Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research 9781789691405, 9781789691412

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research

edited by

Dragoş Gheorghiu and Theodor Barth

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research edited by

Dragoş Gheorghiu and Theodor Barth

Archaeopress Archaeology

Archaeopress Publishing Ltd Summertown Pavilion 18-24 Middle Way Summertown Oxford OX2 7LG www.archaeopress.com

ISBN 978-1-78969-140-5 ISBN 978-1-78969-141-2 (e-Pdf)

© Individual authors and Archaeopress 2019 Cover: Land art by Dragoş Gheorghiu at Vădastra, 2016, revealing the eponymous Chalcolithic settlement (Photo by Marius Hodea)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. Printed in England by Oxuniprint, Oxford This book is available direct from Archaeopress or from our website www.archaeopress.com

Contents Contents�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������i Introduction: Exposition and Transposition. Seeking an Ontologic Sensoriality in Contingencies���������������� 1 Theodor Barth Convergences: Archaeology and Art����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������13 Giulio Calegari Art as Entangled Material Practices. The Case of Late Iron Age Scandinavian Gold Foil Figures in the Making�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������21 Ing-Marie Back Danielsson The Mediality of Rock and Metal. Exploring Formal Analyses of Rock Art through Graffiti�������������������������31 Fredrik Fahlander The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery: At the Time of Production, Deposition, and Publication/Exhibition������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������41 Makoto Tomii Art or Creativity? From Archaeological Photo-Ethnography to Art: Approaches to Two Contemporary Sites �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������59 José Ant. Mármol Martínez Heidegger at Work. An Archaeological Employment of a Theory of Truth in Art������������������������������������������76 Ylva Sjöstrand Art and Thought����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������89 Marcel Otte and Hans Lemmen Experimenting the Art of Origins: Animating Images by Blowing Colours and Sounds���������������������������������93 Dragoş Gheorghiu ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Art, Archaeology and Forensic Anthropology������������������������������������������98 Theodor Barth and Ane Thon Knutsen Epigraphy in the Landscape: Intersections with Contemporary Ink Painting and Land Art ����������������������125 Lia Wei Magnetic Boulders. Unfolding Stone with Gestures and Light���������������������������������������������������������������������145 Geir Harald Samuelsen PORØS: A Model of Resistance as Material Communication�������������������������������������������������������������������������152 Neil Forrest and Theodor Barth Virtual Art in Teaching and Learning Archaeology: An Intermedia to Augment the Content of Virtual Spaces and the Quality of Immersion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������166 Dragoş Gheorghiu and Livia Ştefan Contributors���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������184

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Introduction: Exposition and Transposition Seeking an Ontologic Sensoriality in Contingencies Theodor Barth

‘With the notion of ‘exposition’, we wish to suggest an operator between art and writing. Although ‘exposition’ seems to comply with traditional metaphors of vision and illumination, it should not be taken to suggest the external exposure of practice to the light of rationality; rather, it is meant as the re-doubling of practice in order to artistically move from artistic ideas to epistemic claims.’ Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff (2013: 15) One may plausibly argue that if modernism ended in a series of statements on crisis – the crisis of the artfield (Foster 1995), the crisis of cultural interpretation (Marcus 1999), the crisis of political ideologies (Hobsbawm 1995) and the clash of civilisations (Huntington 1996) – we are now left to ponder on what it means to live ‘after the end’. If this is the archaeological question par excellence then we are living in the era of its proliferation: it coincides with the ethos of the ‘anthropocene’ (Demos 2017).

corresponding computer applications – and therefore the contemporary human mind is somehow ravaged in relation to itself, from lack of overall cogency. Our present culture of real-time knowledge-sharing – included in stages where our queries are not yet determined as science, art nor philosophy (SAP) – has led us to write, talk and make in parallel- rather than serial sequence. We become keenly aware of the differences between written, spoken and numeric precision: where they lead us, how the world appears to us and the different existential modes entailed by them. The problem of how we inhabit our query becomes acute.

We are by no means done with crisis. But it is as though crisis has wondered from the epistemic precincts to the ontological realm. We are in the midst of crisis, which means that it is precisely not limited to the crisis of knowledge, but that we are – in some sense – in the presence of crisis. Living after the end, this ‘archaeological ethos’, is not confined to a group of scientific specialists, but has changed into something far more generic, that we may identify as the contemporary Zeitgeist.

Since, evidently, under such conditions, the fact and impact of how we are dwellers – before we become scientists, artists or philosophers – in our field of query, may provide a concise definition of fieldwork. Expanding the notion of dwelling (Heidegger 1971) not only from the contemporary support structures (Condorelli 2009) of a sedentary conception of our life-form, to a more nomadic form of inhabitation of all structures built by wo/men, but also to those that have reached their end.

A distinctive feature of the present crisis – that is, the crisis that is now and is present to us – is that it is moving beyond the precincts of philosophy, as the guardian of foundational issues in science, to a non-philosophical terrain (Laruelle 2017) in which 1) existence according to writing, 2) existence according to number and 3) existence according to speech, are disjoined not only in their philosophical foundation, but are also empirically disjoined. So, the crisis is presently specific.

The problem of ‘dwelling’ – before our queries have acquired the clarity of thought and the determination as built environments – has accordingly acquired a sharpened, expanded and multiplied determinations, in the wake of globalisation of ‘advanced capitalism’ (Braidotti 2006) and the anthropocene. Our modes of inhabiting our fields of inquiry are evolving into detailed propositions on dwelling in the expanded field where past human life-forms become contemporary.

Which means that the opposition between epistemè and doxa no longer is water-tight: whichever knowledge (epistemè) is articulated in Pages, Numbers or Keynote1 will each appear as opinion/assumption (doxa) to the two others. These differences exist at the operational level – because each of them are articulated daily in their 1 

A key-word in working to develop a research-content – to bring dwelling beyond Heidegger’s philosophical musings – is liminality: this paradoxical realm of the ‘between-space’ of immersion through a) the manual operations of crafting and b) the manufacture of

Or, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

1

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research embodied schemes, comes about as the crossroads of analogue operations and digital procedures multiply. This scope is where Dragoş Gheorghiu’s work is articulated in a variety of scales (Gheorghiu and Ştefan 2013). A strategy of deepened dwelling.

and they cannot be ignored. It is often the secondary ideas, those less good ideas found in trying to address the cracks in the first idea, that become the core of the work… the intention is to provide a forum for these less good ideas – arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things that you didn’t know in advance, but knew were somewhere inside you.’

The problem of dwelling is the problem of human being in the anthropocene; it needs to be deepened to reach the full extent of what has been constructed by human beings – in the past and present – and the liminal strategy, proposed by Gheorghiu, could be used as a prompt for the majority of the texts in this book. It springs from his claims of working inside art, in an outsider relation to the art-field where the main focus is on art and research as avatars of each other.

This is a particular bid on the concept of ‘exposition’, but a particularly interesting one since it comes from an artist. And one who is well-versed in material practices engaging in a broad variety of techniques, where the point of ‘the lesser good idea’ is repeated, not only from head-to-hands, but from one material technique as a hatching ground for ideas subsequently worked on through other means (materials and techniques). In the end, his activities conspire towards cogency.

The idea of this book is to explore this as a) an archaeological proposition; b) an artistic proposition – and to query if the ensuing research efforts can make up a cogent ensemble. And it is to open up for claims that originate from activities in stages where they are undefined by disciplinary boundaries, that we are interested in workings of immersion and embodiment, as modalities of dwelling where the ‘quirks’ of human cognition can be used to home in on cultural contingencies.

But not a cogency in argument. Rather through how the artist – and the public – engages with the activities’ matter of fact. Which is the point. It links with José Pellini’s contribution to archaeology through his work, and his associate’s, on sensoriality (Pellini et al. 2015). In Kentridge’s work sensoriality is engaged through a particular view of artistic practice, where materiality brings forth what, on second thought, is discovered and revealed as the subject matter of interest (cf. Ingold 2013).

We – the two editors – have thus been interested in the potential of immersive techniques as a platform to conversation where understanding hinges on precision in writing, number and speech; and how these somehow become wired or embodied through engaging in a variety of techniques: ranging from elementary acts of drawing, to complex activities that are more demanding in terms of crafts and skill. At that same time, we have been looking where to turn for a scientific foundation.

It is not a pre-constituted idea, but one emerging from engaging with materiality. The senses are slowed down by material inertia and the obstacles of making, to a level where the relation between language and senses becomes reversed; and language no longer has to chase its objective, but starts to operate in a receptive mode. In this sake on sensoriality we can readily intuit how sensoriality is brought to bear on theorizing, and considered the mode of theorizing of the future.

That is, a foundation in the sense of Laruelle’s First Science (Laruelle 2017): one that ensues from a lopsided and incomplete reliance on science and philosophy, and the idea that we are better served by a sufficient philosophy in engaging with art – and artistic practice – than an exhaustive philosophical necessity (Laruelle 2013): that is, if we accept criticality, instead of critique (Rogoff 2003), as a regulative idea – criticality (defined as the time-space hatching of new repertoires, past a critical threshold). Which means that, in its relation to art, philosophy contributes with an ontological vector, in Laruelle’s parlance (2013), hatching the fiction which is immanent in the reality of art. But what of the artistic process (artistic research, as a hatching-place for a certain kind of knowledge as interests us here)? Pitching his Centre of the Less Good Idea, South African artist William Kentridge (2017) quotes a Tswana proverb: ‘If the good doctor cannot help you, find the less good doctor.’ He continues: ‘Often, you start with a good idea. It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you put it to work the cracks and fissures emerge in its surface,

This has been known to neuropsychologists for quite a while: under idle conditions sensory-motor loops in human conscious voluntary behaviour is much swifter than human linguistic awareness (it is formed and articulated a lot slower than a conscious voluntary act is mobilized by the sensory-motor apparatus [Libet 1985]). However, the ability to linger through concentration and work shifts the ratio of relative speed; and language becomes a vessel for sensory-motor understandings.2 The interest of art and the artistic process clearly resides in its affordances to instigate a foundational query – and its readability as such by a third party – as In Agamben’s extended notion of language (cf. Agamben 1993) the object is conceived to constitute, as it were, the holes in language; as the equivalent of zero in mathematics. This notion is of interest here since the concept of manérie – local ways of unfolding and being – also defines the brink from language to action 2 

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Theodor Barth: Introduction: Exposition and Transposition

pointed out by Dieter Mersch (2002). That is, a query with no pretence at being exhaustive; neither in its constituted aspects (the artefact) nor in its constitutive aspects (the artistic process). Neither does it claim to draw out this potential, but needs to be solicited – even pressed – to do so. Professing is not part of its vocation.

succeeds in negotiating in relation to them, and the unknown springing from their depth: in other words, it will develop on contingencies (cf. Rorty 1989). It is not random. It is not arbitrary. It is contingent. Hence the crisis of history – adding to the other crises – may help us move our attention to the problem of existential provincialism.

However, once we accept thinking of our linguistic apparatus as a container – whereby sensory-motor processing features as content, or thought – the contemporary trouble relating to the existential fragmentation (what exists according to writing, number and speech) is changed, as they become not only locked to the contingencies they query, but somehow guided by them). The relationship between them becomes empirical. Empirical in relation to both ideas and evidence.

If our hypothesis is that contingencies is what have held human beings from existential fragmentation in the past – and not only in the present – then the artistic query holds the unexpected promise that human life-forms have left, and will leave, their ontological footprints – not only their lifestyles and cultural beliefs – in contingencies: the combination of chance, negotiation and the unknown is a human signature, that wherever they are found there have been humans.

Many readers would agree that there is some art in all research, but the work that presently needs to be done is to identify the potential for research in art. Evidently, this will not be achieved in the scope of this book. But it will serve to illuminate – through the variety of its contributions – the element of discovery not only springing from fact, but also relating to ideas: that is, that ideas are subject to discovery whenever the contingencies of the material world summon sensoriality.

So, if the concept of ‘exposition’ is vested in the obviation (Wagner 1989) of what is found, negotiated and queried, it features the prototypical interest of humans in things human, which always will add new layers of contingency to what is already there. That seeking to transcend the limits of our understanding, will invariably result in our adding to contingencies. In the artistic query, an alternative orientation is brought to bear, however: the orientation to immanence/ immersion. Immersive techniques aim at revealing the ontologies that art makes readable in contingencies. Artistic practices can delve into what is at stake in contingencies, and what is/was humanly going on. From this point on, contingencies can be seen as a material language belonging to humans, which is sensorially readable, measured by its aesthetic proportion and spoken in poetry, a direction which the work of Giulio Calegari (2017) can serve to demonstrate. If crisis is the hallmark of modernity, then the crisis of crisis is the herald of the contemporary: we are led to take into consideration crisis itself, as a vehicle of identification in things human rather than one of alienation and difference. The existential provincialism of modernism has surreptitiously defined crisis – at least in its scientific and philosophical definition – as a variant of the white man’s burden. We cannot accept this. By cultivating research in art we may move beyond these confines.

Figure 1: ‘Triolectic’ diagram proposing a relationship between a specific divergence within writing-speechnumber and contingencies [or, the found-negotiated-unknown as ‘resident principles’]

We do not need to query the depths of philosophical inquiry to determine the impact of philosophical protocols on science. It suffices to take due notice of the educational practices from which scientific skills and prowess are hatched. In this education it is presupposed that the scientist – at least in the areas of her inquiries – should have some answers (if not the answers). So, s/

When living after the end – certainly the end of history in Francis Fukuyama’s sense3 – humanity will feed on found materials, the relationship s/he Cf, Fukuyama (2012). Contrary to Fukuyama we hold that end of history may hold the possibility of wo/man – in the nietzscheian sense that human being is yet to be achieved. 3 

3

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research he is cross-examined by the kind of questioning which is confrontational or with a pedagogical intention.

cultural learning, beyond the human individual, at a trans-personal level. In the context of the present book we therefore might want to ask – in a line of work that ranges from archaeological digs, conservation techniques, artistic methods – how to understand the computer?

Whether the impact of this protocol of crossexamination has a positive impact on the quality of research (given that the student is driven by the desire to learn) is an issue worthwhile raising, in the discussion of the inclusion of artistic process into the realm of research, since what the artist does more readily is to raise questions, rather than provide answers; and that it also is a common knowledge that finding the point of entry to a research problem is the key to its solution.

As a production-device the computer is one amongst many tools used by archaeologists and artists – more specifically, the authors involved in the making of this volume. The practices they are involved in, and engage, exceed the contours of the computer-screen. And if we consider these practices as their compound field of immersion, the computer is but one in a range of tools. Of course, I am here talking about the computer as a hand-tool rather than as a broadcasting device.

Hence emphasising the importance of the question – as a troubled understanding’s critical point of entry – to what we might call ‘problem-design’: given that whoever has succeeded in hatching trouble-shooting with a problem-definition, is already in the space of the solutions. This is why the incorporation of artistic repertoires into archaeological research fosters a specific ambition to formulate the tenets of a First Science. Not as a cult of primordiality, but for practical reasons. What we mean by a First Science – then – comes with the material engagement with contingencies (past or present – or, contemporary [Agamben 2009]) which, at some time, will hatch the questions that will constitute the critical point of entry into a space of problem, featuring research in a more regular scientific sense (with the philosophical query reformulated as a boundary transaction between science and art). There are certain immediate consequences for the editorial process. The computer, editorial concept and process

Figure 2 : Tapestry in Kristin Sæterdal’s series called ‘surveillance’ (weft in recycled Dell computer monitor frame, wool in hand-coloured sepia-tones, exhibited at Kunstbanken at Hamar [November 3rd-December 30th 2018], Photo: Theodor Barth, Owner: Theodor Barth)

First we are interested in the line of questioning that emerges in each contribution, as the performative aspect of each piece. From that we are interested in determining whether these queries ‘conspire’ to foster a conjoint query. That is, the query of the volume as a subject of discovery in the editorial process. In the next section, a state of the art of our topic will be discussed. A following synoptic presentation of the contributions will prompt the reader.

However, this might not be a bad place to start developing a contemporary understanding of the computer: that is, a visual contraption not dissimilar from a Jacquard-loom in that a numeric code is the basis for the production of a visual pattern – pixelbased in the case of the computer – which thereby is comparable to a weft (made of coloured light elements, rather than coloured threads). Whilst the broadcasting function features the present platform of global online publishing (Ramussen et al. 2017).

In this sense, the introduction is intended as a vade-me-cum for the reader, or a support structure (Condorelli 2009) which – as an architectural device – offers a structure that learns alongside the reader as s/he proceeds to work a path through the thirteen contributions included into this anthology. This idea can scarcely be surprising to the contemporary reader, since the developments in IT have made such adjacent learning processes quite common/ubiquitous.

We should ask what each of us having publishing available – as an option – at the tip of our fingers, entails for how we engage with the world, in the panoply of other practices that are at play in the archaeological venture. And also, in turn, how we should understand this engagement with the world, in what is readable to us on our ‘Jacquard-monitors’. I understand onlinepublication as belonging to the wider category of

However, the point is that – as architectural devices – ‘support structures’ are contraptions that arguably have existed as long as there have been humans; that the world of artefacts constitutes a repository of 4

Theodor Barth: Introduction: Exposition and Transposition

manifestation: exposition belongs to this class, as does digging.

Again, the manifestation of Neolithic ochre paintings in northern Sweden with Heidegger’s ontological turn applied in art-theory (Ylva Sjöstrand); the manifestation of art and archaeology as adjacent coevolving queries (Macel Otte and Hans Lemmen); the manifestation of archaeological learning in practices of immersion (Dragoş Gheorghiu and Livia Ştefan); the manifestation of literary practices in Virginia Woolf ’s type-setting and book-binding (Theodor Barth and Ane Thon Knutsen).

Working my way through the contributions to the present anthology it became obvious to me that there is a common denominator, emerging from the crossfertilisation of archaeological and artistic vantage points: i.e., the bulk of the contributions are – in one way or the other – dealing with manifestation. Or, rather: the contributions may not be dealing with manifestation, if read separately according to their explicit premises, but their ‘vectorial sum’ is about manifestation.

Finally, the manifestation of entanglement between archaeological and artistic practices in two projects both derived from Seng An Daoyi’s monumental sutras in the mountains of Shandong in Eastern China (Lia Wei); the manifestation of body-shaped boulders and rock-art in Fontainebleau through the intermedium of climbing and haptic drawings (Geir Harald Samuelsen); the manifestation in research of sensoriality through ritual agency (Dragoş Gheorghiu).

That is, the manifestation of the archaeological query in the language of poetry (Giulio Callegari); the manifestation of intra-action the making and finding of ‘gold-men’ (Ing-Marie Back Danielsson); the manifestation of rock art in the light of contemporary graffiti (Fredrik Fahlander); the manifestation of Japanese prehistorical pottery under the eye of the archaeologist’s camera lens (Makoto Tomii); the manifestation of art- and innovation in the archaeological dig (José Mármol Martinez).

An artistic research conversation between Neil Forrest and Theodor Barth compares manifestation in ceramics and video. So, the reader is kindly invited to work through the anthology using a comparative approach.

Table 1: Structure of the anthology featuring the manifesting agent as a comparative dimension Authors

Manifesting agent

Title of the contribution to this anthology

Giulio Calegari

poetry

Convergences: Archaeology and Art

Fredrik Fahlander

graffiti

Makoto Tomii

photography

The Mediality of Rock and Metal – Exploring Formal Analyses of Rock Art through Graffiti

José Ant. Mármol Martinez

archaeodrome and dig Art or creativity? From Archaeological Photo-Ethnography to Art: Approaches to Two Contemporary Sites

Part 1 – Archaeology and Art Ing-Marie Back Danielsson

intra-action

Art as Entangled Material Practices – The Case of Late Iron Age Scandinavian Gold Foil Figures in the Making

The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery: At the Time of Production, Deposition and Publication/Exhibition

Ylva Sjöstrand aesthetic theory Part 2 – Art and Archaeology

An Archaeological Employment of a Theory of Truth in Art

Marcel Otte and Hans Lemmen

adjacency

Art and Thought

Dragoş Gheorghiu

ritual performance

Theodor Barth and Ane Thon Knutsen

typography

Experimenting with the Art of Origins: Animating Images by Blowing Colours and Sounds

Lia Wei

entanglement

Geir Harald Samuelsen

haptic drawing

Neil Forrest and Theodor Barth

ceramics

POROØS – A Model of Resistance as Material Communication

immersion

Virtual Art in Teaching, and Learning Archaeology: An Intermedia to Augment the Content of Virtual Spaces and the Quality of Immersion

Dragoş Gheorghiu and Livia Ştefan

‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Art, Archaeology and Forensic Anthropology

Epigraphy in the Landscape: Intersections with Contemporary Ink Painting and Land Art Magnetic Boulders – Unfolding Stone through Gestures and Light

5

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research To picture how this operation can be fruitful, the reader is invited to imagine that, in each of the above-listed contributions, some matters are conceived as spoken, others are written materials, and again images and manufacture relate to proportion and number.

Barth as chair (Barth 2018). For them, the extent to which we will comprehend the world begins with the emotive perambulation that prompts our engagement with the world, and from which hatches the queries of a more systematic kind. However, neither of them stops at this: the emotive ability to connect is one that defines humans, not only in the first but also the last instance.

In turn, to conceive the transition from epistemic exposition – whether in archaeology or art – to ontologic manifestation, the reader is invited to assume that our notion of existence may be divided: i.e., existence according to speech, according to number and according to writing are never exactly the same thing,4 and thereby subject to loops of triangulation in which different learning strategies – as linked to speech, writing and number – conspire towards cogency.

Profiling the contributions In his contribution, Giulio Calegari writes that: ‘Even when I have had to locate objects and images of my archaeological research in chronological order, I have never lost sight of their ‘voice’.’ In the creative interactions with fields beyond his own discipline, it is the accident of each element that claims voice with its forays in exact science, psychoanalysis, education and human geography. His special knowledge thereby inscribes itself within the wider scope of ‘natural history’ (Goethe).5

If this is tenable, it is through the ‘existential end’ – rather than the ‘topical edge’ – that the pieces in this anthology are comparable; through the commonality of the ‘support structure’ constituting an architectural task; which each of the contributions identify and solve in each their own way. Which is why the support structure hereby is considered a vehicle of ontological manifestation, that learns in the sense that ‘ontologic learning’ can take place: a sensorial and performative style of learning.

Reading through his piece the reader may be struck by how collections of artefacts, performance as a vehicle of comprehension and prompting the poetic entry to language through song, act as oblique references to theatre. That is, a kind of theatre in the sense of performance – or, a locus for acting or music – but conjointly in the sense of display, as a museum or a collection. In his work, he becomes involved in acts of world-making, where old and new elements meet with a caress.

Understanding the progress in working up these manifestations as linked to a kind of transpositioncoding (cf. Schwab 2018) operating at the brink between modern epistemology to contemporary ontology, in which the manifestation of the code and the process of the knower in becoming clear to her-/himself are a) related; b) transmittable. All the projects in this book have a brink where 1) what is found and how it is negotiated, is relieved by 2) what is negotiated and how it is found.

His work is truly contemporary in the sense that the way acts and things come together – the old and the new – is pervasively experimental. It is not argued, at least not more than strictly necessary. In such a way, that the work of his scientific queries – significantly with fieldworks in the African continent – also makes up a certain way of living. In his piece, he makes that human being is a dweller, whether in the past or the present, and in this capacity also a creator of lifeworlds.

In this way, what I am suggesting here, is that we take a giant leap out of modernism – where existence is linked to a native realm on which artists, literary authors, philosophers and playwrights can specialise – to a condition where existential matters are learned, in a global society where ontological manifestation is needed to allow existential variables (above) set, in a world where the change-factors are not likely to let them settle. Which means manifestation is an ongoing concern.

If one may consider the pieces of this anthology as ‘learning theatres’, Ing-Mari Back Danielsson’s contribution brings the reader to scope a category of gold-foil figures between narratives from the late 18th century on the way they could be found after storms e.g. on the Ravlunda beach in Skåne, and similar contingencies that relate to their making: stamped on gold-foils of less than 1 gramme, their value in the late Iron Age appeared to be independent of their level of execution.

The idea of this book comes from the WAC 2016 session organised in Kyoto by Dragoş Gheorghiu with Theodor Saadia Gaon (2001) The Sefer Yetsirah (The Book of Formation) is an early cabalistic text that has fascinated Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy), Jean-Paul Sartre’s last personal secretary they discussed the importance of this ancient text for existential philosophy (Sartre and Levy 1991). Saadia Gaon is a Mediaeval philosopher from Baghdad (9th-10th century C.E.) who was at the head to the Talmudic Academy of Baghdad. 4 

Cf, Barth, Theodor (2018) Drawing as performance – The Greenroom: A new perspective on empowerment through education, in FormAkademisk – Volume 11, No 3 DOI: 10.7577/formakademisk.2681 5 

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Theodor Barth: Introduction: Exposition and Transposition

She turns to Karen Barad’s agential realist ontology (Barad 2007) in linking aspects of the making of foil-figures – ‘gold men’ – in the late Iron Age, to the way they later were found by sea-side strollers in the Enlightenment century (18th century). The entanglement suggested precisely in this mode of remote connection provides the scenario in which she explores the notion of intra-action: that is, the production of bodies and artefacts through the workings and staging of the apparatus.

past environments, as found in the ground. His research on this subject matter is extensive. His interest in the pottery lies in a 4D approach of the artefacts as narrative objects: owing to asymmetric tilted features in Jomon-pottery they are sensitive to their place in space, relative to other items and structures that would contribute to orient them (and thereby reveal the aesthetic value that might have been placed on asymmetry in the past). The author relates how the pottery was taken out the realm of archaeology, and placed into modern aesthetics, by Taro Okamoto.

Her interest in the fleeting execution in the manufacture of the ‘gold-men’ catches her interest on account of the material and semiotic affordances of these artefact; thereby featuring the brink between matter and signification – where matter matters (Barad) – or between the figures as representations and ‘…as having a ritual or symbolic significance’: i.e., as subjects of embodied knowledge, that also interested e.g. modern artist Asger Jorn who collaborated with archaeologists.

Okamoto was influenced by Bataille and related the relevance of Jamon pottery to modern aesthetics in his piece ‘A dialogue with the four-dimensional’. The narrative starts with the frontal side for the potter. In his detailed discussion of photographic angle – also used in display – the author questions whether the centring of the rim-projection can be used as a criterion to determine frontality. His analysis reveals the importance of decisions on display made by the archaeologist.

In Fredrik Fahlander’s piece graffiti constitutes the ‘learning theatre’ – or, manifesting agent – in his efforts at comprehending graphic art from the Bronze Age. More specifically, the manifestation of practices of managing space on surfaces where more than one artist has been at work; as well as the visibilisation of newer elements, departing from the same spatial constraints, and corresponds with the manifestation of new graphic styles. New styles differ on both accounts.

José Ant. Mármol Martinez’s piece is a comparative inquiry into experiments with a) the ‘archaeodrome’ – an experimental and pedagogic site where land-art installations into the ground precede archaeological excavations – and b) the innovation of field-practise as the site-survey shifts into the dig (as a different mode of working). He is concerned with how installation artpractices and photo-ethnography offer a comparative manifestation of the dig as a ‘learning theatre’.

Thus, his query overlaps with Back Danielsson’s in the sense that he is interested in art as both image and materiality. He is interested in the illicit aspects of graffiti that makes its self-regulatory practices – in respecting others’ work and using space – more striking. He also develops a sense of how changes in material and visual practices, may reflect on social change. In the case of his graffiti-studies he follows its developments, in directions that may indicate gentrification.

He describes the range of experimental installation in the archaeodrome – largely with the use of contemporary items (such as IKEA furniture) – and ponders what an experience with destruction, rather than production, as the context of developing knowledge in our contemporary society: the archaeodrome being largely a site for archaeologists working alongside artists, lay-people and children to share into the ways of archaeological knowledge through a hands-on experience.

By using the lens of graffiti he manages to intensify questions raised by Bronze Age paintings in Sweden, where the juxtaposition of visual elements could indicate similar transitions in the past. In this part of his discussion he is also bent on arguing a more nuanced view of the meaning and impact of images, that may make them depart from symbols and representations. The reader may find this piece particularly revealing of what the archaeologist’s work of tuning in to the site.

He also ponders the significance of ‘archaeological acting’ in his comparative case-work, from two projects: the other project features an archaeological survey and dig in Murcia (Spain), in which the photo-ethnographic venture similarly brings an awareness of ‘acting’; thereby, prompting a displacement from the perceptual to the conceptual. One may understand his piece as the study of surprise – with two different genealogies – in a paradoxical timescape where the past lies forward.

Makoto Tomii’s piece makes a particularly clear statement of manifestation from epistemic exposition – knowledge acquisition from pottery-findings in archaeological digs – through ontologic transposition, by analysing how the frontality of photographs, often taken by archaeologists themselves, will significantly vary from the orientation of the same artefacts, in their

In Ylva Sjöstrand’s piece art is not the resident principle, but rather the adjacent category of ‘as art’ that has been used by archaeologists to appraise e.g. rock paintings, 7

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research from a time when art was not a category; and according to a concept of art according to which art is related to experiences in the outside world. To counter this view, she uses modern aesthetic theory – adapted from Heidegger’s philosophy – to see a perspective on a rock painting from a vantage point beyond subject/object.

Dragoş Gheorghiu and Livia Ştefan take us further into what – from an archaeological perspective – may be seen as a parallel track. Since it is concerned with a technical aspect of artistic manufacture in the use of digital technologies to develop environments for virtual reality (VR), to enhance experience in archaeological learning. The reader will notice that this piece has left the problematic of ‘as art’ (Ylva Sjöstrand) to explicate some artistic aspects of working with archaeology.

That is, from an existential vantage-point where art has its own truth-claims without external reference, nor seated in the privacy of a human psychological experience. In this sense, Heidegger’s philosophy becomes a ‘learning theatre’ that allows the author to manifest a rock-painting from Hovden, in Härjedalen (Sweden). She quotes Heidegger to the effect that the truth of art lies in that it establishes its own nature through its origin; or its originarity (Derrida).

They essentially compare two technological platforms for their adequacy to enhance experience and promote immersion in built VR-environment, in which archaeological learning and knowing can be folded. The piece is dense with references relating both to the developments in the field of VR, and to the literature that connects their work to archaeology. The piece serves to demonstrate how art – i.e., how art works – is not inextricably tied to the need for expression and authenticity.

Hence she moves from art as tokens of experience, or cultural/ideological beliefs, and a non-representational take on the motif directs the reader’s attention to the symbolic affordances; underscoring the rock-painting’s entanglement with the surrounding context. She takes the decisive step from discussions what makes a work of art, to what makes art work, which is the transposition from the epistemic to the ontologic: what is present to hand beyond the framing gaze.

They are interested in how these can be supported, which is a realm of artistic knowledge, namely that of design. In their venture in using and developing the OSUN platform, they compare the technical affordances and the virtues of the OpenSimulator (OS) and the Unity application (UN), on the backdrop on a case-study of a Roman workshop with a glass-kiln. It discusses the alternate and conjoint need for abstraction and realism in building immersive learning environments.

Her piece concludes the section ‘Archaeology and Art’ and the way she teases out the resident principles (at Hovden) and finds them where they belong – in the works to the archaeologist – brings us to Marcel Otte’s and Hans Lemmen’s piece, in which two parallel texts, the one an artist’s and the other an archaeologist’s, brings the reader into the anthology’s second section; the section called ‘Art and Archaeology’. The piece features two parallel processes.

Theodor Barth and Ane Thon Knutsen’s piece can be read in a similar vein, in the sense that the difference and conjunction between the abstracter ways of the anthropologist (Theodor Barth) and the sensorial method of designer-artist (Ane Thon Knutsen), are conjoined in an uneasy but fruitful journey: the vehicles of conversation and writing are clearly contrasted, in their extended working-relationship, while remaining connected at the level of their shared interest in making and number.

It is manifested on the page itself, with two texts running in parallel – each in their separate columns. It is a simple arrangement, where Marcel Otte (the archaeologist) features in the text placed in the left pane, while Hans Lemmen (the artist) formulates his ideas on archaeology as an inspiration for art, in the column featuring in the right pane. The text-materials are co-evolving, though not in direct dialogue. The artist has made the illustrations to the archaeologist’s text.

This working-relationship evolves alongside Ane Thon Knutsen’s work as a research fellow in artistic research, devoted to type-setting, printing and bookbinding: these contrasting craft-sets accompany her in her investigation of modern author Virginia Woolf ’s literary practices, emphasising typography. The piece relates how she – through this investigation – developed her own literary voice, reflected both in writing and lectures, as well as colour-studies of literature.

In this piece – that borders unto a ‘curious manifesto’ – the spatial arrangements of the texts are echoed by the adjacency of their topics. Where the differences are articulated, they therefore also serve to connect. The material artefact, the piece therefore prompts the súmbolon – in the act of joinery – while the parallel parsing of the contents invites the reader into appreciating the metaphoric relationship between the two texts: it is unique in the collection in that it manifests itself.

The centre-piece of her study of Virginia Woolf is a short-story – The Mark on the Wall. In the present piece this work is analysed in terms borrowed form quantum theory: in which intra-action, superposition and entanglement (Barad 2007) are key words (the proximal relationship between type-setting and Virginia 8

Theodor Barth: Introduction: Exposition and Transposition

Woolf ’s stream of consciousness [intra-action]; the superposition of Ane’s and Virginia’s life-worlds, the remote connections of the mark [entanglement]).

border-crossings, in which philosophical queries can be referred but put to the test of the experiment, rather than being met by argument alone. It interestingly raises the question of what is the equivalent of the experiment in natural science, in the arts and humanities.

In Lia Wei’s work on Seng An Daoyi’s monumental epigraphs in the mountains of Shandong in Eastern China, at the level that I am discussing here, shares some characteristics with the previous piece, but also with José Ant. Mármol Martinez’s piece in this book’s part 1. That is, she compares two projects as him, she has also been hands-on engaged in both projects, but while the artistic process in his piece is ‘as art’, her Biface Graphy project is outrightly an art-project.

Dragoş Gheorghiu’s chapter queries the understanding of images from the past, through performative reproduction on the one hand, and on the other hand through sound: respectively engaging with the site through material techniques, and the acoustics of the site. Which affords the kind of triangulation needed to investigate the possible relationship between the site and the image. In both cases, the approach is immersive in that sound and technique are executed in situ.

It links up with the previous piece in its emphasis on the collaborative context. She juxtaposes her archaeological research on the epigraphs in the rocks palisades of Shandong, with the 6-7 year peinture-à-deux experience – bringing this backdrop from her rock-climbing into other settings; a foundation sacrifice for a building, land-art experiments and an exhibition in Arsenale (Venice) – of which the outcomes are emergent, rather pre-conceived in methodological terms.

The connective element between the execution of sound and technique is, in this case, the human breath: used for spray-painting, in the one case, and for fluteblowing in the other case. They also are ritual in the sense that they are adjacent to the professional enquiry of the archaeologist, and communicative: they manifest the site in their performance, and impact the perception of the archaeologist working to determine the affordances of what is found. Hit and impact.

The piece accordingly wires what is manifested in a process of co-creation with her colleague Zhian Qiang, to what is manifested her archaeological research on Buddhist rock-graphy. The art-project appears to power the archaeological project, in the sense that her terrain of interest is the difference drawn by Deleuze, between the despotic signs – paranoid signifiers – and authoritarian signs, that are post-significant, subjective and passioned. It is a Deleuzian study.

Hence the piece features the shift from a) what is found and how it is negotiated [the archaeological epistemological], to b) how it is found and what is negotiated [the archaeological onto-logic]. It demonstrates how contingencies can be sought as the teacher of things human, and the tracery of the past can be linked to the manifestations of the present. It links up with Giulio Calegari’s piece in that all research on the life-forms of yore, starts with living.

Geir Harald Samuelsen’s piece proceeds in a similar way, in the sense that his study of the animal-like shapes of rock-formations in the Fontainebleau woods (France) is manifested by the intermedium of what he calls ‘haptic drawings’. These are parallel to Lia Wei’s silkpaintings. They share the common feature of springing out of a direct contact through rock-climbing. Geir Harald Samuelsen, however, initiates his research from engaging with a natural setting, or context.

The piece featuring ceramist Neil Forrest in conversation with Theodor Barth lingers on the dis-juncture of the encounter between artistic research and natural history. The conversation is therefore left open-ended, and is printed here in its original form. The purpose of including it is to contrast the train of additive relevance (pursued by the anthropologist) with what is relevant from an artistic point of view, by emerging from and being tested in the artistic process.

When his study eventually takes him to prehistorical rock-art – dissimulated in the same area – he is closer to Ylva Sjöstrand’s perspective on art claiming its own truth, where the nature of the art-work – what makes it work – lies in its entanglement with its surrounding natural context. In Geir Harald Samuelsen’s piece, the artist’s haptic drawings manifest the natural shapes in an act of ontologic transposition, and precedes his discovery or interest in the rock art.

The conversation queries manifestation as a topic relative to the material experiments Neil Forrest has done with ceramics, to its possible extensions into the workings of video-transmission – from material practice to the haptics of experience in an audience – through the intermediary of a ‘skin’. The skin is here seen both as a vector of semiotic efficiency, moving from the truth in art to art happening, and a transitional contraption where real material exchange is taking place.

In this case, the climber’s direct engagement with the rock-shapes – their manifestation through haptic drawing – becomes a learning theatre for older human traces. He thereby contributes to a growing corpus of 9

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research The skin, in this understanding, relates to the place in the act of taking: it is a similar notion to the experimental methods expounded by Dragoş Gheorghiu in his chapter. However, also linking to his piece on digital technology, since the crossings discussed on the case of video, involves digital code (video). The piece therefore challenges manifestation as something principally anchored in phenomenology, linked to pragmatics by the intermedium of the ‘semiotics of skin’.

transposition from epistemic claims to ontological manifestation is ‘coded’; and how something coded in this way, will become clearer by ‘multiple crossings’: if the pull of the contributions are comparable, is this the push? If we are not set to solve the past as though it was a puzzle – or, a riddle – then we are not set to solve problems, neither when we are going archaeology nor artistic research. But we may be – in the words of Swiss designer Karl Gerstner – be programming for solutions: so we may add to the wealth of human kind’s ‘cultural genome’; allowing us take an active interest in the hatching of wayfinding repertoires constituting the real wealth of humanity: in the past, the present and future (Gerstner 1964).

Conclusion If we consider how the sequence of our ‘epistemic queries’ – what we can know by archaeological and artistic means – are counterpointed by a consequence of ‘ontological learning’ – the existential triangulation of contingencies by sensorial means – we will be puzzled when it is established that what is surely an ‘epistemic community’ in this book, is as ontologically diverse within the group as the life-worlds of the past humans we want to comprehend are between themselves.

An aspect of this problematic lies beyond the solitary query, which the comparative perspective outlined here, in the introduction, locates at the transpersonal level of how the contributions are communicating, by the mere fact of appearing in the same volume: e.g., the ‘colliding’ effect of being queued up in the present order. Since selection of pieces is the result of organising processes before, during and after the Kyoto-conference, some cohesion would be expected.

The question is whether we should be – or, actually are – surprised by this? If the desired level of cogency emerges from the way we garden the contingencies that remain after human life-worlds that attract our concerns (and desire); should be astonished that our comprehension eschews a unified knowledge project? This is by no means a plea to embrace fragmentation, but rather is the child of curiosity: what are ways in which the celebration of this multiplicity might be productive?

However, the issues floating up from working conjointly with the present contribution – which was expertly prepared by Dragoş Gheorghiu – was not achieved by consensus, but through working up the found affordances in the sequenced pieces, and linking them up to a discussion in artistic research within the frame of archaeological and anthropological relevance: specifically, the epistemic frameworks of exposition and transposition, here taken in an ontological direction.

If archaeology can be seen – by definition – as the trope of knowing ‘after the end’, what is achieved once the ontological transposition, dwelling, occurs? It may well be that if the turn from what we find and how we negotiate it in knowledge (epistemic [exposition]), to how we find and what we negotiate (ontological [transposition]) what we are negotiating is the unity of the world: a thesis of radical immanence where the seat of unity is not in knowledge but in the real (Foster 1996).

I find it noteworthy that some of the same principles that organise Giulio Calegari’s reflections, on how his own archaeological teaching is taking place on the backdrop of his African fieldworks, resonate with Dragoş Gheorghiu’s two pieces: but where Calegari’s learning theatre centres on his teaching, Gheorghiu – in his first piece – is centred on fieldwork, and homing in on the archaeological site. While his more didactically oriented second piece, co-authored with Livia Ştefan, discusses digital technologies.

Rather than setting off a new metaphysics, I see this possibility as one emerging from the nature of building – as an activity: or, construction (Potter 1991). That in the ebb and flow between destruction and repairing – that invariably accompanies the human trails in this world – there is a notion of construction in which each step has to set before you embark on the next. If so, the way we comprehend our matters is fundamentally dependent on the ways of the world, at every step.

Evidently, the existence of this book is tributary to the relevance of concluding on shareable formats, since this is essentially what enclosing a miscellany of texts between two covers is about. But in the bold attempt at exploring the possibility of a post-historical archaeology – rather than a post-human one – features the newer possibility of considering ‘broadcasting’ on the side of the utilities, that appears with online publication as a personal prerogative in the computer age.

In the present setting, this statement is perhaps even a bit trivial: to people who have embarked on a journey where comprehending is based on making, will have these insights into their embodied repertoire. What is perhaps less trivial is the knowledge of how the 10

Theodor Barth: Introduction: Exposition and Transposition

Publication thereby is linked to something like a ‘utility’, adding to the institutional and cultural aspects of publishing culminating e.g. in the present bookproject. Because online-publication is an aspect of massculture – and lends itself to the manifestation of things that concern us – the little troupe of contributors to this volume, cannot be considered only as an epistemic group, but also as an ontological community (i.e., a ‘coming community’, in Agamben’s [1993] sense). This is a core issue.

where we learn and teach. It is a common prerogative for archaeologists and anthropologists to do so, even though the injunction comes from a designer. But the next point on his list ‘find them where they belong – in the job itself ’ is a game-changer: the task is thereby wired to the occasion. In the framework of ontologic transposition the encounter with the place is a form of manifestation of the past as culture. It is a cultural encounter which – in its ontologic definition – is germane to dwelling. It develops in the triangle of assimilating the resident principles (found locally on the site), negotiation with the institutional framework within which the query is taking place, which is always a negotiated situation, and the definition of hospitable terms to 3rd parties (past, present, future).

Since Internet – as a utility (say, at the same level of water and electricity) – is an infrastructure that allows everyone with computer-access, to comprehend matters deemed important not only by discretionary powers of knowledge, but with the framework of manifesting these matters in public. Which is why it is relevant to see manifestation – in the contemporary setting – as internal to each project in this book. Broadcasting can be done at any time by anyone with a smart-phone.

The persona I propose to call the creative reactor – as the persona of the dweller – hinges on the prerogative of establishing the ground-conditions of agency, whenever teams, projects, subjects and ideas are fallen apart (and are re-configured). I resist the idea of conceiving the dweller as a role, but rather conceive it as a mobile prerogative that can – and tends to – be picked up by whichever team-member sees the possibility to respond, whenever responsibilities are in peril (cf. Figure 3).

Used intelligently, it can put our beliefs – the rational beliefs of the knower – to the test: since manifestation has at all times been a resort, sometimes a court of last resort, in our work and efforts to comprehend the world. In a scientific publication open to importance of artistic means, these matters cannot be taken lightly. They are presently on our palette of commodities that are available to us at every single step of the road. And changes the ‘hand’ of the scientific enterprise.

My namesake Fredrik Barth (1972) conceived the way tasks and occasions feed each other as the generative principle in culture as the ‘social organisation of encounters’. I am therefore inclined to provisionally conclude that the problem of ‘shareable formats’ does not have a general solution, but can be programmed for solutions. In the same sense, the present effort does not programme for shareable formats, but programs for their ontological manifestation through acts of transposition.

Consider the following thought-experiment: if we follow Norman Potter’s injunction (1991: 90) ‘Seek always the resident principles’ we can do this wherever we are: whether we are in the field, or the places

Bibliography Agamben, G. 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. 2009. What is the contemporary? In: What is an apparatus and other essays, transl. Michael Hart. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway– Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Barth, F. 1972. Analytical dimensions in the comparison of social organizations. (Reprint from American Anthropologist 74/1972. nr. 1-2). Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association. Barth, T. 2018. Benjamin in Kyoto – KYOTObook, artist book. Oslo: KhiO. Braidotti, R. 2006. Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Figure 3: Support structure: a ‘triolectic’ diagram featuring the realm of professional activity – whether in the field or on campus – as a ‘learning theatre’

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research Calegari, G. 2017. Aperture all’immaginario. Tra archeologia africana e incertezze. Milano-Macerata: Quodlibet. Condorelli, C. 2009. Support structures. London, New York: Sternberg Press. Demos, T. J. 2017. Against the anthropocene – Visual culture and environment today. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Foster, H. 1995. The artist as ethnographer? In: G. Marcus and F. Myers (eds) The traffic in culture. Refiguring art and anthropology: 302–309. Berkeley, LA and London: University of California Press. Foster, H. 1996. The return of the real – Art and theory at the end of the century: Avantgarde at the end of the century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fukuyama, F. 2012. The end of history and the last man. London: Penguin. Gerstner, K. 2018. [1964] Designing programmes. Zurich: Lars Müller Publications. Heidegger, M. 1971. Building Dwelling Thinking. In: Poetry, Language, Thought (transl. Albert Hofstadter). New York: Harper Colophon Books. Hobsbawm, E. 1995. The Age of extremes – The short twentieth century 1914-1991. London: Abacus. Huntington, S. 2002. [1996] The Clash of Civilizations: and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ingold, T. 2013. Making – Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London, New York: Routledge. Jorn, A. 1964. Essai de triolectique – Dans ses application de situlogie générale (Éditions en langues étrangères). Silkeborg: Institut de vandalisme comparé. Kentridge, W. 2017. Centre for the Less Good Idea. http://www.designindaba.com/articles/creativework/centre-less-good-idea (accessed on 20.112018) Laruelle, F. 2017. Principles of non-philosophy. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Laruelle, F. 2013. Photofiction, a non-standard aesthetics. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing. Libet, B. 1985. Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action. The Behavioural and Brain Sciences 8: 529-526. Marcus, G. 1999. Anthropology as a cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mersch, D. 2002. Ereignis und Aura– Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik der Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Pellini, J., Zarankin, A. and Salerno, M. 2015. Coming to senses. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Potter, N. 1991. Models and constructs: margin notes to a design culture. London: Hyphen Press. Ramussen, H. H., Albrecht, D., Maharaj, S., Schneider, J. G., Frank, R., Gfader, V., Hande, A., Sonjasdotter, Å., Hamid, Z. H., Willemse, K. 2017. World Wide Weaving – Atlas. Weaving globally, metaphorically and locally. Oslo: Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Rogoff, I. 2003. From Criticism to Critique to Criticality. In: transform.eipcp.net, Retrieved from http:// eipcp.net/transversal/0806/rogoff1/en/base_edit (accessed 20.11.2018) Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, irony and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saadia Gaon 2001. Commentaire sur le sefer yetsirah. Paris: Verdier. Sartre, J-P. and Lévy, B. 1991. L’espoir maintenant – Les entretiens de 1980. Paris: Broché. Schwab, M. 2018. Transpositions: Aesthetic-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Schwab, M. and Borgdorff, H. 2013. Introduction. In: The exposition of artistic research: Publishing art in academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. Wagner, R. 1989. Symbols that Stand for Themselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Convergences: Archaeology and Art Giulio Calegari Abstract The relationship between Archaeology and Art is that of an ancient connection. Although on very rare occasions art events have suggested new paths for archaeological research. Artists have often been inspired, for better or for worse, by archaeologists. Even if some inputs have reached the archaeological environment from the arts, it is a case of suggestions translated into a ‘scientific’ language. This is paralysing. We must have the courage to find a new language, able to break up with tradition. A provocative language, such as that of the ‘artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century. We must find a new way involving both Art and Archaeology, joining the two disciplines in a new sphere of research and expression. I have often described this research of mine as ‘Archaeology of beauty’, locating it mainly in a performative environment. In this paper I shall quote some examples of my path.

archaeology which gives comfort to those who love fantasy, and for lack of poetry or opening to artistic imagery, accepts the easiest kinds of stimulation.

Archaeology (by which I mean research into prehistory), in defending its scientific rigour, risks assuming an attitude and a language so specialised as to move further and further away from the possibility of dialogue, both with ordinary people, and with the experts of other cultural expressions. On many occasions, the public are given a faded version of findings and researches, with a preference for subjects which can possibly be turned into a spectacle, often bound with the ‘communication and culture of profit’.

Overall, the enthusiasm and the desire for change and innovation which in the past have been found in many of the characters which have made history seem to have been forgotten in prehistory archaeology. This enthusiasm was making them like any other representative figures of the culture of their time with a great curiosity and ability to make comparisons. Altogether, a synergy capable of opening to the future, towards a time of innovative ferment, and not only in human and natural sciences, mainly connected with prehistoric research, but in arts, politics and in philosophical and social thought.

There certainly are also capable expositors, able to create curiosity and interest, even at a variety of cultural levels as well. Important shows and thematic exhibitions, even high quality ones, are certainly not lacking. Most of the times though, these initiatives are interpreted as worldly events or occasions not to be missed. I am mainly referring to the Italian experience.

I am told from many sides that archaeological research, and above all that on man’s prehistory, is the discipline closest to the exact sciences, comparable with mathematics. Fine! We shall certainly not deny the need for exactness, rigour and the necessity of multidisciplinary and techno-scientific approaches on such a complex research into a past so far away in time, but what is its purpose?

Almost always the public at large lacks a real preparation, which the school system does not provide. Many of those attending these exhibitions are in the condition of a deaf person at a concert. Specialists talk among each other, in areas more and more either specific or local, detaching themselves from a wider cultural conversation. Therefore, from their isolated position, they offer information that often does not serve either to understand or to emotionally imagine or dream of the past, in contemporary terms.

To whom is this research addressed, outside the narrow specialisation of the sector, what other knowledge does it encounter or assist? Perhaps history? Or that linear vision of time and the past which Western Culture has been building over time, and which it defends tooth and nail?

Except in few cases, even the attempts to change perspective or to create new models do not go beyond the circle of archaeologists. This isolated specialisation is contrasted with an archaeology of fantasy, linked to visions of the past, perhaps populated by aliens or full of ancient mysteries and of superior civilizations now disappeared.

The claim to acknowledge past history as ‘Teacher’ seems rather naive to me, in the light of daily events. We must be able to put our listening to the World close to a description and rigorous understanding of the World!

This is an unthinkable archaeology, but one which wants to be assertive and to challenge data and documents which are the result of years of serious research. An

We are accustomed to look at the past through the prism of our own day, which we want to be rigorously scientific. In the same way, we pretend to grasp 13

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research whatever is fantastic, imaginary, and the dreams of the past with the same prism.

a new approach to the past, which would give it back to us ‘open’, for a new hearing and dialogue with it.

Actually from archaeology man wants to re-discover a past in which he feels he has taken part as representative of his own species. He wants a dream to frequent, in a time that, despite respect for the document, becomes also close to a surprising tale. Perhaps he wants to find again an ancient beauty, a utopia. To return it to the same archaeological research.

Indeed I myself am a man who comes from the world of art, I am mainly dominated by fantasy, by curiosity, by expressivity. Even when I have had to locate objects and images of my archaeological research in chronological order, I have never lost sight of their ‘voice’. I have rather preferred to yield to surprise in front of artefacts capable of recalling a time of imagination, able to give the past a new life. Perhaps offering a vision of it.

And what is better than an alliance with art?

The studies and researches I have so far completed have not only been for me moments of knowledge and reflection on some pages of the past. Researches and discoveries have offered a chance to explore a new language, which was not just expressing the knowledge of a specific discipline, a language open to dialogue and capable of blurring with various artistic contemporary expressions: music, dance, poetry. Able to creatively interact with exact sciences, with psychoanalysis, education and human geography. I have often described this research of mine as ‘Archaeology of beauty’, locating it mainly in a performative environment (Calegari 2017).

Art is in its own time, and at the same time outside time. It is on this boundary that we must meet. Picasso himself used to say that he was a ‘contemporary’ of the painters from the Upper Palaeolithic. And he was right! It is not a coincidence that, until not too long ago, there was a dialogue between archaeology and art, in a relationship which is that of an ancient connection. Today however, and more than ever, the dialogue between the two disciplines is decisively unbalanced. On very rare occasions art events suggest new paths for archaeological research. Artists have often been inspired, for better or for worse, by archaeology.

One must not be fearful if a shock has to be given to some petrified rules. The turn must be decisive and without uncertainties! It will be met by criticism and rejections: attitudes which will confirm us in our chosen path. A path along which, by good luck, I must say that I have met many travelling companions.

Even if some stimuli have reached the archaeological environment from the arts, it is a case of suggestions immediately translated into a ‘scientific’ language. This is paralysing and sometimes out of place. Nowadays some artistic innovation can be caught in an attempt to make a spectacle or to rejuvenate exhibition practice; think for instance of the use of neotechnological art, with some moments of interaction and of augmented reality which are now fashionable in the new museography.

But let us come to my experiences. I think that everything started around 1982. I remember that I was giving a lecture in the main lecture hall of the Natural History Museum in Milan: I was talking about prehistoric artefacts and of the movements required to use them. I was holding in my hand a Palaeolithic ‘hand axe’ and a bone.

We must find a new path to unite Art (and obviously music) and Archaeology, mixing disciplines in a new mode of research and expression, without putting one below the other.

In the first row among the audience a woman, like everybody else, was taking notes of what I was saying. Suddenly I had an inspiration. I stopped my speech and said ‘Please, stop taking notes and listen to me’.

We must go further: to make a new language of Archaeology (of palaeoethnology, which is what concerns me); to acquire deep knowledge, and to transform them into a vision, in an expression which is lively and in empathy with the beauty of the past. If we make mistakes, it will be an occasion for discussion and reflection!

I had realized that I was trying to communicate something beyond the ideas which I could have transmitted simply by distributing a publication. With a firm movement, using the ‘hand axe’ I hit and smashed into pieces the bone which I was holding in my left hand.

We must have the courage to find a new language, which breaks with tradition and brings new sap. A provocative, fracturing language, such as that of the ‘artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century. In short,

Those who were taking notes at last raised their eyes, rather surprised. ‘You see, I said, now we can study and check on the floor the arrangement of the fragments of this bone, number them, and reconstructing it as 14

Giulio Calegari: Convergences: Archaeology and Art

it was, we can calculate the point and the strength of the impact of the stone which has fractured it, assess the movement of the hand, and much more. But if I do not tell you the reason of this action of mine, or if you are unable to grasp its meaning, the investigation and the reconstruction of the fragments of this gesture will have been of no use whatsoever.

Experiences related to figurative art and to photography supported these explorations of mine and the urban documentations (Calegari and Pezzoli 1977, in ‘Arte e Società’, Exposition at the Centro Internazionale di Brera, Milano). I was therefore able to take note and converse with expressions of individual characters, craftsmen, residents, travellers or visionary people who marked with their own ‘traces’ districts or areas of the city. Later on, until now, I have never failed to observe and document traces and marks on buildings or monuments of the city. As I would have done with rock art.

I had inaugurated my ‘Archaeology of beauty’! And so in due course I found myself in Africa, directing expeditions for the study of rock art, especially in Mali and in Eritrea, more and more settled in my conviction that I should transform my research into a new language (Calegari 1989; 1993; 1999).

In my researches my artistic contribution to archaeology is quite evident. However, in my artistic expressions I have submerged the most visible side of archaeology, to avoid falling into citationisms (perhaps figurative). However, I have preferred to use my experience as a prehistory scholar as a frame of mind, or support for my artistic work, without excessively emphasizing it.

I moved closer and closer to ethnoarchaeology, with its willingness to welcome and to mingle with other research areas, with its ability to renew itself after a process of transmutation, not letting itself be mortified by rotting and pretentious schemes dear to the academic conservative culture, to the ‘functionaries of the past’.

I believe that the most significant part of my experience is linked to performative aspects. Therefore in this chapter I shall mainly refer to them.

It is probably worth remembering also the following very lively interchange, however brief, between anthropology and contemporary art.

I want to start with an interesting day of work, organized together with artists Ernesto Jannini and Paolo Rosa in the hall of the Natural History Museum in Milan. The title of the meeting, held in March 1995, was ‘Convergences in new sensibility: archaeology-artscience’.

Around the seventies, (the years of political commitment) some artists adopted the term ‘anthropological’ when referring to their own artwork. Their commitment was mainly social and political, their eyes turned to nature with an environmentalist eye.

Several important practitioners of various disciplines joined in this first appointment: artists, archaeologists and palaeontologists, art historians, psychologists and psychoanalysts.

Starting in 1973, within the Milan circle I had a chance to take part in the experience of ‘Anthropological Art’ with personal and collective exhibitions, participating in seminars and research groups.

Following the important exchange of ideas of that day, on 28 April 1995 a meeting was held, with title ‘Stratigraphy’, at the LOFT Gallery in Valdagno (Vicenza). During this meeting with Jannini, we created layers of images, words, objects which I laid on the floor one on top of the other during a discussion linked to an archaeological discovery in Africa. Later on, we broke off fragments of plastering from the walls of the Gallery.

Fortified by practice at the Natural History Museum in Milan, of Palaeoethnology researches nurtured by comparative ethnology and by an opening to experimental archaeology, I cross-fertilized my artistic experiences with this knowledge. And conversely, I approached some districts in Milan as I would have done in an archaeological or anthropological expedition. Among other things, it was possible for me, as I stepped into various areas of the landscape and of the urban territory, to document and show from an artistic viewpoint some manifestations of lower social classes.

These fragments were exhibited during a further meeting in June 1995, in the ‘Buco del Corno’ cave in Bedulita (Valle Imagna, Bergamo). Several artists and archaeologists took part in this ‘exhibition’, which suggested for the gallery the metaphor of the cave; later on, on 22 October 1996, they all met again at the Natural History Museum in Milan to carry on these convergences.

In evidence were spontaneous or collective experiences which revealed specific visual or behavioural codes that were marking the territory and offered occasions for dialogue and creative suggestions.

Many further days of work and lectures followed in subsequent years, all bound to the dialogue between 15

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research art and archaeology, most of the times melted in the same event. Some examples: In a meeting on November 2000 with the sculptor Kengiro Azuma, and the psychoanalyst Gaetano Roi, with the title ‘The artist’s sign in nature’, we have reflected on the poetic sign with which an artist is able to set up a dialogue with a place. We know exciting examples from the prehistoric or ethnographic world: think about engraved rocks, painted caves, holy trees… A contemporary artist can understand this better than many archaeologists. An artist in tune with expressions of a far distant past is able to communicate his experience to us, an experience which is often in agreement with other expressions, far away in time and space.

Figure 1: Giulio Calegari and Francesco Marelli during the conference ‘Palaeontology - The discovery of a wild past’.

In many other lectures I have instead decided to seek the help of music, not as an accompaniment, pleasant or simply evocative in describing a distant time, but rather as an element able to let us enter into resonance with an ancient expression.

The painted wall itself appeared to express an infinite number of moos, as tonalities of different tracings and colour. In a cave some cattle were pictured while standing on two legs as if they were mooing to the sky. There are prayers which moo. Aum! Expression of breathing, interpretation of the universe.

Not agreeing with the discourse, but instead looking for a desired provocation in the combinations, in various lectures I have accompanied the description and the questions addressed to the painted rocks with musical pieces of the Italian tradition (from Lombardy), pieces which were not illustrating, but were having a dialogue with the images, trying to give a new meaning to the questions. Unusual questions, sometimes nonsensical. Musical pieces performed by Francesco Marelli, sculptor and musician. (Figure 1)

Then I put beside these prehistoric paintings the voice of Sarastro, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Magic Flute. And, still on new images of cattle, I presented a piece of Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony in A minor, rich in alpine motifs and in symbolism, as in Giovanni Segantini’s paintings. To summarize, an itinerary that I meant to lead to the recovery of the theatrical space, in order to attribute a new meaning to what had been, without betraying its meaning.

Other times I have turned to classical music in order to travel through time, to overcome the limits imposed by the space enclosed within a lecture hall; music which was criss-crossing with the words of the speaker, also accompanied by the movements of a performing dancer.

Always in the same place, in the XVIII Valcamonica Symposium of the year 2000, the theme of which was ‘Conservation and protection of messages’, and in other important international conferences, such as the XIVth UISPP Congress (Calegari 2006), I was able to do another archaeological-artistic performance. It is related to my research campaigns in Eritrea, between 1993 and 1996, where I had observed the different attitudes of the locals towards rock art. In particular, by chance I discovered an important and unknown rock art near the Bardà village, 23 km south west of Asmara (Calegari 1999).

Perhaps I caused a first, real moment of ‘rupture’ with the archaeological system in 1999, at the XVII Valcamonica Symposium with my lecture. The theme of the Symposium was ‘Deciphering the image’, a theme suggesting interpreting rock art as a prelude to the invention of modern writing. In short, the research for a logical structure of art, an analysis which I did not feel I could share.

It was a bas-relief, which could be attributed to the first millennium BC. The local people, who were Christian, used to say that it was the representation of the Mother of Jesus among Saints and Angels. The place was called Ba’attì Mariam, Mary’s cave. It was the object of veneration and of some legends. (Figures 2 a,b)

So I decided, in cooperation with the psychoanalyst Gaetano Roi, that my lecture would only be one of images accompanied by sounds and music, and I would not say a single word! Neolithic paintings, unpublished, portraying cattle painted in a cave in Eritrea were accompanied for several minutes by moos. 16

Giulio Calegari: Convergences: Archaeology and Art

Figure 3: Envelope with the Ba’atti Mariam rock presented in several conferences

Other times I have tried to transform a lecture into an artistic language, moving at the same time between scientific and artistic environments. After a lecture on experimental archaeology, with Gianni Veronesi, I picked up the flint flakes which had come off during our reproduction of artefacts in splintered stone. These splinters became the illustration for an ‘Art book’ (Figure 4) published by Pulcinoelefante in a limited edition. The title was ‘I believe in things until I see them’. The whole book is composed of only this sentence: ‘If the past were always the same we would have used it all up’ (Calegari 1998).

Figures 2a, b: The Ba’atti Mariam bas-relief in Eritrea

In particular, I discovered that the bas-relief was scratched by the inhabitants of the nearby village to extract powder and fragments of rock. The fragments would then be eaten, or worn as sacred substances. I confess that, in addition to the discovery, this greatly struck me. It does not happen every day that one comes across an ancient example of rock art still the object of a cult that, even though updated, has reached our days. This is the reason why, having occasion to talk about the Ba’attì Mariam bas-relief in several international conferences, I introduced myself as ‘dealer of performative experiences’. I have invited my conference colleagues to taste the pulverized rock, which I was carrying under my jacket in authenticated small envelopes. (Figure 3) I had obviously removed it from a point on the rock far away from the images, but the surprise of and the impact with the public was nevertheless remarkable.

Figure 4: Art book with an illustration made with flint flakes

‘Art books’ are by their nature a light and seductive instrument able to melt a poetic or aesthetic message with words. (Figure 5) Many times I have addressed myself to this means of expression, and I think it would be useful if adopted by many scholars, together with the traditional lexicon. It would give a breath of air to an obsolete language, and it would open a new way of communication, made of synthesis and rigour, but able to open to imagination.

I cannot avoid thinking that it is preferable to see this work eaten and consumed by the faithful, rather than killed and devoured by tourism. Or to see it ‘mummified’ in a time beyond ours, perhaps protected by a transparent layer, destined to collect mould, damp, filth and breakages.

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research

Figure 5: Art book containing memories and discoveries

Even to travel the whole night among caves and places where there are traces of prehistory with artists and poets, musicians and scholars is important. Listening to the resounding landscape, the murmur of water and the crackling of fire, to reflect on the presence of man and to open to new and emotional questions. But this is a different story. I had another occasion to ‘melt’ the rigidity of certain scientific certainties, which I did on several occasions by breaking a written piece of mine into its components. I did one of these presentations in 2009 at the Filodrammatici theatre in Milan. While three people were randomly reading fragments of a publication of mine on the Lower Palaeolithic of Eritrea, I was instinctively recomposing the words I could hear.

Figure 6: Detail of a performative moment with words, drawings, and voice which, if deconstructed, acquire new meanings

classifying some fossil bones of the cave bear. I handed to her the bones left over from my meal, and she kept dating, classifying and drawing these finds of mine as well. I thought that if everybody did that, documenting one’s own daily meals, future archaeologists would be spared much fatigue.

I was then writing thoughts and drawings on sheets of transparent acetate, with a water felt-tipped pen. (Figure 6) I was putting these sheets one after the other in a glass basin full of water. Words and drawings were projected with an epidiascope on a large screen while they were dissolving in water. A jazz singer was interpreting in her turn the dissolving words. This is a work susceptible of many interpretations.

I also happened to read some pages of daily papers from 1958 which were wrapping some Neolithic finds, during a lecture at the National History Museum in Milan (again with Francesco Marelli’s musical accompaniment). The news that I was finding in those daily papers represented the context and the historical moment of the time of Professor Cornaggia Castiglioni, who had studied those finds and wrapped them in those newspaper sheets.

Actually I was interested in moving from a rigorous script to a fragmented rereading of it. This reading, done by people unfamiliar with archaeology, was suggesting new sentences and drawings which were still recalling the topic but were composed with a different meaning, were ending up vanishing in water and in time. As the singer’s voice which was emotionally grasping the various passages. In this way ancient finds were offering chances for a poetic vision and a creative moment.

I will briefly mention a more conceptual and ‘cold’ piece of work, which I managed to exhibit in various art galleries, from Milan to Rome. I was enclosing very short descriptions of archaeological areas and of finds investigated by me in envelopes, which had been sent to me by important scholars and institutes. I would print on the envelopes the latitude and longitude of the areas involved in my researches. Once sealed the envelopes were not to be opened and became aesthetic objects. (Figure 7)

Still in Milan, in 2010, during the Triennale Vision Lab Science and Art crossing, I did a performance of irony and provocation. I sat at a smartly laid table and I started to eat a roasted chicken. In front of me a large TV set which was showing a cave of archaeological interest. Next to me a scholar of prehistoric archaeology (Barbara Cermeson) was drawing, measuring and 18

Giulio Calegari: Convergences: Archaeology and Art

putting the musical results together with sign and colour. In this fellowship between art and archaeology it is possible to make more ‘classical’, or figurative, works, where the experience in the archaeological area is underlined and recalled. I have moved in this direction as well, but, as I said earlier, I have preferred to quote my experiences more closely related to performances. There are experiences which I consider decisively more provocative and in tune with the choice of rupture and desired cross fertilization. I shall only mention some of my figurative works like that on the front page of issue XXXI, 2017 of SIBRIUM, the journal of the Centro di Studi Preistorici e Archeologici in Varese. (Figure 9)

Figure 7: Envelopes of letters containing memories of places and of discoveries. Unique copy, with geographical directions

Going back to rock art and to music, I considered an interesting Neolithic image in the Sullùm Ba’attì Cave in Eritrea. It showed a bovine animal surrounded by highly stylised human figures in the shape of a harpoon. (Figure 8) I thought I recognized in this image a strong sense of rhythm. Among other things, an old Eritrea woman, seeing that painting, told me that in her village, during the sacrifice of a big bull, the people of the village would gather around it singing. I then asked a contemporary composer, Mario Totaro, if he thought it possible to grasp the rhythm expressed by the pictorial representation, getting an inspiration for a musical piece of work (Totaro 1998). He created an interesting piece for percussion, with title ‘Ba’attì’, which was performed on 24 February 1998 at the Natural History Museum in Milan, for the first time ever, by the percussionist Ivan Gambini. It can be heard online (Google or You Tube, click Totaro ba’atti)

Figure 9: The 2017 cover of ‘Sibrium’, a review of the Centre for Prehistoric and Archaeological Studies in Varese. Figurative works by Giulio Calegari have been combined with Roman mosaics

In this line, I thought of translating into music the decorations made with shells and fingers, on fragments of Neolithic shards with so-called ‘cardium prints’,

Figure 8: Sullum Ba’atti, Eritrea, detail of the painted wall

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research I would also like to mention some experimentations which I am carrying out with young artists involved in the use of new technologies where different techniques are in a dialogue. Expressions still at an embryonic stage, but pregnant with possibilities of expression. Works of digital narrative, where paintings using traditional technique (oil on canvas) with archaeological references take on life and become animated thanks to the new technologies. Such works are already shown in various shows and exhibitions.

Italiana Scienze Naturali Museo Civico Storia Naturale di Milano vol. 26(1). Calegari, G. 2006. Eritrean rock art experienced by the people. In: Le Secrétariat du Congrès (eds) Section 15: Préhistoire en Afrique / African Prehistory General Sessions and Posters. Acts of the XIVth UISPP Congress, University of Liège, Belgium 2-8 September 2001 (BAR International Series 1522): 163-165. Oxford: Archaeopress. Calegari, G. 2017. Aperture all’immaginario. Tra archeologia Africana e incertezze. Roma: Quodlibet. Totaro, M. 1998. Ba’attì. Archeologia Africana - Saggi occasionali 4: 76-83.

With these brief examples, which partly summarize my involvement in the dialogue Archaeology-Art, I have wanted to express my attempt to ‘inject’ a large dose of creativity in the archaeological environment. I do not exclude that this choice of mine may raise annoyed reactions. And perhaps this is what is needed! As far as I know, there are still few scholars of archaeology who move in the environment of contemporary art. This creates even more separation and incomprehension towards those languages which may offer new stimuli and open to unexpected possibilities of expression. Personally, I have always instinctively approached these two environments, extracting from both of them an exciting vision of the world: reason for curiosity and creativity. This reflection occupies a good part of my thinking, and has led me, since my earliest interests, to commit myself simultaneously to researches related to prehistoric archaeology and to express myself as an artist; as if it were the same activity: two sides of the same coin, each nurturing the other without invading their respective territories. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Giuliana Parodi for the translation of this chapter. Bibliography Calegari, G. 1989. Le incisioni rupestri di Taouardei (Gao, Mali). Problematica generale e repertorio iconografico. Memorie Società Italiana Scienze Naturali. Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano vol. 25(1). Calegari, G. (ed.) 1993. L’arte e l’ambiente del Sahara preistorico: dati e interpretazioni. Memorie Società Italiana Scienze Naturali. Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano vol.26(2). Calegari, G. 1998. Credo nelle cose finché non le vedo. (art book in a limited edition of 33 copies with an original piece of work enclosed). Osnago: Edizioni Pulcinoelefante. Calegari, G. 1999. L’arte rupestre dell’Eritrea repertorio ragionato ed esegesi iconografica. Memorie Società. 20

Art as Entangled Material Practices The Case of Late Iron Age Scandinavian Gold Foil Figures in the Making Ing-Marie Back Danielsson

Abstract This paper discusses Late Iron Age gold foil figures from Scandinavia. The figures can be described as tiny humanoid beings stamped on very thin gold foil. They date to c. AD 550–800, and are commonly interpreted in representationalist ways, and as being symbols. By contrast, this paper starts from the assumption that art and imagery are simultaneously material, affective and emergent. As a consequence the gold foil figures are seen as to be continuously in the making, where Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and agential realist ontology are especially helpful to illuminate the open-ended and generative character of the figures.

Introduction Scholarship in art history, anthropology and archaeology has tended to present art and imagery as static entities to be decoded. Iconographic, symbolic and semiotics analyses all take this kind of approach. Recent scholarship, influenced by new materialism, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in particular, has instead argued that matter is vibrant, affective and emergent (e.g. Bennett 2010; Barad 2007). In this paper I discuss what happens to our notion of art and imagery if we instead argue that art and imagery are simultaneously material, affective and emergent. How does this alter our accounts of art and imagery? Consequently, I discuss images as things in motion. I further investigate how such a stance may alter our understanding of the role of art and imagery, in both ancient and contemporary settings. Specifically, I turn to the theories of Karen Barad and her concept of intra-action and her agential realist ontology. In doing so, I explore the open-ended and generative character of art and imagery, and their mutability and ontological nature. This approach is in line with the renewed interest of contemporary artists in thinking of drawing as an open-ended and sensuous material practice (e.g. Sawdon and Marshall 2015); a practice that helps to articulate and connect human experience. Alongside this, archaeologists have begun to explore the ontological dimension of imagery, arguing for a symmetry between image making and world making (e.g. Alberti 2012; Back Danielsson et. al. 2012; Jones and Cochrane Forthcoming).

present. I start by briefly describing Barad’s theoretical engagements with, and explorations of, how matter comes to matter. I then describe the archaeological material of gold foil figures, and highlight their different processes of being and becoming different things in the past, and in the present. Material culture as entangled material practices Karen Barad (2003; 2007) has discussed how matter comes to matter at great length. She invents the concept of intra-action, and speaks of an agential realist ontology. Her work is the result of, but of course not limited to, a detailed study of physicist Niels Bohr’s sometimes implicit ontological views. Her agential realist ontology is an account of the performative production of material bodies (Barad 2003: 814), and should therefore be of the greatest interest to archaeologists, or indeed researchers in general that are devoted to studies of material culture. According to Barad, material bodies are produced through apparatuses, while at the same time the phenomena are produced. The apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced have a causal relationship that is the result of agential intraaction. To Barad, phenomena are ‘neither individual entities, nor mental impressions, but entangled material practices’ (2007: 334) and further ‘phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’’ (2003: 815, emphasis in the original). She thus draws our attention to the performative intraaction between objects, bodies, discourses, human and other non-human material things. Categories such as these intra-act as elements of a greater whole, where the world, when understood from within, is transformed in the process (Barad 2011: 147). She explains that it is not possible to gain knowledge by standing outside the world, but emphasizes that we are

The discussion departs from a kind of material culture that archaeologists call gold foil figures. They belong to a part (AD 550–800) of the Scandinavian Late Iron Age (AD 550–1050). The figures are commonly described as small images of human-like beings on thin gold foil. It is argued that qualities of affect, for instance, are created through specific intra-action, both in the past and in the 21

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research

Figure 1: Map of Scandinavia with most known locations of gold foil figures and patrices. (After Watt 2004: 168, Figure 1).

of the world, and as such ‘…are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse’ (Barad 2003: 829). Instead of departing from this assumption, Barad suggests categories such as for instance subject and object are only relationally distinct. They intra-act, and are mutually constituted and do not exist as individual components. Through specific intra-actions both boundaries and properties of what is included in the phenomena become determined, and specific embodied concepts become

meaningful (Barad 2003: 815). Of special importance to archaeologists is that both matter and meaning are considered materialized through practice (cf. Alberti and Marshall 2014: 22, 26), which means that no part precedes or exists before the other. I will now present, analyse and discuss the objects that archaeologists call gold foil figures through the lens of Barad’s concept of intra-action and her agential realist ontology. The figures will thus be approached as entangled material practices, or phenomena, that are continuously in the making through a variety of apparatuses. A focus on practice also highlights 22

Ing-Marie Back Danielsson: Art as Entangled Material Practices

the importance of recognizing the human body, and the manipulations it has made and experienced, as a central device for relating to the ongoing nature of the world. However, although of importance, discussions of the human body, and the humanoid bodies that can be recognized on the stamped thin gold foil, will not be addressed in this paper. They have been discussed previously both by myself, and other researchers, although of course a great deal can still be said in this respect. To a far lesser extent, if at all, Scandinavian Late Iron Age imagery, in this case gold foil figures, have been discussed in Baradian terms. Gold foil figures – background Gold foil figures are only known from today’s Denmark, Sweden and Norway thus making them an exclusive Scandinavian phenomenon (Figure 1). They date to c. AD 550–800, that is, to the period just before the more well-known Viking Age (AD 800–1050). Gold foil figures are very tiny, having a length of c. 1-2.5cm, and weighing less than one gram (Gullman 2004). Despite their small size, the figures may be very detailed in their execution. A few may further be highly stylised or vague in character, and some have been manipulated, as in crumpled up. The thin gold foils may show human-like single figures, couples, and from one place of discovery, also animals (Figures 2, 3). They are often, but not exclusively, found in ceremonial halls at so-called central places, that served several functions (e.g. Watt 2002: 81; cf. Herschend 1993 on halls). The place that has harboured the most figures is Sorte Muld on Bornholm, Denmark, with more than 2,300 figures. Other places have yielded far more modest numbers, ranging from a single, to a few, and occasionally, to more than one hundred figures.

Figure 2: Single gold foil figure from Sweden. (Source: Swedish History Museum (SHM). Licensed to the public under Creative Commons 2.5 Sweden).

The term or notion gold foil figure entered into books in the 18th century. Otto Sperling made a drawing of a gold foil couple that he published already in the year 1700 (Figure 4). Gold foil figures came to be named guldgubbar (Swedish) in a thesis by Nils-Henric Sjöborg in 1791, a notion he had heard people call the gold foil figures they occasionally found after storms on the Ravlunda beach in Skåne, Sweden. The notion guldgubbe has persisted ever since, and it embraces a vast category of tiny gold foil strips that, judging from their executed form or physical impressions made, are interpreted as pictorial symbols of human beings, or rather humanoid figures (Back Danielsson 1999: 7). Despite a very varied and multi-facetted material in terms of execution, size, geographical location, and dating, they are all treated as one and the same material: ‘guldgubbar’. Ever since their first appearance in books, the interpretations of gold foil figures have taken flavour from the current discourses of the time. For instance,

Figure 3: A gold foil couple from Helgö, Sweden. (Source: Swedish History Museum (SHM). Licensed to the public under Creative Commons 2.5 Sweden).

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research Earlier interpretations I will now briefly account for the most common interpretations of the gold foil figures, presented during the last decades. Archaeologist Margrethe Watt (e.g 1991a, 1991b; 2004; 2008) has foremost categorized, analysed and described the massive amounts of gold foil figures from Bornholm, Denmark, dating to the 6th century. To the largest extent the gold foil figures of Bornholm are single figures; less than 20 are couples. Watt also has contributed to shedding light on the connections between the gold foil figures retrieved on Bornholm with those recently excavated at the cultic place of Uppåkra in Skåne, Sweden, as well as other gold foil figures found in Denmark. Watt has maintained that the gold foil figures were utilized as a sort of templecoin, ‘a disposable oblation, given in connection to cultic activities’ (Watt 1991b: 99, my translation from Danish). Karl Hauck is in agreement with Watt that the gold foil figures could have been used as payment for services of a ritual character, an idea Lamm also agrees upon (Hauck 1994: 302; Lamm 2004).

Figure 4: A gold foil couple, as interpreted by Otto Sperling. (Source: Sperling 1700: Figure 24 on spread with figures, unnumbered page).

Further, archaeologist Jan Peder Lamm has made a compilation of the known figural gold foils in Sweden, published in 2004, with a specific analytic emphasis on the 26 gold foil couples that were encountered in and connection to halls on the sacred island of Helgö, Sweden, that date to the first half of the 8th century. Wilhelm Holmqvist (1960) described these figures as ‘dancing gods’. Bengt Söderberg (2005: 181) has discussed aristocratic networks, spatiality and border-crossing in Southern Scandinavia with special focus on three Danish aristocratic settings and two Swedish, Järrestad and Slöinge, where gold foil figures, or patrices to make them, have been retrieved. He suggests that perhaps several interpretations of the gold foil figures’ meanings could be combined or be valid. Ulla Mannering, archaeologist with textiles as her speciality, in her thesis from 2006, has in turn made interesting analyses of the clothes that the figures are seen to be wearing. She has shown that the depicted clothes and jewellery of the figures have their counterparts in real life (e.g. Mannering 1998: 41, 63-65). In 2009 Sharon Ratke published her thesis with an ambitious catalogue with photographs of many of the gold foil figures from Bornholm, and she also categorized many of the gold foil figures found in Denmark, Sweden and, to a very little extent, those from Norway. Magnus Rognstad Tangen (2010) recently presented a master thesis with a compilation on the Norwegian gold foil figures. These commendable research efforts have a few things in common. They want to know the real function of the figures (e. g. Lamm 2004; Mannering 2006: 37; Ratke 2009; Rangstad Tangen 2010) and express the view that the symbolic system of the figures has not been solved yet.

Sperling (1700) could only envision the gold foil couples, that is a foil showing two people standing in front of each other, as two males, one wearing secular clothing, the other in a priestly garb (Figure 4). Later, in the late 19th century or early 20th century, the same opposing figures were recognised as being of the opposite sexes, and soon came to be interpreted as ‘loving couples’ (Olsen 1909). The loving couple interpretation has persisted ever since. Jumping ahead a few decades, as the archaeological discipline became more professional in its excavation techniques, for instance, while at the same time the number of excavations increased due to a variety of reasons, the number of known finds of guldgubbar also increased. How they were used Gabriel Gustafson (1900: 92–3) suggested that the gold foil figures were fastened by an adhesive on some sort of foundation, perhaps wood, metal or cloth. C. J. Thomsen (1855: 299) also speculated that the figures were fastened on leather or clothes. Larsson and Lenntorp (2004: 23, 42), in a volume on Uppåkra, Sweden, put forward the idea that (some) gold foil figures had been attached to the posts of large buildings or halls by means of honey or fat. Erik Rosengren (2000: 12) has made the same suggestion for the posts of Slöinge. In my view, judging from the excavation results, gold foil figures have both been attached to roof-bearing posts and been deposited in post-holes. In addition, some may have been transformed into pendants. 24

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Not only archaeologists have been devoted to interpreting the gold foil figures – other disciplines have also sought to find their meanings. They have in common using Norse literature as their interpretational key or inspiration, which, by the way, archaeologists too have utilized. The efforts have concentrated on the figures per se and their possible identities, almost as if they were contemporary photographs (e.g. Hauck 1992; 1993; Watt 2001; see also criticism of this in for instance Bailey 2005: 12-13). Focussing on the gold foil couples, Magnus Olsen (1909), mentioned above, was of the opinion that the couples were representations of a loving couple, with a prominent association to a fertility cult found in the much later medieval text Skírnismál. They were in effect representations of the gods Frö and Gerd, argued Olsen. His interpretation was strongly criticized by Jöran Sahlgren (1928) and later by Daniel Sävborg (2006: 339), but also by Clunies Ross (1994), Simek (2002) and Ratke (2009). Despite these criticisms a number of scholars have interpreted Skírnismál and the couples as being connected to a fertility cult, for instance Gro Steinsland (1990, 1991), Sundqvist (2002), and Jan Peder Lamm (2004). Simek (2002: 475) argues that instead of mythic weddings, the gold foil couples are representations of dynastic weddings, and later together with Ratke (Ratke and Simek 2006) that the single figures were wraiths.

certain bodily areas of the figures. In other words, the practices and the events in which the figures partook are neglected, and as a result, the possibility to understand the figures in terms of affect is precluded. Another problem concerns the gold foil figures that are purposefully presented as vague, that is, the patrix itself, that was used to produce the figure, was made to present what we would describe as a vague or less human-like being. Before addressing the importance of these manipulations, I would like to describe how the gold foil figures came into being.

Gold foil figures in the making – in the past

The analysis of the gold in the foil figures has shown that the precious material was smelted many times and came from different origins (Gullman 2004: 113). We can already notice here the motility of gold as a material; the gold has been transformed in a variety of circumstances to become a variety of objects. The gold content of gold-foil figures has been scientifically measured, and it has been conclusively shown that the people who manufactured and used the foils showed very little, if any, concern with the gold content (Gullman 2004: 112–13). Gold foils within one and the same context demonstrate a great variety as regards the purity of the gold. Even die-identical figural foils from the same place may differ in gold content,

The majority of the gold foil figures are stamped on thin gold foil. A few are cut out directly of thin gold foil. In order to work a drop of gold into thin foil, repeated heating and steeping is demanded; if this is not done, the metal will easily fracture (Gullman 2004: 113). The stamped figures are made with the use of patrices of bronze (Lamm 2004: 109). Whereas a matrix has a depression into which the material is pressed, a patrix has a raised motif, over which thin material, in this case thin gold foil, is pressed or moulded (Figure 5). A solid bronze patrix produced the gold foil figure with a positive image in relief. Another way of putting this is that the patrix, the smith, the gold foil that had been hammered thin, etc., intra-acted to bring about the gold foil figure.

The main limitations of the approaches described above consist of regarding and treating the figures as representations and as having mere ritual or symbolic significance. Interpretations have also followed the conventional binary separation of matter and meaning, and they consequently have been made in representationalist terms. Although these analytical methods of course are important and have been fruitful, they are also problematic. One of the most problematic aspects concerns the disregard of the variety of bodily manipulations the figures have undergone, such as being crumpled up, or showing piercing activities on

Figure 5: making of a gold foil figure. (Source: Watt 1991a: 9, drawing by J. Kraglund).

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research such as gold foil numbers 737 and 1860 from Helgö, Sweden, containing 63 percent and 88.6 percent gold, respectively (Gullman 2004: 113). From this it can be concluded that other features of the foils, and not their gold purity, were deemed significant and important – such as the detailed production and formation of the figures themselves, the metal’s shiny quality, and the overall visual impression. This argument for the aesthetic significance of gold is further supported by the fact that figures were also occasionally made of other shining metals, such as silver and bronze. Equally, I would like to suggest that it was the process of production that was considered important. The ‘magic’ happened in the moment when smiths created the gold foil figures (or rather when the totality of the apparatuses of bodily production intra-acted and created the phenomenon). Manipulations In previous analyses (Back Danielsson 2010; 2012) I have described the manipulations the gold-foil figures have undergone as incorporated and added manipulations (Figures 6, 7). Incorporated manipulations are made when the figure itself is produced. These include the exaggerations or abbreviations (manipulations) of bodily attributes on the patrix used to make the foil figure. The most common exaggerations concern the eyes, the nose, and jewellery. Since it is known that jewellery carried significant details in pivotal stories or ceremonies (e.g. Magnus 2001), it is not surprising to find these elements in larger sizes. It is only the artisan/ smith that can make these incorporated manipulations, since this person is likely to be the one making the patrix. However, incorporated manipulations also include instances where the entity or body is only vaguely reminiscent of a humanoid being. These gold foils are seldom photographed properly, or engaged with, like the crystal clear ones or rather those that display more easily recognisable human characters. By contrast, added manipulations are made after the birth or manufacture of the figure. They may consist of adding details to it, or piercing certain body parts, or crumpling the figure up. The same artisan who created the figure could add a great variety of manipulations, but, importantly, added manipulations could also be made by other people during a single or multiple performances over the life of the figures. Already here it is evident that the figures were perceived as having affective qualities, that made people engage with them in specific ways. Also, these practices tell of the figures’ varieties of being and becoming different things or versions of themselves, throughout time.

Figure 6: Gold foil with incorporated manipulations from Slöinge, Sweden. (Source and photographer: Halland county museum. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons 2.5 Sweden).

Returning to the gold foil figures that are less humanlike or vague, it must be mentioned that these are rarely photographed, described or form part of the archaeological or indeed museum discussions/

Figure 7: Gold foil with added manipulations from Slöinge, Sweden. (Source and photographer: Halland county museum. Licensed to the public under Creative Commons 2.5 Sweden).

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discourses of gold foil figures. Instead, the crystalclear ones, with for us recognisable bodily limbs and postures, dominate. However, there is nothing to suggest that these figures were considered different from the ‘nice’ ones by the Late Iron Age people. Rather, my analysis of the pattern of distribution in one of the halls at Helgö, Sweden, for instance, reveals that the different kinds of gold foil figures were found in similar places (Back Danielsson forthcoming). All together, the important recognition of the incorporated and added manipulations more than indicates that we need to approach the figures or human-like entities in new ways in order to reach a deeper and more nuanced understanding of their itineraries in time and space (cf. Joyce and Gillespie 2015). Seemingly, in their animated states, for instance during performances in aristocratic halls, things were made to the figures. The reasons for such expressions or alterations probably were many, but one concerns size. Gold-foil figures are small. The size choice brings with it certain desirable and perhaps also unintended effects. Small figures or bodies may evoke emotions in the handler or viewer, such as wonder, awe, alterity, and/or empowerment (see Bailey 2005: 29, 33). But at the same time, encountering something small, a reminder of human-like, or god-like, bodies may engender feelings of humbleness, because the tiny entity/living could be perceived as needing you to take care of it. Gold foil figures in the making – in modern times When gold foil figures were discovered on the sandy beaches of Ravlunda (Figure 8), Sweden, or were presented in books for the first time during the 18th and 19th century, or indeed were unravelled during professional archaeological excavations, new apparatuses were used, that created new phenomena. We do not know what these items were called in prehistoric times, but they became the phenomenon guldgubbar through a variety of apparatuses that intra-acted, some of which date back to the 18th century. Also, archaeologists use various types of equipment during excavations, and later use a variety of measuring tools and methods to describe (that is creating) the material culture we come to identify as guldgubbar. They are also re-created, or represented through the use of photographic media. The photos commonly appear in enlarged formats in books or in digital media. For instance, they can be found on museum web pages that also offer zooming in alternatives. All these instantiations are examples of how different apparatuses create new phenomena, that are affective and effective in new ways. They demonstrate how, for instance, humans, discourse, computers, and photographs intra-act and bring about the phenomenon that we generically call a gold foil figure, but in actuality, material-wise, are different things (cf. the materiality of a photograph [a piece of

Figure 8: Gold foil figure from Ravlunda, Sweden. (Source: Swedish History Museum (SHM). Licensed to the public under Creative Commons 2.5 Sweden).

paper], and the materiality of a gold foil figure in real life [a tiny piece of metal]). The different components that are used when, for instance, photographing the specific material culture at hand (camera, lighting, flashes, room features, material in focus, photographer, etc.) deeply affect the outcome. In Barad’s words, these different components intra-act and create the new material culture in the form of a photograph, whether digital or analogue. The importance of apparatuses, which themselves at some point in time have been phenomena, are not very often elaborated upon. But one pertinent example might be mentioned in this context. It concerns the Danish artist Asger Jorn (b. 1914–d. 1973), and his collaboration with archaeologists in the 1950s and onwards. Jorn recognized that the figures on thin hammered gold from the Scandinavian Iron Age, foremost in the shape of golden bracteates, could be interpreted as an early form of independent Scandinavian art (Østergaard Pedersen 2017). Golden bracteates are a category of objects 27

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research that are earlier and at times contemporaneous with the gold foil figures that are discussed here. They are circular in shape, and usually c. 2–5 cm in diameter. In his efforts to make the point about a true Scandinavian and independent art style clear, Jorn started working with a professional photographer. Together they staged and photographed material culture from different prehistoric ages, not only gold bracteates, in specific affect enhancing ways, for instance through certain lighting arrangements, close-ups, etc. When doing so, it becomes clear that the choice of apparatuses create both boundaries and properties of the studied, or rather determined, phenomenon (Barad 2003: 815). Hence, issues of politics and power relations can also be considered in our research of art and imagery.

but also the matter. They (material and discourse) are intertwined (Barad 2007: 141). Gold foil figures are thus created as phenomena and matter through the intraaction with a variety of agencies. An example of this can be taken from the earlier mentioned Ravlunda beach in Sweden. At Ravlunda beach, the bourgeoisie enjoyed walking after storms in the 18th century, since the storm occasionally was able to unravel tiny, enigmatic gold foil figures. In this case, the following agencies intra-acted to bring out or create the ‘guldgubbar’: the storm, the sandy beach of Ravlunda, the gold foil strips, the imagery of the strips, the upper class humans walking on the beach, the bodies of humans, etc. These different discursive-material phenomena, human and non-human, together created or brought about the gold foil figures. Such a perspective also underlines that gold foil figures are not only things, but indeed ‘…a doing, a congealing of agency’ (Barad 2007: 151). Consequently, Barad’s concept of intra-action allows us to take ontological questions into consideration, and gives us an opportunity to understand and articulate a world that is entangled. A singular focus on the gold foil figure material alone would not recognize the figures to be a performative practice, with different agencies intra-acting and creating a phenomenon termed ‘guldgubbar’. Ultimately, the idea of images-inthe-making offer the realisation that images might be involved in complex and extended processes. This in turn may alter our accounts of art and imagery both in the past and in the present, and offer deeper and more nuanced understandings of the societies of which they were and are a part.

Conclusions The study of past art and imagery is still theoretically and methodologically underdeveloped in archaeology. Approaches to prehistoric imagery and art have traditionally circled around representation, symbolism and meaning. Such approaches have recently been questioned, as they deny art or imagery the possibility of doing and being something else, more specifically being and becoming something in themselves – a material entity that does more than signify or merely passively reflect or depict. In this paper I have instead departed from the assumption that archaeological art and imagery are things that are made. Not only that, I have placed an emphasis on art and imagery as something in the making, and as being part of network of relations between, for instance, materials, humans, non-humans, and places, that constantly undergo change. Specifically, I engaged Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action and her agential realist ontology in an analysis of a category of objects that archaeologists call gold foil figures. These figures are only found in Scandinavia and are dated to c. AD 550–800. Barad’s concepts along with an analysis of the figures throughout time enabled a discussion of the figures as being, meaning, and becoming a number of ‘things’, underlining the fact that the figurations undergo change over time.

Bibliography Alberti, B. 2012. Cut, pinch and pierce. Image as practice among the Early Formative La Candelaria, First Millennium AD, Northwest Argentina. In: I.M. Back Danielsson, F. Fahlander, and Y. Sjöstrand (eds) Encountering Imagery. Materialities, Perceptions, Relations: 13–28. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Alberti, B. and Marshall, Y. 2014. A Matter of Difference: Karen Barad, Ontology and Archaeological Bodies. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24: 19-36. Back Danielsson, I.-M. 1999. Engendering Performance in the Late Iron Age. Current Swedish Archaeology 7: 7-20. Back Danielsson, I.-M. 2010. Go Figure! Creating Intertwined Worlds in the Scandinavian Late Iron Age. In: Gheorghiu, D. and Cypher, A. (eds) Anthropomorphic and Zoomorphic Miniature Figures in Eurasia, Africa and Meso-America. Morphology, Materiality, Technology, Function and Context: 79–90. Oxford: Archaeopress. Back Danielsson, I.-M. 2012. The Rape of the Lock: or a comparison between miniature images of the eighth and eighteenth centuries. In: I.-M. Back Danielsson, F. Fahlander, and Y. Sjöstrand (eds). Encountering

Barad speaks of apparatuses of bodily production that produces certain phenomena. The apparatuses of bodily production could be for instance, archaeological equipment, discourse, humans, etc., and the phenomena produced could be gold foil figures. These have a causal relationship, argues Barad, that is the result of agential intra-action. When Barad talks about bodies they are to be understood in a general sense, and thus not only refer to human bodies, but also to non-human bodies as in, for instance, things. Barad’s intra-activity refers to how ‘discourse and matter are understood to be mutually constituted in the production of knowing’ (Barad 2007: 149). The concepts used, as well as the apparatuses, create not only the phenomena we study, 28

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Imagery. Materialities, Perceptions, Relations: 29–50. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Forthcoming Image Making and World Making. Two Peas in a Pod. Back Danielsson, I.-M., Fahlander, F., and Sjöstrand, Y. (eds) 2012. Encountering Imagery. Materialities, Perceptions, Relations. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Bailey, D. 2005. Prehistoric Figurines: Representation and Corporeality in the Neolithic. Abingdon: Routledge. Barad, K. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-831. Barad, K 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K 2011. Nature’s Queer Performativity. Qui parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19: 121–58. Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Clunies Ross, M. 1994. Prolonged Echoes. Old Norse myths in medieval Northern Society. Vol 1: The Myths. (The Viking collection 7). Odense: Oden-se University Press. Gullman, J. 2004. The gold of the figural gold foils. In: H. Clarke, and K. Lamm (eds), Excavations at Helgö XVI. Exotic and Sacral Finds from Helgö: 112–113. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International. Gustafson, G. 1900. Et fund af figurerede guldplader. Foreningen til norske fortidsmindesmaerkers bevaring Aarsberetning for 1899: 86–95. Hauck, K. 1992. Frümittelalterliche Bildüberlieferung und der organisierte Kult. In: K. Hauck (ed.) Der historische Horizont der Götterbild-Amulette aus der Übergangsepoche von der Spätantike zum Frümittelalter: 433-574. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Hauck, K. 1993. Die bremische Überlieferung zur GötterDreiheit Altuppsalas und die bornholmischen Goldfolien aus Sorte Muld. Frühmittelalterliche Studien 27: 409–79. Hauck, K. 1994. Götterbilder des spätantiken Polytheismus im Norden auf Votivgold-miniaturen. Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57: 301–5. Herschend, F. 1993. The Origin of the Hall in Southern Scandinavia. Tor: 175-199. Holmqvist, W. 1960. The Dancing gods. Acta Archaeologica XXXI: 101–27. Cochrane, A. and Meirion Jones, A. 2018. The Archaeology of Art. Materials, Practices, Affects. Routledge. Joyce, R. A. and Gillespie, S. D. 2015. Making Things out of Objects That Move. In: R. A. Joyce and S. D. Gillespie (eds) Things in Motion. Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice: 3–19. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Lamm, J. P. 2004. Figural gold foils found in Sweden: A study based on the discoveries from Helgö. In:

Gyllensvärd et al (eds) Excavations at Helgö XVI, Exotic and Sacral Finds from Helgö (Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien): 41–142. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Larsson, L. and Lenntorp, K.-M. 2004. The Enigmatic House. In: Larsson, L. (ed.) Continuity for Centuries. (Uppåkrastudier 10): 3-48. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Magnus, B. 2001The enigmatic brooches. In: B. Magnus (ed.) Roman gold and the development of early Germanic Kingdoms: 279-296. Stockholm: KVHAA. Mannering, U. 1998. Guldgubber: Et billede af yngre jernalders dragt. Unpublished dissertation, University of Copenhagen. Mannering, U. 2006. Billeder af Dragt. En analyse af påklædte figurer fra yngre jernalder i Skandinavien, Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Copenhagen. Olsen, M. 1909. Fra gammelnorsk myte og kultus. Maal og minne: 17-36. Østergaard Pedersen, T. 2017. Eigi einhamr. Om jernalderens guldbrakteater og den åbne krop som form i norrön visuell kultur. Unpublished dissertation, Aarhus University. Ratke, S. 2009. Guldgubber – Einblicke in die Volkerwanderungszeit. Bonn: Universitetet i Bonn. Ratke, S. and Simek, R. 2006. Guldgubber, Relics of PreChristian Law Rituals? In: Andrén, A. et al (eds) Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives. Origins, changes and interactions: 259-264. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Rosengren, E. 2000. Undersökningar av ett hövdingasäte på Bergagård i Slö-inge. Hallandsbygd 1999–2000: 10–13. Sahlgren, J. 1928. Sagan om Frö och Gerd. Namn och Bygd (Tidskrift för nordisk ortnamnsforskning): 1–19. Sävborg, D. 2006. Love among gods and men. Skírnismál and its tradition. In: A. Andrén, K. Jennbert, and C. Raudvere (eds) Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives. Origins, changes and interactions (Vägar till Midgård 8): 336–40. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Sawdon, P. and Marshall, R. (eds) 2015. Drawing Ambiguity: Beside the Lines of Contemporary Art. London: I. B. Tauris. Simek, R. 2002. Rich and Powerful: The Image of the Female Deity in Migration Age Scandinavia. In: G. Barnes and M. Clunies Ross, (eds), Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society. Proceedings of the 11th International Saga Conference Sydney: 468-479. Sjöborg, N. H. 1791. Topographia paroeciae Raflunda et monumentorum quae circa sunt. Lund. Sperling, O. 1700. De nummorum bracteatorum et cavorum Nostrae ac supe-rioris aetatis Origine and progressu. Lübeck.

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research Steinsland, G. 1990. De nordiske gullblekk med parmotiv og norrøn fyrsteideologi. Et tolkningsforslag. Collegium Medievale 1: 73-94. Steinsland, G. 1991. Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi: en undersøkelse av hierogami-myten i Skírnismál, Ynglingatal, Háleygjatal og Hyndluljóð. Larvik: Solum forlag. Sundqvist, O. 2002. Freyr’s offspring: rulers and religion in ancient Svea Society. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Revised edition. Söderberg, B. 2005. Aristokratisk rum och gränsöverskridande, Järrestad och sydöstra Skåne mellan region och rike 600-1100. Stockholm: RAÄ. Tangen, M. R. 2010. Gullgubber. En revitalisering av norske funn, unpiblished MA dissertation, Tronheim. Thomsen, C. J. 1855. Om Guldbracteaterne og Bracteaternes tidligste Brug som Mynt. Annaler for Nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie: 265–347. Watt, M. 1991a. Tilblivelse. Skalk 1: 8-11. Watt, M. 1991b. Sorte Muld. Høvdingesæde og kultcentrum fra Bornholms yngre jernalder. In: P. Mortensen and B. Rasmussen (eds): Fra Stamme til Stat i Danmark 2 (Jysk Arkæologisk Selskabs Skrifter XXII: 2): 89–106. Aarhus. Watt, M. 2001. ‘Gummor’ og ‘grodor’. Om kønsbestemmelse af guldgubber. In: B. Magnus et al. (eds), Vi får tacka Lamm: 219–228. Stockholm: The Museum of National Antiquities. Watt, M. 2002. Images of Women on ‘Guldgubber’ from the Merovigian Age. In: R. Simek, and W. Heizmann (eds) Mythological Woman, Studies in Memory of Lotte Motz, Studia Medievalia Septentrionalia 7: 81-91. Wien: Fassbaender Verlag. Watt, M. 2004. The Gold-Figure Foils (‘Guldgubbar’) from Uppåkra. In: Larsson, L. (ed.): Continuity for Centuries (Uppåkrastudier 10): 167-221. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Watt, M. 2008. Guldgubber. In: C. Adamsen et al (eds) Sorte Muld (Bornholms Museum Wormianum Kulturarvsstyrelsen): 43-53. Ystad.

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The Mediality of Rock and Metal Exploring Formal Analyses of Rock Art through Graffiti Fredrik Fahlander Abstract This paper explores a formal method of analysing cumulative visual expressions that do not rely on representation or iconographic mimesis. A study of a tagged roller shutter in central Stockholm revealed a number of non-discursive aspects of the visual culture of the graffiti scene. The ways in which the taggers adapted when the shutter became full stress aspects of visibility and indicate a hierarchy of the available space. That overlapping of tags was avoided suggests that older tags were respected even though the available area was limited. A parallel case study was performed on a Bronze Age rock art panel. The rock art, which is quite different from graffiti in most respects, nevertheless shows similar concerns with hierarchical space, horizontal distribution, and respect for previous images, and an ontological status of being something more than mere images.

Art in archaeology and the mediality of art The relation between art as concept and practice has a multifaceted history in archaeology (Leroi-Gourhan 1967; Chittock and Valdez 2016; Bailey 2017; Robb 2017; Sjöstrand 2017). Art as concept varies between disciplines and has undergone several proclamations of its death as well as attempts at resurrection over the years. In archaeology, visual expressions are either seen as direct reflections of culture or as symptoms of an overarching ideology or cosmology (AldhouseGreen 2004). The lion’s share of interpretations of prehistoric art tend to follow the iconological scheme of Panovsky in which the meaning of art is supposed to be understood from its social context. Especially in post-processual archaeologies, the meaning of an artistic expression is to be found ‘behind’ the image. A common theme for culture-historical, processual, and post-processual archaeology alike is the focus on imagery as representative, as pictures of something else. Art may be abstract, but even the most simple visual expressions tend to be translated or decoded as schematic or symbolic representations of more complex features. Art is only rarely allowed to be a material expression in itself. In recent archaeology and anthropology, however, the imagery as materiality has been explored (Gell 1993, 1998; Gosden 2001; Herva 2004; Jones 2006, 2015; Cochrane and Russell 2007; Osborne and Tanner 2007, Tilley 2008, Back Danielsson et al. 2012, Tilghman 2014; Fahlander 2012, 2015; van Eck 2015; Balm 2016; Sapwel 2016). In this research, the mediality1 of imagery is stressed but does not by any means replace iconographical approaches. It adds a necessary material dimension to the imagery and allows for certain generative abilities. However, despite this renewed interest in art as a process and material articulation, there is little consensus as to how to

approach visual expressions as materialities. When it comes to methodology there is a significant lack of useful methods (Cochrane and Russell 2007; Jones and Díaz-Guardamino 2017). Recently Peircean semiotics has been advocated as a tool to mediate between the materialist and the idealist approaches (Creese 2017; see also Sjöstrand 2017). It is, however, unclear in what way semiotic models actually contribute to the interpretation. Besides a number of individual case studies, there are not yet any broader attempts to formulate a more generalised and formal way of approaching art as both image and materiality. In this text I will explore a fairly straightforward, nonrepresentational way of understanding art in terms of material modes of visual articulation. In particular, I will use horizontal stratigraphies in order to understand visual expressions of rather different kinds. A vital part of the method consists of establishing how new additions relate both to previous images and to the mediality of the canvas. This enables the possibility to study variations, alterations, additions and displacements over time that provide a basis for a discussion about important aspects of the visual expression. The key point is that this can be achieved without any preconceived ideas of what the imagery is supposed to depict or symbolise. I take inspiration from a special type of visual expression, graffiti, in order to make sense of a much older and different visual mode of expression: Bronze Age rock art. There have been a few suggestions over the years relating rock art to a kind of prehistoric graffiti, but there are very few cases where such an epithet may apply. On the contrary, Bronze Age rock art is quite far from what we normally associate with graffiti. The intentions, mediality, motifs and role of the art in society differ quite greatly between the two. Rock art it is a rather time consuming enterprise even for cutting small figures in the bedrock. The imagery is far from being scribbled down, on the contrary, aspects

‘Mediality’ refers to the material and physical properties of the image, while ‘materiality’, which covers much the same aspects, also includes the potential generative and social aspects of the image as an actant (Belting 2005; Fahlander 2013, 2018). 1 

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research of size and complexity are crucial because every detail of an image has to be tediously hammered out. Modernday graffiti can also be time-consuming and is certainly carefully planned and performed, but when it comes to simpler motifs and tags, it only takes a few seconds to spray. However, when discussing visual art as an active and integrated materiality in social relations, the two forms of visual expression may actually be mutually informative. Both can be studied in terms of modes of visual expression, that is, the different ways in which the art relates to their respective material ‘canvas’, available space, and how new additions are adjusted to older ones. Since such modes often are intuitive, unspoken and not particularly formalised, the analysis must be based on the mediality of the art (Belting 2005).

stratigraphy and the untouchable status of previous tags on the shutter, a formal way of interpreting rock art emerged that helped to make sense of the seemingly random distribution of individual motifs on the rock. When fop met BZT.: a modern example of cumulative visual culture In a busy street, Swedenborgsgatan, in the heart of the Swedish capital of Stockholm, a small convenient store uses a roller shutter during the closed hours. As in many other cities, such shutters are favoured by graffiti artists and are rapidly filled with graffiti. In the photo taken in 2012 we see that the shutter is densely filled with combinations of letters in different styles and colours (Figure 1). The acronyms, or ‘tags’, are codified signatures, which normally consist of three to five letters or digits (Jonsson 2016: 3). Since graffiti is an illegal and underground movement we have few clues to their meanings or purposes. The main purpose of tagging is to claim a part of the graffiti ‘scene’. It is however, more that just an emblematic statement, but also involves a wide range of aspects such as ‘respect’ in terms of artistic and stylistic equilibrism (Kimvall 2015; Jonsson 2016).

By analysing the horizontal stratigraphy of art it is possible to establish important information about the meaning and purpose. The first case study concerns an analysis of a tagged roller shutter in central Stockholm, Sweden. When studied in detail, the graffiti revealed a number of key elements that exposed certain nondiscursive aspects of the practice, for instance, the ways in which the taggers solved difficulties that emerged when the shutter became filled with tags. Despite an apparent hierarchy of space, overlapping of tags is typically avoided and instead other creative ways to fit new tags within an already full canvas are explored. The study of the shutter spawned ways of thinking about the production of outdoor art that inspired ways of understanding some underlying principles regarding prehistoric rock art. A parallel case study was performed on a Bronze Age rock art panel about 100 km north-west of the modern city of Stockholm. By employing the experiences from the study of the shutter concerning hierarchical space, horizontal

However, we do not need to know what the tags represent to study how the shutter gradually became filled with graffiti. For example, we can study how different tags relate to each other and the surface, and despite lack of knowledge about graffiti culture, still reach some conclusions about what is important in this specific visual culture. First of all, it seems that the taggers have been keen to stick to the space of the shutter; only one tag is placed outside (BZT.) on the slider holder on the left. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that previous

Figure 1: A tagged roller shutter of a convenient store on Swedenborgsgatan, Stockholm 2012. Photo by the author.

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Fredrik Fahlander: The Mediality of Rock and Metal

tags generally are respected. When adding new tags, their shape and size are generally adapted in order to avoid superimposing earlier tags. Because the tags are in different colours, it is easier for us to establish a horizontal stratigraphy, that is, the sequence in which the tags have been added. Even though we cannot grasp the full process in detail it is possible to identify at least three distinctive phases. We can see that it started with the more orange, grey and yellow tags in the central area of the surface. Then, additional tags (red and black) have been added around the previous ones in a second phase, so that in the last phase, only small additional tags could be squeezed into empty spaces between the older ones. A particularly interesting tag is the two pink-coloured ‘Wt’ tags found at the bottom of the right and left corners of the shutter. They probably belong to phase two as they seem to adapt to the tags of the first phase and are superimposed by the aesthetically less expressive black tags (fop). It is interesting that the size of the tags is maximised while still retaining some expressionism in style within the available space between previous tags. Because the ‘Wt’ tags use the same colour they are likely to have been added on the same occasion. The duplication of the tag can be interpreted as a way to compensate for the peripheral location in the low corners of the shutter.

particular instance indicates both the importance of size (visibility?) and a hierarchical division of the space of the main ‘canvas’ (the shutter). Furthermore, it is also notable that a similar surface of similar material and colour was chosen for the larger BZT. tag. It could be seen as an argument for the significance of the mediality of the canvas. Both the ‘fop’ and the ‘BZT.’ tags are indications of a synchronous variability that can be informative about the world in which graffiti is a part. The graffiti of the shutter is obviously not the result of a single event, nor is it a planned composition, but something that emerged over time, created by different groups of individuals sharing the same forms of expression but differing in terms of visual culture. The horizontal analysis is able to infer several interesting aspects concerning the tagging practice without any concern for or any knowledge of what the characters mean or represent. An informed survey would surely add another layer of information, but the point here is that the tags can be discussed as material articulations without knowledge of their cultural context or meaning. What can be learned from the study is a formal method based on how different visual expressions relate to each other and a surface over time. By creating such a horizontal stratigraphy, we can identify both patterns and differences. Overall, one can assume that the tags have been added in different events, probably over a short period of time (a couple of months). There are clear indications that a tag represents something other than simple vandalism in the way that the older ones are respected when new ones are added (see also Kimvall 2015). We can assume that the available surface is hierarchically divided, with the central zone being the most preferred. The size of the tags is obviously significant since most tags maximise the available space. The materiality of the ‘canvas’ also seems to be significant, as the peripheral BZT. tag shows by its creative solution to a problem of resources (available space). Last but not least, the surface seems to have been used by different individuals/groups that do not fully share the same visual culture, as was evident from a number of tags that do not follow suit. In addition to this, we can also reflect on what these visual expressions do to us and how they may affect the environment they are situated in. What tangible social effects do they have and what role do they play in their contemporary milieu? On a more general level, it is undeniable that graffiti have generative properties. Graffiti and tags are not just an artistic expression and a statement; in some cases they are part of gentrification processes and the general decline of an area. It is not necessarily the graffiti that is the source of such a development, but it can certainly be part of such a structuring process that has little to do with the artists’ intentions or with the meaning of the figurative content. In this particular case, the filling of a public area with expressive tags, they seem to have

It is interesting to note that one tag (fop), which in terms of style more resembles plain text, in the lower right corner apparently belongs to a category of tags that differ from the others. It is most likely to have been added late during to the last phase. The fact that it flagrantly superimposes earlier tags and is partly sprayed outside the ‘canvas’ gives the impression that it was created by someone who is not part of the same collective as the rest and/or does not share the same stylistic and formal ideal. Without any profound knowledge of the tagging scene is it tempting to view the fop tag as something inspired by the previous ones, but added by someone who did not understand the visual culture of tagging. In that way, being a late addition, it can also be interpreted as a beginning of a breach of tradition where style or respect for previous tags is no longer important. Another example of a deviation from the norm is the previously mentioned peripheral location of ‘BZT.’. A small BZT. tag is also found squeezed in between older tags in the centre of the shutter. Perhaps the tagger was not satisfied with such a modest size and felt the need to make a visually much bigger tag to the right of the shutter. Whether this actually was the case or not is it still interesting that the tag is as big as the sliders would allow. It can be interpreted as a way to compensate for barely getting any space on the central surface, as well as being a strong example that the respect for the older tags actually is so great that you either squeeze a small tag where there is room or put it on the side. This 33

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research inspired amateurs who apparently stand outside the graffiti culture to express themselves in a similar way. This is only the first step in what can develop into a new chain of events initiated by the first tags. In most cases the story ends after such a first deviation, but in certain cases such an event may be pivotal. In some contexts, it is not impossible for such discontinuity to be the beginning of a newer tradition of tagging inspired by the previous tradition but not understanding or wanting to include everything from it. It may be argued that this example of graffiti tagging is about signs or icons rather than about imagery and art, but I would argue that the principle is the same as with images. Without knowing what the tags represent or mean, or what ideals govern the practice of tagging public environments, it is nevertheless possible to understand something about this type of visual expression by formal analysis of how they are organised and designed. In the following, I will apply a similar method and reasoning to a prehistoric Bronze Age rock art panel in order to create a timescale and highlight contrasts and patterns in how new images relate to older ones and their canvas, the rock. Through such horizontal stratigraphy it is possible to discuss difference and development and it is only when we identify such a sequence of events that we can get closer to the traditions and ideals that surround production of imagery on rock.

Figure 2: Typical Bronze Age rock art from southern Scandinavia (Boglösa 73: 1). The motifs, ships, cup-marks, humans, animals, wheel crosses, and foot soles etc, are painted red for visibility. Photo by the author.

same category without regard to its size, level of detail, aesthetics and relations to other motifs (Figure 3). An iconographical approach like this has been questioned in recent research in visual culture studies (O’Sullivan 2005; Khalip and Mitchell 2011; Rose and Tolia-Kelly 2012; Barrett and Bolt 2013). They underscore the key insight that imagery may have meaning and impact in other ways than as symbols or representations (Mitchell 1996, 2004). Indeed, a pecked rock art motif is also a material expression with particular properties that cannot be reduced to a representation based on the apparent pictorial content only. A vital aspect of the rock art lies in its physical form – its mediality. The rock has several important affordances and material properties (e.g. hard and resilient, static and immovable,

The art of making Bronze Age rock art the practice of pecking images into rock panels has a long tradition in northern Europe from c. 7000 BC (Gjerde 2010: 386). In the transition from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age at the beginning of the second century BC, a modified version of rock art begun to spread also in southern Scandinavia (Malmer 1981). The array of imagery is generally restricted to a limited range of images assumed to depict, boats, weapons and tools, humans, animals, foot soles, sun symbols or wheels (Figure 2). Bronze Age rock art research is by tradition focused on representation. The rock art imagery has consistently been understood as illustrations or reflections of cosmology, ideology, or everyday practice. This iconographical viewpoint has encouraged simplified one-to-one interpretations in which a pecked boat motif is taken as evidence for seafaring, and dense sites with many motifs automatically stand for either greater importance or the aggregation of many people. From such a perspective, rock art as visual expression thus becomes static, silent signs of a lost world. Due to a lack of a more elaborate ‘art perspective’, a boat motif becomes an image of a generalised ‘boat category’ lumped together with other images of the

Figure 3: ‘This is not a ship’ (made by the author after ‘The Treachery of Images’ by René Magritte, 1929).

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Fredrik Fahlander: The Mediality of Rock and Metal

smooth and textured etc.), which are essential aspects of the image (Tilley 2008; Fahlander 2012). A material perspective on imagery is thus needed to emphasise the particular qualities that affect the way it is produced and appropriated. From such a perspective, images, mediality and practice are intertwined instead of being separate aspects. Visual expressions such as rock art can hence be considered ‘material articulations’ – something between materiality and practice.

we need not be too concerned about such differences. Graffiti play with the style of letters, but they are still identifiable. The same goes for the Bronze Age boat motifs that also vary in style, but still are easily recognised as variations of the ‘same’ motif. When it comes to representation, both are allusive and unknown in terms of meaning. It is hardly possible to understand either of the two visual modes of expression only from decoding. A more problematic difference lies in the way we look at shutters and at the rock. The shutter is a symmetrical, flat surface, which causes only minor distortion when transformed to a digital photograph. The far from flat, slightly elevated rock face, however, is much more difficult to capture. There is no obvious angle from which to properly view rock art. In the following study I use both photographs from different angles (Figures 4 and 5) and a flat, two-dimensional tracing (Figure 7). The photographs show different aspects of the rock in terms of colours, cracks and

Rock art at Hemsta (Boglösa 131) Bronze Age rock art is a quite different visual mode of expression and different mediality from graffiti. The tags are made quickly but a single rock art motif can take hours to produce (Lødøen 2015). There are also significant differences between tags in the form of stylised acronyms and the more figurative rock art motifs. However, in terms of horizontal stratigraphy

Figure 4: The uppermost part of the Hemsta impediment. Photo by Einar Kjellén (Enköping county museum id: 131.1QqCBekHemsta)

Figure 5: Another view of the same panel. Photo by Einar Kjellén (Enköping county museum id: 131.1Ll CBshHemsta)

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research grooves. The motifs themselves are filled with paint in order to show up and are thus in many ways a matter of interpretation. Some of these aspects are also captured in the two-dimensional documentation. It does not register all the cracks and grooves of the rock visible in the photos, but illustrates variations in the pecking depth of the motifs (three grades of grey), which is an important parameter together with style and size.

symmetrically designed boats sharing the same alignment and arranged in two columns (A). Their prows are slightly turned inward and the hull is hammered out. The boat at the top of the right column is similar in type to the others, but is contour-cut instead of being hammered out. In all other respects this is nonetheless of similar type to the other type A motifs. Below the two columns are a few similar types of motif but these are smaller and have a much thinner hull, almost singlelined (B). Their prows are also extended but more as straight lines that sometimes are turned outwards. The boat between the two columns is a special case that falls between the types. The hull is almost single-lined, but with its prows clearly turned inwards. I will come back to this particular motif later. Finally there are also the two delicately pecked boats with hatched hulls (C). These are clearly different from the other types and in fact a rare sight in Bronze Age rock art. To these motifs we can also add a group of six zoomorphs (D) and the cluster of cupmarks (E).

The panels in question are situated on the Hemsta rock outcrop (Boglösa 131:1) in the parish of Boglösa about 100 km west of the modern capital of Stockholm in centraleastern Sweden. Hemsta is a 45 × 30 m large rock outcrop that due to land-lift rose out of the sea around 2500 BC as a result of the general land-lift process. It soon became filled with rock art during the second millennium BC, which comprises most of the common Bronze Age imagery. Of the roughly 670 individual motifs on the rock, 200 are classified as ‘ships’, 88 as ‘animals’, and 32 as ‘humans’ together with a few ‘foot soles’, ‘circles’, and about 240 cupmarks (Broström and Ihrestam 2016). The images on this outcrop were accumulated over a period up to a thousand years, which makes it necessary to study each panel individually. In this text I will consider a panel with mainly boat motifs located at the higher parts of the outcrop (Figures 4 and 5). If we look more closely at the photograph (Figure 4) we can see that the imagery actually is arranged in three panels delimited by the natural cracks and grooves in the rock. A long horizontal crack limits a lower part from an upper. The latter is further divided into two panels by two vertical cracks. It is these two panels I will analyse in this text. Bronze Age rock art tends to be adjusted to the cracks and grooves of the natural rock and in this case we can also note that the available area has been filled quite efficiently. For example, the column of boat motifs to the right becomes successively larger following the outline of the crack. This close relation to the microtopography of the rock is typical for Bronze Age rock art and constitutes an important aspect of the imagery. In the uppermost area we find a group of extra deep and large cupmarks and in Figure 4 it is easy to see how the boat images are situated as high up as possible on the outcrop. In the left column, they are placed close to the ridge and a dark grove in the rock. The elevation is not likely to be a matter of visibility since the rock face only is slightly curved. It seems, however, that the orientation of the rock art was significant as there are no images on the other side of the ridge.

Figure 6a: Types of motifs, A - E: Boats, zoomorphs and cupmarks

Figure 6b: The different elements of the boat motif.

There have been many efforts to sequence Bronze Age rock art motifs in relation to stylistic elements. Especially the common boat motif has been subject to several attempts to create a typology. Some are based on similar carved motifs on datable bronze objects (Kaul 1998) while others proceed from the altitude of typical styles in relation to the shoreline displacement (Sognnes 2003; Seitsonen 2005; Ling 2008). In general, prows that are turned inward are considered an early feature while prows turned outward are later. This is not an exact science, however; there are lots of hybrid forms that comprise both early and late features. There

Already at this point we have some interesting clues to what is important about the rock art, but before we continue to distinguish different phases in which individual motifs were added, we need to identify a relevant number of different types of boats that roughly correspond to the different tags in the graffiti example. (Figures 6a and 6b) First there are the large 36

Fredrik Fahlander: The Mediality of Rock and Metal

are also indications that some prow and keel extensions may in some cases be later additions or modifications of older motifs (Milstreu 2017). The cup marks are known from the Mesolithic to the present day and cannot be dated otherwise than by shore displacement. In this particular case, the cupmarks are situated on the highest point of the outcrop and cannot be older than c. 2500 BC when the rock surfaced out of the sea for the first time. There are no typologies at hand for the simple zoomorphs of the southern tradition, which can be from either the Stone Age or any period of the Bronze Age. In this particular area the type A boat motif has been typologically dated to Montelius period I and the type B to period II (Ling 2013: 48, 85). Type C is something quite different from the normal Bronze Age style of a boat. It is symptomatic that one of them actually stretches across the vertical crack and that the other one is merged with one of the zoomorphs. A fluid relation between the boat and animal motifs is a common phenomenon in Stone Age rock art (Sjöstrand 2011). Since they are superimposed by both type A and B motifs of the Early Bronze Age, it is likely that these are among the oldest motifs on the rock, perhaps even Neolithic.

of activity on the panel. In the first phase (I) we have the superimposed boats with hatched hulls (C). Because one of them is merged with one of the zoomorphs (D) it is likely that these belong to the same phase. The extra long and inward-turned prow extensions are also an indication that they represent an early type of boat motifs. Since the highest part of the outcrop seems to be the most prominent space, it would not be farfetched to argue that the cupmarks also are among the first additions to the outcrop. A few of them are extra large and deep-cut and may have been refurbished several times while the less deep cupmarks may have been added over time. The next phase (II) of motifs consists of the deep-cut boat motifs (A) that are strictly arranged in two columns separated by a crack in the rock. The distinct design, alignment, and depth constitute a great contrast to the previous delicately pecked boats with hatched hulls (C). The dominant style of the superimposition indicates that it was very much intentional and perhaps even an example of an iconoclash: a statement of power and domination (Latour 2002). The last phase (III) concerns the type B boats. One of these is also superimposed on one of the hatched boats and is thus later than those. What is evident is that type A and B motifs seem to avoid superimposing each other. The tricky question is to determine how they relate to the type A boats. In the two-dimensional documentation (Figure 7), a fifth boat of type B is identified in the middle of the right column. Note how its prows seem to be adjusted in order not to interfere

Three relative phases From these general observations is it possible to establish a rough sequence of events and the order in which the different motifs have been added to the rock. It is not possible to make a stratigraphy of the same detail as is the case with the graffiti tags, but not far from it. In all there are at least three identifiable phases

Figure 7: A two-dimensional documentation of the panel from Hemsta (Boglösa 131) that also captures variations in cutting depth. Note the additional fifth boat motif in the middle of right column. Modified from original documentation by Broström and Ihrestam (2016).

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research with the previous motifs. It gives the impression of being inserted between two type A motifs rather than vice versa. This suggests that the type B is indeed later than type A – although probably added fairly close in time.

The photos show how the boat motifs are crowded in this area even though there is plenty of space further down the rock. The type B motif inserted in the right column is an example of this spatial emphasis. Note also that there is no rock art on the northern side of the ridge. The direction is apparently of importance here. During the Early Bronze Age, the Hemsta outcrop was a small islet in the outer part of a shallow bay, which may indicate why this direction towards the open sea was important. After all, being an island, the only way to reach Hemsta during the Early Bronze Age was by boat (Fahlander 2013).

The order of the three suggested phases fit reasonably well with the general typology of the boat motif in the area. However, two questions remain: one concerns the aberrant boat motif between the two stacks and whether the columns of motifs grew from the bottom up or vice versa, and if one stack was produced before the other or they were made in parallel to each other. In previous texts (Fahlander 2012, 2013), I have suggested that the boat motifs of the two columns were added from the bottom up. However, considering the seeming importance of the highest point of the rock outcrop, it is perhaps more likely that the columns expanded from the top down. It is interesting that the two columns are not fully symmetrical but also comprise a certain level of stylistic variability. In the left column there is one motif with considerably thinner hull and in the right there is the contour-cut motif on top. The apparent similarity in design of the prows thus supports the general conclusion that the motifs of the stacks are fairly contemporary (from months to a couple of years), but not produced in a single event (Fahlander 2018). A similar kind of reasoning may also apply to the odd boat between the two stacks. Stylistically, because of the inward-turned prows, it would be of an earlier date than type A and B, but later than type C since it superimposes the prow of one of the type C boats. If we take the alignment and its divergent direction into account (the same as the two type C boats), it actually may belong to the earliest phase. This is also supported by the fact that the prow of the top boat of the left column actually seems to have been adjusted in order not to superimpose the keel of the boat in question (see enhancement in Figure 5).

Another typical topic is that all motifs, besides the first type C boats, respect both earlier images and the cracks in the rock. In the case of the graffiti tags this was interpreted as respect for the other groups on the ‘scene’. It is not likely, however, that the rock art boat motifs represent different groups of people. The differences in style are really too insignificant to work as totem insignia or emblematic signs. It is, however, simultaneously apparent that the rock art was not a product of one group sharing the same culture, ideology or cosmology. There is a certain level of competition here over the most prominent part of the Hemsta rock. There are also certain differences in design, alignment and relation to the microtopography of the canvas, the rock, between the first and the two latter phases. The fact that the motifs of the two main phases (I and II) generally respected earlier motif and natural cracks in the rock suggests that they may be more than just imagery. Considering the mediality and the timeconsuming practice of making the motifs and their apparent durability, we may rather suspect that they were produced this way, using this medium, in order to last. In this respect they differ from the earliest, possibly Neolithic type C boats. This could indicate a change in the ontological status of the boat motif. It is also interesting, and probably significant, that the relatively long prows of the boat motifs apparently were considered especially important. It would otherwise have been much simpler just to make them shorter in order to fit the available space between cracks and earlier motifs. Instead they are bent in different ways to fit. This is one small indication that the motifs were not depictions of real boats per se, but rather a special kind of feature of which extended keels and prows were significant elements. We have no means to know whether such objects actually existed in reality or in myth since there is no comparable material (the known Bronze Age vessels are either dug-out canoes or rather flat and square-shaped boats without pronounced prows or keels). Whether or not the rock art motifs are to be considered ‘art’ is a matter of definition, but what becomes clear from the study is that they are as much objects as they are images.

The three rough phases can certainly be divided further into several sub-phases, but that would mean extending the data further than what it really can account for. In this context, a distinction between an early, middle, and a later phase is sufficient to say something about the practice of making rock art. The ontological status of rock art as image and materiality So what can be learned from this succession of events? The Hemsta sequence reveals, as in the case of the tagged shutter, a few clues of what elements were considered important in Bronze Age rock art. I have already mentioned a similar hierarchy of space as in the case of the roller shutter. In this case, however, it is the highest part of the outcrop that is most prominent – and more specifically: the panel facing south-west. 38

Fredrik Fahlander: The Mediality of Rock and Metal

Summary: the art of metal and rock

‘scene’ (the fop tag). A similar scenario is also found on the Hemsta rock, where the early, atypical type C boat motifs were intentionally superimposed by large and deep-cut images in a different style. In this case too the first motifs (C) can be argued to have encouraged the production of new images (A) which also at a later point were followed by others (B) with apparently less understanding of both the visual format of stacking and the hierarchy of space.

It has been argued that the study of prehistoric art needs to consider issues of mediality to a higher degree. In order to study visual expressions as morethan-representative, a formal method of horizontal stratigraphy has been applied inspired by modern-day graffiti. By studying how new elements relate to older ones and the mediality of the ‘canvas’, is it possible to identify interesting information about the motifs themselves, but also about the social circumstances in which the imagery was produced and used.

Acknowledgement This study was made possible by the generous funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.

In contrast to the short-term accumulation of tags on the shutter, the Bronze Age rock art of the Hemsta panels comprises a considerably longer time frame. However, the accumulative character of both graffiti and rock art link the two visual expressions in a way that goes beyond their meaning, purpose and representation. The graffiti tags consist of a series of letters and characters that may or may not constitute acronyms or simply chosen to look ‘cool’. In that way they are as much images as a rock art boat motif. They are nonetheless easier to categorise, ‘BZT.’ Is the same whether it is spelled horizontally or vertically, in capitals or in lowercase. It is not obvious, however, that all boat motifs should be treated as ‘the same’. We need to carefully consider details such as the style of the keels and prows, the manner of the hull as well as other details such as size, symmetry and other elements such as ‘crew strokes’ and keel extensions etc. If graffiti tags are emblematic signs of groups on the graffiti ‘scene’, the rock art motifs are clearly something different. They show no indications of being emblematic, but are probably a quite different type of material articulation. Given the mediality of the rock and what that implies in terms of permanence, immobility and time-consuming production, the rock art is perhaps more related to e.g. magical purposes, for instance, a kind of votive offerings, than part of a type of socio-material communication in a similar way to the graffiti tags (Fahlander 2018).

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A vital part of the horizontal method consists of reconstructing how new elements relate both to previous images and to the mediality of the ‘canvas’. This is a kind of microarchaeologial approach that instead of seeking parallels or analogies it digs deeper in detail (Fahlander 2003). Horizontal stratigraphies also enable a time depth and the possibility to study variations, alterations, additions and displacements over time on a smaller timescale than typological chronologies allow. They can also be employed in order to explore the potential agency of the imagery, that is, how it can inspire to action, for example, by a particular design or placement. An example of this is found both in the graffiti example and in the rock art case. Apparently the first tags inspired others to follow, which in the end also evoked responses from individuals outside the 39

Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research art. In: B. Alberti, A. Jones, and J. Pollard (eds) Archaeology after Interpretation. Returning Materials to Archaeological Theory: 305-24.. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Fahlander, F. 2015. The skin I live in. The materiality of body imagery. In: C. Hedenstierna Jonson and A. Klevnäs (eds) Own and be owned, Archaeological perspectives of the concept of possessions: 49-72. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Fahlander, F. 2018. Bildbruk i mellanrum. Mälarvikens hällbilder under andra årtusendet fvt. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Gell, A. 1993. Wrapping in images. Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Gjerde, J. M. 2010. Rock art and Landscapes. Studies of Stone Age rock art from Northern Fennoscandia. Tromsø: University of Tromsø. Gosden, C. 2001. Making Sense. Archaeology and Aesthetics, World Archaeology 33: 163-7. Herva, V-P. 2004. Mind, materiality and the interpretation of Aegean Bronze Age art: from iconocentrism to a materialculture perspective. Oulu: Oulu Univ. Jones, A. 2006. Animated images. Images, agency and landscape in Kilmartin, Argyll. Journal of Material Culture 11 (1/2): 211-26. Jones, A. 2015. Rock art and the alchemy of bronze. Metal and images in Early Bronze Age Scotland. In: U., Bertilsson, P. Skoglund, and J. Ling (eds) Picturing the Bronze Age: 79-88. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Jones, A. M. and Díaz-Guardamino, M. 2017. ‘Enigmatic Images from Remote Prehistory’: Rock Art and Ontology from a European Perspective. In: B. David and I. J. McNiven (eds) The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Rock Art: 1-25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jonsson, B. 2016. Graffitins spänningsfält: en studie av graffitikultur och interventioner på en lokal arena. Diss. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Kaul, F. 1998. Ships on bronzes. A study in Bronze Age religion and iconography. Copenhagen: National Museum. Khalip, J. and Mitchell, R. 2011. Release – (Non-) Origination – Concepts. In: J. Khalip and R. Mitchell (eds) Releasing the image from literature to new media: 1-25. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kimvall, J. 2015. The G-word: virtuosity and violation, negotiating and transforming graffiti. Årsta: Dokument Press. Latour, B. 2002. What is iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars? In: Latour, B. and P. Weibel (eds) Iconoclash. Karlsruhe: ZKM Centre for Art and Media. Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1967. Treasures of Prehistoric Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Ling, J. 2008. Elevated rock art: towards a maritime understanding of Bronze Age rock art in northern

Bohuslän, Sweden. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg. Ling, J. 2013. Rock Art and Seascapes in Uppland. Oxford: Oxbow. Lødøen, T. 2015. The method and physical processes behind the making of hunters’ rock art in Western Norway: the experimental production of images. In: H. Stebergløkken, R. Berge, E. Lindgaard and H. Vangen Stuedal (eds) Ritual Landscapes and Borders within Rock Art Research. Papers in Honour of Professor Kalle Sognnes: 67-78. Oxford: Oxbow. Malmer, M. P. 1981. A chorological study of North European rock art. Stockholm: Vitterhets-, historie- och antikvitets-akademin. Milstreu, G. 2017. Re-cut rock art images (with a special emphasis on ship carvings). In: S. Bergerbrantd and A. Wessman (eds) New Perspectives on the Bronze Age: 281-88. Oxford: Archaeopress. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1996. What Do Pictures Really Want? October 77: 71-82. Mitchell, W. J. T. 2004. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. O’Sullivan, S. 2005. Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond representation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Osborne, R. and Tanner, J. (eds) 2007. Arts agency and art history. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Rose, G. and Tolia-Kelly, D. P. (eds) 2012. Visuality/ materiality: images, objects and practices. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Robb, J. 2017 ‘Art’ in Archaeology and Anthropology: An Overview of the Concept. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(4): 587 – 597. Sapwel, M. 2016. Understanding Palimpsest Rock Art with the Art as Agency Approach: Gell, Morphy, and Laxön, Nämforsen. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory: 1-25. Seitsonen, O. 2005. Shoreline displacement chronology of rock paintings at Lake Saimaa, eastern Finland. Before Farming: The Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers 2005(1): 1-21. Sjöstrand, Y. 2011. Med älgen i huvudrollen: Om fångstgropar, hällbilder och skärvstensvallar i mellersta Norrland. Stockholm: University of Stockholm. Sjöstrand, Y. 2017. The Concept of Art as Archaeologically Applicable. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(2): 371-388. Sognnes, K. 2003. On Shoreline Dating Of Rock Art, Acta Archaeologica 74: 189-209. Tilghman, B. C. 2014. On the Enigmatic Nature of Things in Anglo-Saxon Art. Different Visions: A Journal of New Perspectives on Medieval Art 4: 1-43. Tilley, C. 2008. Body and image: explorations in landscape phenomenology II. Oxford: Berg.

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The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery: At the Time of Production, Deposition, and Publication/Exhibition Makoto Tomii Abstract This paper sheds light on people’s perception of pottery, both in the past during its use after being created, and in its present archaeological presentation, by examining the frontal side of pottery both in an archaeological context in the past and in publications/exhibitions in the present. Materials are prehistoric Japanese pottery from the Jomon to Kofun periods, and both similarities and differences in cognition of pottery appearances between users in the prehistoric past and present archaeologists are focused on. It follows that precise record of an archaeological context and detailed research on archaeological materials could provide us with the key to understand the diverse sense of aesthetics of prehistoric pottery in the present as well as at that time.

Introduction: Jomon pottery rediscovered by a famous post-war artist

aesthetics of Jomon pottery did not attract the public attention for many years.

Since the late twentieth century, Japan’s Jomon pottery has become increasingly well-known to the world for its considerable antiquity and unique beauty of threedimensional form (Figure 1: 1). However, before the defeat in World War II, even domestic art historians did not include Jomon culture in the tradition of Japanese arts. Prior to the end of WWII, the Japanese educational system taught the national foundation myth as Japanese antiquity, and Jomon culture, which had been developed by hunter-gatherers over more than 10,000 years, was considered to have been the product of the indigenous people of Japan, who were regarded as possessing a separate culture. Jomon pottery was very far from an object of aesthetical interest in Japanese arts. From such a historical background, even after freedom of thought was ensured in post-war Japan, the

The subsequent Yayoi culture, which had been influenced by the continental farming cultures approximately 2500 years ago, and whose bearers were thought to be to the likely origins of present day Japanese people, produced quite different pottery (Figure 1: 2). One of the leading post-war archaeologists, Yukio Kobayashi, considered Yayoi pottery as having a structural beauty of a curved surface, without three-dimensional design elements which would break the sense of proportion (Kobayashi 1953). From Yayoi pottery onwards, Japanese ceramic history progressed, almost without dynamism in morphology, to the twentieth century. Thus, it is not surprising that evaluation of Japanese ceramics had long been made from the Japanese traditional viewpoint of a sense of balance, a taste for the simple and quiet, and the beauty of use (e.g. Oyama 1948, Kobayashi 1953, Takiguchi 1960).

Figure 1: Examples of prehistoric Japanese pottery. 1: Jomon pottery unearthed at Tama Newtown Loc. 72, Tokyo, assigned to the Middle Jomon period (c. 5000 BP); 2: Yayoi pottery unearthed at Yoshiko, Fukui prefecture, assigned to the Middle Yayoi period (c. 2000 BP).

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research It was one of the most famous twentieth-century Japanese artists who changed theories in ceramic history. Taro Okamoto (1911-1996) introduced the aesthetics of Jomon pottery to the public by writing a sensational article, ‘An essay on Jomon pottery’, in a traditional art magazine in 1952 (Okamoto 1952). Okamoto was born to a well-known caricaturist father, and studied art in the Tokyo Fine Arts School (presentday Tokyo University of the Arts). He then went to France, staying there for ten years from 1930, to improve his sense of art. During his stay in Paris, Okamoto was strongly influenced ideologically by Georges Bataille. Probably due to this ideological background to some degree, he was sometimes confidently proud of his introducing Jomon artefacts into the public; freeing Jomon pottery from archaeology’s monopoly (Okamoto 1969). The public in turn have often regarded him as a rediscoverer of Jomon pottery; a foremost philosopher of the post-war generation mentioned that ‘Okamoto’s discovery of the overwhelming beauty of Jomon pottery in contrast to elegant beauty of Yayoi pottery is a definite fact.’ (Nakamura 1979: 404).

concept of dual transcendence of a difference in time forwarded by Okamoto, I will provide some examples of prehistoric pottery in order to evaluate how much the attitude to a particular vessel was shared between the potters and users in the past, and between them and present artists and/or archaeologists. The key to this approach is frontality; which side of the pot was recognised as the front (or the back in some cases). Flame style pottery: symmetry or asymmetry In his epoch-making article, Okamoto (1952) subtly put a photograph of so-called flame style pottery (Figure 2: 1) in the very centre of the first page of a two-column text, and enthusiastically praised Jomon pottery for its asymmetry: discordance. This was written after his fateful encounter with Jomon pottery in 1951 at the special exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum, one of whose planners was a promising archaeologist: Ichiro Yawata. To Okamoto, what was free from concordance was its configuration; three-dimensional design elements such as projections and motives expressed by cordon. Cordon applied to its surface was moving wildly, energetically, and unrestrictedly with an aura of solidity (e.g. Figure 1: 1). Okamoto felt an emotional shock caused by its incredible asymmetry of form as a whole. This asymmetry was discord and dynamism (Okamoto 1952).

Okamoto’s revolutionary article was subtitled ‘A dialogue with the four-dimensional’. There, on the one hand, he stressed that the unrestrained motives expressed by cordons – clay strings – on the pottery surface was created by potters who he believed had transcended the generations in their thinking. Conversely, he implied that his sense of beauty also transcended the Japanese ceramic historical context and corresponded with Jomon culture. Following the

In reality, he must have seen the photograph of such a flame style vessel in the guidebook for the exhibition (Figure 2: 2), though he did not witness any original

Figure 2: Examples of flame style pottery of the Middle Jomon period, both unearthed at Umadaka, Nagaoka, Niigata prefecture (reprinted with the permission of Nagaoka Municipal Science Museum). No. 1 is the first pot of this style that was reconstructed from fragments to almost the original shape, and Okamoto used a photograph of this vessel on the first page of his article in 1952. No.2 is the one that Okamoto likely saw in the guidebook for the exhibition in 1951.

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Makoto Tomii: The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery

such vessels in the museum (Ishii 2016). One of the important points in his article was that he must have been well aware of its effectiveness in winning the hearts of the readers by making wise use of rhetoric and layout. Regardless of the fact that he had not seen an original before publishing the article, readers definitely try to grasp his aesthetics with reference to the frontpage photograph: the flame style vessel. Twelve years later, his collection of essays ‘Traditions of Japan’ (Okamoto 1964), which included this article and whose first edition appeared four years after its publication (Okamoto 1956), was republished in paperback with its book jacket featuring a close-up photograph fully displaying the flaming rim of the same vessel.

number four, and they are placed at regular intervals. The whole canvas of the pot is deliberately quartered by the vertical line-up composed of the rim projection, perforated handles, and clay string columns. Although the motives in all quadrants of the body differ in detail, the layout of the vortex, or double spiral clay strings, as well as the fill of the remaining area, is well standardised in each of the four. The overall configuration of the design elements might actually be better proportioned, and the silhouette of the whole vessel would display bilateral symmetry if it stood with either of its rim projections or the very middle of two projections centred in the image composition. This design standardisation was responsible for some unfortunate confusions. In ‘An Anthology of Primitive Art: Jomon Pottery’ published in 1964, which was edited chiefly by Sugao Yamanouchi, ‘the Father of Jomon studies’ (Sahara 2005: 287), captions of two similar vessels of this type were reversed (Yamanouchi et al. 1964: 200), and on the cover of ‘Ancient Jomon of Japan’ written by Junko Habu (2004), the photograph of this pottery type was the result of inversed printing.

What is important about his article here is his sense of ‘asymmetry’. It is true that every one of the four rim projections is asymmetric in its shape as seen from its outer front (Figures 2 and 3). The clay string motif on the body underneath the projection is also different on the right and left sides; in the shape of vortex, the direction of spiral twinning, and so forth. But the overall silhouette of flame style pottery is symmetric when it is seen from the frontal side of any one-rim projection. Within the flame style pottery, rim projections always

Thus, asymmetry of flame style pottery for Okamoto occurs only within the rigid framework for the

Figure 3: Developmental photographs of the vessels in Figure 2, both taken by Yasunori Nitta (reprinted with the permission of Nagaoka Municipal Science Museum). No.1 is of Figure 2-1. a: the frontal side of Figure 4(b). b: the frontal side of Okamoto’s article in 1951. c: the frontal side of Figure 4(a). d: the frontal side of Yawata’s contribution in 1953. No.2 is of Figure 2-2. a: the frontal side of Figure 6(a), b: the frontal side of Figure 6(b), c: the frontal side of Figure 2-2.

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research symmetric arrangement of every essential constituent. It is probably no coincidence that a rim projection slightly escapes from the centre in the photograph he used at the top of his article (Okamoto 1952: 3), though it is not certain whether or not he took that photograph himself, as he often did in his works.

surface then cannot be identified even by the most careful observation. All we can say is that the centre of a certain projection or the very middle between certain two projections might have been the beginning. Additionally, it has also so far proven impossible to examine the past user’s awareness of the intended frontal side of flame style pottery by excavation as most flame style vessels were unearthed in a mixture of other various artefacts from a cultural layer without any specific context. In short, it is extremely difficult to justify a comparison between the past and the present notion of the frontality in flame style pottery.

Instead, the real importance of Okamoto’s impression is his implication that there might have been a starting point in the total motif of decoration. He stated that those who stood to see Jomon pottery of asymmetric design would start to feel an irresistible impulse to move around the vessel from a certain side of its surface in order to check the overall decoration (Okamoto 1952: 7). If there were a story in the motif on pottery surface decoration, and if the story were expressed through turning around the body as a whole, past potters must have started decorating at a particular point on a particular side of the vessel, where the story opened. That starting point should be considered the frontal side for potter.

Frontality of flame style pottery in the present The holotype of the flame style pottery The first almost intact vessel of this style was unearthed at the Umadaka site, Nagaoka city, Niigata prefecture by Tokusaburo Kondo (1907-1945) with his father in 1936 (Figure 2-2). Before this discovery, there had been only fragments found belonging to this style. This flame style vessel has thus been regarded as the holotype specimen of this pottery style. According to Nakamura’s autobiographical essay published in 1995 with a photographic collection, a photograph of the holotype (Figure 4: a) was taken by Kozaburo Nakamura (19101994), who learned archaeology from Kondo’s family and who was a guardian of Kondo’s archaeological collections after his death, in perhaps the latter half of 1951. This vessel had initially been reconstructed

However, even if such a story-telling were existent, it would be impossible for any person in the present to share the story with the past potter, partly because complete pottery is very rarely excavated, and partly because flame style pottery was so elaborately decorated through a sophisticated technique of using clay strings that the order in which the strings were applied could potentially remain unreconstructed. The very beginning of the decoration/story on the outer

Figure 4: Photographs of the holotype specimen of flame style pottery (reprinted with the permission of Nagaoka Municipal Science Museum). a: The original reconstruction by Tokusaburo Kondo, the first person to discover this type of vessel. b: The second reconstruction by Kozaburo Nakamura, pupil of Kondo, for publication in the Umadaka excavation report.

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Makoto Tomii: The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery

with glue by Kondo from ninety one fragmented pieces, and he honestly recalled that Kondo’s reconstruction was unsophisticated so that it stood rather obliquely. He implied that its frontal side was selected in order that its inferior reconstruction would be covered up when photographed (Nakamura 1995). Its tilting was evident by careful observation of the two photographs which appeared in 1952 and 1953. The former was the snapshot on the front page of Okamoto’s article which was taken from the angle 30° anticlockwise from that of Nakamura’s photo, thus showing a slight rightward tilt (Okamoto 1952: 3). The latter was seen in ‘Complete Works of World Art 1: Primitive Times’ whose contributor to the Jomon pottery section was Ichiro Yawata. The photo angle of this pot was turned clockwise at an angle of 45° from that of Nakamura’s photo, thus showing faint leftward tilt (Yawata 1953: 31).

Okamoto’s article, however, differing from Okamoto’s sense, he put the projection into the very centre in image composition; possibly trying to keep his sense of balance, or symmetry. Meanwhile, Yawata did not change his sense of form, judging from his choice of the same frontal side in the book he edited ‘Complete Works of Ceramics 29: Jomon Pottery and Figurines’ published in 1963, though the angle of elevation was different (Yawata 1963: Plate 15). According to Nakamura’s comment on Yawata that he ‘has long devoted himself to the archaeology of Niigata’ (Nakamura 1995), it is probable that Yawata stuck to his view of this vessel which was regarded as a masterpiece of Jomon pottery by many archaeologists (e.g. Serizawa 1960, Nakamura and Esaka 1964). Okamoto also once adopted Yawata’s angle in the first edition of his essay ‘Traditions of Japan’ in 1956 (p. 4). He possibly barrowed the photo from Yawata’s work, though he declared in the preface of the book that all photographs used in the book were the product of his own photo-taking (Okamoto 1956: 50). The photo angle in the revised edition of the book, which was published by a different company in 1964, was changed again (Okamoto 1964: book jacket). There, it became the same as that which Nakamura used in the excavation monograph.

Here, it is clear that Nakamura at first chose to place more importance on the whole balance of pottery in silhouette than on design elements configuration while Yawata preferred that a rim projection came to the centre at the least possible expense of delicate balance. As for Okamoto, it is reasonable to assume that he also preferred to centre the rim projection, but that he set it slightly off the very centre possibly in order to create a sense of asymmetry.

Actually, from the year of publication of Umadaka excavations monograph onwards, it seems that this angle was almost exclusively adopted as the frontal side (Yoshida et al. 2014). Yawata’s preference seems to be very exceptional. Although a photo from the overhead view of the vessel in the monograph was mistakenly rotated clockwise through 90 degrees from the right angle (Nakamura 1958: Plate 17), Nakamura must have decided the frontal side of this holotype. Later, he made a mark on the inner surface of the pot with red ink in order to reflect his frontality (Miyao pers.com; Figure 5).

An archaeological monograph on the Umadaka excavations by Kondo was published in 1958 (Nakamura 1958). By that time, Nakamura had re-reconstructed the vessel (Nakamura 1995). It was a challenging task for him, taking months throughout the winter of 19521953 to complete (Nakamura 1970), and then he retook its photograph (Figure 4: b). For the publication, he changed the photo angle of the holotype. He focused on the same rim projection that was selected in

Figure 5: Overhead views of the holotype of flame style pottery with a red mark indicating the frontal side: a: Photograph appearing in the 1958 excavation report. b: Photograph appearing in Nakamura’s 1995 autobiographical essay (reprinted with the permission of Nagaoka Municipal Science Museum). c: Red mark made by Nakamura on the inner surface to indicate the front of this pot, clearly showing his frontality. d: close-up of the mark. Colour-balance in both c and d has been modified to emphasise the mark.

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Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research The overhead view photograph was correctly arranged in his autobiographical photo essay (Nakamura 1995: Plate 58). This side was adopted by Ken Domon (19091990), who was one of the foremost photographers of the post-war era in Japan, in a magazine on photography in 1959 (Oguma 2001: 4). Domon had had an interest in archaeology from his youth and visited Nakamura in Nagaoka several times. In ‘Complete Works of World Art 1: Japan (1) Prehistory’ published in 1960 (Takiguchi 1960: Photogravure 2), Chosuke Serizawa, who was a wellrespected member of the post-war Japanese prehistoric archaeology community at that time, and who had studied photography under Domon, gave a commentary on the holotype (Serizawa 1960). The photo in the book was possibly taken by Domon, whose name was listed in the acknowledgements. From the same publisher, Okamoto’s revised edition of ‘Traditions of Japan’ was published in 1964, and this photo was reused as its book jacket. In the same year as Okamoto’s revised book, the above-mentioned book edited by Yamanouchi’s appeared, and despite being selected by a different photographer, the angle from which this holotype was photographed followed suit (Yamanouchi et al. 1964: Plate 145).

very same angle, but principally because Nakamura, the guardian of the vessel, made a clear decision with a bold mark. They preferred the angle at which one of the four rim projections came to the centre and the selected projection could show a well-proportioned form with the least tilt. Other flame style vessels There is another vessel of this type that has similarly appeared in many books of prehistoric art (Figure 2-2), and it was also excavated at the Umadaka site by Kondo (Nakamura 1958). This seems to have been regarded as the second representative of flame style pottery until a series of excavations at the Sasayama site near Nagaoka unearthed a good assemblage of flame style vessels, which were later designated as a national treasure. It was a photograph of this vessel in the guidebook of the exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum in 1951 which introduced Okamoto to flame style pottery, as mentioned above (Ishii 2016). This vessel has always been shown from the same side in various books, and as such its frontal side can be regarded as fixed in the present. The Umadaka excavations report by Nakamura also showed the same frontality. Although it is not certain whether the present frontal side was determined by Nakamura or not, the frontality of this second representative of the flame style vessels has been consistently shared among most contemporary archaeologists.

The frontal side of the holotype specimen of flame style pottery has mostly been shared between present leading artists and prehistoric archaeologists since Nakamura published the excavations report of the Umadaka site, from which it had been unearthed. It is reasonable to think that this frontal side was fixed partly because the two contemporary, well-known artists in Japan focused on the same vessel from the

This might be partly because only one rim projection has a rhombic shaped hole on its upper right while

Figure 6: Photographs from different angles of the flame style pottery shown as Figure 2-2, demonstrating a tilting of this pot (reprinted with the permission of Nagaoka Municipal Science Museum). a: Clockwise rotation from that of Figure 2-2. b: Anticlockwise rotation from that of Figure 2-2.

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Makoto Tomii: The Diverse Sense of Frontality of Prehistoric Pottery

the other three have round shaped ones in the same location (see Figure 3). Each hole in this part of the four projections usually takes a rhombic shape in this type of vessel. There might, however, be other reasons, such as the preservation conditions of the surface and/or tilting. Differing from the case of the holotype, which had also tilted in the first reconstruction, this vessel was able to obscure the tilt when the rim projection was centred in image composition (Figure 6). Additionally, the plastered area for lost fragments around the frontal side appears narrower than on the opposite side of the body.

com/2012/11/15/dont-miss-these-fabulous-flamepots-from-five-thousand-years-ago/>, viewed on 12th January 2018). After its return to Nagaoka in 2013, the front, as presented to the public in the flyer for the triumphal-return exhibition, was side D, though side B was the front in the show case of the exhibition (see the photo appearing in , viewed on 19th February 2018). It can be concluded that, to a large degree, the frontal side of this vessel seems to vary according to the preference of the person in charge of publication/exhibition respectively. This is a different case from the two vessels found at the Umadaka site. The main reasons of such diversity might be that it is well-balanced in all directions and its condition is relatively equally preserved in every quadrant.

On the contrary to the two well-known vessels, the frontal side of the flame style vessel which was excavated at the Iwanohara site, also located in Nagaoka city, is varied at exhibitions (Figure 7). This vessel was first introduced as one of several examples of flame style pottery in the excavation report issued in 1981, in which side A was looking forwards (Komagata and Terasaki 1981: plate 41). However, of all the flame style vessels, this piece has perhaps impressed the highest number of overseas minds because it was exhibited in the British Museum for four months from October in 2012 to January in 2013.

In short, it is safe to conclude that a rim projection is centred as the frontal side in image composition for photo-taking as well as exhibiting, and that a sense of form also features in such decision-making of the front. While it is possible that a people in the present share a sense of frontality with people in the past based on the rim-projection factor, it is uncertain, however, which of the four projections was considered the front by the past maker/user(s), and a hypothetical frontal side in the present is too hard to be successfully determined unless: (a) the starting point of decoration can be confidently identified, or (b) an excavation can indicate the past frontality in some kind of archaeological context. Another factor, that being a vessel’s form/ balance, is possibly far from the past potter’s intention since tilt might have been caused: (a) during the time between the final stage of decorating and the end of firing, and/or (b) by unsophisticated post-excavation reconstruction of fragments to the original shape. This factor also makes it extremely difficult for us to share frontality with the past potter. However, important to this paper is the potter’s uncontrollability, which might have already been exposed in the past. It might occasionally happen that the final product did

During the exhibition, side B was facing the entrance in October (suggested by a photograph featured in an internet blogat , viewed on 12th January 2018), while in the pre-exhibition campaigning on the Internet it was featured at almost a right angle to that side (side C). Thus, the pre-exhibition campaign angle was not reflected in the orientation of the vessel during the exhibition. Furthermore, it cannot be denied that there might have been a change in orientation at some point during the exhibition, according to some blogs on the internet, if the photo was taken from exactly the same angle as the above-mentioned one (see the photo appearing in