One of MacGregor’s experts, talking about this object, called the Greeks a “conflictual society,” meaning: unending struggle, everybody always in conflict. If that’s true (are there societies that aren’t “conflictual societies”? I guess there are, totalitarian or fascist ones), perhaps it’s something they passed on to their heirs: the Romans, the Europeans, the British, the Americans, ‘cause we Americans certainly seem to live on conflict. The big conflict here—the one that may have inspired this entire podcast series, I don’t know—is the conflict betwee post-imperial England and Greece in terms of who should own the Elgin Marbles. I don’t think anybody today would dispute that the UK has no right to own most of the stuff that’s in the British Museum; the first hundred years of archeology was nothing but robbers and pirates. But whether or not the collection should be pulverized, at this point, and sent to every corner of the world, is not an easy question to answer. (On the podcast, MacGregor out-and-out contradicts this Greek woman, a professor from the University of Athens, who’s one of his special guests.) I couldn’t even answer the question of who’d be authorized to set the standard, in terms of, “If you [Brits] produce one ‘History of the World in Objects’ series every five years, you are doing the world enough of a service that you’ve earned the right to be a custodian of all the stuff you stole.” The UN?
Anyway, the Parthenon, the big temple to Athena on the Acropolis hill in the center of Athens, had loads of these marble statues, many of them now beautifully displayed, and free and open to the world public, in London. Many of the marbles in the museum depict one-on-one fights between the mythical centaurs and Lapiths; apparently the Lapiths were having a wedding and gave the centaurs too much to drink; they went crazy and started kicking butt. (From 9 years ago, here’s my photo of one of the marbles I prefered, with a Lapith kicking a centaur in the groin.)
According to MacGregor, who’s echoing Robert Graves, these stories work by demonizing the enemy: the centaurs, in this myth, were probably originally understood to refer to the Persians, or the Spartans, or somebody else the Athenians didn’t like. Again, if that’s a hallmark of this culture—making their enemies into mythical monsters—it’s something the Greeks did a good job of passing on to their cultural descendents.
Even so, we obviously owe a lot to the Greeks, and since everybody in the West learns plenty about Greek culture and history and that 5th century BC flowering of Athens, MacGregor doesn’t pay all that much attention to them in this history of the world. In terms of sculpture, and indeed all the arts, the Greeks obviously developed new ways of doing everything, and it’s the extreme photographic realism of a lot of Greek sculpture—let alone drama, poetry, etc.—that most enchants me. In the case of MacGregor’s sculpture here, the palpable pain and suffering of the defeated Lapith; in my sculpture, the six-packs, calf muscle, sinews on the Lapith’s knee. The sensual pleasure I’ve always gotten from Greek sculpture is akin to the pleasure I get from enjoying human eye candy: wow, that’s a good-lookin’ ---- (man, woman, centaur, goose, etc.). I don’t have that experience with lots of other sculptural traditions...certainly the appeal of Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, for me, lies more in its design and landscaping than in the actual sculptures that are there.
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