Archaeology in the Expanded Field, Spring 2022 (Istanbul)
I don’t remember exactly when it hit me, but I know that I was on my hands and knees covered in cool, damp earth sweating under the summer sun on an archaeological dig. As I worked my trowel around knotty tree-roots and jumbles of artifacts embedded in the dirt, I began to imagine excavation as a form of sculpture. That both practices involved slowly removing little bits of extra material to reveal a form hidden within—whether a beautiful figure or the traces of a long-abandoned building—was a fun idea, but not something I took seriously at the time.
It was only during the long, homebound, vaccine-less first summer of the pandemic—prompted by one of the exercises in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (“Quickly list 10 things that you would try if you didn’t have to do it perfectly”)—that I returned to this notion and began to develop it further. I started by suspending tchotchkes I had accumulated on my travels in hot candle-wax and, once cooled, “excavating” them with a pen-knife. I pedestalled the little bits and bobs as if they were special artifacts whose precise stratigraphic position required a lasting extrusion, or, as if they were ready-mades mounted on a pediment for gallery display. From there, continuing with wax as a medium, I learned to shape the basic solids before moving on to carving vases and other objects whose profiles were familiar to me from years of drawing and photographing artifacts as an archaeologist-in-training. But, as with many art practices, one’s vision quickly outstrips one’s abilities and means. I began to dream up works drawing on my fieldwork experiences—both directly representational and more conceptual—at a much larger scale: installations, earthworks, fake monuments, happenings, and so on.
Before I had the chance to begin realizing these pieces, however, my practice took a new direction due to my relocation from Philadelphia to Istanbul, where I had been offered a research fellowship at a cultural heritage institute located in the heart of Beyoğlu, the city’s historical arts-and-culture district.
One of my first contacts in the city—an artist, curator, and critic with a background in classics and a critical orientation toward archaeology that I share—not only introduced me to the arts scene in Turkey, but also pushed me toward further exploring the affinity between archaeology and contemporary art. We mused that artists have had, for decades now, a fascination with archaeology that has not been reciprocated. But immediately we wondered: could this in fact be true? Are archaeologists less interested in art than artists have been in archaeology? In general, yes. But that does not mean that archaeologists have not engaged with the arts in some serious, sustained, and fascinating ways.
As it turns out, Turkey is a particularly interesting place to think through and explore these engagements, and excellent vantage point to develop an appreciation of what we might call, with all due respect to Rosalind Krauss, “archaeology in the expanded field.”
***
Art and archaeology may at first seem like strange bedfellows. There are, however, good reasons for the two disciplines to be interested in each other. Both artists and archaeologists have deep investments in visual culture and in the meaning and value of objects. Both ground their work in representational and imaginative practices that seek to engage, understand, interpret, and communicate about humanity’s past, present, and future. Both are closely associated with museums and “high” culture, which have given artworks and artifacts a similar a kind of aura and mystique, whether granted by the genius of the artist or the mystery of time. Aside from these sorts of commonalities, the fields have interacted directly and indirectly with each other in a variety of ways, which can be visualized as the axes of a simplified semiotic square.
The simplest axis, the left-hand side, comprises the visual technologies of documentation in archaeology. These include illustration, photography, map-making, and other forms of visual inscription that are used to communicate archaeological findings according to scientific convention. In the past, archaeological image-production was often—but not always—the domain of specialists with formal artistic training. Nowadays it is expected that archaeologists be proficient in many different types of image-making, skills often acquired on-the-job as part of routine excavation procedures. Nevertheless, it is along this axis that many archaeologists are exposed to the possibility of transcending archaeology’s own technical visual culture toward the artistic.
Passing across the square to the right-hand axis, we can identify a field of practice that curator Dieter Roelstraete has termed the “historiographic turn” in contemporary art, announced and codified in a show he curated at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called The Way of the Shovel. Instantly recognizable to anyone who has paid attention to the art world in the past two decades, this mode of art is concerned with ‘history-telling,’ involving what Roelstraete describes as “a methodological complex that includes the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the art of reconstruction and reenactment, the testimony.” This influential ‘turn’ has inflected both the content and form of the output of a large but loosely-cohering group of artists and curators, who “either make artworks that want to remember, or at least to turn back the tide of forgetfulness, or [are] about remembering and forgetting.”
At times, works occupying this axis can be quite literal and direct in their use of the archaeological, including facsimiles of excavation practice. Such works have been described by Michaël Jasmin as ‘mock science,’ encompassing everything from happenings such as The Boyle Family’s Dig, to performance art such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig and New England Digs and Hans Haacke’s Digging (Archaeology of a Vacant Lot), to complex sculptural installations such as the work of Taiwanese artist Tu Wei-Cheng whose practice involves the aestheticization of the archaeological discovery of an unknown (fake) civilization called ‘Bu Num.’ At other times, these ‘archaeological’ works are more metaphorical, in which artists liberally borrow from the conceptual and/or lexical repertoire of archaeology. In these cases, according to Roelstraete, artists describe their work using a language of excavation, in which they reveal traces and reconstitute fragments of history in moments of Benjaminian profane illumination. An excellent piece of such work comes from the Beninese artist Romauld Hazoumé, for example La Bouche du Roi (The Mouth of the King), which Yannis Hamilakis describes as archaeological in multiple senses:
“[Hazoumé] finds, collects, and reworks abandoned and discarded objects and artefacts, objects that embody histories, times, and relationships, desire, power, and exploitation. He recognizes the evocative and symbolic power and agency that these objects and substances hold, their ability to embody and act like humans. He then places them into new contexts and draws new associations and links amongst them, much like an archaeologist who retrieves objects and produces and reconstitutes them as ‘archaeological record’, as museum pieces, as scientific material.”
Clearly, the right axis of the square is a domain that goes well beyond a paradigm of producing artworks that represent archaeological monuments and processes in one way or another. Indeed, contemporary artists working in this space interrogate the circulation and display of objects, the imbrication of archaeological practice in broader political currents, the historical conditions of archaeological knowledge production, and the recuperation of narratives of participants in the archaeological process often excluded from or ignored by the discipline’s more official views of itself. Just looking at artists either from or focusing on the Middle East, we can see this in the work of, among others, Michael Rakowitz (e.g., The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist), Hera Büyüktaşcıyan (e.g., Lithic Verses), Morehshin Allahyari (e.g., Material Speculation: ISIS), Sara Ouhaddou (e.g., I Give You Back What’s Mine / You Give Me Back What’s Yours), Nafiseh Fathollazadeh (e.g., Goddess and Weapons), Rayyane Tabet (e.g., Alien Property), Ahmet Sarı (e.g., Uyurgezer [Sleepwalker]), Jannane Al-Ani (e.g., Shadow Sites I) and Akram Zaatari (e.g., Father and Son).
Rotating our attention to the top axis of the square, we find a proliferation of terms to describe this domain of practice, including, as noted by Helen Wickstead: “art and archaeology,” “artists in archaeology,” “art + archaeology,” “art archaeology,” “art/archaeology,” “artaeology,” as well as “creative archaeology.” Regardless of the terminology we use to describe it, Jasmin has identified four distinct modalities of archaeological involvements in the field of contemporary art.
The first category includes archaeologists—notably Colin Renfrew and Douglas Bailey—writing and reflecting on contemporary art in a resolutely humanist mode to examine the thematic points of contact between the two fields. This work, at its best, reflects upon how artistic and representational practice can help open up archaeological perspectives and ways of thinking that may, to take just one example, increase our understanding of modes of representation developed by past societies. The second category comprises archaeologists who use artistic interventions to question the precepts and practices of the discipline as part of their otherwise more conventional field research. A notable example of this category is the work of Christopher Tilley, Sue Hamilton, and Barbara Bender at Leskernick Hill in Cornwall, which through wrapping standing-stones à la Christo and Jeanne-Claude, probed the “conceptual links between producing installation art works in the present and interpreting prehistoric lifeworlds.” This category also includes Greg Bailey, Cassie Newland, Anna Nilsson, and John Schofield, who excavated a Ford Transit van previously used by archaeologists and museum workers as though it were an ancient habitation site, thereby blurring the boundaries between conventional archaeological practice and performance art. We can also look to the work of Elin Andreassen, Hein Bjartmann Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen, whose archaeological investigation of the abandoned Soviet mining town on Svalbard—Pyramida—primarily used art photography as a mode of intervention into discussions about heritage and memory in the archaeology of the contemporary past. The third category consists of archaeologists who are also themselves visual artists, such as Aaron Watson, Michaël Jasmin, and Michael Shanks, whose work combines both practices, producing photography, site-specific installations, and sculptural works that present alternative ways of seeing and thinking about archaeological monuments, excavations, and objects.
The fourth and most interesting category is that of collaborative partnerships, with archaeologists inviting artists to display or create work at archaeological sites. Within this category there are two subgroups. The first comprises artists creating or installing work at sites open to the public. These works can be interesting in their own right, such Anish Kapoor’s exhibition of Turning the World Inside Out sited at the Rollright Stones, but such works often stand or fall on the quality of the art itself, rather than on their articulation with the archaeological setting of display. The second and more compelling group involves artists being invited by archaeologists to make artistic interventions during the process of fieldwork and excavations. The earliest examples of these projects go back to the early 2000s and include everything from Simon Callery’s sculptures made at Alfred’s Castle (e.g., Trench 10), Sara Bowler’s installations and photography in Caithness, Scotland (e.g., Excavate:Overlay), and Pil and Galia Kollectiv’s film at Stonehenge (e.g., Another Proof of the Preceding Theory). Also notable are joint ventures between gallerists, conservators and archaeologists, most famously in the case of the excavation of Francis Bacon’s painting studio in London and its subsequent reconstruction at the Dublin City Gallery at Hugh Lane led by Barbara Dawson, Mary McGrath, Margarita Cappock, and Edmund O’Donovan. As Jasmin writes, such artistic interventions rarely aim to generate new knowledge about the past, but rather interrogate our relationships to it in the present. At their very best, such works can provide interesting and even arresting insights into these processes, by “play[ing] on the polysemy of the senses and uses of archaeology” and raising questions about archaeological ways of knowing and representing past life-worlds.
Thus, it is clearly one thing for artists to be inspired by archaeology or to work on archaeological themes/with archaeological metaphors. And it seems to be another thing for archaeologists to create contemporary art as part of their research practice. But its altogether something else entirely for artists and archaeologists to work alongside each other to create something new together, to “allow archaeological practice to be affected and changed by experimentation with art.” According to James Dixon, this can only be done by transcending a diffuse sense of creative inspiration to engaging in specific and intentional collaborations. Indeed, this is what Douglas Bailey identifies as particularly special in the work of Simon Callery:
“[O]n the archaeological site, [Callery] did not talk about making art in the ways that he usually did—he did not bring his expertise and experiences to the site as if they were some resource which the archaeologists could feed from in derivative extractions, as if the artist was an ethnographer of some community, offering analogies and tools for better interpretation and clearer understanding of that ancient site and of its inhabitants. On the contrary, Callery talked about exploring new territory and about taking advantage of unique places and times and intersections of material and being.”
In other words, as interesting and stimulating as “creative archaeologies” and works falling under the umbrella of the historiographic turn can be, Bailey argues that the horizon for the future of the art-archaeology relationship is to push into a new dimension. Rather than artists and archaeologists being mere tourists visiting each other’s lands—where encountering an unfamiliar environment jolts new ways of understanding or representing—the ideal should be to make an intentional and collaborative leap into an extra-disciplinary space, with no intention of return. That is, to work together to create something beyond, that is neither archaeology nor art, but another thing altogether: the bottom axis of our semiotic square.
While there has been more and more such art/archaeology in recent years across a range of media, with successful engagements around themes of mutual interest such as identity, materiality, time, and so on, there is still much less work across the bottom axis of the square than along the top and right-side axes. Interestingly, one of the areas of practice where there has been the most work in this neither/nor-beyond space is in the domain of film and the video arts.
Archaeology and film have a long history, with two particular focal areas: cinema and documentaries. Hollywood has had a well-documented and enduring fascination with archaeology going all the way back to the 1930s and continuing to the present with the Indiana Jones and Mummy franchises. By sheer volume of productions, however, the main genre of archaeological films—documentary—overlaps more directly with archaeological practice. According to Colleen Morgan, these films typically focus on the archaeological process, tell a story about a single site, relate a historical narrative about a region or ‘civilization,’ or else, focus on a topical issue such as the origins of agriculture.
While they are much more rare, more relevant to our purposes here are archaeological films that can be classified as “experimental” or “art” films. Archaeologists themselves have experimented with this genre, in making what Morgan calls “impressionistic documentaries, that are lyrical rather than didactic, poetic rather than argumentative.” While these are vanishingly few in number, Morgan argues that because these films navigate the hybrid and interdisciplinary space between art and archaeology, they nevertheless have the potential to push both fields into new domains of practical, theoretical, and aesthetic expression. More common, though still few in number—but with the same potential to cross from the top to the bottom axes of the square—are experimental archaeological films produced by contemporary artists. Turkish artists have made some notable contributions in this domain, including Barış Doğrusöz—whose trio Güç Odağı [Locus of Power] collectively investigates the ruins and ruination of the archaeological site of Dura Europos in Deir ez-Zor, Syria from antiquity to the present—and Ali Kazma who produced PAST a meditative and painstakingly detailed tableau of the process of an archaeological excavation at the Gallic site of Bibracte in central France, part of an ongoing series of films focusing on the precise details of how craftspeople engage with the tools and products of their vocation.
The most promising examples of experimental films for breaking into the neither/nor-beyond space, however, are those produced via direct collaboration between artists and archaeologists in the context of fieldwork. One standout example was a product of the Artists in Archaeology (now art + archaeology) residency program, part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. This program brought artists into the field alongside scholars and students, to live and work alongside each other on the excavation, as if they were just another group of specialists participating in a multidisciplinary research project. According to Helen Wickstead’s account, this proximity led to “both excavation and art [becoming] processes through which relationships could be generated and interrogated.” Significantly, in making the film “staff and students worked alongside the artists, sharing equipment and participating in the production of performances and film and video artworks.” As a result, Another Proof of the Preceding Theory, shot and directed by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, is admirable on a number of levels as both its form and content provokes fundamental questions about both the process of archaeology and the medium of film through its fantastical narrative structure and VCR-tape aesthetic, juxtaposing memory, ritual, preservation, and decay.
***
As it happens, one of the most important locations globally for these kinds of art-archaeology collaborations—and thus a place likely to give rise to trailblazing work of the neither/nor-beyond type—has been at Çatal Höyük in south-central Turkey. Under the directorship of British archaeologist Ian Hodder, numerous Turkish and International artists have been invited to engage with the materiality and imaginaries of the site in their own ways for going on twenty years. As I learned, the practice of inviting artists to participate in excavations has spread from Çatal Höyük to several other sites in Turkey.
Living in Istanbul this year, I visited a gallery show that was both the downstream result of a residency at Çatal Höyük and represented a further intensification of its logic, that of Kazı Izleri (Lines of Site). This exhibition was the outcome of a research program in which archaeologists and artists came together in an interdisciplinary and intercultural dialogue to generate a new mode of writing the history of the 10,000-year-old village of Aşıklı Höyük. The purpose of the project was explicitly stated to be reimagining the past through contemporary art and questioning the role of creativity and artistic practice in an evidence-based culture. According to the Turkish curator of the exhibition Fırat Arapoğlu, the artistic focus in the project was on the one hand with archaeological ways of knowing but also with the unique archaeological qualities of the site of Aşıklı Höyük. Indeed, Kazı Izleri is significant for the sustained encounter it engendered, playing out over the course of several years, with a particular emphasis on probing the similarities and differences between archaeological and artistic research practices, modes of representation, and ways of knowing.
As engaging as the idea of the overall project and exhibition was, the majority of the pieces in the exhibit could be considered fairly conventional examples of “art about archaeology,” i.e., occupying the right-sided axis of the semiotic square above. One piece stood out to me, however, as potentially representing a step into the neither/nor-beyond: “Evde Isik ve Karanlik (Aşıklı Höyük’ten Iç Mekanlar)” [“Light and Dark at Home (Indoors from Aşıklı Höyük)”] by Eva Bosch. As it turns out, it was Bosch who catalyzed the entire project; based on her previous experiences and artistic interventions at Çatal Höyük, Bosch had become interested in the question of light in adobe houses. Bosch’s inquiry at Aşıklı Höyük got the excavators thinking that they were missing an artistic perspective and from there the collaborative project grew.
In a public lecture delivered at Posthane in Istanbul, Bosch describes her practice as centered around the experimental houses constructed at Aşıklı Höyük and how light moves through them. Her objective with her piece for Kazı Izleri was to attempt to phenomenologically access the experience of living in these spaces. Her research involved what archaeologists would call ethnoarchaeological investigations, including sleeping overnight in the houses, learning to keep a fire going inside without producing smoke, singing, and dancing within the interior spaces, and interviewing elderly villagers about their experience of growing up and living in similar architectural spaces. The experimental houses at Aşıklı had been constructed to have variable access points from the roof (since there was no solid evidence of where they had been placed), meaning that light traveled through each of them differently. Bosch filmed the journey of the light inside each of the houses as it passed through these roof openings from dawn until dusk. Her aim was to give the viewer of the film a sense of the passing of time, and in so doing to provide a degree of access to a potentially similar experience as people might have had 10,000 years ago. For the viewer of the gallery the films were sped up such that this journey could be experienced in approximately ten minutes. Her ideal format of presentation would have the exhibit space exactly replicate the dimensions of the experimental houses to further the effect, but this was not possible at the Tarihi Hüsrev Kethüda Hamamı in Ortaköy, though through the soundtrack to the film—ambient nature sound recorded in the vicinity of Aşıklı Höyük—some of this effect could be replicated.
***
To conclude, I could hardly have imagined that this is where a brief conversation in my first week in Istanbul would have led, but here we are. Upon reflection, it appears hardly fortuitous, however. Istanbul is a world-class center for both archaeological research and the production and consumption of art, experimental film included. It should perhaps not have been such a surprise that the points of contact between the worlds of art and archaeology would be more easily discernable here. Regardless of where I started, my vision for what is possible at the intersection of art and archaeology has been broadened considerably by my time here—not only in terms of an enlarged repertoire of case studies to draw on, but also in conceptualizing archaeology’s “expanded field.”
Over the past year, through the galleries and exhibits I’ve encountered and the many conversations with practitioners of both disciplines who’ve pointed me to ever more artists and works to consider, I’ve come to understand that the links between the two fields not only can go beyond mutual admiration and mimicry, but indeed should be pushed into a whole new domain of collaborative practice. I hope that I’ve piqued the curiosity of at least one or two of you to join me in exploring the as-yet-still-under-populated but potentially boundary-busting world of neither/nor-beyond-art/archaeology.