An Iraqi/German pair of artists
just pulled off what might be one of the most digitally-enhanced art
heists in recent time. They covertly scanned the Nefertiti bust (with an Xbox 360 Kinect sensor, no less) and released the 3D printing plans online. They did so as an act of defiance, as the bust was actually looted from an Egyptian site by German archaeologists.[x]
Last October, two artists entered the Neues Museum in Berlin, where they
clandestinely scanned the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the state museum’s
prized gem. Three months later, they released the collected 3D dataset
online as a torrent, providing completely free access under public
domain to the one object in the museum’s collection off-limits to
photographers. Anyone may download
and remix the information now; the artists themselves used it to create
a 3D-printed, one-to-one polymer resin model they claim is the most
precise replica of the bust ever made, with just micrometer variations.
That bust now resides permanently in the American University of Cairo as
a stand-in for the original, 3,300-year-old work that was removed from
its country of origin shortly after its discovery in 1912 by German
archaeologists in Amarna.
Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles with the 3D bust in Cairo
The project, called “The Other Nefertiti,” is the work of German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri and German artist Jan Nikolai Nelles,
who consider their actions an artistic intervention to make cultural
objects publicly available to all. For years, Germany and Egypt have
hotly disputed
the rightful location of the stucco-coated, limestone Queen, with
Egyptian officials claiming that she left the country illegally and demanding
the Neues Museum return her. With this controversy of ownership in
mind, Al-Badri and Nelles also want, more broadly, for museums to
reassess their collections with a critical eye and consider how they
present the narratives of objects from other cultures they own as a
result of colonial histories.
The Neues Museum, which the artists believe knows about their project
but has chosen not to respond, is particularly guarded towards
accessibility to data concerning its collections. According to the pair,
although the museum has scanned Nefertiti’s bust, it will not make the
information public — a choice that increasingly seems backwards as more
and more museums around the world are encouraging the public to access
their collections, often through digitization projects. Notably, the
British Museum has hosted
a “scanathon” where visitors scanned objects on display with their
smartphones to crowdsource the creation of a digital archive — an event
that contrasts starkly with Al-Badri and Nelles’s covert deed.
3D rendering of the bust of Nefertiti
“We appeal to [the Neues Museum] and those in charge behind it to
rethink their attitude,” Al-Badri told Hyperallergic. “It is very simple
to achieve a great outreach by opening their archives to the public
domain, where cultural heritage is really accessible for everybody and
can’t be possessed.”
In a gesture of clear defiance to institutional order, Al-Badri and Nelles leaked
the information at Europe’s largest hacker conference, the annual Chaos
Communication Congress. Within 24 hours, at least 1,000 people had
already downloaded the torrent from the original seed, and many of them
became seeders as well. Since then, the pair has also received requests
from Egyptian universities asking to use the information for academic
purposes and even businesses wondering if they may use it to create
souvenirs. Nefertiti’s bust is one of the most copied works from Ancient
Egypt — aside from those with illicit intents, others have used photogrammetry
to reconstruct it — and its allure and high-profile presence make it a
particularly charged work to engage with in discussions of ownership and
institutional representations of artifacts.
“The head of Nefertiti represents all
the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world
currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt,”
Al-Badri said. “Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate
for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of
important objects can be found in Western museums and private
collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures
continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic
struggles.”
Al-Badri and Nelles take issue, for instance, with the Neues Museum’s
method of displaying the bust, which apparently does not provide
viewers with any context of how it arrived at the museum — thus
transforming it and creating a new history tantamount to fiction, they
believe. Over the years, the bust has become a symbol of German identity,
a status cemented by the fact that the museum is state-run, and many
Egyptians have long condemned this shaping of identity with an object
from their cultural heritage.
Ultimately, the artists hope their actions will place pressure on not
only the Neues Museum but on all museums to repatriate objects to the
communities and nations from which they came.
Rather than viewing such
an idea as radical, they see it as pragmatic, as a logical update to
cultural institutions in the digital era: especially given the
technological possibilities of today, the pair believes museums who
repatriate artifacts could then show copies or digital representatives
of them. Many people have already createdtheirown Nefertitis from
the released data; the 3D statue in the American University in Cairo
stands as such an example of Al-Badri and Nelles’s ideals for the future
of museums, in addition to being one immediate solution that may arise
from individual action.
“Luckily there are ways where we
don’t even need any topdown effort from institutions or museums,”
Al-Badri said, “but where the people can reclaim the museums as their
public space through alternative virtual realities, fiction, or
captivating the objects like we did.”
If you ever feel like archaeological mysteries are impossible to solve without positing aliens, just remember that archaeologists ONLY JUST NOW realised that wet sand is easier to drag stuff along on than dry sand… and that this probably means Egyptian images showing people pouring water from vases in front of stone blocks as they were pulled are probably actually depicting the way those stones were pulled, not some religious ritual of “blessing the rocks”.
FYI in academia, “probably had religious significance” means “I haven’t got a clue what this is for”.
People who aren’t academics, but who have knowledge of things like spinning fibre, knitting, carving, smithing, building, hairdressing etc, keep on astounding academia by having insights into stuff they thought was a mystery.
Female figurine from the Hohle Fels cave near Stuttgart, about 35,000 years old. Interpreted as a pornographic pin-up.
“The Earliest Pornography” says Science Now, describing the 35,000 year old ivory figurine that’s been dug up in a cave near Stuttgart. The tiny statuette is of a female with exaggerated breasts and vulva. According to Paul Mellars, one of the archaeologist twits who commented on the find for Nature, this makes the figurine “pornographic.” Nature is even titling its article, “Prehistoric Pin Up.” It’s the Venus of Willendorf double standard all over again. Ancient figures of naked pregnant women are interpreted by smirking male archaeologists as pornography, while equally sexualized images of men are assumed to depict gods or shamans. Or even hunters or warriors. Funny, huh?
Consider: phallic images from the Paleolithic are at least 28,000 years old. Neolithic cultures all over the world seemed to have a thing for sculptures with enormous erect phalluses. Ancient civilizations were awash in images of male genitalia, from the Indian lingam to the Egyptian benben to the Greek herm. The Romans even painted phalluses on their doors and wore phallic charms around their necks.
Ithyphallic figure from Lascaux, about 17,000 years old. Interpreted as a shaman.
But nobody ever interprets this ancient phallic imagery as pornography. Instead, it’s understood to indicate reverence for male sexual potency. No one, for example, has ever suggested that the Lascaux cave dude was a pin-up; he’s assumed to be a shaman. The ithyphallic figurines from the Neolithic — and there are many — are interpreted as gods. And everyone knows that the phalluses of ancient India and Egypt and Greece and Rome represented awesome divine powers of fertility and protection. Yet an ancient figurine of a nude woman — a life-giving woman, with her vulva ready to bring forth a new human being, and her milk-filled breasts ready to nourish that being — is interpreted as pornography. Just something for a man to whack off to. It’s not as if there’s no other context in which to interpret the figure. After all, the European Paleolithic is chock full of pregnant-looking female statuettes that are quite similar to this one. By the time we get to the Neolithic, the naked pregnant female is enthroned with lions at her feet, and it’s clear that people are worshipping some kind of female god.
Yet in the Science Now article, the archaeologist who found the figurine is talking about pornographic pin-ups: “I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, ‘Nothing’s changed in 40,000 years.’” That sentence needs to be bronzed and hung up on a plaque somewhere, because you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the classic fallacy of reading the present into the past. The archaeologist assumes the artist who created the figurine was male; why? He assumes the motive was lust; why? Because that’s all he knows. To his mind, the image of a naked woman with big breasts and exposed vulva can only mean one thing: porn! Porn made by men, for men! And so he assumes, without questioning his assumptions, that the image must have meant the same thing 35,000 years ago. No other mental categories for “naked woman” are available to him. His mind is a closed box. This has been the central flaw of anthropology for as long there’s been anthropology. And even before: the English invaders of North America thought the Iroquois chiefs had concubines who accompanied them everywhere, because they had no other mental categories to account for well-dressed, important-looking women sitting in a council house. It’s the same fallacy that bedevils archaeologists who dig up male skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that the society was male dominant (because powerful people wear jewelry!), and at another site dig up female skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that this society, too, was male dominant (because women have to dress up as sex objects and trophy wives!). Male dominance is all they can imagine. And so no matter what they dig up, they interpret it to fit their mental model. It’s the fallacy that also drives evolutionary psychology, the central premise of which is that human beings in the African Pleistocene had exactly the same values, beliefs, prejudices, power struggles, goals, and needs as the middle-class white professors and students in a graduate psychology lab in modern-day Santa Barbara, California. And that these same factors are universal and unchanged and true for all time.
Hohle Fels phallus, about 28,000 years old. Interpreted as a symbolic object and …flint knapper. Yes.
That’s not science; it’s circular, self-serving propaganda. This little figurine from Hohle Fels, for example, is going to be used as “proof” that pornography is ancient and natural. I guarantee it. Having been interpreted by pornsick male archaeologists as pornography because that’s all they know, the statuette will now be trotted out by every ev psycho and male supremacist on the planet as “proof” that pornography is eternal, that male dominance is how it’s supposed to be, and that feminists are crazy so shut the fuck up. Look for it in Steven Pinker’s next book. ***
P.S. My own completely speculative guess on the figurine is that it might be connected to childbirth rituals. Notice the engraved marks and slashes; that’s a motif that continues for thousands of years on these little female figurines. No one knows what they mean, but they meant something. They’re not just random cut marks. Someone put a great deal of work into this sculpture. Given that childbirth was incredibly risky for Paleolithic women, they must have prayed their hearts out for help and protection in that time. I can imagine an elder female shaman or artist carving this potent little figure, and propping it up somewhere as a focus for those prayers.
On the other hand, it is possible that it has nothing to do with childbearing or sexual behavior at all. The breasts and vulva may simply indicate who the figure is: the female god. Think of how Christ is always depicted with a beard, which is a male sexual characteristic, even though Christ isn’t about male sexuality. The beard is just a marker. Or, given the figurine’s exaggerated breasts, it may have something to do with sustenance: milk, food, nourishment.
The notion that some dude carved this thing to whack off to — when he was surrounded by women who probably weren’t wearing much in the way of clothes anyway — is laughable.
#reclusiveleftist #women’s history #porn #white men are stupid
Good lord I am so glad I took ancient art from a female professor.
Just a little related note, I have learned over the years that when an archaeologist says something is ‘ritual’, it really means ‘I don’t know’. But of course males are programmed never to admit they don’t know something.
BEAUFORT — If at first you don’t succeed — try, try again. On their fourth effort this month, state underwater archaeologists brought up two cannons Thursday from the Queen Anne’s Revenge shipwreck in Beaufort Inlet.
Archaeologists had originally planned to bring up three cannons that day, but because of time left the third on the ocean floor for a future expedition.
It’s been a challenge for archaeologists, who had originally set out to bring up eight cannons in June, but because of poor weather conditions had to cancel previous dives.
It was sweet victory for archaeologists as cannons were hoisted aboard the Cape Fear Community College research vessel, the Dan Moore, as a boat full of media and others invited to witness the event watched on a nearby vessel that had been chartered by Wendy and Bucky Oliver of Beaufort, members of the Friends of the Queen Anne’s Revenge, the nonprofit fundraising organization for the project. Read more.
Reminds me I got to see some parts of the Merrimac at a museum once.
Ithyphallic figure from Lascaux, about 17,000 years old. Interpreted as a shaman.
Hohle Fels phallus, about 28,000 years old. Interpreted as a symbolic object and …flint knapper. Yes.
