Art + History+ Artist
Two years ago and a bit, I shared a link with you about a video series produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which curators talked about how individual pieces in the museum had changed the way they see the world. It was charming and smart and in a short enough format that I could justify watching it as soon as it appeared in my in-box*--208 minutes spread over the course of a year fits into anyone's schedule.
Evidently I'm not the only who loved it because the Metropolitan Museum is now producing a related series, The Artist Project. Contemporary working artists--different ages, genders, ethnicity, media--discuss works of art in the Metropolitan's collection that spark their imagination. Some of them discuss works in their own media. Others chose a work that has no obvious relationship to their own, until they talk about it. The relationships between curator and art were intelligent; the relationships between artist and art are more intense and more personal and no less intelligent. Some of the artists focus on what a work meant in their own lives or an extraordinary artistic technique.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the episodes that stick with me the most are the artists who are deeply aware that works of art that transcend time are also rooted in their own time. Listening to an artist discuss how the form and content of , say, Kongo power figures or Egyptian mummy paintings are formed by their purpose is always interesting and often illuminating. Sometimes when you add art to history you get more than art history.
Give it a look--you can afford two minutes a week, right?
*Unlike, say, the 15-18 minute long TED talks that show up in my in-box every day. Which are also worth watching. Eventually.
Reading My Way Through Roman Britain, Part 3
British journalist Charlotte Higgins (It's All Greek To Me) was always fascinated by the classical world, but that fascination didn't extend to Roman Britain. She thought of Britain as an unglamorous outpost on the edge of the Roman Empire--an opinion shared by most Romans of the time-. A visit to Hadrian's Wall changed her mind. Under Another Sky: Journeys In Roman Britain is the story of her search to understand Rome's 360-year occupation of Britain and its influence on the British sense of history and identity
Higgins travels across Britain in an unreliable camper van in search of traces of ancient Rome. She walks the tourist-friendly Hadrian Wall and tracks down the remains of Londinium through modern London with the help of a map published by the Museum of London. She visits small museums, major museums, and a tourist trap called Iceni Village. She interviews archaeologists, museum curators, farmers turned innkeepers near Hadrian's Wall, and a full-time Roman centurion who appears at museum events and school programs. She considers the unexpected cache of Roman "postcards" known as the Vindolanda writing tablets, an influential eighteenth-century forgery of a Roman text, and re-imaginings of Roman Britain by later generations of British antiquarians, poets, military engineers and composers, including Benajmin Britten's soulful Roman Wall Blues, composed for a radio play by W. H. Auden.
Under Another Sky weaves together Britain's history and contemporary landscape into a complex and fascinating whole that is part travelogue, part history, and wholly charming.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Reading My Way Through Roman Britain, Part 2
Guy de la Bédoyère's The Real Lives Of Roman Britain: A History of Roman Britain Through The Lives of Those Who Were There is not a narrative history of Roman Britain. (De la Bédoyère has already written several versions of that narrative.) It is instead an attempt to look at the 360 years of Roman occupation in terms of human experience rather than "the generalities of military campaigns, the antics of emperors, the arid plains of statistical models and typologies of pottery, the skeletal remains of buildings, and theoretical archaeological agendas." [p.xi]
The attempt is not entirely successful due to a problem that de la Bédoyère identifies early in the book as "visibility". There is surprisingly little evidence, physical or textual, about the Roman experience in Britain and even less about individuals--often no more than a name and a hint. (Sometimes not even a name. One individual, known as the "Aldgate-Pulborough potter", is recognizable only by the distinctive incompetence of his work.) Consequently, much of the book is devoted less to the lives of Roman Britain and more to an evaluation of the available evidence.
In lesser hands, this close analysis of inscriptions, clay tablets, pottery shards, and, yes, the skeletal remains of buildings could be as dry as the dust from which they are taken. De la Bédoyère considers each bit of evidence with wit and imagination, leading the reader with him on the path of discovery rather than simply providing her with his conclusions.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.