Hercules: The Water Jug

When two people marry, according to Late Byzantine customs, they should be given a ceramic plate symbolizing their union into a new domestic unit, wishing blessings of fecundity and dining bliss (or it's just an early form of the registry). Many such plates survive from Cyprus, Corinth and other Byzantine sites. The most beautiful specimen (right) is an incised sgraffito plate excavated in Corinth during the 1930s (Charles Morgan, Corinth XI: The Byzantine Pottery. Cambridge, Mass., 1942, pl. LII). Alison Frantz (Hesperia 10, 1941, pp. 9-13), James Notopoulos (Hesperia 33, 1964, pp. 108-133) and others have tried to connect the scene with Digenis Akritas, wishing to heroize a modest representation. I think it's just a wedding plate no different in spirit than the ceramics illustrated in the ad (left) from April 25, 1940. In early 1940, Westinghouse held a letter-writing context with 10 refrigerators given away each week to the bride with the best answer to "I should have a Westinghouse Refrigerator because ..." In the middle right of the page, the conjugal refrigerator has been opened to show four complimentary ceramic gifts: a blue water jug at the top tray, two left-over dishes (green and yellow) and a yellow butter dish at the bottom tray (see below for detail zoom). The set constitutes the Hercules line produced by the Hall China Company in East Liverpool, Ohio between 1940 and 1941, as a complementary gift accompanying the purchase of a new refrigerator. On purely formal terms (color, shape, line, texture, etc.), the Hercules water jug is one of my favorite objects of 20th-century design.

On the occasion of the marriage between Elias Markolefas and Iota Vassilopoulou, I explore one particular vessel that brings modernism and archaeology into harmonious cohort. Preferring the aquatic metaphors of wedlock (refrigerated in the hot months of summer), my gift is a cobalt blue Hercules water jug, which I acquired on eBay. Now that it has safely arrived to Athens in one piece, I can write a few words without the threat of jinxing it. When the vessel arrived, it had a distinctive smell, suggesting that it served its las owner as a cigar box, making it additionally appropriate for the smoking room introspection that philosophical Elias continuously accommodates.

Hercules was designed by J. Palin Thorley (1892-1987), a fascinating individual of diverse skills and a pioneer in combining modernity with the material past. The first Hercules water jug I ever saw belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was featured in American Modern, 1925-1940: Design for a New Age, an exhibit that came through the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2002 (exhibition catalog, J. Stewart Johnson, New York, 2000, p. 155). Thorley also designed the “General” water jug (1939), which I saw for the first time at the Victoria and AlbertMuseum, London. It’s possible that Thorley also designed the “Phoenix” collection (1937-1939), but I haven’t found any proof of this. I began collecting Hall pottery in 2004, after seeing a stunning red “Ball Jug” (introduced in 1938) in Hamilton, Ontario. Since then, I have spotted Hall ceramics in antique stores throughout the Carolinas and on eBay. It’s quite an affordable habit. The moment I heard of my friends' marriage, I set out in a quest to find a Hercules jug for them. Given how cheaply-manufactured plastic containers have taken over our domestic lives, I find it especially apt to celebrate the ceramic containers of early modernity and recycle them in use, hoping that their ethics of production and their exceptional aesthetics will guide domestic life.

Thorley was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, considered to be the home of England's pottery industry. He studied art in the Hanley School (1902) and apprenticed in the drawing department of Wedgwood (1906-1913), where, among other projects, he worked on Theodore Roosevelt’s and William Taft’s china service for the White House. As America began to dominate the industrial ceramics market, opportunities and demand grew; in 1927, Thorley immigrated to East Liverpool, Ohio hired as artistic director of booming local pottery firms, including the Hall China Company. A notable chapter in his career included a position at Colonial Williamsburg (1941-1956). In 1937, Thorley entered academia founding the ceramics department at the University of Pittsburgh, soon after the completion of the fabulous Cathedral of Learning (see, Lucia Curta, "Constructing 'Imagined Community': The Romanian Classroom at the University of Pittsburgh, 1927-1943," Studies in the Decorative Arts 5:2 (Spring-Summer 1998), pp. 40-68). By 1942, Thorley is no longer listed as professor. The trans-global designer and short-lived academic was also an archaeologist. He took part in the excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim and Bab ed-Dra', collaborating with William F. Albright (John Hopkins) and James L. Kelso (Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary).

Most importantly, Thorley pioneered methods known today as "experimental archaeology." Reviewing Thorley's chapter in W. F. Albright's, The Excavations of Tell Beit Mirsim 3: The Iron Age (New Haven, 1943), Herbert G. May writes, "For the first time we have a definitive analysis of the texture and manufacture of Palestinian pottery, based on experimentation and collaboration between ceramic expert and archaeologist. Other institutions may follow suit" (H. G. May, Journal of Biblical Literature 63:2, (June 1944), p. 194). There is no doubt in my mind that Thorley's direct archaeological experience influenced his design and craft. We know of his early love with archaeology following the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb; Thorley joined the British Army in World War I with the the hope of making it to Egypt. Thorley's Hall pottery for Westinghouse has streamlined ribs that, on the one had, remind us of machine age aesthetics but, on the one hand, speak of ribbed amphoras from the Late Roman Mediterranean.

As was the case with many archaeologists of the 1920s and the 1930s, the past was usable. The line between archaeological research and modern design was porous. For Thorley, the ancient potter was contemporary, a colleague invested in the challenges of synthetic material. He writes, "We live in a day of synthetics--synthetic rubber, synthetic gasoline, synthetic perfumes, and countless others. The first synthetic to be discovered in mankind was pottery, an artificial stone produced by firing clay shapes to a temperature sufficiently high to change the physical and chemical properties of the original clay into a new substance with many of the characteristics of stones."(Kelso and Thorley, "Palestinian Pottery in Bible Times," Biblical Archaeologist 8:4 (December 1945), pp. 88). Thorley and the ancient potter were engaged in a common agenda, the creation of a synthetic world. The industrial challenges of modernity were historicized with the origins of civilized society. Similarly, free enterprise found its precedents in craft production: "Pottery represented one of the major manufacturing industries of the ancient world and the Israelite potters belonged to what we call today 'up and coming business men'." (Ibid, p. 81).

From the designer's point of view, ceramic vessels are conditioned by common functions. Thorley's Hercules water jug fits snuggly next to the freezer of the Westinghouse refrigerator (ad detail). It stores water, cools it and finally pours it. Its job is related to that of ancient jugs like one described by Albright, Kelso and Thorley: "The spout of this jar is excellent designing. The problem of drip is handled by giving the lower surface of the spout a sharp upward cut back so that the drop cannot follow the contour of the spout and smear up the face of the jar. Furthermore the spout, although a short one and placed high on the jar, reaches beyond the body of the jar and thus prevents any drops smearing the jar ... The flat top of the spout depresses the liquid as it passes through the spout, thus making a better stream for controlled pouring. Furthermore, this almost flat surface gives variety and contrast to the well-rounded three-dimensional volume of the pot--a principle of design used in the best modern teapots." ( "Early-Bronze Pottery from Bab ed-Dra in Moag," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (Oct. 1944), p. 13).

From a historiographic point of view, Thorley is all but forgotten. His papers were acquired by the College of William and Mary in 1996 and can be found at the Special Collections of the Earl Gregg Swem Library. The best secondary literature is two articles by John Austin in Ceramics in America (2005 and 2006). I thank my friend and colleague Mike Vatalaro for the inspiration in contemporary ceramics. Mike is Art Department Chair and Professor of Ceramics at Clemson University. Born, raised and educated in Akron, Ohio, he knows all about the Ohio ceramics industries. As an MFA graduate student at Alfred University, moreover, he witnessed the discovery of terra sigilata's material constitution. I wish I could put Mike Vatalaro and Guy Sanders (dir. of Corinth Excavations and world authority on Roman/Byzantine ceramics) in the same room (or kiln) and sit back to watch the sparkles fly.

For more research on Thorley, I offer a preliminary bibliography below.

Mazel tov to Elias and Iota (and an overdue gift)

Albright, William Foxwell. 1943. The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim (Joint Expedition of the Pittsburgh-Xenia Theological Seminary and the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem), v. 3, The Iron Age. (The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, vols. 21-22, for 1941-43), New Haven. Chapter by James Leon Kelso and J. Palin Thorley.

Albright, William Foxwell, James Leon Kelso, and J. Palin Thorley. 1944. “Early-Bronze Pottery from Bab ed-Dra’ in Moab,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 95 (Oct., 1944), pp. 3-13.

Austin, John C. 2005. “J. Palin Thorley (1892-1987), Potter and Designer: Part I,” Ceramics in America 2005, ed. Robert Hunter, Hanover and London, pp. 160-201.

Austin, John C. 2006. “J. Palin Thorley (1892-1987), Potter and Designer: Part 2, Williamsburg Ceramics in America,” Ceramics in America 2006.

Bowman, Raymond A. 1944. Rev. William Foxwell Albright, The Excavation of Tell Beit Mirsim. Volume III, The Iron Age, in The American Historical Review 49:4 (Jul., 1944), pp. 691-692.

Kelso, James Leon, and J. Palin Thorley. 1945. “Palestinian Pottery in Bible Times,” The Biblical Archaeologist 8:4 (Dec. 1945), pp. 81-93.

Kelso, James Leon, and J. Palin Thorley. 1946. “A Ceramic Analysis of Late-Mycenaean and Other Late-Bronze Vases from Jett in Palestine,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 104 (Dec., 1946), pp. 21-25.

May, Herbert Godon. 1944. Book review of Albright 1943, Journal of Biblical Literature 63:2 (Jun. 1944), pp. 191-195.

Thorley, J. Palin 1938-1941. “Pottery Fundamentals” in Pottery, Glass and Brass Salesman, starting May 1938 and at least to June 1941.

Thorley, J. Palin 1942. “The Ceramic Designer in Wartime” Crockery and Glass Journal, two part article, June and August.

Byzantium N O W

"We're stocking up on Windex" said a Getty spokesman in preparation for Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai, the premier 2006-07 Byzantine art exhibition in America. Judging from the New York Times review (Nov. 12, 2006), the organizers seemed intrigued by the devotional repercussions of such an exhibit, namely visitors smearing their bodily fluids on the pristine airtight glass cases. The curator, herself, discovered such practices in Cairo, when a Coptic housekeeper kissed the image of the catalog proofs scattered on her work table. The Getty exhibition highlights most dramatically the biblical gulf that separates the white tower of Byantine art-history and its subject matter (not to mention the monks' postmodern relationship with the Getty during their visit). Perhaps it has less to do with culture (East vs. West) as it might have to do with class and social expectations. One hardly needs to travel to Egypt to see the devotional kissing of objects; housekeepers all over Los Angeles engage in such practices if one attends closely to the Latino community. Sometimes, I think that Byzantine wisdom resides in the plastic furniture covers of immigrant households, or even in Gus Portoklalos' prophetic cure, "every ailment from psoriasis to poison ivy can be cured with Windex" in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002).

During the last year my research has been focusing on the intoxicating motivations for studying Byzantine art during the 1930s. For better or for worse (and for a variety of reasons too complex to enumerate here), Byzantium mattered greatly. The same could be said for the 1960s, too, which explains the renaissance of Byzantine art history during this period. Glenn Peers is working on a terrific new project showing how Byzantium infected American postwar art, why Clement Greenberg would write "Byzantine Parallels" in 1958 (Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston 1961, pp. 167-170), or why the de Menils would commission both a Byzantine icon chapel and a Rothko chapel at Houston (Peers, "Utopia and Heterotopia: Byzantine Modernisms in America," paper, Florence, 2005). But this only takes us into ca. 1980. Did Byzantium lose its cultural relevance? Not entirely, considering that postmodernism loved all marginal periods. Byzantium was useful for a greater counter-canonical critique, which ultimately addressed the canon itself (and those who cared about it from Allan Bloom to Lynne-Chenney's NEH. In 2005, Anthony Cutler gave a talk at the University of Toronto illustrating some lessons from the classroom, showing how Byzantine art was perfect for introducing the postmodern condition. And research on Byzantine historiography flourished in the mid-1990s, with some excellent works, such as, Robert Ousterhout, "An Apologia for Byzantine Architecture, Gesta 35 (1996), pp. 21-33; Robert S. Nelson, "Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art, Gesta 35 (1996), pp. 3-11; "The Map of Art History," Art Bulletin 79 (1997), pp. 28-40.

During this last semester (Spring 2008) , I've been part of an Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) public outreach program, lecturing on Byzantium, the avant-garde, archaeology and the 1930s. After my talks, an inner voice and often an audience member would ask the natural question: Does the West care about Byzantium today? Has Byzantium lost the relevance (or even a superficial hotness value) that it had in the 30s? Are there any subjective motivations for studying Byzantine material culture in the 21st century? I commonly gave one simple answer. Yes, the lore of Byzantium rose after World War I and World War II because Byzantine lands (like Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia) were at the limelight of "the other." Up until the Cold War, Byzantium was the edge of the West. Thanks to 9/11 and China's economic growth, the front has moved to Mesopotamia and China. American academia unabashedly displays its opportunist underbelly. Dressed up in some transparent do-good enlightenment, every art history department is scrambling to hire Islamicists and Asianists. Sure, the discipline needs to integrate those lesser known periods and regions, but the timing of multiculturalism requires reflection. Our academic open-mindedness is politically and economically motivated, simply riding on a much larger wave. Have we forgotten about Orientalism altogether? have we forgotten about Napoleon and the Egyptian Expedition? what happened to all that reading of Foucault we seem to be doing, inquiring about the relationship between knowledge and power. Getting to know Islam and the East corresponds cannot be separated from the geopolitics of dominance. The culture wars (focused on America) have shifted into the global wars (focused on American dominance). From a Machiavelian vantage point, the waning of Byzantium makes clear sense. Frankly, I don't know what is better: to relish liberal academia's attention, knowing that heavier guns surround it, or to chose oblivion. I won't try to answer this question but simply acknowledge that Byzantine Studies are spectacularly diminishing and perhaps we should celebrate that condition (even if it means a whole bunch of unemployed Byzantine art historians).

A more interesting question for me right now is how Byzantium is positively capturing the public imagination. My AIA lecture tour coincided with the release of Richard Price's new novel Lush Life (2008). I had never read Price before (Clockers, 1992, etc.) and knew him only as a writer for HBO's The Wire, a growing addiction (having no HBO, I'm only now getting the first season from Netflix, and, OH MY GOD, IS IT GOOD). Having my own first experience with public lecturing (and, I guess, self promotion), my ears perked up when catching Price's parallel promotional campaign, which has been quite pervasive. No regular PBS viewer or NPR listener could have missed an interview. Returning from two lectures in Ohio, on April 16, 2008, I caught Price on the Bryant Park Project in the early morning on Charlie Rose (PBS) in the late night. In both interviews, Price talked about ... Byzantium or the Byzantine landscape of his novel. A month and a half earlier, the New York Times had referred to the "Sleepy-Eyed Writer Wandering Byzantium," (Charles McGrath, March 2, 2008). Price's Byzantium is the Manhattan's Lower East Side where "the shift in the tectonic plates" is taking place, and where six separate universes are intersecting: 1) Fujianese/Chinese, 2) Orthodox Jews, 3) Porto-Ricans/Dominicans, 4) Projects Un-Rehab tenements, 5) Black culture, 6) La Bohèmers. In his review of Lush Life, Michael Chabon calls Price a demonologist like Dostoevsky and Philip Roth ("In Priceland," New York Review of Books 55.7, May 1, 2008).

At first, it seemed that Richard Price is using Byzantium as a metaphor for ethnic tapestry or cultural mosaic. So, I resisted the novel, especially since I've been reading another book also referred to as "Byzantine," Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day (2007). Having committed to 1,000 pages of sheer Pynchon pleasure, I wasn't ready for additional reading commitments (and, I must agree with the critics, Against the Day is the next best Pynchon novel since Gravity's Rainbow, 1974). But after repeated flirtations with Lush Life at the Greenville Barnes and Noble, I finally broke down and started reading it. The experience was a revelation. Although it's premature to make any overall statement, I cannot resist commenting on the first 32 pages that I have read. Byzantium is more than a metaphor, it is a paradigm laboriously worked through in the language, the motifs and the novel's preoccupations. Generic cultural history is not what Price has in mind. Eric Cash, the main character, thinks: "But after nearly a decade in the neighborhood, even on a sun-splashed October morning like this, all of this ethnohistorical mix 'n' match was, much like himself, getting old" (p. 15). It's as if Price is commenting on the state of Byzantine art history, especially the kind that tracks cultural influence (from the East, the South, the North, the West).

Walking to work, Eric runs into commotion. A young Chinese policeman, Fenton Ma, like the archangel of the Annunciation, tells Eric of the religious revelation taking place inside the Sana'a 24/7, the mini-mart run by two Yemeni brothers. The conversation goes as follows:

"What is it?"
"Mary's in there," Ma said, getting bumped by the ripple effect of the crowd he was holding back.
"Mary who."
"Mary the Virgin. She showed up in the condensation on one of the freezer doors last night. Word travels fast around here, no?" Taking another bump from behind. (p. 17)

Price's novel begins with an image, perhaps a work of art, manifesting itself on the glass surface, similar to the condensation eradicated by the Getty's Windex army at the Mount Sinai exhibition. "The Virgin was a sixteen-inch-high gourd-shaped outline molded in frost on the glass doors fronting the beer and soda shelves, its smoothly tapered top slightly inclined to one side above its broader lower mass, reminding him vaguely of all the art-history Marys tilting their covered heads to regard the baby in their arms, but really, it was kind of a stretch." (pp. 17-18). Price's description takes us into the most quotidian realm and self-consciously humors the image. There's been an explosion of art-historical scholarship on the Byzantine Virgin (mostly from Harvard) which desperately stretches traditional art history towards theory. Price's condensation-Virgin manages to capture the complexity of Byzantium (iconicity, materiality, subjectivity, meaning, meaninglessness) in ways that supersede the verbiage of scholarship. The hero Eric asks policeman Lo Presto (this time not Chinese but Latino):

"Can I ask you something?" Eric said lightly, not knowing this guy.
"Have you seen her in there?"
"Who, the Virgin?" Lo Presto looked at him neutrally. "Depends what you mean by 'seen'."
"You know. Seen."

The vision and erasure of the cooler condensation provides an element of hubris. Ike "casually reached for the glass door, opening it for a few seconds, then closing it back." (p. 24) Later in the bar, Ike humors Eric, "I have a real bad feeling it's going to come back and bite me in the ass... I'm just fuckin' with you brother." (p. 29) Ike's murder (later that night) and Eric's accusation becomes Lush Life's narrative premise.

Perhaps I'll never be able to sufficiently articulate how EXCELLENT this incident is, vis-a-vis art history today, but I am thoroughly provoked. This is TOTALLY Byzantine in some deeper way. A few days ago, I attended Holy Friday services at the Greek Orthodox Church at Greenville. The experience was sociologically terrific. Lots has been written about the Southern Greek-Americans (esp. RE: rates of assimilation) and, indeed, they are an interesting lot (I'm one of them, too). At the end of the service, Father Tom made a fabulously weird apologia on the visual quality of the Epitaphios flowers. Apparently, the faithful had complained in previous years that the flowers were not bright enough. Father Tom went through a catalog of this year's colors and explained how the problem is not the floral selection but the lighting of the space. Saint George is a Byzantine revival structure (from the 1990s, I believe) with a huge central dome and insufficient lighting for fancy display. After last year's complains, someone from the church council placed a spot light in the back of the church to assist in highlighting the brightness of the sepulcher. Father Tom's sermon revealed the innovation. The discussion alone, following a long and beautiful service, was priceless in addressing problems of experience, revelation and aesthetics but with Greenbergian material rigor. The southern flowers of Greek Easter, like the condensation of the Lower East side, make Byzantium still infinitely interesting (in ways that Chinese or Islamic art could not fully replace).

Listening to Price interview makes it clear that he is a master of conversation. Chabon calls him "one of the best writers of dialog in the history of American literature" (see earlier). The beauty of his book lies heavily on the hours and hours of fieldwork he has put in studying the tectonic plates of the Lower East Side; he's an artist-ethnographer and an artist-archaeologist. So I anticipated the amazing conversational voices of the novel. But I never expected the levels of visual acuity that I've encountered. This novel could be seen as a treatise on the state of contemporary art history. Price directly tackles the world of visual imagery from tattoos to architecture. A waitress (another Virgin perhaps?) "had all seven dwarfs tattooed in miniature trampling up the inside of her thigh." (p. 19) Ike, a new bartender in Eric Cash's cafe, visits the condensation Virgin and extinguishes the vision by opening the refrigerator door. He is tattooed, too. "He had a shaved head and a menagerie of retro tattoos inside both forearms--hula girls, mermaids, devil heads, panthers--but his smile was as clean as cornfield." (p. 20). Another character, Paulie Shaw, tries to sell the restaurant owner slide transparencies, originals of Jacob Riis--who is, in many ways, Price's predecessor in documenting Manhattan's human condition (How the Other Half Lives, 1891). Shaw holds the slides up to the light: "Each one personally hand-tinted by Riis himself for his lectures ... The man was light-years ahead of his time, total multimedia, had sixty to a hundred of these fading in and out of each other on a huge screen accompanied by music." (p. 20) Price becomes our multimedia word-smith. We turn the corner and, in fact, we have architecture, a synagogue whose roofed collapsed a few days earlier. A rabbi tries to save the tattered remains of prayer books, while a light-skinned and Latino teenager are stuffing the salvaged sheets into pillowcases. This is truly a visual masterpiece. We gather from his interviews that Price was personally immersed in the project of documenting the Lower East Side, a place that was inhabited by his Jewish immigrant ancestors and a century later by his hipster teenage kids.

In conclusion, I believe that Byzantium continues to matter. This is suggested in Price's Lower East Side research turned into fiction. I usually cringe with the association between New York and Byzantium, as it often stays at the level of gold and glitter (not that there is anything wrong with gold and glitter). At some visceral level, the cultural traditions of Latin America are relevant to Byzantium and they are vibrant in New York. Diego Rivera is probably one of the earliest artists to import Byzantium into the Americas. In 1920, Rivera visited Ravenna studying its mosaics as a visual prototype for his own monumental art. Rivera's tradition survives in what the New York Times calls "Hip-Hop Byzantium." Surely a whole new blog posting may be necessary to describe the relevance of Byzantium in modern Latin American arts and the public work of Nanny Vega. Suffice it to conclude with sending you to David Gonzalez's discussion of Vega's work in "In Mosaics, an Artists Lasting Impressions", NYT February 25, 2008.

Is it a class thing? Perhaps it is. Art history, its curators and scholars are aiming high and missing low. Byzantium N O W is better nourished in the bosoms of Coptic and Latino housekeepers. The geopolitics of Empire my take us far out into China and Iraq, where we can buy the latest hot Chinese art or the latest luted antiquity. But the business of the cultural historian might keep him closer to literature, New York, L.A. (minus the Getty), Philadelphia, Cleveland, the Byzantium of Richard Price or, for that matter, the Detroit of Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex, 2003). I like this Byzantium of N O W even if I'm not sure exactly what it may add up to. Christ has risen in Greenville, y'all, and Ike has opened the cooler door that erased the Virgin. Happy Easter.

Punk Archaeology: Glue

Street art has been a vibrant form of the urban underground for the last decade. Back in the 1990s, I began photographing such ephemeral installations throughout Philadelphia, returning even to trace the effects of deterioration or intentional erasure. This documentation, obviously, satisfied my archaeological sensibilities but, more importantly, got me to seriously think about medieval epigraphy and graffiti, a genre that is rarely considered as protest. Interestingly enough, we rarely imagine medieval men and women subverting public space through writing or scratching; we rarely think of them outside the modes of religious expression. Michael Camille's sign typology--protection, power, publicity, memory, location, public fantasy--does not include political subversion ("Signs on Medieval Street Corners," in Die Strasse, ed. J. Gerhard, Vienna, 2001, pp. 91-118). I have a suspicion that some Byzantine inscriptions served a subversive role, an idea based on prison graffiti from Corinth, as well as a series of proto-cartographic scratches.

Philadelphia street art (clearly defined as post-graffiti) boomed when I was a graduate student in AAMW (Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World) . Photographing this vernacular art while studying vernacular architecture gave me an excuse for meaningful procrastination. The discovery of street art, moreover, introduced me to the Space 1026 collaborative, which is responsible for producing some of the best Philadelphia street art. One day, I even stepped up the stairs of 1026 Arch Street, met Ben Woodward, explained my project and bought one of his prints, the barking dog with the word LOST. The print was inexpensive enough ($10) that I also bought a copy for my god-son, whom I've been intentionally trying to subvert through skate boards, CDs, etc. So a LOST print now hangs in a teenager's room in Überlingen, Germany, mind you, not glued in the streets but properly framed and hung).

On April 18, I returned to my alma mater and gave a lecture on Byzantium, Modernity and the American School at AAMW's Archaeology Lunch series. It was a wonderful event in its own right and quite emotional; my last involvement with AAMW was 5 years ago, scrambling to complete my thesis. In my last trip, spring had just began in Philadelphia, offering great opportunities for walking the streets. Although the visit was short and the wanderings even shorter, one image kept creeping up, the sticker you see above. It's a small red monochrome print juxtaposing a simple figurative image of a small mouse and the word GLUE. The print is wheat-pasted on a street pole near 44th and Pine Streets. In fine Pop Art form, text and image are congruous and incongruous. The subject matter itself is so appropriately regional to Philadelphia's domestic life, punctuated by the ever-present mouse problem creeping through every row-house. I cannot even begin to list the Philadelphia mouse stories. Sadly enough, mice was the subject of the last conversation I had with my father before he passed away (unexpectedly from a heart-attack), and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Another memorable incident is returning from a trip to Greece and finding a mouse strung around the strings under my mother's sewing machine (she was a seamstress). The poor baby-mouse had spun itself into its own death. We were gone long enough that the bodily deterioration was complete and what confronted us was a beautifully textiled flat object.

I find GLUE to be such a thought-provoking piece beyond the vernacular associations to West Philadelphia life. I will spare you of my own multiple readings. Flat as it may be, GLUE reverberates with so many references, including images from Robert Mapplethorpe's famous "Perfect Moment" show (1988) at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (which, back then, was housed in Meyerson Hall). Most obviously, GLUE is about prey and preyed, animals and humans, wild and domestic, but also about art process and meaning (the piece itself is literally "glued" on a post). Having just heard a fantastic Studio 360 episode, I cannot fail to see connections with Abu Ghraib as well. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (2008) just out in theaters and Stephen S. Eisenman's The Abu Ghraib Effect (London, 2007) are high on my list--Eisenman teaches Art History at Northwestern and he is the editor of Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (3rd ed., 2007); I received a review copy of this textbook and could not put it down . I have no idea who produced GLUE, but I thank them for articulating so many subterranean strata with economical eloquence.

Whether coming out of punk rock, skate-boarding, or both, the aesthetics of street art have reached national exposure in the last few months. One of its most celebrated practitioners, Shepard Fairey, has donated a portrait to the Barak Obama campaign. Fairey's CHANGE is sadly SOLD OUT, but you can read more about it in Rob Walker's, "The Art of Politics" (NYT Magazine, April 13, 2008, p. 27). Fairey was born in South Carolina (which adds another bizarre geographic thread) and became famous through his OBEY THE GIANT signs. Even if you have never heard of Fairey's name, you have probably seen his work; this is one of the beauties of a genre that is (partially) anonymous but (thoroughly) pervasive. A few years ago, street art was an underground phenomenon integrally connected to other subversive urban grass routes movements. At this point, street art has entered both mainstream political arena and popular culture; Fairey, for instance, has designed the cover of a greatest hits CD for Led Zeppelin. Another artist, Banksy, is equally unavoidable. Last summer, I was so happy to find a copy of his Wall and Piece (Phaidon, 2007) at Barnes and Noble (Rittenhouse Square) to give to my godson when I visited him in Greece . When I walked into my godson's room in Athens, I saw the very same Bansky book in his library; the book had already been translated into Greek (now, that is globalization). I ended up lugging the (ungiven) gift all the way back to the U.S. and returning it to the Barnes and Noble. Whoever has bought that copy, has unwillingly purchased a much traveled book. Incidentally, my godson has now fully embraced hip-hop (as well as computer hacking) and goes by the nickname Pak. Regardless of its mainstream status, the much-traveled street art of Philadelphia seems potently alive and exciting. GLUE not only made my day happier but provided some wonderful connective tissue across multiple years of punk, art and urban archaeology.

PS. Connected to subversive street art, see the documentation of an ephemeral historiography in Boston, Chrstina J. Hodge "History on the Line, Davis Square, " Archaeoblog, April 10, 2008.

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)