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At a time when 'Time Team' and the Turner Prize are
on primetime television as 'popular' manifestations of
'high' culture, we now have an authoritative explanation
of how and why the twin pursuits of archaeology and modernism have
so many features in common. Figuring it out is a convincing
and compelling analysis by a distinguished archaeologist exploring
why the processes of archaeological investigation and discovery
have been paralleled by the installations and art works of many
artists, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.
Taking Gauguin's text, which became the credo for 20th century
modernists, 'Always have in your mind's eye the Persians,
the Cambodians and the Egyptian; the Greek is the great error, beautiful
though it is' as his point of departure, Renfrew accounts for
the similarity between the experience of uncovering the long-hidden
past, such as the sensations evoked by the excavation of the five
and a half thousand year old chamber of Quanterness, and our response
to works like Richard Long's Chalk Line of 1984, which
bears an uncanny formal resemblance to the outer sandstone surface
of the Orkney cairn. Much of this is a direct - and moving
- reflection of the author's own experiences as an archaeologist,
and of a lifetime spent in the company of contemporary art and artists.
Yet it is neither a series of personal responses nor an exercise
in Gombrichian mix-and-match, but an entirely new account of why
20th and 21st century artists have been driven to answer the questions
asked by Gauguin's famous symbolist canvas of over a century
ago 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?'
Renfrew finds the answers to these questions in homo sapiens's
engagement with the world of 'material-symbolic culture'
in early agrarian societies, in the stone monuments of structures
like Stonehenge and Orkney, where artefacts symbolised the relationship
between idea and object, before the emergence of writing in the
city-states of Sumer and predynastic Egypt in the 4th millennium
BC. This crucial time in man's evolution saw the establishment
of commodification and trade which made symbols of power and repositories
of value, before language was turned into writing to make a permanent
record of such human experiences. It was this stage in our evolution,
rather than the next phase, which gave birth to the mythopoeic tradition
of Western civilisation and ultimately to its decadence ('The
Greek is the great error' of Gauguin's statement) that
is defined by Renfrew as the mainspring of modernism. There is an
echo here of Worringer's distinction in Abstraction and
Empathy (1908) between the empathetic response to Greek sculpture
and the courtly geometry of Egyptian, Indian and Byzantine civilizations,
which embody the 'urge to abstraction'. However, Renfrew
moves Worringer on art historically, because his theory accounts
for much more than a single stylistic division between East and
West, by embracing 20th century artistic expressions across a wide
spectrum of cultural differences and societies. Dispensing with
the worn out art historical categories of figurative, abstract,
pop, minimal, conceptual and so on, Renfrew's analysis throws
new light on artists as stylistically and ideologically diverse
as John Bellany, Duchamp, Barry Flanagan, Antony Gormley, Ian Hamilton
Finlay, Cornelia Parker, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo
Paolozzi and Andy Warhol.
The basic urge of the early agrarian societies to symbolise their
power in order to survive and prosper, Renfrew argues, has a direct
parallel with our own intensely capitalised culture which encourages
contemporary artists to explore and comment on the nature of man's
relationship with the world and to materially engage with it, whether
in the land art of Long's walks, the social satire of David
Mach's artefacts, Paolozzi's parodies of the machine,
or the archaeological pastiches of Mark Dion. For the exploration
and discovery of the past is as relevant to an understanding of
the urban needs of man as it is to those of less developed cultures.
The persuasiveness of this argument is firmly grounded, not only
in Renfrew's account of the distant archaeological past, and
in a new account of its visual parallels with the present, but also
in an anthropological understanding of how late capitalism has conditioned
and affected the choice and treatment of subjects by contemporary
artists. This goes further than merely contextualising Duchamp's
ready-mades as the depersonalisation of a mechanised society, or
the Conceptualists with the dematerialisation of values of more
recent times. Since Renfrew has been very active in highlighting
and legislating against the illicit traffic in smuggled archaeological
artefacts, he is more aware than most art historians of the material
and cultural pressures which are brought to bear on contemporary
art through the dealer and museum system. He thus brings a refreshingly
material analysis to his interpretations, which is a welcome corrective
to the over theoretical nature of so much art historical writing
on modernism. Figuring it out is a groundbreaking book, comparable
with Kubler's The Shape of Time, making a strong case
for the relationship between archaeology and art in the early 21st
century.
Robin Spencer
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