Totem and Taboo

I generally have a love-hate relationship with museums. I sometimes can relax and enjoy some of them, like a good natural history museum, but art museums in particular have the habit of draining me from any trace of energy. I think that with every work of art I see in them, instead of the viewing adding to my inspiration and to my mind, it seems to take something away from me, for the immediate hours following the visit, so that it takes me a few days to recover from the experience and appreciate what I saw. I remember coming out even from my favourite museums, the Musee d'Orsay and the Hermitage, completely exhausted and drained, as if I had just been through some kind of physical and mental examination. 

The experience of course is much worse if I am accompanied by people who have the habit and feel the need to read every single caption next to the work displayed and so take numerous hours to go through an exhibition (let alone a whole museum). When I was younger I used to be polite and hang around waiting for them, but now I just go my way and seem to race through the rooms quite speedily, which seems to be all I can bare to do. 

To all this there is one very notable exception and that is the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens. This is a very small museum dedicated to Cycladic Art and is the only museum that I have voluntarily visited more than twice. In fact I think I have visited it many many times and I always go there again every time I am in Athens. I have a free pass to all archaeological and art sites in Greece which allows me to do that. This museum has a very different feel to it. It is very dark, with dim lighting and velour slate grey display cabinets and a cool air conditioned atmosphere. In summer it feels like you are in a really luxurious and seductive hotel room. Of course all this should not be important, as you are there to see the work, but somehow in this case it is very important. I am always so relaxed there and I lose track of time so much that I sometimes go in in the afternoon and come out in the evening. The works displayed there are each treated with such care and meticulous thought, that it makes you stop in your tracks and look properly. Then of course they have to work with some of the most intriguing and memorable, both in form and in nature, art pieces there ever were.   

Cycladic Art refers to the art created on the Aegean islands from around 3000 to 2000 BC. Standing out amongst the art of that period are the marble sculptures of human figures, mainly depicting the female form but also representing a variety of musicians and other group configurations. The figures are highly stylised, sometimes with a geometric and "modern" feel to them, so much so that they were liked and admired by artists such as Picasso, Modigliani and Brancusi. Although we know for a fact that these figurines were extensively used throughout the islands and mainland and many have been found in graves, their exact purpose still remains elusive. They were not made specifically for burials, as many show signs of damage and repair sustained prior to the burial, but were presumably treasured enough and used by the deceased during their lifetimes to be put in their graves. They might have been idols of gods and deities or even toys. Some are tiny and some are life size and according to, relatively recent findings, they must have been brightly coloured. 

Cycladic Female Figure

Cycladic Harp Player

This issue had caused quite a bit of a stir amongst the Greek fine art circles. My aunty is an exceptional marble sculptor, from the Athens Fine Art School, trained as part of the course on Tinos island, an island producing some of the purest white marble in the world and renowned for its marble carving heritage. The training and technique that has to be mastered for marble carving is very unique, lengthy and specialised. Work of months can go to waste; with just one wrong blow of the chisel against an almost invisible "vein" of a pure white marble and you witness everything shattering into thousands of pieces. It's heart breaking to watch. I remember having very heated discussions with my aunty about the Cycladic figurines on a couple of occasions. 

One of them was regarding the presumably bright colouring of them (apparently Greek and Roman marble sculptures of antiquity were also brightly coloured). Some German archaeologists had done reconstructions of antiquity sculptures, this time coloured in pigments that they had tried to recreate from their research. I think that exhibition was at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens and according to almost a unanimous verdict, was at the best tasteless and at the worst grotesque. My aunty was saying that if they did that to the Cycladic figurines, they would totally lose their figure and shape and would become just a platform for colour, covering their unique form. And I was kind of agreeing with that, but was also saying that if they were actually originally painted (which they were), surely we should try and see how they looked like back then? Maybe that would also help us find out their original purpose? But my aunty argued that we would need to find the exact pigments and the exact combinations and intensity of colour to do them justice and that would not be very likely nor very possible. I remember I was thinking at the time that all the amazing marble work that Rodin did was based on a misconception that all antique figure sculptures were pure white; maybe we should be grateful for that? What would his work have looked like if it was coloured? I bet my aunty would not want to imagine that. 

The second occasion we discussed the Cycladic figurines, was after my visit to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. It seems that the Cycladic figurines were so common, everyday things during their time, that for every single one so preciously and carefully exhibited at the Goulandri Cycladic Museum in Athens, there are a hundred laying around in other Museums in Greece. The Heraklion Museum is so busy and full of tourists, with a queue of 2 to 3 hours in August, that I did something I don't often do and used my free pass to jump the queue and felt a bit like a detective flashing my card around. This is a very different Museum, old and bright and spacious and quite run down. The artefacts are not as much displayed there, as they are placed around, so that it feels like they were found in the exact position you see them today. In a peculiar way this makes me feel also very relaxed (in a different way from the Cycladic Museum) and in a moment of relaxation and lapse of concentration I crossed a (really pathetic) thin grey low rope, into a room used as a storage/workshop. There was no one there and although I gathered that I was trespassing I still remained nailed on the spot. The room was filled with a countless amount of Cycladic figurines. Some of them were just laid on the workshop tables, some were placed under large glass bell-shaped covers, some were supported on armatures which looked specifically made for them, presumably awaiting cleaning or restoration. Some were in the course of being packed and transported to other museums. Those were treated with specialised packing materials, brightly coloured  and organic looking polystyrene shapes, spongy looking material  moulded around the figurines so that they fit in it perfectly. In the room were also some brass state of the art equipment that detect vibrations form earthquakes and some beautiful humidity measuring equipment. I found the whole image mesmerising. 

I remember telling my aunty afterwards how amazing I thought it was that such thousands of years old figurines were amongst such man made, modern material and equipment and how I found the mix of marble, plastic, polystyrene, brass and glass absolutely fascinating. The fact that the sculptures were of human figures made the whole thing even more interesting to me; who would have imagined when they made them, so many thousands of years ago, that these figurines would now have this new life, touring around the museums amongst all that gear, their bodies moulded in spongy material and swimming amongst bright pink polystyrene shapes.  My aunty was not sharing this with me and was left quite at a loss with my enthusiasm. Things became worse when I started a series of drawings inspired by the Cycladic figures. Mine looked more like creatures rather than human and my original intention was to model them with wax (my marble carving skills being very basic) and then cast them in a mixture of cement, sand and plaster which would give them an old stone appearance. I was then intending to place them in different scenarios, amongst modern material and current situations to try and recreate that experience of mine in the Heraklion Museum. 

some of my drawings inspired by the Cycladic Figurines 

My aunty loved the drawings and even suggested to help me carve one in marble. She said they looked like Totems. Totems apparently are based on animals or plants as opposed to the human figure. They are used around the world (but mostly observed amongst Native American people) as symbols of a family or clan, often also having strong religious and spiritual significance. But when I spoke of the "situations" I wanted to place the finished Totems in, my aunty lost interest and switched off. I felt a bit embarrassed about that, as if I was degrading the original Cycladic figurines with these ideas of mine. It almost felt like anything to do with changing in any way the original figurines was a Taboo subject; so as that I stopped talking about it. I felt like that once before, when I joined the Athens Fine Art School in an exhibition viewing and I remarked afterwards how one of the old wooden frames on a painting had caught my eye so much, that I was looking from painting to frame and back again, not knowing which to admire more. The room went silent and no one replied to me. They just kept on walking in a deadly silence.

I managed to make four of my drawings into wax models, but without a studio never managed to cast them the way I wanted. Instead I made a series of drawings where I placed them in silly scenarios, just like I was hoping to do in the three dimensional version. I manipulated those in Photoshop afterwards. This project would be the first thing I would do if I ever get a studio.