are stacked on top of each other. The divergence from reality can arguably be seen as an attempt to represent these deities “more nearly as they are in God, or nearer to their source” by depicting them as incompatible with the sensate world.

One of the Bucovina Painted Monasteries

The paintings on monasteries of Bucovina in Romania illustrate a similar divergence from reality. Built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the monasteries employ Byzantine-influenced paintings to convey religious stories. As the Byzantine style of art avoided realistic depictions of religious figures so as not to recall the sensate qualities of Greek and Roman “idols,” which were condemned by the church, the Byzantine figures are flattened, unshaded, and abstracted. This does not suggest a lack of skill, rather, a movement away from the celebration of the physical human body in favor of the non-physical. They are set in vividly colored backgrounds that are divorced from reality. The artists do not attempt to recreate the “illusory world,” rather, they cast the figures in a heavenly landscape and abstracted their appearances in order to separate them from the viewers. This, like the sculptures at the Sun Temple of Modhera, reflects a rejection of the sensate world in the favor of the spiritual, supersensory world. Not only that, but both the Sun Temple and the painted monasteries utilize figures as if they are patterns, folding into the fabric of this supersensory reality, much like what is seen in the “Book of Kells.” All of this indicates an artistic adherence to the ideal type of the ascetic ideational mentality within these sites.

This adherence to the ideal type of the ascetic ideational mentality reveals similarities between two cultures that are not often compared. In the future, I would like to do more research on why exactly these similarities exist – be it due to regional proximity between the Early Christians and the Hindus or derivations of Hindu thought in Abrahamic religions – who knows! There are many implications for this research that require further attention, and I hope my preliminary study inspires reactions from students in other fields.  -Sarah Faulkner