Art//Archaeology//Art: Letting-Go Beyond
Professor Bailey investigates the articulations of art and archaeology. He argues that while recent influences of contemporary art have expanded archaeological interpretations of the past, more provocative and substantial work remains to be done. The most
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Art//Archaeology//Art: Letting-Go Beyond Doug Bailey
Professor Bailey investigates the articulations of art and archaeology. He argues that while recent influences of contemporary art have expanded archaeological interpretations of the past, more provocative and substantial work remains to be done. The most exciting current output is pushing hard against the boundaries of art as well as of archaeology. Bailey’s proposal is for archaeologists to take greater risks in their work, and to cut loose the restraints of their traditional subject boundaries and institutional expectations. The potential result of such work will rest neatly within neither art nor archaeology, but will emerge as something else altogether. The new work will move the study of human nature into uncharted and exciting new territories.
Introduction The articulations of artists and archaeologists are many and hold fascination for scholars and practitioners across both subjects.1 Many archaeologists have found inspiration in the works of painters, sculptors, performers, and poets as sources of either interpretative models for us to explain past behaviour or ancient material that we need to examine, categorise, and interpret. Just as frequently, inspiration flows the other direction; contemporary and traditional artists have found stimulation and subject matter not only in ancient objects and sites, but also in the practice and process of archaeological excavation, analysis, and curation. Chris Evans has written (e.g., 2004) about the relationship between artist and archaeological subject, for example the ways in which the archaeological landscape of the Vale of the White Horse in the 1
Recent work of note includes Renfrew (2003); Renfrew et al. (2004) and Bonaventura and Jones (2011). D. Bailey () Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA e-mail: [email protected]
I. A. Russell, A. Cochrane (eds.), Art and Archaeology, One World Archaeology 11, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8990-0_15, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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UK has inspired artists: the unusual and evocative photographs of archaeological landscapes that Paul Nash produced in the 1930s, work that is simultaneously artistic and archaeological (e.g., Nash The White Horse, Uffington, Berkshire 1937).2 A full discussion of artists’ renderings of archaeological landscapes, of ruins, and of artefacts is worthy of its own book or even set of books. In such a conversation, one would drill down through the deep layers of nostalgia that may lurk in Nash’s work (or at a second level, in Evans’ commentary on Nash’s work). Alternatively, one could work through the archaeological contexts and imaginations of a 1761 Giovanni Battista Piranessi lithograph Scenographia reliquiarum aedis quae Concordiae asseritur, Agrigenti in Sicilia, or one could take flight into vast, descriptive discussions, for example, of the evolution of prehistoric figurine form from naturalist to realistic representation. In this e
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