A Year of "Shoveling"

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago

Recently, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago for an exhibit, The Way of Shovel: Art as Archaeology. The show offers various artists’ creative takes and appropriations on subject of archaeology. The exhibit peaks my interest because of the concept of crossover of art, archaeology, and educational inquiry. It includes audio recordings of our own curator at the Oriental Institute, where I currently work, discussing interpretations of the “real” archaeologist on the selected topics brought up in the exhibit. What was most fascinating to me is how contemporary artists have taken archaeology as a metaphor and method of inquiry on issues relating to philosophy, politics, and activism. At the beginning of 2014, I want to use this exhibit to reflect upon what I have learned from the field of archaeology as a museum educator in the past year.

The earlier stages of the archeological process involve pre-field investigation, survey, and excavation. In The Way of Shovel exhibit, one of the artists, Derek Brunen, created a three-part installation, Plot (Tombstone 2013), which was presented in video, showing the artist digging his own grave in a cemetery located in his hometown. The artist uses the tool – the shovel – as a metaphor in engaging greater philosophical questions about the meaning of life, death, labor, fate, and the relationship between self and the world. When seeing the video of the artist’s performative, repetitive, and meditative movements of digging, I thought of it as a manifestation of life as a perpetual process of learning and making connection with our world. We learn through questioning, doing,  and digging deeper, then repeating this.

Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, 2013.
The Museum of Contemporary Art.

 

In the other room, Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is a collection of re-created sculptural statues made of Middle Eastern product packaging materials. These objects represent the lost artifacts due to the US-Iraq war in 2003. The artist’s work delivers ironies through the idea of opposites – through the playfulness of the images of the materials used, it reinforces the seriousness of the political-diplomatic issues that were being dealt with; and through the use of modern packaging materials on the objects, it also reminded me of the vulnerability of the world ancient cultural heritage in light of warfare.

In 2013, I had written two posts relating my exploration of archaeology: From Art to Archaeology and  Encountering a Mover-Shaker: Gertrude Bell. In this new year, I look forward to sharing more on my journey exploring the archaeology – perhaps like the archaeologists exploring and excavating their field, and maybe like the artists “shoveling” our history. As a museum educator, our museum collection will be my fieldwork where I can discover ways to engage our audience such as families, students, teachers, and the public, and help facilitate your inquiries about our history.

Encountering a Mover-Shaker: Gertrude Bell

“Khan al Musalla” (March 1911), by Gertrude Bell. Image Source: Gertrude Bell Archive, NewcastleUniversity Library.

As I continue to learn more about the field of archaeology, I turn to reading books about the life and journey of individuals, particularly women, who make their way into seeking and preserving the past. I like to learn from their rise, times that they overcame challenges, or even their responses to dead ends or situations that are out of their control, and how they combat it. Whether it is art, archaeology or other fields, human resilience transpires across disciplines. As a newcomer to the study of archaeology and ancient Middle East culture, reading literature about the lives of these people is encouraging and motivational for me to keep going, when the knowledge of field itself presents too vast and deep for me to fathom.

This is how I came to hear about the legendary Gertrude Bell (1868-1926). Born into a wealthy family in the 19th century, Bell’s family was enlisted as one of the major tycoons of Victorian English society at that time.  Gertrude Bell was an individual who fearlessly broke away from most conventions and had a heart on the world outside of her comfort zone. She was among the few women who graduated from Oxford University with a Modern History degree. As an aspired traveler and adventurer, she toured to Europe, and later to the Middle East, of which some places did not even exist on the map at that time. She developed a high proficiency in Arabic, and it allowed her to navigate the places with the locals and gained the people’s respect. What impresses me further was her being a self-taught archaeologist, mountaineer, photographer, poet, and author of many influential books on the study of the Middle Eastern archaeological landscape. Bell was also involved in the making of the modern Iraqi politics and the shaping of its government.

“Hak” (April 1911). Image Source:
Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University Library.

Among many of her international contributions, Gertrude Bell is perhaps most recognized for her influence in helping to establish the Baghdad Archaeological Museum (now called the Iraq National Museum) in 1926. The Museum is a home to some of the world’s most important ancient artifacts of Mesopotamia. Although the museum has undergone some significant destruction due to wars and looting between the 1990s through early 2000s, and is still facing many challenges, the Museum remains dedicated to the collection and interpretation of 7,000 year-history of Iraq, representing Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, and Islamic cultures.

When I read Gertrude Bell’s story and people and places she encountered on a land far from her hometown, it hits home to me. Way before any technological conveniences, she went to unfamiliar terrains, while trying to make connections and create changes that help improve people’s living circumstances.

Gertrude Bell’s story and the photography she took in her travel to Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and beyond in the early 20th century showed to me how history can inspire and shape a person, and vice versa. The closer I look at her photographs, the greater I appreciate the antiquity and archaeology around the world, as well as people who take part in it. Like Gertrude Bell, each of us can be a mover and shaker in our own right.

From Art to Archaeology

Funerary statuettes from the tomb of Nykauinpu from Giza (ca. 2477 B.C.). Oriental Institute Museum.

Learning is lifelong, and the learning of archaeology for me as a person who comes from the arts is a monumental step not only in my career, but also the way I connect with my own cultural roots and greater human history. The past six months since I began my new role at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago as a museum educator has been an astonishing journey in exploring the ancient world and human’s unending creativity throughout history.

In recalling my first encounter of archaeology, it happened during my family trip to Xi’An in my high school years. I remember the visit to the Terra-Cotta Warrior Burial, a massive tomb with more than 8,000 life-size clay figures of armies and chariots that the first emperor of Chines built so lavishly for protection in his afterlife. It was a mind-blowing experience. There I learned that a discovery of fragments of a clay figure was made by a group of peasants in the 1970s as they were digging a well which led to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of modern world history. The Museum of the Terracotta Army, a four-acre underground pit, has been opened around the discovery site since 1979 to the public.

The magnitude of the collection of the 2,000 year-ago artifacts in this Burial still stun me today even so many years after the trip. Each one was crafted with distinguished stylistic postural expression and unique features on its armors. Archaeology and the history unearthed through the artifacts open up a door for us to learn about the stories and myths of ancient life.

I have come to a place where I circled back to archaeology after a voyage in teaching. Six months into my new role at the Oriental Institute, I have the privilege to get much closer to the study of the ancient world. The Oriental Institute is an interdisciplinary research center and the museum exists to promote understanding of the development and functioning of the ancient civilizations of the Near East by conducting archaeological excavations, systematic stewardship of museum collections of artifacts, philological studies, historical research, and the development of dictionaries of ancient languages in the Near East.

Tracing the origins of objects excavated, discovering stories about life in the past, and making connections between then and now in the field of archaeology as well as having the opportunity of being in a place like the Oriental Institute grants me a completely new lens of looking at and deciphering ancient cultures. I have come to see the profound relationships between the artifacts and their contexts in forming our knowledge about the past are interwoven – across times, people, things they make, and the environments in which they live.