Embodied Bodies in the Coffin of Medieval Art History

I try not to express the odd frustration that occasionally knocks on the door of this blog, but recently, the knock of "embodied bodies" has been deafening. Take for instance the theme of the upcoming Southeastern Medieval Association conference, "Bodies, Embodiments, Becoming." It's a commendably smart title, but so utterly ambiguous that I begin to get nervous. The persistent juxtaposition of the words "body" and "embodiment" proliferates the literature of medieval art enough to make one wonder. The very repetition in the title and its double proliferation in public view suggests some secret code, a secret handshake, that only art historians can understand. During a recent academic search for a Byzantine/Medieval art historian, practically every candidate's job talk had both "body" and "embodiment" in its title. From the perspective of an architectural historian, embodiment is such a central concept that it cannot be tread lightly or simply metaphorically. I speculate that the popularity of embodied bodies parallels the progressive demise of architectural history, or, more generally, the demise of material culture under the onslaught of visual culture. Obviously, both material and visual culture are historiographic constructs, but the latter seems to be winning the limelight. Visual culture's complementary (or combative) relationship with literary culture brings it closer to literary theory and a vocabulary that is appropriately opaque. I tip my hat to the brilliance of post-structuralist theory, but I worry that its vocabulary is reduced to catchy phrases in the hands, pens, and voices of medieval art historians. I worry that embodied bodies have become puerile advertising logos to catch the fleeting attention of academic consumers and to conceal a conservative methodology beneath. Perhaps, if the body discourse didn't seem so dated to the 1980s, it wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb almost a quarter century later.

I may be tickled by the vocabulary of visual studies as it seeks to materialize itself, but I truly have no bones to pick. My own intellectual development is dated to ca. 1990 and if it weren't for Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, I would have left academia happily after college. What concerns me deeply is a different phenomenon, a progressive loss of reality and a progressive disinterest in the methodologies that document this reality. This is painfully evident in journalism, for instance, in the lack of documentation that characterized news coverage before the Iraq War. Bill Moyer's makes this point well in the documentary Buying the War (PBS, 2007). Since it began in American universities, architectural history was defined as a discipline of documentation. Thanks to its contiguity with architectural studies (and the archaeological commitments of the Beaux Arts), the reality check was ever-present. Although less pronounced than the Bauforschung tradition of Germany, the careful study of ancient and medieval monuments was integral to the curriculum of American art history through the 1990s. But I cannot help to notice that most of the retiring mentors of this tradition are not replaced in kind; their positions are morphing into different forms (typically non-architectural, non-western, or modern). Art history is under new pressures to be globally expansive and to keep in step with the theories of the dominant faculties of literary culture (compare the size of English and Art History departments). My own mentor (Cecil L. Striker) has luckily been replaced by the next generation of premier architectural historians (Robert Ousterhout), but this is simply a fortunate exception. Professor Striker's most new book, Kalenderhane in Istanbul, vol. 2 (Mainz, 2007) makes the reader weep with the exquisite quality of documentation. But one may also weep realizing that such a publication may never occur again, as publishers themselves lose interest in facts. Kalenderhane makes no qualms about embodiment; the publication itself offers the closest proxy to its original.

Whereas I hope not to offend my friends in literary and visual studies, sometimes I feel the urgency of a disciplinary crisis. In my own university, architectural history is severely cut from the curriculum of the design profession. Architecture, at least, had offered a branch on which the architectural historian could once stand on. But strangely enough as architectural education becomes itself more theoretical, the historical discipline dissipates. Postmodernism injected historicism into the tabula rasa of modernism; I'm afraid, the net affect (25 years later) has been a dematerialized and iconic (but luckily ironic) relationship to the facts of history. What puzzles me most is that our postmodern fore-fathers urged us to pay MORE not LESS attention to the instruments of documentation. Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge is fundamentally archaeological. Even if we are drowning in global waters of simulacra, we must not throw out the baby in the bath for its embodied embodiment.

Writing off the Wall: Transcription as Resistance

We know that inscribing texts on masonry is a political act, whether celebrating the powers that created the building (commemorative inscriptions) or declaring an unofficial subversive message (graffiti). But what about the scholarly act of transcribing inscriptions, copying the scratchings, deciphering the paleography and interpreting their content?

Between November 1943 and March 1944, Anastasios K. Orlandos transcribed 130 unknown inscriptions from the Early Christian and Byzantine phase of the Parthenon in Athens. This act of decipherment doubled our epigraphic knowledge to a total of 232 inscriptions, which were fully published with Leandros I. Vranouses three decades later, in Ta charagmata tou Parthenononos (Athens, 1973). Reading the preface of this volume made me realize that Orlandos was operating during the height of the Nazi occupation. Orlandos remained head of the Greek Restoration Service during the war, a time when all resources for restoration were naturally limited. Climbing up on the walls of the Parthenon to transcribe these invisible inscriptions resonates as an act of resistance, keeping busy at a time of limited resources. When you are not able to inscribe your own message, transcribing a latent message seems to be a powerful alternative, especially when these texts contain political ideas in proxy. Some of the Byzantine inscriptions (like the one represented here) mention Greek generals (strategou tes Ellados). Propped on a ladder within the masonry of the Parthenon and communing with past generals must have offered the kind of political hope that a powerless archaeologist needed under the oversight of the German authorities. OrlandosAcademy of Athens on June 15, 1944, still under the German regime (the Allies liberated Greece four month later in October). One can only wonder whether there was a political tone in the public lecture. Preliminary French publication followed in 1946, during the Greek Civil War, in Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique (1946) 70, pp. 418-427. Incidentally, the final 1973 publication took place a year before the Greek military junta fell. presented his inscriptions at the

Orlandos was not the only Greek spending wartime with inscriptions. In 1941, the Society of Christian Archaeology in Athens began the corpus of early Christian inscriptions. Orlandos’ mentor, the academician Nikolaos Vees published the first volume on the inscriptions of CorinthCorpus der Griechisch-Christilichen Inschriften von Hellas. Band I. Die Griechisch-Inschriften des Peloponnes (Athens). So what is it about inscriptions and a time of war? Is it simply a passive way to do archaeology, or is it also instrumental in regaining authorial power? and Isthmia,

How bizarre it would have been for Orlandos in 1943 to discover inscriptions referring to a number of Byzantines named Germanos (nos. 79, 142, 156, 160, 161, 187), a word which had ceased to be used as a personal name and meant quite explicitly the German. Even if the Germanoi of Byzantium were archbishops, domestikoi, episkopoi, or sakelarioi, in the realities of 1940s they were the occupying forces. Many of these funerary inscriptions, celebrated the death of the Germanos (as in no. 160 reproduced here). Could phrases like “Germanos has died” also offer hidden and subversive hope? I think they might have.

The intersection between scholarship and political oppression contains all kinds of ethical problems and compromises. Before World War II, Orlandos had been a Germano-phile, attending the lectures of Wilhelm Dörpfeld and pursuing the Bauforschungen methods of the German school. Then suddenly, his national mentors became his oppressors. Although I am not sure of Orlandos’ political leanings and activities after the War (and during the Civil War), his oppression by the German forces seems undeniable. As a government official he did not starve like many other Athenians, but his position cannot have been comfortable or easy. The situation of Vees must have been equally conflicted, having had strong academic connections with Germany from the turn of the century.

Looking down from his ladder on the Acropolis, Orlandos’ view of Athens in 1943-1944 must have been gruesome, a city ravaged by starvation and death. Mark Mazower’ Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (New Haven, 1993) provides a detailed account of the horrors, including the role of archaeology. More recently, Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2005) revisits the utter disparity between German occupations in Greece and northern Europe (France, Belgium, etc.): “Nazis treated western Europeans with some respect, if only the better to exploit them, and western Europeans returned the compliment by doing relatively little to disrupt or oppose the German war effort. In eastern and south-eastern Europe, the occupying Germans were merciless, and not only because local partisans—in Greece, Yugoslavia and Ukraine especially—fought relentless if hopeless battles against them.” (p. 17).

The Acropolis was an important locus of representational resistance for the Greek people. It was from here that on May 30, 1941, Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas (two law students) took down the Nazi flag replacing it with a Greek flag. We must also not forget that Yannis Miliadis, the director of the Acropolis left the service in opposition to the collaborationist Greek government. In 1941 he joined the Communist-dominated government (EAM/ELAS) in the mountains. During the battles between the British and the Communists in December 1944, Miliadis was arrested and exiled. Orlandos, in contrast, chose a more passive form of resistance. For more information on Greek archaeology under dictatorship, see Dimitra Kokkinidou and Marianna Nikolaidou, “On the Stage and Behind the Scenes: Greek Archaeology in Times of Dictatorship,” in Archaeology under Dictatorship, ed. Michael L. Galaty and Charles Watkinson, (New York, 2004) pp. 155-190.

I should note that the person that has turned me onto the Parthenon inscriptions is Amy Papalexandrou. My digression on Orlandos' political action was triggered by Amy's terrific new study, "Echoes of Orality in the Monumental Inscriptions of Byzantium," Art and Text in Byzantine Culture, ed. Liz James (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 161-187. The article suggests directions of "voiced readings" that animate an otherwise dull discipline. I personally cannot wait for the book, even if a couple of books down the line. Same goes to Linda Safran, whose sociolinguistic approach has transformed the inscriptions of southern Italy, see "Language Choice in the Medieval Salento: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Greek and Latin Inscriptions," Zwischen Polis, Provinz und Peripherie (Wiesbaden, 2005), pp. 819-840. I thank both for sharing their research with me. I also look forward to reading Bill Caraher's work on early-Christian inscriptions.

For a related posting on Nazi-occupied Greece, see Bishops, Earthquakes, Immigration.

"Priest Houses": Sacred or Profane?

Architectural history is plagued by a typological binary between sacred and profane functions. The roots for such a demarcation lie in the theological debates of the Protestant Reformation and their eventual translation into the concerns of secular nation-states and their academies. A tendency to identify pre-modern civilizations with their religious cultures has lead to an over-representation of temples, churches and mosques in material-culture studies. Byzantine architectural history is almost exclusively a history of churches. The standard textbooks, Cyril Mango's Byzantine Architecture (New York, 1974) and Richard Krautheimer's Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (New York 1986, 4th ed.), include very little domestic architecture, nor can one find a rudimentary survey of houses in the Byzantine world. But this is a quite well known problem, the result of an ultra-conservative discipline.

What concerns me here is a related, but smaller problem, one that smacks the ignorance of houses against the scholarly plethora of churches. In other words, what happens when a house is slapped against a church? How do we separate sacred from secular in such an instant? The question came to my mind after reading William Caraher's discussion of "Early Christian and Hybrid Space"and the Lechaion Basilica in Corinth. Caraher is here concerned with the original 6th-c. phase of the building (dated a century later than previously thought). Instead, I am interested in the 7th-c. shrinking of the church and the attachment of a domestic quarter; this is the lesser known phase, discussed by Demetrios Pallas in his excavation reports (Praktika 1956-1961). Although, I am not as close to the material as Caraher or Guy Sanders (who has looked at Pallas' pottery), I distinctly remember a residential accretion described as the bishop's palace.

In a different context, I have been reading up on early British medieval excavation methods, using Christopher Gerrard's guide, Medieval Archaeology: Understanding Traditions and Contemporary Approaches (London, 2003). The book is slightly misleading in not including the word "United Kingdom" anywhere on its title, since it concerns itself with British archaeology. Discussing the emergence of sound scientific methods in the interwar period, Gerrard mentions the excavations of St. Catharine's Hill at Winchester College of 1925-1928 (p. 69). Although not remarkable in excavation techniques, this project included detailed documentation of all kinds of lesser finds, including (what interests me greatly) medieval roof tiles. So, I requested the original publication through Interlibrary Loan, C.F.K. Hawkes, J.N.L. Myers, and C.G. Stevens, Saint Catharine's Hill Winchester (Winchester, 1930) and started reading through the publication once it arrived (from Harvard!!! Clemson never gets ILL from Harvard!!!). The site's medieval phase (over the earlier Iron Age) constitutes of a church built in 1110-1125 and characteristic of Norman plans; an earlier phase, isolated in the east, may date close to the conquest, 1066. Around 1530, the chapel was suppressed at a time when the local cardinal closed a number of monasteries and transfered their endowments to Colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. The first lay tenant of the property is responsible for the destruction of the building, which remained unknown until its archaeological discovery.

In addition to the beautifully illustrated rooftiles, what interests me about this excavation is the discovery of two small rooms attached to the tip of the chapel's northeast corner. In its precarious proximity the space was assigned the function of "priest's house," a natural conclusion. But is it really that natural? What does this proximity say about the life of priests, or the boundary between sacred and profane. Is everything near a recognizably religious building a priest's house. Such haphazard identifications characterize much of ancient archaeology, as well. Any seemingly residential complex near ancient sanctuaries has always been called the house of priests or priestess. This is exactly the subject of Deborah Brown's on-going dissertation at Bryn Mawr College.

So, I'm simply raising the question. Given the insurmountable boundary in modern conceptions of religious versus domestic space, houses that attach themselves to churches throw a nice wrench. Churches that attach themselves to houses have been more thoroughly dealt with as "private chapels." At this interface between church and house we might find the vocabulary to talk about medieval domestic architecture more meaningfully.

Philadelphia Literature?

"There is no good literature on Philadelphia,” said David Leatherbarrow over dinner at Greenville, South Carolina, the day before giving his lecture at Clemson University Architecture Department's Critical Practice for the Next Generation (Feb. 22, 2008). Dr. Leatherbarrow (my undergraduate mentor and theory hero) made this comment in relation to a class he is currently teaching at Penn, where the students read city-specific writings on architecture and literature. David’s comment put me into a query, and since it’s Philadelphia that I call home, I struggled for some bibliography.

There are, of course, Christopher Morley’s writings from the 1920s, edited by Ken Kalfus (Christopher Morley’s Philadelphia, 1990). Kalfus’ most recent novel A Disorder Peculiar to This County (2006) deals with 9/11 (hence a New York focus). Some of his previous works narrates personal experiences from the Soviet Union, where he resided with his wife, the Moscow correspondent of the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time -- see Pu-239 And Other Russian Fantasies (1999), the title story of which was made into an HBO movie and premiered November 17, 2007. I first saw Kalfus on Bloomsday, the celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses taking place at the Rosenbach Library. He read with his wife, Inga Saffron who is currently the architectural critic of the Inquirer. They both live in Philadelphia and are spotted on the street with their daughter (who seems like the coolest teenager in the world). Saffron’s blog, Skyline Online provides the BEST update on what’s happening on Philadelphia’s architectural scene. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next best Philadelphia fiction does not come out of the pen of Ken Kalfus. I’m impatiently waiting for a Philadelphia Ulysses.

In the meantime, I want to suggest a couple of quintessential urban Philadelphia works, not necessarily novels. For instance, my recent most favorite has to do with the Mummer’s Parade of 2008. Space 1026 is a funky art collaborative on Arch Street, whose importance was recognized in a 2002 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Members of the group formed the Vaude-Villains and entered the Parade with the theme “Eaglize It.” The resulting confrontation between old and new, straight and gay, working class and art class is so incredibly Philadelphia; I cannot think of a better manifestation of the city’s new greatness. For a full coverage of this project, see Ryan Creed, “Never Mind the Sequins,” The City Paper (Dec. 26, 2007).

A slightly older book which grows from Philadelphian experiences is The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power (2002). Although from Chicago, Travis Hugh Culley lived in Philadelphia while writing this memoir. The book is very intelligent, exploring the bike-messenger as the ultimate new urban hero, but also revisiting the American city and the persistent suppression of anything non-automotive throughout its history. It is not surprising that Philadelphia has the hippest track-bike culture in the US. How can anyone resist buying a bag from R.E. Load, a grass-roots manufacturing company. The neo-Arts & Crafts movement is shaping up in Philadelphia.

Consider, moreover, that not all of the editors of n+1 (the recent literary journal) live in New York. Some live in Philadelphia; and they are producing masterpieces. Mark Greif’s “Afternoon of the Sex Children" (N+1, no. 4, Spring 2006) is one of the best things I’ve read for a while. Not only was it reproduced in Harper’s (Nov. 20060, but also selected for The Best American Essays 2007, ed. David Foster Wallace. Two year earlier, Greif’s essay “Against Exercise’ (n+1, no. 1, Fall 2004) was selected for The Best American Essay 2005, ed. Susan Orlean and Robert Atwan. I may be mistaken but either Mark Greif or Marco Roth lives in Philadelphia. At least I want them to live in Philadelphia.

New Books: Peripatetic History

André Breton worshiped aimlessness, wandering through the city and facilitating chance encounters. One was the encounter with Nadja, the subject of his 1928 novel by the same name. Such surreal narrations established a literary form of free association and an intellectual discipline of peripatetic urban research. The late-19th-century flâneur wandered the streets of Paris in disengaged poetic alienation, which for Charles Baudelaire (and later Walter Benjamin) became the archetype of modernity and aesthetic experience. The narrative meandering of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is another classic paradigm (Swann's Way is literally a road). Yet again in the 1960s, a second generation of Surrealists, the Situationist International, refined the method of urban drift (dérive) into an arbitrary science; the Beats did the same in the US (plus Algeria, and even Greece). The Baudelaire-Surrealist-Situationist-Beat tradition was still palpable in the intellectual climate of the late-1980s and early-1990s; consider among a multitude of examples, Jim Jarmusch's 1984 classic Stranger than Paradise, which has just been released on DVD (Criterion Series, 2007). I'm immensely grateful that Clemson's library already has a copy. And to wrap a thread between this and the last posting on punk archaeology, let me highlight Joe Strummer's strong relationship with Jarmusch (he even appeared in one of his movies, Mystery Train, 1989). The Situationists bled into the Clash (and punk) through their producer Bernie Rhodes, who was inspired by the Situationists. Rhodes was the intellectual directing the Clash into theoretical coherence (and away from silly love songs). It was Rhodes, for instance, that convinced Paul Simonon (bassist) to design the band's clothes and fill them with texts, to emulate the Situationists' famous psycho-maps (Chris Salewicz, Redemption Song, New York, 2006, p. 151).

I mention this intellectual tradition of urban wandering and psychogeography because I've noticed a resurgence of peripatetic literature in the last few months. By no means related to each other, or even claiming a common genealogy, a number of new authors explore wandering as a structure for history writing. For those of us who study and teach historical objects, monuments and landscapes, the model of the aimless memoir brings some excitement into our jobs. Most of the books that I will discuss below are not academic publications, but they manage to tell academic stories. In reviewing one of those books, Mark Mazower asked, "who would dissent from the desire to rescue history from the curators, the academics and the heritage industry experts and to inject it with the passion that will win its new devotees?" (The Nation, Feb. 11 2008, p. 43) As an academic, and hence a member of the heritage industry, my ears perk up. I fling my doors open to the flaneur and invite him up into my dull academic office hours -- the student don't come anyway.

Although a couple of years old, I should include Rebecca Solnit's, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York, 2005) into the great recent works on wandering (the hardback is on remainder on Amazon for only $6.49). Many of you may have noticed that 2007 was the year of Jack Kerouac since On the Road celebrated its 50th Anniversary. Remember how 2005 was the year of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," another 50th Anniversary? A couple of weekends ago (while visiting my good friend Joe Alchermes for dinner in Manhattan), I chanced upon a wonderful exhibit displaying Kerouac's original manuscript and other paraphernalia at the New York Public Library (the exhibit is on till March 16, 2008). I will say more about this NYC visit because I also chanced uponDamien Hirst's installation at the Lever House. But this blog-posting is not about my derivee in New York; it is about some interesting new books that can be read while siting.

The new books are Will Self's, Psychogeography, William Vollmann's, Riding Toward Everywhere, Geert Mak's, In Europe and Sarah Vowell's, Assassination Vacation. I should note at the outset that I have not read these books yet. They've come to my attention through a variety of sources (the Nation, the Sunday New York Times, National Public Radio, or Public Radio International). As I write, they sit on my bookshelf (or my Amazon cart). So what will follow is less of a review and more of an invitation. This is what I'll be reading in the next few months; want to join me?

Will Self and Ralph Steadman, Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place (New York, 2007). Will Self is a British writer and journalist with a regular column on the Independent. I've glimpsed through a previous collection, Junk Mail (2006), but really learned about this book from Kurt Andersen's radio show, Studio 360 ( #849, Dec. 7, 2007). The Studio 369 interview begins where the book begins. On a trip from London to New York, Self walks from his home to Heathrow and after the flight from JFK to Manhattan. This becomes an act of resilience, a political gesture against the intentional placelessness of modern topography (with slight 911 overtones). The book is illustrated by Ralph Steadman, the British cartoonist best known for his illustrations of Hunter S. Thompson. The illustrations are reason enough to buy the book; Steadman's style revives the surreal visions of Max Ernst with a dosage of George Grosz and Francis Bacon.

William T. Vollmann, Riding Toward Everywhere (New York, 2008). Vollmann is also a journalist/novelist. I haven't read much of his work, I've only browsed through his recent historical novel Europe Central (2005), which won the National Book Award. His new book is about jumping on trains and traveling aimlessly. See review in NYT Book Review. Vollmann's book has a different flavor as his interests fall on the world of the underclasses, the hobos who actually ride the trains. The journalistic research on poverty dominates his earlier Poor People (2007; just released in paperback). Riding Toward Everywhere is not sociological or preachy. It has two dominant motifs, a desire to reconnect with an earlier generation of blue collar American males immersed in industry, metal and machines (Vollmann's father and grandfather) and a call for liberation. Vollmann wants to inspire his contemporaries to escape with him.

Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century (New York, 2007).
This sounds like an amazing enterprise. Dutch journalist Geert Mak has been traveling through Europe's modern monuments, the places where Europe's tortured identity was written. There, he investigates the vestiges of cultural memory that remain in the 21st century. As the European identity drifts away from the burden of historical conscience (inescapable in the 20th century), its landmarks dissipate in memory and commemoration. This books wanders through those places looking for their past in their present. Mak's earlier book is interesting, too; Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth Century Europe (London, 2001) documents rural depopulation and its effects on the European psyche. Jorwerd, Mak's home village in the northwest Netherlands (Friesland), forms his case study. In Europe was beautifully reviewed by Mark Mazower, "Rambling Man," The Nation (Feb. 11, 2008), pp. 38-43. Mazower, a historian at Columbia University, is prolific (The Balkans; Dark Continent; Salonica); his best work and a must for ANYONE working on Greece is Inside Hitler's Greece (New Haven, 1993). More recently, he also edited a fascinating collection of essays dealing with the effects of the Greek Civil War in ordinary society, see After the War Was Over (Princeton, 1993). If Mazower endorses this ramble (see quote in first paragraph), then I cannot wait to read it.

Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (New York, 2005; new in paperback).
Sarah Vowell is one of the amazing young journalists contributing to Ira Glass's This American Life on Public Radio International. The premise of her book is visiting every place that an American president has been assassinated. This peculiar self-imposed tourism becomes a narrative of American history as well as a documentary project on the present reality of those historical landmarks. You can hear Vowell speak about the Lincoln Memorial in last week's Studio 360, "American Icons: The Lincoln Memorial" on(#907, Feb. 15, 2008).

Happy reading. Tell me what you think. I'm personally very excited about these books.

Punk Suburbs

For this post, I'll cheat and direct you to another blog that contains some brilliant comments on Punk Archaeology. Ordinarily William Caraher's "The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World" is devoted to archaeological topics (methodological, theoretical, and other), providing an additional insight into the activities at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where Bill is currently Carpenter Professor. Although written in Athens, this blog also addresses the regional complexities of North Dakota, where Bill teaches when he's not on-leave. So, I'm thrilled to have distracted Bill towards yet another of his interdisciplinary interests. Without further ado, please visit, "Punk Archaeology: Some Preliminary Thoughts."

You'll find some wonderful theoretical insights and an urban complement that I had inadvertently ignored, namely the suburb. Having bought into punk's own urban mythology, I've failed to appreciate the suburban origins of the music; as Bill points out, Garage Rock is by definition suburban. Perhaps I'm also avoiding the scene's most contemporary phase, residing almost exclusively in mall merchandising. I still have not made up my mind whether I like mall-punk (Green Day, Rancid, Offspring). Or simply, I've had my nose buried in British bibliography. I'm deeply humbled by my cyber conversation with Bill across the waters. This is truly the first proof I've ever received that blogging can have practical intellectual value, helping towards a more communal form of brainstorming.

Since this very posting is outwardly directive, I include some indispensable secondary literature. This is by no means exhaustive, but includes the most enduring general histories that I have read.

Azerrad, Michael. 2001. Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991, Boston, New York and London

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London. (2nd edition, 2005)

Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.

McNeil, Legs, and Gilliam McCain. 1996. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, New York. (New edition, 2006)

Savage, Jon. 1992. England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, New York.

Punk Topography 101(ers)

The Clash front man Joe Strummer started his first band in 1974. Their name "The 101'ers" reveals the urban domestic origins of punk, named after 101 Walterton Road, where the band members squatted. Strummer had just bought his iconic Fender Telecaster; among other odd jobs he trimmed flower beds at Hyde Park and was janitor for the English National Opera. Earlier in the winter 1972-73, Strummer had a truly archaeological job, working as a gravedigger (as did Rod Stewart) The story of the band is told in Strummer's official biography, Chris Salewicz, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer (New York, 2006). Strummer and the rest of the 101'ers lived and practiced in the basement, which had a dirt floor. Walterton Street was a war time ghetto, which the government was slowly tearing down, house-by-house. 101 Walterton was the last house on the block razed in 1975. The squatters then moved to 36 St. Luke Road, close to a West Indian community. Essentially, the 101'ers were inhabiting an abandoned urban carcass. The house had no interior toilet, no hot water, no electricity and was flea infested. Electricity was illegally tapped from the public grid (Salewicz, pp. 116, 118, 129). The photo on the left, from Salewicz, p. 110, gives an architectural image of punk's origins, rising out of dilapidated brick houses of the 19th-century. Spaces such as these would become dwellings and performing spaces for countless bands in the UK and the USA.

Although 101 Walterton does not exist anymore, it was located at 51°31'29.83"N, 0°12'3.08"W (lat/long) and can be visited via GoogleEarth. Technically, quatting means the occupation of abandoned buildings without official permission or payment of rent. For a global overview, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting.












Masonry brick wall became central to the iconography of punk. In stark low budget black-and-white photography, the brick matrix provided dramatic visuality to the music. An exaggerated Xerox manipulation, further contrasted the black brick against the white mortar. Consider the architectural backdrop on the Ramones self-titled debut album (1976), a graffitied masonry wall from Lower Manhattan (probably outside CBGB's). Similarly, when the Clash released their first (also self-titled) record in 1977, it also set the band within a highly dramatic brick wall. The photo was taken by Kate Simon for an article in Sounds in late 1976. The setting was an alleyway opposite the front door of the band's Rehearsal Rehearsals building in Camden Town (Salewicz 181). The 1980 album cover for Sandinista also featured a brick-wall background. The aesthetics of bare brick walls contrasts with those of a decade earlier. When Andy Warhol moved into the Factory in January 1964, he had Billy Name (a lighting technician) cover the bare brick walls with silver. The demise of the Factory in 1968 corresponds with the pealing of the silver application. Punk did not have glitter. It's also noteworthy to compare the punk walls with rock's most famous masonry, namely The Wall by Pink Floyd in 1979. The 2-LP album sleeves highlight a crisply drafted wall, pure whiteness inscribed by pure black lines. Above this orthographic drawing, we have the blotchy graffiti of the band's name and record title. True to its conceptual art-rock narrative, this wall exists in a fantastic, timeless, highly representational graphic realm. Although of similar iconography, it is foreign to the rough and real bricks of the Ramones and the Clash.

Punk Archaeology

Punk rock seems to be one of the most urban music movements of the late 20th-century in contrast to the Arcadian aesthetics of the hippies. An aversion to nature helped the punks define themselves against the hippies, one of their many professed enemies. From the outdoor concerts like Woodstock to the creating of self-sufficient alternative communities, the Sixties fit into romantic tradition where the countryside reveals paths to goodness, hope and rebirth; hippies were the offspring of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Enlightenment and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism. The desire to build a new society took hippies outdoors, dancing on the tabula rasa, living physically within nature, freely cultivating natural substances that induced heightened sensorial experiences and practicing non-hierarchical organic social relations like free love. Cities, the consummate product of the bourgeoisie, were not good places for such an enterprise. Even if dwelling in urban centers, the hippies abandoned the modern city as an intellectual project. This is not to say that alternative communities did not flourish in cities. San Francisco is a good example, but even here the image of Golden Gate Park dominates. The political component of the Sixties had a visible urban manifestation in the anti-Vietnam and the Civil-Rights movement. We can hardly visualize 1968 without urban demonstrations. And we can hardly generalize the Sixties; experiences varied from region to region. May 1968 in Paris, for example, was undeniably one of the highest expressions of urbanism (incited by Guy Debord, Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists). But was the Parisian left, really hippie? Already we encounter some technical problems in defining “the Sixties.” The French experience differs greatly from the American experience; not only was it more fundamentally urban, but also more politically structured around the Communist party.

However we encapsulate the Sixties radical generation, it was undeniably different than the generation of the late Seventies and Eighties. Something happened in 1977. The contemporaries were keenly self-aware of articulating a new movement and, in retrospect, they historicized it in their narratives. One distinctive difference between punks and hippies lies in their urban commitment. Punks found the hippies idealistic, deluded and soft. Replacing escapism with nihilism, the punks embraced urban blight and tailored their identities to fit within the physical spaces of abandoned urban form. Rather than communing with nature, punks squatted in the city; they literally inhabited abandoned buildings and shaped an aggressively edgy existence out of domestic ruins. Growing up at the heights of suburban flight and the demise of the American city, the punks were the first post-industrial generation. Hippies, on the other hand, grew up at the heights of industrialism, benefiting from America’s postwar prosperity. The same industrial might that won World War II had been redirected to domestic social realms: cheap suburban houses, comforts, appliances, social conformity and streamlining. The American dream of the Fifties was a dream of victory. The hippies grew up in a prosperous, although socially constraining environment. Coming of age within the coherence of the Fifties household, they accumulated a profound social confidence. If their parents could reinvent—and rule—the world so could they, except that the world they desired was different. Living the optimism of the American dream, deceived them into unreachable goals, such as creating an equally universal alternative.

The punks emerged at the tail end of economic prosperity. In the words of Jon Savage, they came together "in a network of relationships as complicated as a the rabbit-warren London slums of Dickens's novels" (England's Dreaming, New York, 1992, p. 3) Their internalized sensibility was one of coping, resisting and collapse. The punks experienced abandonment the way that the hippies experienced flight. Whether conceived as a music movement, a youth movement, or a cultural movement, they created a pervasive ethos with various characteristics, including an archaeological one. I will explore the connection between punk and archaeology in a series of case studies. For me, the connection is obvious at a visceral and deeply personal level. Generally speaking, I belong to Generation X—I even read the manual as soon as it came out, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture (1991). My formative youth experiences (high-school and college) fit comfortably within 1981-1991. More specifically, however, I grew up in cities. My attraction to the post-punk music and social culture began in Columbia, South Carolina, and flourished when my family moved to Philadelphia, which at the time was one of the most devastated cities in the East Coast. As a teenager immigrant, I never quite fit in main stream youth culture (Michael Jackson, proms, malls) but was attracted to the intellectual sophistication, public sphere and sensual character of the musical underground. The punk/post-punk scene manifested itself in multifarious musings and gatherings within the urban fabric. Punks squatted in the abandoned houses of West Philadelphia, where they also formed bands and performed; these were my friends, this was my dilapidated neighborhood. The movement’s superstars (like the Clash, Black Flag, Hüsker Dü, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat) had such a limited audience that they performed at small venues, church basements, rotary clubs, bars, houses. There were no “concerts” only “shows.” To get the full historical flavor of the scene read, Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (2001). Having grown up around an underground that lived and breathed the abandoned city, I hope to articulate what I can only describe as an archaeological. It is not a surprise to me that the punk ethos directly cultivated in me an archaeological predilection. The punk ethos has caused much conflict in its generation by its sheer negativity. How do you continue to fight the power when you accumulate power as a mature member of society. Professionally, I translated punk’s spirit of abjection into archaeology, which I practice academically. Thus, the case studies that follow are exercises in self-reflection if not self-validation. The archaeological manifestations of punk are clear to my friends who shared these formative experiences during our teens and twenties. Not surprisingly, many are now academics. More importantly, they have shaped their respective intellectual inquires according to some feature of this shared punk ethos (whatever it might be). I didn’t fully realize the poetic significance of this generational experience until reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005); of course, we all knew that we were part of something larger from Greil Marcus’, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1990). I owe many of my ideas to the critical discursive culture that the punk scene generated. I will probably bring their stories to bear, so I will enumerate those friends as a preliminary expression of gratitude. They are Jennie Uleman, Stephanie Camp, Elias Markolefas, Laurel Taylor, Emily Hage, Jules Dingle, Jenn Ball, Bill Caraher .

Bishops, Earthquakes, Diaspora

A devastating earthquake struck Corinth on April, 1928, causing the progressive depopulation of Old Corinth and the demographic upsurge of New Corinth. After all, New Corinth was the child of an earlier earthquake that had destroyed Old Corinth in 1858. The 1928 event had obvious consequences to both Corinthian natives and American archaeologists. For instance, a building designed by Richard Stillwell and recently completed (the Oakley House) was severely damaged.

The late 1920s was a transformative period for the American School of Classical Studies (ASCSA), ushering, among other things, the discipline of medieval archaeology. The discovery of Byzantium forced a cultural confrontation with Orthodoxy. This was not necessary in the ASCSA's 19th-century identity since Classical Studies, by definition, blamed Byzantium and Christianization for the violent demise of its prized golden age. To my knowledge, no-one has studied the relationship between American archaeologists and the ecclesiastical elites. We know more about the ASCSA's contemporary relationship with Greek political elites (Venizelist circles, etc.) and economic elites (the Benakis, etc.) From the limited archival evidence that I have explored, I have not seen evidence that Corinth directors, such as Bert Hodge Hill, Rhys Carpenter, Richard Stillwell, or Charles Morgan considered the Bishop of Corinth as their peer. They didn't seem to form any kind of alliance beyond the formal niceties. Certainly the bishops visited the archaeological site to claim spatial links with the sacred topos of Saint Paul; but did they have a personal relationship with the Americans? After the 1928 earthquake, both New and Old Corinth had to be rebuilt. Interestingly enough, Byzantine archaeology played a significant role in the architectural reinvention of both the Bishop of Corinth and the American School in Corinth. Were the two parties aware of each other's appropriations?

In my study of a proposed Byzantine museum in Ancient Corinth, Rhys Carpenter employed Byzantine foundations and aesthetic prototypes for his design of a modern building (Hesperia 76, 2007, pp. 391-442). Known as "Carpenter's Folly," the museum never actually opened. Another structure, the Corinth Museum that opened in 1930 similarly makes strong allusions to Byzantine architecture. Correspondence in the ASCSA's Administrative Records makes it clear that the design was modeled on monastic prototypes. At exactly the same year, a new Cathedral of Saint Paul was erected in New Corinth, designed by Aristotelis Zachos, the father of Greek modernism. Similarly, a Bishop's Residence was designed by Anastasios Orlandos based on direct Byzantine prototypes. Greek ecclesiastics and American archaeologists were playing exactly the same game. The 1928 earthquake provided both an opportunity to stylistically reinvent themselves. Did they ever discuss this? After all, they were neighbors. One would imagine at least some cross-fertilization. At this point, I have no direct evidence.

If anyone might have bridged the transatlantic (and mostly mental) divide, it would be Damaskinos, one of Greece's most fascinating church leaders. Damaskinos is best known as the Archbishop of Athens (and the Orthodox Church in Greece) between 1938 and 1947, who formally resisted Nazi atrocities, protested the persecution of Jews and organized an underground system of providing their safety. His heroism is celebrated by the statue erected in front of the Metropolis Cathedral in Athens (photo above). Before this heroic office, however, Damaskinos was Bishop of Corinth in 1922-1938 and would have, therefore, directly witnessed the ASCSA's new attention to Byzantium. Previously, Damaskinos was Abbot of Petraki Monastery (1918-1922) across the street from the ASCSA in Athens. It was during his last year at Moni Petraki that John Gennadius donated his library to the ASCSA. We must not forget that the Gennadius Library was built on land expropriated from Moni Petraki. The negotiations for this transfer (willful or forced?) would have been done by Damaskinos. Construction for the Library began in 1923. In short, Damaskinos was a neighbor to Americans for two uninterrupted decades: four years at the ASCSA in Athens, followed by 16 years at the ASCSA in Corinth.

Damaskinos was a master mediator. For instance, he negotiated the Greek-Bulgarian-Serb rivalries at Mount Athos after the Balkan Wars (where he served as a soldier). Most interesting for me is the negotiations he carried out in the United States. During the 1920s Greek American communities replicated the conflicts that enveloped Greek domestic politics, namely the schism between Royalists and Venizelists. In most American cities, in fact, two separate Greek Orthodox congregations could be found, serving the two parties. The rift was incredible and had to be solved for the sake of the community. On May 1930, the Patriarch of Constantinople sent Damaskinos to reconcile the groups. Why Damaskinos? Here is how we come to a full circle. If you remember, Corinth had suffered an earthquake in 1928. As the ecclesiastical leader of Corinth, Damaskinos was involved in the relief effort. His fund-raising took him to the United States, where he solicited donations by the Greek American communities. It was this very experience that had provided the contacts and credentials necessary to dissolve the schism in 1930.

So, not only was Damaskinos' the ASCSA's neighbor, but he had traveled to the United States twice, heading two important economic and political delegations. One cannot resist more questions: Did he also accumulate American credentials through his American neighbors? How did those American connections affect the cultural conversation between ecclesiastical (Greek) and scholarly (American) elites? Moreover, how did Damaskinos' American connections play out during the frightful years of the Nazi occupation of Athens? Many of the Jews hidden in Athens' underground eventually fled to the U.S. Were American archaeologists involved in this? How does Gladys Davidson and Saul Weinberg fit into the picture? Davidson was the daughter of a prominent Hebrew scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. As an ASCSA fellow (1934-1937), she spent much of her time in Corinth. Gladys and Saul were married in 1942 and, in fact, after the War they both served in Europe in the Secret Service.

Perhaps I have asked more questions than I have answered, which is never reassuring. Nevertheless, I hope this posting would direct future research to those interpersonal relations that flavor cultural attitudes but also facilitate action.

For a quick overview of Damaskinos life, see: http://orthodoxwiki.org/Damaskinos_(Papandreou)_of_Athens.
For Damaskinos' contribution to the saving of Jews in Athens, see posting by Intenational Raoul Wallenberg Foundation
On the schism of the Greek-American community, see standard histories:
Charles C. Moskos, Greek Americans: Struggle and Success, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, 2002)
Theodore Saloutos, The Greeks in the United States (London, 1964)

1930s Facebook

Archaeological fieldwork offers many hours of concentrated labor and intellectual activity but also presents seemingly endless hours of boredom. Evening leisure time can be expended by limited means especially in remote settings with few social offerings for the outsider. With digital media, this is less of a problem today through the Internet, iPods, and DVDs (in Greece, these are often pirated, sold by itinerant peddlers). Yet even in our media saturated times, students still find the need to socialize around a computer screen to watch a popular movie, sharing some necessary R & R.

Field directors (older in age than their students) may be horrified by such insular forms of entertainment; so we encourage the students to go out there, practice the language, socialize with the natives, live the culture. But if contemporary archaeological practices are so integrally tied to the computer (digital notebooks, photography, databases, GIS, graphics, project websites, electronic field reports, etc.), how surprised can we be that entertainment uses the same tools of labor?

Forms of archaeological entertainment seem to be most indicative of forms of archaeological thinking. Turning back, once again, to the 1930s, I want to reveal one fascinating form of entertainment: creating silhouettes. It became clear to me coincidentally, while reading the catalogue of a current exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Washington, D.C., 2007).
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/snapshotinfo.shtm

In her essay "Quick, Casual, Modern 1920-1939," Sarah Kennel discusses the emergence of a new photographic form promoted by Kodak through advertisement, the making of silhouettes (left, The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978, pp. 77-79). By placing a light source behind the photographic subject, the amateur produced a compelling black figure framed by the white background of a sheet or a white wall. This became extremely popular, a combination of "theatricality and youthful sociability." Kennel uses the example of an album, "Silhouettes, Ooh! Phi-Oh Meeting" from August 7, 1931. College-age men and women take humorous and often sexually suggestive poses. I show you one snapshot where a young lady poses with a Greek vase (at the beginning of the post). The photographic practice was based on a slightly older drawing tradition, projecting a silhouettes onto a sheet of paper and tracing it by hand.

How does this connect with American archaeology? Last summer, the American School's archivist Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan showed me a set of silhouettes that have not been identified. I was researching the drawing collection of George Peschke, and Natalia wanted to check whether Peschke may have been responsible for them. The silhouettes are clearly the product of the same youthful and theatrical entertainment popularized by Kodak, but executed with older graphic medial. The silhouettes were made by the ASCSA's 1930s youngsters stuck in Ancient Corinth with nothing to do after hours. What proves the connection is a passing reference made by Doreen Canaday Spitzer in the obituary of her dear friend Gladys Davidson Weingberg: "Evening entertainment at the excavation house was simple: tracing by lamplight the profiles of resident Corinthians and the visitors" (Akoue, Winter 2003, p. 18).

The conceptual implications of silhouetting are intense. It is a form of entertainment that seeks to inscribe the physical identity of the player onto a permanent record (drawn or photographed). It allows the players to optically caress the bodies of their friends, while maintaining a safe social distance. It is a form of autobiography, created by highly visual individuals who have devoted their lives to the graphic duplication of a buried, invisible, secret world. Their books become their faces and their faces become their books. And let's not forget that this is the 1930s, when the documentary mode overtakes all creative forms in American life from the WPA photographs, to Dos Passos U.S.A. See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York, 1973)

Overwhelmed by the power of these silhouettes, I try to organize my thoughts into six directions that I share with you below.

1) The youthful Corinthian archaeologists spent much of their work drawing precise profiles of the material culture they were excavating. Whether studying architecture, sculpture, or pottery, the technical medium of representation involved the tracing of objects (the world) into inked outline, thus guaranteeing orthographic truth and numerical measure (though which the archaeological reader could reproduce the world). The extension of a work-habit into a leisure-habit, bonds the object of scholarship (the pot) with the subject of scholarship (the face of the archaeologist). Think how the modern student seamlessly navigates from digital documentation to digital identity-making, in the websites of social networking (Facebook, MySpace, etc.) This doesn't seem much different than silhouetting.

2) Silhouetting means less to us today, but in the 1900s it reverberated with the experimentation of Isadora Duncan, the celebrity dancer who un-knotted classical ballet with movement copied from ancient vase painting. Isadora Duncan's dances imitated the flat representations of antiquity, a process that liberated the body into a more natural predicament. I'm sure that many of the contemporary American Schoolers had seen Duncan perform her silhouetted dances in the Theater of Dionysus in Athens, where she would unravel her "happenings."

3) The relationship between ancient vase painting and the visual arts has an even longer and fascinating history. We cannot speak of silhouettes without mentioning the art of the Enlightenment. Artists such as John Flaxman (1755-1826) used the simplified flattened graphics of Greek vase painting or (freshly excavated) Pompeiian frescoes to devise a new pictorial space. In the hands of David, Ingres, or even Canova, Flaxman's silhouetted space was radical. See Thomas Crow's excellent survey in Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History, ed. Stephen F. Eisenman (London, 1994), pp. 14-50. A newer edition of this book is out, but not yet available, I'm lucky to have received a review copy. It's a MUST for all visually literate classicists. Another great new book on Pompeii/Herculaneum and modernity, is Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ed. Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl (Oxford, 2007). Look out for Jon Seydl, a dear friend, who has left the Getty and is now Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art. I mention him gratuitously because he is responsible for getting me hooked on . . . Facebook!

PS. After reading this post, Jon Seydl brought to my attention the "Corinthian maid" tale, which was intensely popular in the 18th c, in the discussions over the origins of art, etc. The story originates in Pliny the Elder's Natural History:

"Dibutades, a potter of Sicyon, first formed likenesses in clay at Corinth, but was indebted to his daughter for the invention. The girl, being in love with a young man who was soon going from her into some remote country, traced out the lines of his face from his shadow on the wall by candle-light. Her father filling up the lines with clay formed a bust, and hardened it in the fire with the rest of his earthen ware."

Our young Corinthians were reenacting the origins of art.

4) Silhouetting should also be seen as a necessary prerequisite to collage and the aesthetics of fragmentation. Since I just read the novel, I cannot resist sharing the opening scene of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), where Mrs. Ramsey's young boy cuts away pictures and collages them: "James Ramsey, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores." Of course this is a technical metaphor for Woolf's own collaged narrative, but in this opening scene the cutting promises the future success of adulthood: "his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs." (Harcourt paperback edition, New York, pp. 3-4). Sorry about the literary digression.

5) Even more specifically, the leisure of silhouettes provide some additional context in understanding Piet de Jong's famous caricatures of the archaeological scene, beautiful published in Rarchel Hood's Faces of Archaeology in Greece: Caricatures of Piet de Jong (Oxford, 1998), and recently revisited in John Papadopoulos ed., The Art of Antiquity: Piet de Jong and the Athenian Agora (Princeton, 2006). The caricatures are hence a masterful extension of the leisure activity. We might even wonder whether de Jong began his drawings by actual silhouettes. That would make his caricatures the equivalent of death masks.

6) Silhouetting reminds me of another related medium of scholarly documentation, racial profiling. In his study of skeletal material from the Agora, Larry Angel published an eerie morphological catalogue of Modern Greek skull types with frontal and profile viees, J. Lawrence Angel, "Skeletal Material from Attica," Hesperia 14 (1941), pp. 279-363, pl. XL. This may appear shocking to us today, but racial typology was a standard practice in 1930s physical anthropology. One cannot but wonder, whether the silhouetting of the Corinthian students implied some kind of racial recognition. This would be particularly sensitive, I presume, with the Jewish minority of the ASCSA, with Gladys Davidson Weinberg, for instance, whose father was an important scholar in New York's Jewish Theological Seminary. We cannot forget that the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany began in 1933.

Art Deco Beauty: A Lonely Saturday Night

Since I teach in rural South Carolina, I often escape to the closest Barnes & Noble (and nearby Starbucks) about 45 minutes away in Greenville's urban sprawl. Last night was one of those Saturday escapades where Barnes & Nobles offers an intense sense of cosmopolitanism: you will not believe the people out on the prow between shelves, especially near golf and Christian inspiration. Such evenings spent in a joyful anonymous crowd are great for the urban soul, even if they take place around the sterile corporate props of the mall bookstore. Browsing through the magazine rack, my eyes fell on a treasure (left), an image that suddenly displaced me into the most cosmopolitan space of1920s Athens, Paris, New York, the world of Joan and Eugene Vanderpool. (Laura Claridge, "Temptuous Talent," Art and Antiques, Collector's Sourcebook 2007, pp. 48-57)

One of my greatest intellectual pleasures at the American School at Athens this summer was to sit next to Ben Millis on a cigarette break from work at the Blegen Library and the Archives. In particular, I wanted to brainstorm with Ben on the history of the Corinth excavations because he has gone through endless notebooks in preparation for his updating of the Corinth Guide (see Akoue , Winter 2004, pp. 4, 16). Discussing the connections between 1920s ASCSA members and modernist art, Ben remembered that he had seen some reference to Joan Vanderpool's time in Paris and a famous portrait that had recently gone on sale. The next day, Ben provided all the necessary documentation. Indeed, a young 19-year old Joan Jeffery found herself in Paris with her fiancé, Rufus Bush. This was a relationship of industrial magnitude between the granddaughter of Thomas B. Jefferey, creator of the Rambler automobile company and the son of Irving T. Bush, the industrial magnate of the Bush Terminal Company and builder of the Bush Terminal in Brooklyn (1902), the Bush Tower in New York (1918), and the Bush House in London (1925). In Paris, the couple met the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka and commissioned Joan's portrait that was completed in 1929. After a short-lived marriage, the couple divorced and Joan Jefferey Bush left for Greece and put her portrait in storage where it staid hidden for 60 years. "The Portrait of Mrs. Bush" was sold at Christie's on May 4, 2004, for $4.59 million (see, Souren Melikian, "Art: Impressionists Blaze at Christie's," International Herald Tribune, May 6, 2004). Better known to American archaeologists is the marriage between Joan and Eugene Vanderpool, which lead into an incredible life in Greece. The 1934 Agora staff photo below shows Joan sitting in the middle and "EV" standing at the right corner (scanned from, Craig A. Mauzy, Agora Excavations, 1931-2006: A Pictorial History, Princeton, 2006, p. 110, fig. 240)

Thanks to Catherine Vanderpool's obituary (in Akoue, Summer 2003, p. 18), I was fascinated to learn that Joan Jeffery Vanderpool studied with Alexander Archipenko in Paris and was friends with Paul Manship, whose most famous sculpture we regularly see on television, the Prometheus (1934) in front of Rockefeller Center. Mrs. Vanderpool was involved in the Delphic Games, organized by her Bryn Mawr friend Eva Palmer and Angelos Sikelianos. While reading through Alison Frantz's archive, I realized how close the Greek and American avant-garde came together through the friendship between the Sikelianos and the Vanderpool families. I regret that I missed all these connections in my article "Byzantium and the Avant-Garde: Excavations at Corinth, 1920s–1930s," Hesperia 76 (2007) pp. 391-442. I've also missed another most amazing discovery related to Carpenter's Folly, the house museum of Byzantine sculpture in Ancient Corinth. The Vanderpools went a whole extra step in the re-use of medieval/post-medieval buildings. In 1956, Eugene Vanderpool renovated an abandoned 17th-century monastery and converted it into a home. The house of Pikermi was an incredible example of re-inhabitation, heralded in the contemporary Greek architectural press, see "A 400-year-old house in Attica is adopted by an American family," Architektonike 7 (1958), pp. 16-21. Demetris Philippides, the modern architectural historian, discusses the house (and includes a plan) in a fascinating new book, Athens Suburbs and Countryside in the 1930s (Athens, 2006), p. 92.

Clearly, the Vanderpools were collectively one of the strongest links between aesthetics and archaeology, and I look forward into researching the connections further. But first, we must pause and take a moment of pure aesthetic indulgence. We must simply fall in love with a 19-year-old Mrs. Vanderpool, clothed in a silky red coat over a dark green dress, shockingly short for its time, declaring autonomy and liberation. Limpicka situates her subject in its appropriate New York context and the skyscraper cult, which Bush's father assisted in creating. Bush Tower in New York is a Gothicizing Deco skyscraper on West 42nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues. http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID137.htm. Parenthetically, Limpicka had infamous and scandalous social life (including an affair with the Fascist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio). In 1929, she came to the United States to do the Bush portrait but also for a show of her works at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh. In her daughter's memoir, we read how Bush approached the painter: "Please, Madame de Lempicka, I'm from America, and I have been over here attending Oxford University. I am going home to be married. I would like you to come to America and do a portrait of my fiancée" (Kizette de Lempicka-Foxhall, Passion by Design: The Art and Times of Tamara de Lempicka, New York, 1987, p. 99). A study for the portrait was included in the 2004 retrospective at the Royal Institute of Art, Tamara de Lempicki: Art Deco Icon (London, 2004), p. 132. Interestingly enough, Lempicka also did a portrait of Queen Elizabeth of Greece, the Romanian wife of King George II (married in 1921, divorced in 1935), a painting that I have not yet seen.

Although Mrs. Vanderpool may have wanted this masterpiece concealed, for the obvious personal reasons (regarding Rufus Bush), we can rejoice in being able to see it again and marvel not only at the subject, but also at the aesthetic complexities that surround the scholars of the 1920s. Much more for them than for us (sadly perhaps), the scientific study of Greek culture was clothed in a red overcoat, a commitment to art as life. How wonderful and unexpected to spend an otherwise lonely caffeinated evening with Mrs. Vanderpool at Greenville's Barnes and Noble.

Who Paid for Corinth's Excavations in 1937?

Charles H. Morgan II (1902-1984) is one of my favorite members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). Like my other favorite Rhys Carpenter, Morgan was intensely well rounded with expertise ranging from ancient art and Byzantium, to the Renaissance and Modernism. How many ASCSA figures could have written The Life of Michelangelo (New York, 1960), or George Bellows: Painter of America (New York, 1965)? Morgan was the consummate product of Harvard’s Norton education (Class of 1924). He was hired by Rhys Carpenter (thirteen years his senior) at Bryn Mawr College (1929-1930), where he overlapped with the Viennese Byzantinist Ernst Diez (1926-1939). However, it was Amherst College that became Morgan’s academic home; between 1930 and 1969, Morgan oversaw the creation of an art history program, a collection, and a museum (the Mead Art Museum, http://www.amherst.edu/mead/)

There is no need to enumerate here the long and significant accomplishment of Morgan's scholarly career including his directorship of the Corinth excavations (1936-1938); for that, I direct you to his obituary, written by Homer Thompson, in the American Journal of Archaeology 88 (1984), pp. 439-440. Rather, I want to answer one question. What was Morgan’s economic background? Going through the official history of the ASCSA (Louis E. Lord, 1947) and the ASCSA’s administrative records (ADMREC Box 318/4, Folder 1), it is clear that Morgan’s father financed the purchase and excavation of Saint John’s at the Central Area of Corinth in 1937. Since J. P. Morgan Jr. had financed excavations in Corinth the previous decade (1925-1927), I was curious to see if there was any relationship between the Morgan bankers and Charles H. Morgan II.

The two Morgan families were in fact genealogically related as cousins, but Charles H. Morgan’s family had made its name in Worcester, Massachusetts independently of the bankers. Charles H. Morgan I (the grandfather) was an engineer. He became superintendent of the Washburn and Moen Company (producers of wire), where he designed the first hydraulic elevator in New England. After several European research trips, Morgan designed a new mill, patented in 1883. Known as the Morgan Mill, it featured a continuous train of horizontal rolls. In 1888, Morgan started the Morgan Construction Company in Worcester with branch offices in New York and Brussels. In 1881, Morgan started the Morgan Spring Company, which in 1905 expanded into Struthers, Ohio. His son, Paul Beagary Morgan, studied engineering in Europe and took over his father’s companies. Hence it is Paul Beagary who financed the Corinth excavations of 1937. Charles H. Morgan II was both son and grandson in a well established family of engineers and mill owners with high standing in Worcester society. For more genealogical details, see Ellery Bicknell Crane, Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Worcester County Massachusetts with a History of Worcester Society of Antiquity (New York and Chicago, 1907), v. 1, pp. 102-107. The family belonged to the Plymouth Congregational Church, which is noteworthy given that Charles H. Morgan II's wife, Janet, belonged to the clergy.

One can, therefore, say that the metal industry indirectly financed the 1937 Corinth excavations. Nevertheless, to have Paul Beagary Morgan finance his son's excavations seems to be a sign of desperate times for the ASCSA. The funds were supplemented by a welcome donation by the Peabody family, who had visited the site in March 1937. A few months earlier, the Peabody's hosted a big coming out party at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, which was featured in Life magazine (January 18, 1937, pp. 61-65). The cover story for that issue was the General Motors labor strike in Dearborn, Michigan. Clearly, Corinth was visited (and financed) by national celebrities. "What attractive folk they are," wrote Morgan, "I only hope Gladys [Davidson] has been able to locate some juicy graves for them." (ADMREC 318/4, Folder 1).

Finally, it is interesting to consider the following. By 1937, Worcester had a sizable Greek immigrant community that included Christos Gatzoyannis, husband of the famous Eleni Gatzoyannis, whose 1948 execution was immortalized by their son Nicholas Gage (in the 1983 best seller Eleni, as well as granddaughter Eleni N. Gage's 2005 memoir North of Ithaka). I have no idea if any Greeks, in fact, worked in the Morgan mills, but it would be fascinating to contemplate that through their labor, Greek immigrants may have contributed to the excavations of Saint John's in Ancient Corinth.