Ryan Stander: Topos/Chora

Last summer, the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus had a novel idea, an artist in residence program. Photographer Ryan Stander spent the season with the archaeologists, (as we would now say) "embedded" in the team. The fruits of this project are now on view at the Empire Arts Center in Grand Forks, N.D. During preparation for the exhibit, I was invited to contribute an essay reflecting on Stander's work. I picked one photo, a kind of self portrait, and wrote about it. The exhibit is now on-line and you can read my reflections here. I am honored to have been invited on this project, a rare example of interdisciplinary collaboration between art, archaeology and the theory of both.

Thinking about the photographic landscape comes at an opportune time for me, as I get ready to start a mapping project this summer in collaboration with Todd Brenningmeyer at Maryville University. Using a combination of balloons, kites and survey, we hope to document a series of urban forms across Boeotia, Phocis, Eleia and Karpathos in Greece. Our idea is to produce aerial digital images with limited topographic survey (G.P.S.) Using the topographic coordinates as anchors, we will geo-rectify the aerial photos and digitize the wall elements visible within them. As a result, we use the photographs to investigate general landscape issues, but also as the base for new urban maps. Many of the sites we will be surveying are situated in difficult and rocky mountain tops. Traditional survey would be extremely strenuous. This will be an experimental season. If our process works, we might just take the show on the road and create a permanently nomadic field project.

I am receiving immense inspiration from my colleague Scott Wright who teaches painting and photography (and a fantastic art history course on Art and Jazz). If you look at Scott's work, you'll note the interface between aerial photography and landscape painting. Scott is also artist-in-residence at the Wohlsen Center, a new organization at F&M devoted to ecology and sustainability. Ryan Stander (see his blog, Axis of Access) has introduced me to the New Topographics school of photography. Just this last week, Scott and I started an informal reading group to deal precisely with issues of ecology and landscape art.

Stella: Athenian Agora

Last year, I learned that one could watch Greek movies and old televion shows online. And I poured over Το μινόρε της αυγής (The minor key of dawn), the 1983 TV series whose soundtrack I had loved for many years. Then, I moved on to classic b/w movies and came across Stella (1955), directed by Michalis Kakoyannis and staring Melina Merkouri. Filmed in Athens, the urban scenes include powerful references to historical topography and archaeology. I have watched the film a couple of times and made a mental note to do some research on the monuments and urban vistas. I thought I might be the only one paying attention to those subtle details until my copy of the last Journal of Modern Greek Studies arrived in my mail. The October 2009 issue is devoted to the Marshall Plan, but it includes Artemis Leontis's review of Yannis Hamilakis' celebrated Nation and Its Ruins and Argyro Loulaki's Living Ruins, Living Conflicts. Leontis' essay is titled "Archaeology in the Neighborhood: Views of the Ancient Agora and Other Ruins from Outside the Gate" (JMGA 27, 2009, 417-432) and it includes the first scholarly citation of this blog (THANK YOU!!!)

I was thrilled to discover in "Archaeology in the Neighborhood" that I wasn't the only person to have noted Stella's importance as a mid-century text. Leontis points out the contextual role that archaeology plays in the movie. This is simply a brilliant set of observations. For better or for worse, Melina Merkouri was made famous through Never on Sunday (1960). Jules Dassin, director and Merkouri's husband, plays a naive American philhelene "Homer Thrace from Middletown, Connecticut" (where Dassin was born) who tries to reform a prostitute from Piraeus. For the longest time, I have wondered whether Dassin or Merkourci knew of Homer Thompson, who was excavating the Athenian Agora through the 50s and 60s. Dassin's Homer, I suspect, might not only refer to the ancient bard, but also to Homer Thompson. Two years later, Dassin directed another movie with Merkouri, Phaedra (1962), which strikes a clear archaeological chord. Merkouri plays the wife of an Onassis-character who falls in love with her son-in-law (played by Anthony Perkins). Perkins and Mercouris first meet at the British Museum in front of the Elgin marbles. It's a beautiful movie (soundtrack by Mikis Theodorakis) that never reached the popularity of Never on Sunday. But Stella is truly the intellectual forefather of all these films, and it introduces the archaeological motif. As Leontis shows, the American excavations of the Athenian Agora bear witness to the films' plot. For those readers that are either archaeologists or modern Greek specialists, I urge you to see Stella immediately and look out for the ancient monuments (the Theseion), the Byzantine churches (Saint George; Holy Apostles) and the excavations (Agora). You can see the movie here (with subtitles). But before seeing the movie, you must read Leontis' observations:

"Evidence of the Agora excavations' uninviting feeling for Greeks who witnessed them appears unexpectedly in another Greek source: Michael Cacoyannis's classic film Stella, released in 1955. In it, the Agora is the backdrop, and Stella's apartment, the scene of extramarital drama, sits alongside the excavation site on the Plaka's western edge. At the time of the filming, the American School's 'big dig' was at the point of completion, having removed, along with all the extant homes, 250,000 tons of dirt and debris from post-classical remains. The reconstruction of the Stoa of Attalos was in progress, but barely visible, as it had just reached ground level. A vast expanse of mounds and trenches loomed darkly behind Stella's apartment. The site makes several cameo appearances from different angles, the most important of which comes at the film's turning point, about 52 minutes from the opening credits, when Stella's abandoned boyfriend Alekos retraces his steps from his asphyxiating upper-class home home in Kolonaki (Lykavitos's Church of St. George can be discerned behind him as he descends) to the Roman Agora. Passing the Gate of Athena Archegetes, he follows a narrow street, opposite the Church of the Holy Apostles, then turns into Stella's alley and heads up her steps. When Stella does not answer the door, he walks to the other side of the building and calls up to her windows. Stella pushes her lover Miltos away and peeks through the blinds, watching as Alekos steps back blindly into the road, with the excavation site spread out behind him like a vast grave. Both Stella and the excavations become mute witnesses to Aleko's accidental death by a passing car." (p. 420)

Thinking about the Athenian Agora, Nikki Sakka's, "The Excavation of the Ancient Agora of Athens: The Politics of Commissioning and Managing the Project" (in Singular Antiquity) and Craig Mauzy's, Agora Excavations, 1931-2006: A Pictorial History (2003) are great essential prerequisites.

Movies like Stella invite revisiting. On the one hand, they offer fantastic historical evidence of an older more beautiful Athens before its unchecked concrete expansion. On the other hand, they reveal central motifs of self-presentation and domestic anxieties. Overshadowed by Italian neorealism, the golden age of Greek cinema is both lightweight and provocative. In addition to the archaeological subtexts, Stella has an extraordinary sophistication in its set design, directed by painter Yannis Tsarouchis. One day, I would love to read/write a comparative study of the exterior urban scenography and the interior rooms. Tsarouchis uses a technique that is evident in his paintings, aligning the characters with objects of great poetic depth. Watching Stella, note for example the role that interior lights play, how they align with characters. Note the role of doors opening and closing, especially doors that also carry mirrors. One could write an essay about electrification, light projection, Greek domestic space, and the technicalities of film. The film would have originally been projected by a bright light source from the back of a movie theater. Keep that in mind as bare light bulbs illuminate the interior spaces of the nocturnal scenes. This reminds us of the bare lightbulbs of Tsarouchis' interiors. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the Tsarouchis' bare lightbulbs are the technical shame-inducing machines of homosexual desire. With Manos Hadjidakis' soundtrack, and Iakovos Kambanelli's original screen-play, we are in the company of high aesthetics. I would love to know how Tsarouchis, Kakoyannis and Hadjidakis may have interacted with the Agora excavations. Unfortunately, Melina Merkouri, in all her admirable Elgin-marble activist, has left us with a very superficial scenario over the conflicts of foreign archaeology.

My mother, my uncle and aunts grew up in Plaka, all born around the time that the Americans began the Agora excavations. I once asked them how the excavations affected the life of the neighborhood. My uncle pointed out how grateful the neighborhood was for the employment that the excavations offered, especially after World War II when much of Athens starved. My mother, who was a little younger, remembers using the excavations as a playground, literally climbing in and out of pythoi. Having just seen Anne McCabe's paper "A Middle Byzantine Neighborhood in Athens: Recent Excavations in the Agora" (see 2010 AIA annual conference), I suddenly visualized the 1930s excavations as a playground of subterranean wells and storage jars. And suddenly remembered Luigi Pirandello story "The Jar," beautifully dramatized in the Tavianni brothers' Kaos (1984).

All these thoughts and allusions bring us back to Yannis Hamilakis and his discussion of pre-modern archaeology (in Nation and Its Ruins, and in Singular Antiquity), to Gregory Jusdanis' "Farewell to the Classical: Excavations in Modernism," Modernism/Modernity 11:1 (2004), pp. 37-53 and to Hamilakis' response. William Caraher is working on an essay on dream archaeology, namely the use of dreams in predicting site locations (see here). Dimitris Plantzos is also working on non-archaeologists' archaeology (see "Displaying Modernity," and other postings in (pre)texts). Between Hamilakis, Leontis, Jusdanis, Caraher and Plantzos, I sense a thrilling new vibe. I'm staying tuned for the fruits of these insightful observations that are derailing archaeology into meta-positivist directions.

Ruins: Feedback

The last couple of postings on punk archaeology have produced some wonderful comments on Facebook that I cannot resist from sharing. Thanks to my supportive friends. You make blogging a satisfying endeavor (one always wonder if anyone is reading out there).

STEPHENNIE MULDER

"Kostis, hard to put into words the emotions this evoked for me, especially since I spent my teenage years running around with a bunch of kids who (thought they were) punk and hanging out in ruins too. Since I grew up in Salt Lake, they were not these nineteenth-century East Coast Gothic-tinged ruins, but, still. I often wonder if the same deep melancholy I got in those spaces, the heavy and intoxicating sense of past lives, ordinary and mundane, their loves, deaths, celebrations and Thursday night dinners, was somehow related to my interest in archaeology. Ruins have the ability to conjure a certain type of melancholy that is like nothing else in human experience, I think. Did you know mourning over ruins is a major theme in Arabic poetry? One of my favorites:

At the way stations
stay. Grieve over the ruins.
Ask the meadow grounds,
now desolate, this question.

Where are those we loved,
where have their dark-white camels gone?

-Ibn Arabi

Thanks for this, and I spent a long time looking at the photographs you linked to, as well."

Stephennie is a friend from UPenn Art History. She is professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin and specializes in Syria. We've recently reconnected thanks to the power of Facebook.

OMUR HARMANSAH

Pogue Harrison on the sight of ruins:

"One could say that, in its world-forming capacity, architecture transforms geological time into human time, which is another way of saying it turns matter into meaning. That is why the sight of ruins is such a reflexive and in some cases an unsettling experience. Ruins in an advanced state of ruination represent, or better they literally embody, the dissolution of meaning into matter. By revealing what human building ultimately is up against -natural or geological time- ruins have a way of recalling us to the very ground of our human worlds, namely the earth, whose foundations are so solid and so reliable that they presumably will outlast any edifices that we build on them." Robert Pogue Harrison, The dominion of the dead 2003: p. 3.

Omur is an old friend from UPenn. He is a specialist in the architecture of the ancient Near East and professor of archaeology at Brown University. Among his many specializations, Omur is especially active in archaeological theory. See, his Theoretical Archaeology Group here.

RYAN STANDER

"Hey Kostis. Are you familiar with Jeff Brouws work? As a photographer he follows the in the New Topographic lineage looking toward the landscape as cultural product/artifact. http://www.jeffbrouws.com/series/main_discarded.html

Ryan is an MFA student in photography at the University of North Dakota. His work explore the nature of place/space through artistic and liturgical lenses. Ryan discusses his work and process on a great blog, Axis of Access. Last summer, Ryan was the artist-in-residence at the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in Cyprus. His work in Cyprus is currently exhibited in Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project at the Empire Arts Center, Grand Forks. It was an honor to be invited to write an interpretive essay for Ryan's exhibition. I've never met Ryan in person, but the blogosphere has brought us together.

Camden: Whitman, Smith, Vergara

Walt Whitman spent the end of his life in Camden, N.J., not far from where Patti Smith spent her childhood. While growing up at Germantown, Philadelphia and then Deptford, N.J., Smith would visit the Whitman Hotel in Camden and imagine that her poet hero once inhabited the spaces. Whitman's trajectory of American poetry extends to William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg, both from Paterson, N.J.; interestingly enough, Williams was Ginsberg's pediatrician and wrote the introduction to "Howl." From Ginsberg, the trajectory continues to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, an inheritance that neither musician undervalue. The celebration of the every-day, even if it smells of sweat and dirt, is central to Whitman's Amerian tradition. This is what architect Louis Sullivan called the "physiology" rather than the "physiognomy" of American life. Sullivan, who coined the "form follows function" equation was himself not a reductivist; his functionalism was "physiological" not technocratic. If American life has been suffering economic ailments, its physiology is evident not in the great skyscrapers of the spirit but in its ruins of its post-industrial cities.

Patti Smith is not alone to bring us back to Whitman's Camden. Camilo José Vergara, the Chilean-New Yorker photographer has devoted his career in documenting America's fallen urban condition. His American Ruins (1999) was a landmark publication, appearing at the same time that a California school of sociologists (Edward Soja and Mike Davis) turned Marxism's attention from the superstructure to the base, from a functionalist view of the city to a consideration of space. Vergara's photographs have appeared in numerous publications and exhibitions since then. But I would like to highlight one particular project, Invincible Cities, where Vergara turns his attention directly onto Camden. Vergara has been producing what he hopes will culminate into "A Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto." Invincible Cities offers Camden as a case study. An interactive database allows the viewer to navigate through Vergara's photographs across space and time.

Vergara has been photographing the American ghetto since the 1970s. His perseverance matches Jacob Riis, while his methodology combines the sociologist's lens with the documentary rigor of Bernd and Hilla Becker. Invincible Cities takes Vergara one step further. I suspect that Patti Smith would find Vergara's lens a little too literal. Walt Whitman might protest the slickness of the digital colors (he would prefer the texture of male sweat). Even if sensibilities differ, Camden needs revisiting and Vergara has let us perform the very kind of scholarly voyeurism that could lead into action if not the transformation of our civic psyche.

Hospital Ruins: Patti Smith

Rebecca Solnit's ruined hospital experience reverberates in Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids, which, last week climbed to the 7th spot in the New York Times nonfiction best seller list. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were regular visitors to Coney Island at a time when the side shows were still surviving. They saw Snake Princess Wago and a flea circus at Hubert's on 42nd St., which closed in 1965. They also visited a small museum with body parts and human embryos in jars. Robert Mapplethorpe became obsessed by the idea and sought to find some of his own specimen. The search lead them to a ruined hospital. The experience seems straight out of a magic realist novel. Patti Smith writes,

"He [Robert Mapplethorpe] asked around where he might find something of that sort, and a friend told him about the ruins of the Old City Hospital on Welfare (later Roosevelt) Island [picture left]. On a Sunday we traveled there with our friends from Pratt. There were two points on the island that we visited. The first was a sprawling nineteenth-century building that had the aura of a madhouse; it was the Smallpox Hospital, the first place in America to receive victims of contagion. Separated only by barbed wire and broken glass, we imagined dying of leprosy and the plague.

"The other ruins were that left of the Old City Hospital, with its forbidding institutional architecture, finally to be demolished in 1994. When we entered it, we were struck by the silence and an odd medicinal smell. We went from room to room and saw shelves of medical specimens in their glass jars. Many were broken, vandalized by visiting rodents. Robert combed each room until he found what he was looking for, an embryo swimming in formaldehyde within a womb of glass." (p. 68)

On the walk back to their home, "... just as we turned the corner to Hall Street, the glass jar slipped inexplicably from his hands and shattered on the sidewalk, just steps from our door. I saw his face. He was so deflated that neither of us could say anything. The purloined jar had sat on the shelf for decades, undisturbed. It was almost as if he had taken its life. 'Go upstairs,' he said. 'I'll clean it up.' We never mentioned it again. There was something about that jar. The shards of heavy glass seemed to foreshadow the deepening of our days; we didn't speak of it but each of us seemed inflicted with a vague internal restlessness." (p. 69)

Hospital Ruins: Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit helped me articulate some threads of Punk Archaeology in her essay "Abandon," in A Field Guide of Getting Lost (New York, 2005, pp. 87-109). Solnit describes her own discovery of punk at the age of 15, "Punk rock had burst into my life with the force of revelation, though I cannot now call the revelation much more than a tempo and an insurrectionary intensity that matched the explosive pressure in my psyche." Solnit's revelation was more than a musical discovery, it was a shift in incorporating the city within the realms of the natural wilderness. Punk directed Solnit and thousands of other youngsters in the 1980s to connect the surrounding post-industrial decay and the inner self. After all, isn't that one of culture's primarily roles, to negotiate between exterior and interior worlds? In the 1990s, selected neighborhoods went into choreopraphed reinventions. New York got Dinseyfied and hipsters became just marketing demographic. Attention shifted from archaeological realism (a desire to see things as they are and adjust aesthetics accordingly) to historicist melancholy (a desire to relive earlier generations' angst through self-fashioning). Such developments make the 1980s seem like a distinct cultural period, where punk and archaeology united.

Reading through Patti Smith's memoir made me re-read Solnit's essay (read tomorrow's posting). There is one particular detail that unites the two experiences, namely the incorporation of hospital ruins into a search for meaning. Solnit begins her essay with an adventure that, in retrospect, seems like a classic punk pursuit, searching for abandoned buildings and seeking to incorporate them into aesthetic life through photography, music and film.

"The most beautiful thing in the abandoned hospital was the peeling paint. The place had been painted again and again in pastels, and in the years of its abandonment these layers flaked into lozenges and curled scrolls, a different color on each side. The flakes clung to the walls like papery bark and piled up like fallen leaves. I remember walking down one long corridor illuminated only by light from distant doorways. There the paint dangled from ceiling and walls in huge wafers, and my passing stirred the air enough that some came drifting down down in my wake. The movie we made there was was too grainy to show such delicate details, but I remember one passage in it where I was coming down such a corridor and the shafts of light behind me were so strong on either side of my neck that my head seemed at times to detach from my body and hover above it. I had become its haunting wraith.

"That was when I was twenty, half my life ago, and a boy my age made the most politely democratic proposition I ever received: would I like to make a move with him in the ruined hospital near my San Francisco home? I would, we did, and we spent the next six years together in amazing tranquility and stayed close for a few years thereafter... It was the early 1980s, and looking back I can see that it was a sort of golden age of ruins.

"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear we were living at the end of something--of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us in the ruins of cities. The Bronx was block after block, mile after mile of ruin, as were even some Manhattan neighborhoods, housing projects across the country were in a state of collapse, many of the shipping piers that had been key to San Francisco's and New York's economies were abandoned, as was San Francisco's big Southern Pacific rail yard and its two most visible breweries. Vacant lots like missing teeth gave a rough grin to the streets we haunted. Ruin was everywhere, for cities had been abandoned by the rich, by politics, by a vision of the future. Urban ruins were the emblematic place for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live." (pp. 87-88)

The image at the top is a photo by Camilo Jose Vergara, who will be the subject of a post later this week. The photo, "Henry Horner Homes, 2051 W. Lake St., Chicago, 1995" was featured in Vergara's recent Slate article, "American Ruins: Nature is Taking back These Buildings," (Jan. 15, 2010).

Lancaster: Architecture of Faith

Although I am bursting with topics to blog about, I have been quiet on OBS mostly because I have been setting up another blog, a blog for my class "Lancaster: Architecture of Faith" (F&M, ART 271). Inspired by Bill Caraher's Public History Internship Program, I decided to turn my seminar loose in the blogosphere. I set up Lancaster Architecture over the weekend and made my students submit all of their research on the blog. This reaffirms our commitment to public knowledge, but it also lets the students share their work (both text and image) in real time. Knowing that their research is made instantly available to the public, including the communities that they are writing about, will elevate accountability and rigor. You can visit the blog here:

http://lancasterarchitecture.wordpress.com/

So far, the students have only met once. The postings to-date reflect their first assignment. Each student had to visit 5-6 churches/synagogues/mosques and report on history and architectural condition. The numbers at the beginning of each entry comes from A. Hunter Rineer, Jr.'s catalog, Churches and Cemeteries of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster County Historical Society, 1993). Within the first two weeks of the class, the students will have reported on over 100 buildings. Already, this will be the largest record of Lancaster's religious architecture available. After the first two weeks, students will focus on individual case studies and issues.

For more information about the class, see earlier postings. The class syllabus is posted here.

Patti Smith: Archaeology of Life

In addition to the memoir (Just Kids) and the Steven Sebring documentary (Dream of Life), Patti Smith has produced another kind of life narrative, articulated through objects (see earlier posting here). An exhibit, Objects of Life at the Robert Miller Gallery features 14 objects that have been significant to Smith and her collaboration with Sebring. They include Smith's childhood dress (left), her Land 250 Polaroid camera and a tambourine made by Robert Mapplethorpe. I hope to catch this show on its closing day (Feb. 6, 2010), when F&M takes its Art History majors to New York.

The exhibit is the first of three that will focus on various themes in Smith's art (see press release). The film Dream of Life shows Smith obsessively engaged with objects. Objects of Life takes the documentary narrative into a different curatorial and archaeological dimension. Unlike traditional archaeological presentation, Sebring/Smith's 14 objects point to inter-subjectivity possibilities and relate to the curatorial themes that Orhan Pamuk raises in the Museum of Innocence.

Patti Smith: Life as Narrative

Over the Christmas holiday, I chanced on the Patti Smith documentary that I had heard about on Studio 360. We had just unloaded the U-Haul, moving to Philadelphia, and the WHYY feature somehow reaffirmed the move to an an urban capital. Patti Smith herself has roots in Philadelphia, a fact that she talked about at length when I saw her perform exactly 8 years ago, at the Keswick Theater, Dec. 27, 2001. That was a special concert for me. I went with my best friend Yorgos and we were both amazed by the number of older people (like us) in the audience who even brought their children. Smith's own mother, who lives nearby, was in the audience and both Smith's sister and son played with her onstage (see a review here).

Soon after Patti Smith lost her husband (Fred Smith of MC5) and her brother (Todd) in 1994, REM's Michael Stipe caller her out of the blue to offer condolences; he also recommended a photographer. Steven Sebring entered Patti Smith's life a that moment, documenting the experiences of an ordinary human being rather than the legendary "godmother of punk." Sebring's filming became the documentary Patti Smith: Dream of Life that premiered on Dec. 30, 2009 on PBS's Point of View. Dream of Life is hauntingly beautiful capturing the creases in the artist's life. I also enjoyed Sebring's focus on Smith's children, especially Jackson Smith who is married to Meg Ryan (of the White Stripes). In many ways, Patti Smith's story after her marriage to Fred Smith is a life centered around Detroit (Saint Clair Shores). Documentaries on rock musicians tend to follow generic lines. Dream of Life breaks away from the mold and becomes a creative enterprise in its own right.

Patti Smith has also just published an autobiographical work on her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1969 booth photo, top). Just Kids was released today (Ecco, 2010). Just as Dream of Life takes us to the period after Smith's New York apotheosis, Just Kids takes us to the period before. For a review of the book, see Janet Maslin, "Bohemian Soul Mates in Obscurity," New York Times (Jan. 18, 2010), pp. C1, C8. Maslin points out that Smith's growing up with Mapplethorpe took place before many of the disturbing pictures that earned Mapplethorpe his late notoriety (and censorship by the NEA). I am looking forward to matching the Sebring documentary with Smith's own reflections. After all, Smith is just as much a writer as a rocker. Returning to the home where I spent my own growing up, I'm especially susceptible to such stories. It was in this old/new home that I first admired Patti Smith.

The Chronotope of Medieval Greek Romances

Only a few days before the Spring semester starts, and I indulge myself at Van Pelt Library by skimming through some new books on Byzantine matters. The Variorum Reprints series has issued a collection of essays by Roderick Beaton, the esteemed literary historian of medieval and modern Greek, From Byzantium to Modern Greece: Medieval Texts and Their Modern Reception (Aldershot, 2008). Although rushed by the pending syllabi that need to be written, I take a filling gulp of Beaton and read, “The Poetics of the Vernacular Greek Romances and the ‘Chronotope’ According to Bakhtin.” (forthcoming in Papers of the Conference Neograeca Medii Aevi no. 6). Beaton explores Mikhail Bakhtin’s “chronotope” notions, developed in the late 1930s and completed shortly before the literary critic’s death in 1975. I haven’t read much of Bakhtin, except his Problems of Dostoevsky Poetics (Minneapolis, 1984), which informs much of how I understand modernist literature. Bakhtin defines chronotope as follows: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. M. Holquist (Austin, 1981), p. 84. In other words, the chronotope defines relationships of time and space internal to the fictional narrative. Bakhtin discusses two distinct chronotopes in the Hellenistic novel and in the chivalric novel. Beaton takes Bakhtin’s categorization and applies it on the vernacular Greek romances of the 13th century (Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe, Belthandros and Chrysantza, Libistos and Rhododamne). Beaton observes that the Byzantine novels are divided into two parts, the first magical the second realistic. The magical and realistic halves provide a background of adventure, the tests of love. Interestingly enough, none of the characters have real geographic origins. The novels have a clear separation between what Bakhtin defines as “biographical time” and “adventure time.” Unlike the western chivalric novel, the Greek novels disguise no allegory, nor do they convey a Christian moral. Beaton concludes that the Greek vernacular novels are a hybrid of the two chronotopes and, thus, articulate “the experience of conflicting and overlapping identities that must have been the reality of a Greek-speaking world fragmented in the wake of the Fourth Crusade.” Beaton argues that the lack of specificity in time/place allows the Greek reader to occupy “the porous boundary” between Byzantine and Frankish rule. Beaton makes a fascinating final observation. Unlike any predecessors in the genre, the heroes and heroines of the novels are emphatically foreign and displaced. If one could articulate a unique chronotope for this literature, it would be the following: “It could even be suggested that the defining characteristic of the chronotope of these romances is precisely this: that time and space are made to function in such a way that the principal characters are presented as multiple exiles.” (p. 13)

Conservative Tastes in the Greek Art World

The Economist's recent special report on the art market affirmed my suspicions about the international market of Greek art (see, "Suspended Animation," Nov. 28, 2009). I have, on occasion, blogged on the sale of Greek art and noted that, although seemingly international, Greek art circulates primarily in Greek hands. Essay "A Whole New World," focuses on the effects of globalization in contemporary art and comments on the success of Bonhams and Sotheby's in capturing the demand for Greek works. I quote the entire paragraph:

"The Greek shipowners who fled political turmoil at home for the calm squares of London in the 1960s had the money to compete for Greek art. They had conservative tastes, seeking out paintings of the Acropolis and large seascapes. The London auction houses were happy to supply what they wanted, and the sales of Greek art from the 19th and 20th centuries at Sotheby's and Bonhams have been highly successful." (p. 15)

The conservative tastes expressed in the international market of Greek art is hence a rigged game, expressing the tastes of a particular class with international distinctions. Whether the taste of Greek shipowners matches the taste of the ordinary Greek remains an open question. In contrast to this older generation of artistic commerce (and I don't mean old in age alone), globalization has brought about new artistic players. Most prominent among them is Dakis Joannou, the Cypriot industrialist, whose Deste museum (in Nea Ionia, Athens) has received international acclaim. "I am not interested in power but engagement. I like to put the work in dialogue with other art, to give it the opportunity to speak, to see whether it can stand on its own feet," explains Joannou to the Economist (p. 9). Joannou started collecting in 1985 with Jeff Koons' Equilibrium. I was intrigued with the repetition of the term "engagement" also in Koons assessment of his own productions. Also quoted in the Economist, Koons states "It's not a critique but an acceptance of our own cultural history. I guess the people who are involved with my work feel physically and intellectually engaged." (p. 11). I suspect that "engagement" is the new code word to distinguish a type of art making and collecting that is differentiated from the market. During the 1990s, as we all know, the art market was inflated by collectors who bought as an economic gamble rather than as a personal love for the objects.

Finally, to situate Greece in the contemporary international market, we must highlight the opening of a Gagosian branch, in Athens on September 15. Adding to three galleries in New York, one in Beverly Hills, one in Rome, two in London and an office in Hong Gong, Larry Gagosian has expanded his international venues to Athens. Gagosian in Athens opened with an exhibition of Cy Twombly. The Athens Biennial, whose theme this last summer was "Heaven," has received little attention in contrast to the Istanbul Biennial, which is becoming almost as important as the biennials at Venice and Sao Paulo.

Athens Building Database

Sometime over 10 years ago, I started a little photographic project that I never completed: to document all the 1930s buildings in Athens. I was inspired by the methodologies I had learned in documenting vernacular architecture at the Morea Project and wanted to apply it on the modern apartment buildings of the interwar period. My 1930s Polykatoikies Project was a great excuse to walk every street of Athens and take photographs. A couple of books on 1930s apartment buildings have come out since then, and the Benaki has established a great architectural archive. Things are looking a little better for modern architectural studies. The field is still dominated by the super-scholars of the Polytechneion (Manolis Korres for ancient, Charalambos Bouras for medieval, Dimitris Philippides for modern), but a new generation seems to be emerging as well.

Athens is full of modern architectural jewels like the 1932 Blue Apartment Building at Exarcheia (published by Maro Kardamitse-Adame, 2006). Some have been studied thoroughly on a one-to-one case and the general historical narrative has been well established. What is still missing, nevertheless, is a systematic documentation of what is on the ground that might include lesser and greater buildings. The online database Contemporary Monuments Database is a good start. The project is directed by Leonidas Kallivretakis of the National Research Center. The database includes 267 buildings and is searchable by construction dates (1467-2003). The general website, Archaeology of the City of Athens, also includes 12 papers by experts on each period. The only annoying thing about the site is its ominous musical introduction.

The recent controversy over the houses on 17 and 19 Dionysiou Areopagitou Street have highlighted the preservation threats of modern Greek architecture. The destruction of the older housing stock during the 1960s is now lamentable. "Here is Athens ... the City before," a documentary from 1980, makes the case most poetically. It features a very nice text by painter Yannis Tsarouchis. The documentary begins with works by Spyros Vasileiou. If you remember from my last posting, Vasileiou is the painter of Patesion Street that Sotheby's just sold for $330,000. The video is available on the Archaeology of the City of Athens website and it's worth the 20 minutes. The documentary itself seems like a relic of the late 1970s. Its images of Athens are already historical.

Patesion Street Art

I'm partial to Patesion Street in Athens, a grand boulevard designed in the 1920s as the city expanded northward. Believe it or not, Athens was called the Paris of the south in the 1930s thanks to such urban features. Reading George Seferis' or other 1930s intellectuals, one becomes quickly convinced that 1930s Athens was quite spectacular. For more information on the city's urbanism, see Manos Bires' Αι Αθήναι από του 190υ εις τον 20ον αιώνα (Athens, 1966). Most people tend to obsess over Athens' 19th-century neoclassical grandeur, its first major rebuilding after independence (1860s-70s especially). The early modernist grandeur, the boulevards, the Bauhaus housing stock get a much shorter schrift. Sadly, the period of Athens' greatest demographic expansion (the 1960s) had no urban vision whatsoever; many historians blame the junta for this. The 1960s city has so engulfed the fabric of Patesion Street that one finds it difficult to imagine that the street would have ever been the subject of poetry and painting.

Sotheby's modern Greek art sale in November included some impressive works. One was "Patesion Street" (above) by Spyros Vasileiou, which sold for $330,000. Vasileiou's early work rarely comes up for sale, so this example was particularly desirable. Vasileiou is a fascinating figure, a painter of the "Thirties Generation" (representing Greece in the 1934 Venice Biennale) but also the first Greek Pop Artist. In 1955 he came to the U.S. and painted the interior of Saint Constantine's in Detroit. He is also the only artist from the Greek Thirties Generation that had his work exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum (in 1960). In 1984, Vasileiou's studio was converted into a house museum, located in Plaka (5a Webster Street). The building itself is a noteworthy specimen of Greek modernism, designed by Patroklos Karantinos in 1957. Vasileiou taught theater design (and designed sets for the 1962 movie Electra)

As has been typical in the last few years, Greek neoclassical works bring the highest price. This year's Sotheby's sale was no different. Nikolaos Gyzis' "The Fortune Teller" (left) sold for $530,ooo. What is amazing about this topseller, however, is that it was only recently discovered in an American collection.

All things considered, the Sotheby's sale totaled $ 6.5 million. Of the 173 works put up for sale, 106 were sold. Six months ago, the Bonham's modern Greek sale was equally successful. See my thoughts on that event here.

London Calling

It seems only yesterday that the landmark LP London Calling by the Clash turned 25, an event celebrated by a re-release of the album with new video and footage. On December 13, London Calling is turning 30 this time. And at the ripe age of 30, the Clash turns archaeological. The anniversary will be marked by the auctioning of the Clash's original art work, the classic album cover with Paul Simonon smashing his Fender Precision bass on stage at the New York Palladium. There's lots to say about Simonon's instruments, including a Rickenbacker given to him by Patti Smith, but basically the white Fender Precision was iconic. The 1979 image contains its own archaeology, namely, The Who smashing their instruments in the 1965 performance of My Generation at the Beat Club, as well as, Sid Vicious hitting an audience member with his own Fender Precision bass. The bass that Simonon smashed in the photo had been newly bought in 1979. Simonon regretted destroying this instrument because it proved to be one of his best sounding ones. The very bass has become a relic and it now resides at the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame. You can read the entire history of Simonon's 11 basses (scroll down to Paul Simonon Bass Story 1976-2008 here ).

At any rate, Bonhams auction house is selling the original London Calling art work by Ray Lowry valued at $100,000 (Sale 16905 Lot 26), and two autographed photos valued at $500 and $300 (Sale 16905, Lot 293 & 294). Ray Lowry, unfortunately, passed away in 2008. After the dissolution of the Clash, by the way, Paul Simonon has turned to a career in painting.

It Happened in Athens

An interesting exhibit just opened in Athens called "It Happened in Athens," (Συνέβη στην Αθήνα), at the "Melina" Cultural Center (Irakleidon 66 & Thessalonikis, Theseion). The exhibit features over 170 paintings representing daily life in Athens and its monuments. It was curated by Iris Kritikou and includes works by Giannis Moralis, Nikos Angelidis, Yannis Psychopaidis, Yannoulis Chalepas, Panagiotis Tetsis and Maria Philopoulou (left). The title of the exhibit refers to the 1962 comedy, It Happened in Athens, directed by Andrew Marton and starring Jayne Mansfield . The movie was produced by 20th Century Fox when Spyros Skouras was its executive. It's about Spyros Louis, the 1896 Cretan Marathon Olympic winner. The movie is not particularly good, but its soundtrack composed by Manos Hadjidakis has endured longer. I suspect, it is the Hadjidakis song that the curators had in mind, rather than the corny Hollywood version of 1896 Athens (see clip here). The exhibit will last for one month (December 1-23, 2009) and I regret that I won't see it. But I hope that the catalog (published by Mikre Arktos) will make its way into American libraries.

Lancaster: Poetic Archaeology

Ben Leech, has outdone his own artistic discipline with "Subterranean Recovery Crew" posted on Old Weird Lancaster (Nov. 17, 2009) and shown above. Since this summer, Ben has been choosing a building in Lancaster, Pa. and drawing it. The series is called "Building of the Week" and is a regular feature of the Lancaster Building Conservancy blog. In addition to the drawing, each building is thoroughly researched and photographed. So far, the series includes Strawberry Hill Grocery, Groff Funeral Home (one of my favorites), Kepper's Confectionary Building, 302-306 West Vine Street, Fleet Wing, Ashley and Bailey Silk Mill, and the Mayer Farmstead. For those who do not know of Ben, he is a practicing Historic Preservationist that came to Lancaster from Chicago only a few years ago. He is best known in the Lancaster community for two blogs, The Lancaster Building Conservancy and Old Weird Lancaster.

When Ben published the drawing above he entered a new realm: archaeology and archaeological poetics. "Subterranean Recovery Crew" contains 12 drawings of objects that Ben found in his back yard while gardening. The piece takes its name from the hotwheel in fig. 11 that reads "Subterranean Recovery Crew." The drawing was posted just as Ben was storing his garden tools at the end of a productive Fall. I love this drawing, it's loaded with associations. First, it is technically immaculate. It uses all the 19th-century conventions of archaeological illustration (orthographic representation, line-weights, stippling). The style itself hence introduces an element of nostalgia, a common trope in archaeological representation, but the irony here is that the artifacts come from the capitalist present. Discarded in Ben's backyard by the previous occupants, even the "present" of our lives has aged and deteriorated. For instance, G.I. Joe has onions growing out of him (after all, even our current war in Iraq is 6 years old). Although brought together by the chance of archaeological discovery, the 12 objects have a provocative narrative quality. They come out of a dream, a Surrealist assemblage, or a Situationist drift. I honestly, cannot stop from looking at the illustration. Every time, I think I've seen it enough, I click on it again and come up with additional poetic scenarios. I thank Ben for letting me reproduce his drawing here.

At the same time, Ben's drawing is more than poetry, it evokes the scientific discipline of Garbology, created in 1973 by William Rathje at the University of Arizona. Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (1992) by Williams Rathje and Cullen Murphy is one of the most important American archaeological publications (in my opinion). Excavating our own everyday lives has been beautifully explored in the collection of essay Archaeologies of the Recent Past, ed. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas (2001). I am particularly susceptible to Ben's drawing because I have been thinking about urban archaeology in Lancaster more broadly. The most recent noteworthy excavation at Lancaster was at the Stevens and Smith House, where a station in the underground railroad was discovered. The project was directed by James A. Delle (Kutztown University) and Mary Ann Levine (Franklin & Marshall College). I would love to see a more permanent F&M excavation at Lancaster and I'm exploring some possibilities.

Hawass, the Greatful Dead, Beyonce

In a recent biographical article on Zahi Hawass, we learn that the most powerful man in Egyptian archaeology attended a Grateful Dead concert at the pyramids during the mid-1970s, see Ian Parker, "The Pharaoh," The New Yorker (Nov. 16, 2009), p. 52ff. A couple of months ago, I posted on the Pink Floyd concert in Pompeii (1971), pondering the connections between rock and archaeology. Parker's reference to Hawass' pyramids concert attendance made a nice match to the photo on the left, from a few days ago, when Hawass guided Beyonce at Giza. Beyonce's "I Am..." tour has raised some controversy in the Islamic world, see Art Daily (Nov. 10, 2009). Although I used this news story as a conversation piece in my Islamic class, I will make no comments on the irony of this picture (the Egyptian cowboy archaeologist and the scarfed sex idol). Hawass spent a few years in Philadelphia as a grad student at Penn. His appreciation of American pop culture is not surprising, nor are his own super-star ambitions.

I will simply take a moment to remember the Grateful Dead concert, which took place in September 1978. The performance at the Giza Light and Sound theater was followed by three shows in Cairo. Interestingly enough, highlights of this Egyptian tour were released a year ago, see David Fricke, "The Dead Rock the Pyramids," Rolling Stone (Oct. 16, 2008). The CD title, "Rocking the Cradle/Egypt 1978," presumably refers to Egypt as the cradle of civilization. I am not a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I appreciate the inclusion of oud player Hamza El Din in their line up. El Din had appeared in the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, and in the 1980s/90s he taught ethnomusicology in various American universities. The 1978 Grateful Dead concert must be added to the saga of rock archaeology.

Churches of Lancaster Postcard

What better way to start an emotional relationship with a city than to start collecting its paraphernalia. I must confess that I have started to collect postcards that feature Lancaster's noteworthy architecture. Considering Lancaster County's tradition as a tourist destination, there is no shortage of postcards. You can imagine how thrilled I was to stumble on "the Churches of Lancaster" on eBay, this being the subject of a class I'm teaching next semester. Naturally, I bid on it and it arrived (above). I am not sure of the postcard's date, I would guess 1950s from the graphics. It proudly shows Lancaster's touristic identity vis-a-vis its historic churches. Considering that Lancaster has 122 churches, knowing which buildings the city promoted as its premier heritage is noteworthy. The churches are the First Methodist Church, St. Paul's Reformed Church, Grace Lutheran Church, Saint John's Evangelical Lutheran Church, and Trinity Lutheran Church.

The postcard will make a perfect conversation piece for the first meeting of my ART271 class, "Lancaster: Architecture of Faith." Pre-registration has just finished at Franklin & Marshall, and I am thrilled to see that the class is registered to full capacity. As I expected, it is a lot more popular than my Medieval Art and Architecture survey.

Airport Chapels on Flickr

Last week, I received some feedback on my last Airport Chapels postings. Blogger Little Ethiopia(n) and Esquire were recently traveling through Washington, D.C. and they spotted the chapel in Dulles Airport. I thank them for sending me the image on the left. This is a fabulous logo with the dome representing holy space and the airplane making a subtle nod to the cross, but not claiming Christian domination. On the subject of crosses, I hope you are following the controversy over the cross at the Mojave National Preserve, see NPR coverage here.

I also want to thank Julia for informing me of a new Airport Chapels Flickr site with 13 contributors and some 186 images. I especially like the group's write up, which I'll quote below:

"Anyone who's spent enough time in enough different airports has discovered that many have small spaces set aside to pray, worship, meditate, reflect, or just find some peace and quiet in. They are often hidden away in lonely corners of the airport, and are often the only place one can escape the incessant noise of a large, busy airport. They may be called chapels, capillas, masjids, mashallah, synagogues, temples, prayer rooms, or meditation rooms. Some are specific to a particular religion or sect, many are not.

All are welcome and encouraged to join this group, the devout, the skeptical, the questing, believers of all kinds, and atheists. But please respect each others' beliefs, whether you share them or not.

Please post your photos of airport prayer rooms and of people praying at airports here! If you can be specific in the captions or comments of your photo about the location of the prayer room, that will help others find one the next time they're traveling. Another source of information is the International Association of Civil Aviation Chaplains www.airportchapel.de/international/ which has a searchable database of airport prayer rooms. Unfortunately, s far it doesn't have nearly as much information on airport prayer rooms in Muslim-majority countries as in Christian ones. Perhaps we can help them expand their horizons!"

West Philadelphia: Transfiguration

The wrecking ball has met the Church of the Transfiguration, on 56th and Cedar Sts. in West Philadelphia. Built in 1905, the church has been vacant for almost a decade. See the Philadelphia Church Project blog (here) for the sad images of demolition. The interior furnishings of the church were stripped last month and can be found at Provenance, the architectural salvage store on 1610 Fairmount Ave. This Catholic church, convent, school and complex was sold by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to Boy's Latin, a charter school that opened in 2007. The school is an interesting, albeit controversial, experiment, see St. John Bard-Smith, "Latin Lovers," Philadelphia Weekly (June 11, 2008). The school will presumably expand in the plot that housed the Transfiguration.

Many thanks to the Necessity of Ruins for recording the processes of Philadelphia's own ruination. I was also deeply saddened to see the wrecking ball meet another West Philadelphia monument, the Drexel Shaft on 30th Street. The demolition took place on Sunday (Nov. 16); for more information, see, Eulogy for a Shaft and Drexel Shaft Implosion (Necessity of Ruins, Nov. 12 & 16). The smoke stack was designed for the 30th Street Station Steam Heating Plane by the office of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White in 1929. This Chicago firm was the successor of Daniel Burnham's office and their ambitious urbanism is legendary. Their plans for Philadelphia's 30th Street resembled the Terminal Tower project in Cleveland. Unexpectedly, the Great Depression kept the full urban scheme from materializing. The smoke stack was an orphan, a monument to a lost moment. The boiler was last used in 1964 and, I agree with The Necessity of Ruins, it was an icon of West Philadelphia. Crossing the Schuylkill River or entering the city by train was always marked by this vertical monument rising over its cubic base.