I doubt the Rapa Nui culture of Easter Island makes it into too many histories, but for MacGregor they’re a good punctuation mark as he comes to his second big demarcation line. (He’s organized human history into a) pre-history, b) after writing but before modernity, c) after modernity, defined as transportation that allows you to circumnavigate your globe.) Also, this statue is just really, really cool.
It was a pyramids-of-ancient-Egypt or Stonehenge-sarsen-stone-hauling building project, which has baffled many ever since the world found out about these statues (this one was brought to London during Queen Victoria’s day). MacGregor brings on a sculptor to wax rhapsodic about how brilliantly these sculptures succeed at what he considers the main goal of sculpture, unleashing the awesome power of stone in the service of human storytelling. MacGregor is a little more interested in something I didn’t even notice, I was in such a hurry as I dashed through the museum. But it turns out that, after these sculptures were created, things turned bad for the Easter Islanders; a later generation, presumably suffering from the effects of climate change, the extinction of food sources, etc., started this whole ‘bird-man’ cult, and mediocre art to that effect is scrawled on the back of this sculpture. It doesn’t diminish the front, not necessarily, although it makes an interesting point about sculpture—a sculpture is a frozen moment, one little bit of time, as Keats tells us about the Grecian Urn, and if that’s a really great moment then there’s nowhere to go but downhill. But the history of art tells us there will be hills again, someday.
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