The Dogon culture blossomed in the spectacular rocky landscape of Bandiagara in what is now Mali. The natural and cultural heritage of the Dogon has been on the UNESCO world heritage list since 1989. More than 270 of the most beautiful objects from the region, including masks, sculptures and jewelry, are on show at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. ARTS.21 visited the Dogon people in Mali.
Starting in the late 19th century, travelers, amateur scientists, businessmen, politicians, and later, professional archaeologists returned from Central America with never-before-seen artifacts. Many of these ceramic, stone, gold, and jade objects ended up in museums and many entered private collections. Regardless of their final destination, these early collections have helped, and continue to help, define a unique and unparalleled ancient history of Central America. This symposium delves into this history by looking at both early antiquarians and more recent scholarly approaches to collecting and understanding the past. It focuses on individuals, institutions, and the social and political factors that have impacted the collecting of objects from Belize and Guatemala in the north, down to Panama in the south. By extension, this conversation is also about understanding the history of archaeology, the history of museum building, and how we construct the past. Featured scholars include Dr. John Hoopes (University of Kansas), Dr. Francisco Corrales (National Museum of Costa Rica), Dr. Rosemary Joyce (University of California, Berkeley), Luis Sánchez (Department of Environmental Management, Costa Rican Institute of Electricity), Dr. James Snead (California State University Northridge), Dr. Elin Danien (University of Pennsylvania), and Dr. Alexander Benitez (George Mason University).
After years of renovation, New York’s Metropolitan Museum recently opened its new galleries displaying the arts and crafts of the Islamic world.
In the New York Times, Holland Cotter writes that in “2003 the Islamic galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art closed for renovation, and one of the world’s premier collections of Islamic art more or less vanished into storage. The timing, barely two years after the events of Sept. 11, was unfortunate, if unavoidable. Just when we needed to learn everything we could about Islamic culture, a crucial teaching tool disappeared. As of Tuesday [, 25 October 2011] the learning can go forward. The Met’s Islamic collection returns to view in what are now being called the galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia. The new, much expanded installation — organized by Sheila Canby, the curator in charge of the department of Islamic art, with Navina Najat Haidar as project coordinator — is as intelligent as it is visually resplendent. The art itself, some 1,200 works spanning more than 1,000 years, is beyond fabulous. An immense cultural vista — necessary, liberating, intoxicatingly pleasurable — has been restored to the city. As its title implies, that vista has been carefully thought out and framed. Rather than presenting Islamic art as the product of a religiously driven monoculture encompassing centuries and continents, the Met is now — far more realistically — approaching it as a varied, changing, largely secular phenomenon, regionally rooted but absorptively cosmopolitan, affected by the intricacies and confusions of history, including the history that the art itself helped to create”.[1]
Cotter continues that the “Met galleries convey some sense of monumentality in a few long-familiar works. The great 11-foot-high mosaic-tiled 14th-century mihrab, or prayer niche, from a religious school in Isfahan is one. The intact wood-paneled reception hall known as the Damascus Room, decorated with poetic verses that have been placed in proper order with this reinstallation, is another. Then there are carpets, portable monuments. The Met has spectacular examples. The Simonetti Carpet, woven around 1500 in Cairo and named for a 20th-century owner, is nearly 30 feet long. In dim quarters in the old Islamic galleries it was hard to appreciate. Now displayed in a high, wide room designed by Michael Batista, the Met’s exhibition design manager, and atmospherically lighted by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, its garden-and-lawn colors — rose reds, grass greens — look tender with fresh life. Carpets like this one, emerging from imperial ateliers, are partly about look-at-me largeness. But they’re also about close-up detail, and this is the real story of the art of the Islamic world, and certainly of the examples gathered at the Met”.[2]
[1] Holland Cotter, “A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty – 1” The New York Times (27 October 2011). http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/arts/design/the-mets-new-islamic-galleries-review.html?_r=1.
[2] Holland Cotter, “A Cosmopolitan Trove of Exotic Beauty – 1”.
Thom Hartmann’s crazy alert, talking about a washed-up 8 foot Lego man. But, is it a mystery or something altogether mundane and even quite cynical???
Hartmann indicated the Dutch artist using the pseudonym Ego Leonard and . . . the news website HyperVocal put it this way: ‘The fiberglass statue, the creation of a Dutch artist, washed up on shore at the Siesta Key Beach in Sarasota, Florida on Tuesday. First spotted on the Zandvoort beach in The Netherlands in 2007 (Leonard has made numerous landlocked appearances in Holland as well), the bizarre creature with the “No Real Than You Are” shirt also made landfall on the shores of Brighton, England in October 2008. But just like many other non-citizens who wash up on Florida’s shores, Leonard is being held in detention. In a statement on the landing, the Sarasota County Sheriff’s office informed the public, “Mr. Leonard is being kept in a secure environment until his owner comes forward.” If and when nobody comes to claim Leonard, the sheriff’s office said he will be handed over to Jeff Hindman, the man who discovered Leonard on the beach on Tuesday morning. Hindman says he might sell him on eBay’.[1]
[1] “8-Foot-Tall, 100-Lb. Lego Man Washes Up on Florida Beach” HyperVocal (26 October 2011). http://hypervocal.com/news/2011/8-foot-tall-100-pound-lego-man-washes-up-on-florida-beach/.
In recent years, the idea that the world will end on December 21, 2012 has gained attention and spawned thousands of web sites, blogs, books and even a Hollywood movie. Although scientists generally dismiss the idea, curators of the Museum of Natural Science in Houston decided to use the prediction as a hook to draw visitors into the world of the ancient Maya. They do it through a planetarium film and an exhibit being prepared for next year – just in time, some might say, for the end of everything. VOA’s Greg Flakus has more from Houston.
The sculptor Mehmet Aksoy’s gigantic work, İnsanlık Anıtı or ‘Monument to Humanity’, is now being destroyed in a sample of officially authorised iconoclasm: ‘Workers began the demolition of Kars’ Monument to Humanity on Tuesday [, 26 April 2011], removing the 19-ton head of one of the figures following some technical difficulties. There will be no reversal of the contentious demolition, Özlem Öztürk, a press consultant for Kars Municipality, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, adding that the work should be completed within 10 days’.[1]
[1] “Demolition begins on Monument to Humanity in eastern Turkey” Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review (26 April 2011). http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=monument-to-humanity-dismantled-piece-by-piece-2011-04-26.
CNN’s Arwa Damon takes a tour of a turquoise jewelry community in Kabul, which is being restored with outside aid. The ‘Turquoise Mountain Foundation’, set up by ‘Rory Steward’, ‘to continue restoration and community development in Kabul, particularly in the Murad Khane project in Kabul’s Old City’.[1]
On its dedicated website the Turquoise Mountain Foundation sets out its aims and goals: ‘Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has been devastated by war, it lacks natural resources and it is largely dependent on the narcotics trade. Much of the population is marginalized and often disappointed by foreign aid. Decades of conflict have undermined Afghanistan’s unique traditions of Islamic art and architecture, from tilework to calligraphy and embroidery. Of the historic structures that have survived, many are now under threat from developers. So too are the incomes which support Afghanistan’s hundreds of thousands of crafts people’.[2] ‘Turquoise Mountain is a non-profit, non-governmental organisation that was established in 2006 at the request of HRH The Prince of Wales and HE Hamid Karzai, The President of Afghanistan. The name evokes the greatest indigenous Afghan capital of the middle ages, Firuzkuh, a city destroyed by Ghengis Khan in 1216 and lost to history. Its only surviving monument is the magnificent Minaret of Jam in Ghur Province. Turquoise Mountain’s aim is to revive Afghanistan’s traditional crafts, and to regenerate Murad Khane, a historic area of Kabul’s old city known for its rich cultural heritage. ‘The work is nothing short of wonderous and very importantly provides employment for hundreds’ [proclaimed the] Spectator Magazine’.[3] Even the Mayor of Kabul is involved . . .
General Contact
Shoshana Coburn
Tel. (Kabul): +93 (0) 798 149 173
Tel. (UK): +44 (0) 1764 650 888
[1] James Shinn, “Turquoise Mountain Foundation”. http://jamesshinn.net/?page_id=175.
[2] “THE CHALLENGE” Turquoise Mountain. http://turquoisemountain.org/about.html.
[3] “OUR MISSION” Turquoise Mountain. http://turquoisemountain.org/mission.html.
One of the first contemporary artists to address subjects such as biodiversity and global warming was Alexis Rockman. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has organized the artist’s first retrospective. With images of tropical plants, insects and amphibians on the walls, it is clear that Rockman has a love of nature but his artist’s eye is drawn less to nature’s beauty and more to its oddities.
The exhibition is called Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow, and appears like a belated recognition of the fact that the climate is really changing, and that change is anthropogenic or caused by human activity. There seem to be quite a few a people around who doubt men’s capacity to alter the environment, or the atmosphere’s composition in this case . . . Human life, as we know it, is not possible without the benign effect of the so-called Greenhouse Gas effect. And now, following the negative impact of the Industrial Revolution, humanity is increasing the amount of Greenhouse Gases in the earth’s atmosphere, heating up the planet and causing major disruptions in weather patterns across the world.[1]
Rockman is New York-bases artist, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (1980-1982) and the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (1983-1985). His paintings represent the visual world in a traditional fashion, yet create an eerie sense of the Unheimliche or uncanny, the appropriate Wiki entry details that ‘the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize’.[2]
[1] “Climate Change is a Hoax???” A Pseudo-Ottoman Blog (02 January 2011). https://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/climate-change-is-a-hoax/; “Moving Picture of Climate Change” A Pseudo-Ottoman Blog (01 January 2011). https://sitanbul.wordpress.com/2011/01/01/moving-picture-of-climate-change/.
[2] “Uncanny” Wikpedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny.
Monument to Humanity: Wanton Iconoclasm or a Sample of Nationalist Rhetoric?
As a geographic location, the territories now occupied by the Republic of Turkey are no stranger to bouts of iconoclasm and wanton destruction of works of art. In the days before Turks ever tread on the soil of Anatolia and Islam had become the law of the land, the Byzantine Empire (to use that time-worn 19th-century coinage) went through a number of turbulent phases in its religious life. Phases in experiencing religiosity that were connected to the use and/or abuse of images, when believers were either iconodules or iconoclasts, loving or loathing icons or depictions of the deity and other holy figures. As such, in Byzantine history two bouts of image-breaking fervour occurred: the “First Iconoclasm”, lasting from approximately 730 till the year 787 and the “Second Iconoclasm”, between 814 and 842. The then-hotly debated issue was whether the worship of the deity through icons constituted idolatry or was a legitimate means of approaching the godhead. Of more recent memory and enjoying large international exposure is of course the Taliban demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in the course of March 2001, an act of gratuitous iconoclasm based on a strict interpretation of Islamic precepts practised by the Taliban and their Wahhabi sponsors. In fact, the Saudis themselves have also committed their share of wilful destruction of cultural heritage. Early in 2002, they destroyed an 18th-century Ottoman-era fortress, al-Ajyad, overlooking a mosque in Mecca for the sake of progress, in order to erect 11 high-rise towers, consisting of apartments, a twin-tower five-star hotel, restaurants and a sacrosanct shopping mall in the holy city (at a cost of $533m), the latter ensuring that pilgrims and local contribute to the city’s economy by means of worshipping consumerism. At the time, the Turkish government “lodged a complaint with UNESCO, arguing that the Saudi move was a crime against humanity’s shared heritage and no different from the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of two massive Buddhist statues inAfghanistan”, as worded by the travel writer Michael Wise. Then-Turkish parliament speaker Murat Sökmenoğlu (member of the Turco-Islamist MHP), declared that a “Muslim country’s destruction of another Muslim country’s historic heritage on holy soil is a sinful behaviour in breach of the moral values of Islam, religious brotherhood and common sense”.
Now that Turkey is living in the grip of the AKP, one of the successors of the recently deceased Necmettin Erbakan’s Refah Partisi (RP), one would think that such Muslim sentiment reigns supreme. Currently, a symbolically-charged statue is being demolished as a result of Recep Tayyib Erdoğan’s statement in January 2011 that a “freak” had been erected in the vicinity of the tomb of Hasan al-Haraqani (963-1033). The Prime Minister was referring to the gigantic and as yet incomplete ‘Monument to Humanity’ (İnsanlık Anıtı), set up in 2008 by the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy. At the time of Erdoğan’s effusion, the Wall Street Journal’s Marc Champion opined that these words signaled “the depth of a freeze in efforts to reopen the border and improve relations between the two neighbors” of Armenia and Turkey. And now, following another round of 24-April trepidations, destruction work has commenced at full force, with the hope that work will be finished in ten days.
But what did Mehmet Aksoy’s gigantic sculpture attempt to do? It is a really huge human figure that is torn in two, with an equally enormous hand reaching out into the distance. The message seems rather obvious: Turks, or should we say Muslims?, and Armenians once lived side by side on these lands. They used to be one body. As a result of a brutal exercise of ethnic cleansing that once-unified social structure became ruptured. Yet, now as neighbour – the sovereign states of Turkey and Armenia– attempts should be made to overcome the legacy of the Great War (1914-18), hence the reaching out of an empty hand looking for friendship. But now, on account of government-sponsored iconoclasm, such feelings of solidarity and attempts at coming to term with one’s past no longer have a physical reminder in a region o f Turkey once heavily populated by Armenians.
And what would the dead saint, ostensibly at the centre of this affair, Hasan al-Haraqani, have said about all these things? After all, his final resting place seems to have provided the pretext for the current bout of iconoclasm in the geographic location of the Republic of Turkey. This saintly figure’s presence in Anatolia predated the Battle of Manazgirt (1077), which ushered in the Turkification and Islamification of Anatolia. Born in Khorasan, he left his home and came to Anatolia following the death of his Mürşid (spiritual teacher) Bâyazid Bistamî. Haraqani was known as a man who cared for the downtrodden and rejoiced in his love for God and mankind. His advice for reaching God was to practice generosity, and to be compassionate and contented. All in all, Hasan al-Haraqani would apparently not have approved of the wanton destruction of a symbol meant to bring people together and bring an end to a century of enmity. In fact, Turkey’s current favourite saint, Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumî, better knowns as just Rumi in the rest of the world, also wrote favourably about him. As a mystic who saw himself as a conduit to God for ordinary people, Haraqani’s life and teachings could serve as a cautionary tale for today’s policy-makers and business-leaders in Turkey trying to come to grips with the annually recurring 24-April crisis and the growing Islamophobia in this post-9/11 world of ours.
What lies behind the present destruction of the ‘Monument to Humanity’? Why did Erdoğan use the word “freak” (‘ucube’) in connection with Mehmet Aksoy’s sculpture? The Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu added that the modernist (or is it post-modernist?) sculpture clashes with the Seljuk and Ottoman heritage of the city of Kars, that it clashes with the architectural aesthetic present in the city. On the other hand, the upcoming elections should not be discounted either. Located on a spot that affords a view of the Republic of Armenia, removing the sculpture might send a message of Turkish determination in the face of Armenian desperation to have the G-word finally officially engraved on the history of 20th-century Turkey, from its Unionist beginnings, over its Kemalist heyday, and into its current post-Kemalist and pro-Islamic phase. Is the Prime Minister merely trying to have the AKP replace the MHP in the hearts and minds of Turkish nationalists by means of removing a symbolic gesture towards Armenia and its on-going struggle to come to terms with the past?
Category:
Art, Christianity, Current Affairs, Current History, G-Word, Islam, Islamophobia, Ottoman history, Political Commentary, Pseudo-Ottoman, Tayyip Erdoğan, Turcica, Turkey