Object : flood tablet

Going towards consciousness

and 

coming away from it.



I enjoyed listening to Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, reading from his work  "A History of the World in 100 Objects " some years ago on Radio 4. I was given his book as a present, so I cannot remember now which objects I heard described and which I have just read about myself in Neil MacGregor's memorable voice with the punctuating sound effects, but the object which I remember most vividly is the Flood Tablet.

It's a clay tablet, part of a collection from ancient Mesopotamia, written in cuneiform script and translated by George Smith, apprentice printer who taught himself to decipher cuneiform script during lunchtime visits to the British Museum in the 1870's.

More specifically, Neil MacGregor tells us, it's from Nineveh in modern Iraq and is about 15cm high, made of dark brown clay and the text is densely written in two close columns. It's a fragment, bits are missing, but enough remains to enable George Smith to tell us the tale it tells; about a man who is told by his god to build a boat and load it with his family and animals in order to survive an impending deluge. It's a familiar story; one retold in Genesis some time after apparently. Neil MacGregor is such a fountain of knowledge.

The translation makes the hairs stand up on your neck, if you're predisposed to that kind of reaction to antiquities revealing treasures :

" demolish the house, and build a boat ! Abandon wealth and seek survival. Spurn property, save life. Take on board all living things' seed ! The boat you build, her dimensions all shall be equal: her length and breadth shall be the same. Cover her with a roof, like the ocean below, and he will send you a rain of plenty. "

Neil MacGregor tells us that there are about 130,000 clay tablets in a library in the British Museum. Most of them are fragments, kept on shelves in narrow wooden trays. I try to imagine what that looks like and marvel at the enormous responsibility in looking after them and handling them whilst deciphering them. I also think, as others do, about the wealth of knowledge and interest they contain.

I have always loved such things. Like other children, I would dig in the garden and sometimes other places, and delight in the treasure found; usually bits of pottery, coins, stones, undefinable bits of things which may have been bone. I would bury things too. The first thing I ever buried was a tin of pennies next to the washing pole. I sometimes wonder if they have been found. You have to consider the receptacle you choose to bury things in. Tin rots slowly, plastic takes forever. Do not bury a beloved pet in a plastic container is something I learned from someone who loved her pet hamster dearly.

Archaeologists and scholars who study ancient objects do a great service. It goes without saying that they are piecing together our history and ensuring that the story and understanding of it is ever evolving as it should be. With each new fragment unearthed, new understandings can be reached.

To preserve fragments before quite understanding their value is an act of faith and even though it can be taught, I suspect for some people, it's an innate and instinctive urge. When we look at ancient objects without scholarly understanding, we have to use our imagination if we are to appreciate their potential significance. Once the imagination has been stimulated with enough bits of information, we can use all our faculties to build a story around each object or fragment.

I am trying to do this when I look at a piece of art work. For so many years, I was addicted to reading the plaques and any surrounding verbal information before really looking at the work itself. I think this urge was stronger when looking at figurative works rather than abstract ones. If there is a narrative being told, then I have a need to understand it rather than imagine it. If I am looking at an abstract drawing, print, painting or piece of sculpture, I assume that the artist is using formal language that I can decipher for myself if I look long enough and use the knowledge I already have of art, including themes, processes and to some extent, history to decipher the artist's intent. I also assume that the artist has chosen to work abstractly in order to leave room for the onlooker to bring their own interpretation and understanding to the work. I accept this could be wrong. Perhaps some abstract work has a specific meaning that is apparent if you observe it correctly. It is, of course, generally hard to know whether to overlay a work with allusions or to try to take it completely literally and get some sense out of it that way.

Looking at the flood tablet and thinking about George Smith teaching himself the cuneiform script makes me wonder if there is a significant link between what he undertook and the process of understanding a work of art. I also suspect that there is a lot of common ground with the kind of thinking taking place in the actual creation of a work.

In order to explore this idea, I am going to try to remember my thoughts when making a piece of work at art college many years ago.


The Torso

It always seemed to feel, and I get the impression that this is still the case, that figurative work is considered both passe and far too simplistic when you're studying fine art at college. I make an exception for certain institutions such as The Slade, the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at  Oxford and other places I don't know about that take care to uphold the tradition. For the most part, I am fairly certain, the modern fine art course taught in this country at degree level is rooted in post modern philosophy and with particular respect to deconstruction, that is, of ideas and of the nature of practice as well.  When I first went to Manchester Polytechnic to study Fine Art in the early eighties, I was blissfully ignorant of this and of postmodern concepts at all and since the teaching/learning style was indirect and osmotic rather than directly instructive, I never fully understood the concepts I was supposed to come to understand during the 3 years I spent struggling to get my degree there. I assume that's the postmodern teaching approach.

I opted to specialise in sculpture in the second year. The reasons for this were complex and I thought for a long time afterwards this was a mistake, but recently as I have begun to consider making art again, I am beginning to understand this is a good approach to making art for me personally.

As the second year wore on, it started to become clear to me that all the work I wanted to carry out was about the body. This made me feel out of synch with the approaches being advocated, albeit in an indirect way, by the lecturers in the department. I may have been misguided in this impression. There is no innate reason why the body is not a fit subject for art produced in a post-modernist way; it all depends on the treatment of it. However, my approach, as a young student, was rather too instinctive, personal and therefore allusory for it to slot into synch with postmodern thinking. Or so I thought then.


The idea

So, feeling somewhat out of kilter with what was being endorsed as good work down at the studios, I made some work at my flat. I was very taken with gyproc plaster bandages; that is, bandages impregnated with plaster used for making casts for people who had broken their limbs and I bought it at great expense from a medical supplies place near to the studios. We had a plaster studio at college, but I did not like the colour or texture of it. It was good for making casts of clay structures, but not for direct work on the body. I know that you can obtain supplies of gyproc - bandage strips impregnated with a fine white plaster - from craft and fine art material suppliers now. I wasn't aware of any at the time.

With the help of my friend, I made a couple of casts, one of each of our faces, and a full torso of myself.

Because I had made these at home, I didn't develop them much further. They were like private pieces, strange and tame as they were. I bound the two halves of the torso together with more gyproc and reinforced the inside with another material I used a lot of as a student and beyond - the so very useful chicken wire. What I did next was related to some other small objects I had been making for some time at college - small wire cages containing soy beans. I filled the torso with soy beans; so I could have entitled this 'piece', this thing, wittily, "full of beans" couldn't I, but I didn't. I kept it in my flat, full of its beans, took some photographs of it which I'm not even sure went into my portfolio, and pondered it daily. The masks remained masks.

I've often thought of this thing that I made. It's just a simple thing and I've seen a lot of other pieces of art work since along similar lines; in particular, a series of works based on corsets. Not quite the same, but dealing with just that middle part of a woman's body which has been the focus of so much art over the centuries. Other examples come to mind, rather ludicrous to link such major works to my own tentative beginnings, but this is just a thought experiment;


The Winged Victory of Samothrace

I've seen this magnificent figure at least three times in the Louvre. (Yes, I've been there a few times, once only long enough to see this again and the Mona Lisa, but that's another story). It stood, it seemed, momentously, at the top of a long, beautiful staircase and on a very large piece of stone resembling the broken prow of a ship.

It's a marble carving and it's impossible for me to imagine carving it. The drapery and the wings - how on earth. It seems supernatural.

Date : Between 200 - 190 BC

Greek

She will, presumably, have had arms and a head originally. In fact, I know she had at least one hand because her right hand, minus her fingers, was found at some point after she herself was unearthed, then later, the tip of her ring finger and thumb were also and these are displayed in a nearby glass cabinet.

The person who wrote the Wikipedia entry about the Winged Victory commented that the figure's very evident power is enhanced by the fact that she has no head.

The things I love so much about it are the obvious ones to do with her pose, the subtle evidence of her breasts, stomach and thighs beneath drapery rendered so well in beautiful Parian marble and not least of all, her wings. They occupy a vast space behind her body, I wonder at how large the original piece of marble was that she has been cut from and what the remaining pieces went on to become.

She is not, in fact a torso is she, since her legs are intact and the wings really have the effect of compensating for a lack of arms. Her stance, together with her robust form, despite her lack of certain essential physical features, still portray immense power, but I suppose this is purely because she is a rigid thing, made of hard stone, still standing despite fatal injury due to the stuff she is made of. Therein lies an allegory, perhaps even one that may have crossed her maker's mind as she was hewn.



Aphrodite of Cnidus

Another Greek beauty, in fact, beauty herself, which has survived since the 4th C BC.

This is the first depiction of the Greek goddess, apparently caught off guard as she emerged from her bath.  Once again, it is described by an art historian thus; "Even lacking its head and limbs, this figure possesses a sensuous movement compelling as one moves around it."  You can just about fill in some of the gaps; Praxiteles, her maker, did such a good job of implying movement in the posture of her torso, you can, if you work at it, imagine how her limbs would look. I'm not so sure about her head, although by what remains of her neck, there is the suggestion that her head was inclined downwards.




Torso Miro

Henry Moore

Barbara Hepworth

Rodin

Torso of the Pharaoh Akhenaten

The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where this fragment of a statue is kept, describe it so ;

"The heavy breasts and sagging belly of the king are typical of his representation, a feminized body that may suggest his fertile receptiveness to life and divine inspiration from the Aten".

The Aten was the deity worshipped in Egypt c. 1353-1336 BCE



Brancusi  Male torsos

Giacometti bronze torso

Louise Bourgoise  Woven Child

As a tapestry of images, torsos become surreal, but looking at them all, it's apparent to me that focussing in on the central area of the body is an interesting way of concentrating on specific ideas. 

Reduction of imagery, leaving parts out yet implying their phantom presence, directs the eye and mind to a focal point which attempts to eliminate extraneous features, yet nevertheless makes our thoughts wander back to them in our wondering about their absence.

Drawing the strands of my thinking together; we imagine there are mysteries in the fragments of the tablets and in a similar way, we are intrigued by the fragmented image of the body. 

In my mind, there are visual references to amputation rather than just the passage of time in the torsos by Hepworth and Rodin. Hepworth seems to imply blood vessels and internal elements in the exposed amputated arm stump. Rodin's figure's writhing posture, together with the tapering shape of the withered arm also suggests injury to me. Conversely, Bourgoise's torso seems complete and intact. Rather an absurd impression I know and I admit I haven't seen any of these works in the flesh so to speak. Perhaps my impressions would be altered by seeing them in actuality.


Wrapped Torso

The only photo' I have of this is of my friend holding the front piece up against her after it had dried. None of the finished object containing beans remain, but it was a very simple thing, so it is easy to visualise. The bandage is very much in evidence; it gives the impression of a wrapping, a bit like The Invisible Man.

So it is a wrapped thing.

Protected, suggesting underlying injury.

A container.

Of space.

Of potential energy - hence the beans. 

It reminds me of embalming.

Of some kind of armour.

A breast plate.

A protection for something.

An outer covering for something precious within

Not a fragment, but a complete container.

I have seen a work by a female artist in bronze which is part vest, part piece of armour, part 

female torso, but empty like a garment.