Daniel Silver in Conversation with Ian Jenkins, with Photographs by Mary McCartney
Recording 1
Daniel Silver: I'm very excited to have you here. I first met you around my Dig, Artangel project, and we had a meeting, and then you came here, and then I came to the British Museum a few times.
I'm very interested in Greek mythology and Greek sculpture. Talking to you always fills in the gaps on the one hand, but on the other hand, it's a very sculptural discussion – so, I always wonder what it is about these Greek relics which are very different today from what they were when they were made.
We know that they were painted like the Body Beautiful exhibition that you did – so, we know that they were painted; we know that they were mass-produced – so, people would have shrines in their homes. (In fact, if I have things wrong, please tell me! I'm saying this as if I'm teaching you.)
And then they got lost; they got broken; they got [burnt/buried]. Different people came and had different ideas about them. I grew up in Jerusalem, walking around and seeing all these sculptures which were missing their testicles or missing their arms – and, as a child, you wonder about these things because you don't really understand what's wrong with this.
0:01:56.7
So, going back to my question, what do you think it is about these Greek sculptures that have so much in them so that when we look at them today, they allow us such a great sense of imagination. Is it to do with the carvers' abilities? I don't really know. You could say that the Romans were greater carvers in a way. I don't know, but there's something in the space that they made it, what's happened to it over two thousand years since they made it (which is super interesting) …
0:02:39.0
Ian Jenkins: I think the quick answer to your question is that the Greek sculptors were humanists and I think, by putting the human being as centre of the universe, they naturally draw our attention because we like looking at ourselves, really, and in the fifth century BC, philosophy had changed dramatically from being natural philosophy which was concerned with the idea of man and his place in the natural universe, and moral philosophy which deals with the idea of humankind as a moral agent in charge of the soul which can be damaged by the wrong sort of experiences.
The leader of this revolution in thought was Socrates and he became the great conscience of the ancient world, really. His pupils, Xenophon and Plato, wrote down the things he said and he becomes an enormous messiah-like figure. He is very exciting to young people when they come across him first because he is so full of wonderful contradictions and quotable sayings. He would say, 'The unexamined life is not worth living', and 'No man knowingly does wrong' – because, to 'knowingly' do wrong, would be perverse, and you would damage your own soul, and he would give Athens the ego of his fellow citizens in a body that was wholly unsuited to his standards. He was bald-headed and pug-faced, chubby-cheeked and bowl-bellied, and he would meet people in the street and say, Epigenes, you're looking rather chubby." And Epigenes would say, "'Naff off, Socrates", and Socrates would reply, "I was only remarking." And Epigenes would say, "But I'm not in the army now. I don't have to go the gym. I'm a free agent." And Socrates would say, "That's what you think, but you have a moral duty to your city, and as a citizen you must be in readiness, always, to defend that city."
0:05:16.1
Socrates was a brave soldier, but people didn't know whether he really meant what he said because he was obviously subversive, and to invoke the city in the way that he did, suggests that he would render onto god, what is god's; and render onto Caesar, what is Caesar's. In other words, he would pick and choose between the world of moral responsibility so that, when he was finally prosecuted, and he was condemned to death, I don't think he was meant to take the execution. He wasn't supposed to drink the hemlock, but he drank it in order to demonstrate the independence of the city's wilful, brilliant mind which could supersede and transcend the ordinary ambitions of petty officials.
So, his was a suicide of kind, and with Socrates the world enters a different phase and awareness of what it is to be human. Human condition is explored in a way which it previously hadn't been and so, Plato is the product of Socrates's great moral virtue and Plato becomes the greatest philosopher the world has ever seen.
The white marble sculptures that we so admire in the exhibition are all part of that same story of humanism, given a free vent to exhibit ideas of humanity as visual as well as moral exemplars.
0:07:18.8
We see that in the facial expressions, the muscles, the postures.
Yeah, yeah. This close observation and the realism of the body as represented becomes something that is startling and arrests your attention now as it must have done in antiquity. I mean, people hadn't been shown in art the way that they were among the Parthenon sculptures.
When you look at the Parthenon sculptures – they were very high up, but you've got some reliefs … Some sculptures that you can look at lower down, and the amount of time that was spent – you know, you would never see the back of the arm, but it's so real. It's beyond real. It's got this feeling that it's there – so, it's beyond seeing the vein come through; it's the posture of the shoulder … I think, as well – would you agree that the fact that so much time has passed, and they have changed as well because of the acid in the rain, and the sand, as different civilisations gets … For me, that adds a degree of a place to imagine. You can kind of reflect your own history in this world as a …
0:08:53.2
Well, that's exactly where we are. I think we have to remember that Greece was not as now, a nation state with a boundary around it, defining its territory. Greece was, in fact, a collection of city states scattered through the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and they would declare war on your neighbouring state and still remain a Hellene.
Hellenes were the Greek-speaking peoples, and you spoke Greek; you had the same gods in focus as your religion; and you had values in common – so, anybody who had all those things in place could be Greek, and it didn't stop you, being Greek, from turning on the neighbouring state or distant state and attacking it for whatever reason you were motivated by.
0:10:02.7
When we look at the sculptures of the Parthenon, we are looking at something which very quickly became obsolete. It was an expression of the empire of Athens at the height of their power to show itself as a chosen people – as a race of autochthonous beings, born from the earth itself and these people are glittering and glamourous and accomplished, and they see themselves as superior to any other people – Greek or otherwise.
When Athenians' glory days were over at the end of the Peloponnesian war, she eventually gets to cross the Spartans once too often and the Spartans eventually turn on her, and the military machine of Sparta could not be resisted. The Spartans destroyed the walls of the city and left Athens in 404BC as a broken and demoralised former empire which had now lost its entire purpose, and so the Parthenon sculptures passed into obscurity.
Nobody, with the exception of a travel writer called Pausanias in the second century AD – nobody looks at them anymore and thinks of them as Athenian. But they continued to be seen, we must assume, until the Christian community in Athens around AD 500 or so attacked the sculptures with hammers and chisels in order to try to reverse the pagan imagery which was so much a feature of the Parthenon. Sadly, this act of outright barbarism was very extensive and only the south metopes, for example, was preserved in anything like their original condition.
0:12:29.3
So, the act of dismantling your heritage was something shocking to us – but, to them, I think it was a liberating exercise. They wanted to illustrate the triumph of the spirit over mortal flesh could be expressed through destroying representations of mortal flesh.
It wasn't until the seventeenth century in 1674 when a French ambassador who was on his way to take up his post in Istanbul stopped off in Athens, and he and his capable draftsman saw, for the first time, these wonderful images of a lost time and they drew them and those drawings went into the Bibliothèque Nationale and they became the important record of how the sculpture looked in 1674 which was even more important when in 1687 the building was blown to bits by an explosion of gunpowder.
So, there is this irony that we know more about the sculptures now than we ever did in antiquity because, in antiquity, they were forty feet off the ground and you couldn't actually get close to them – but now they are at eye level, and we know them better than the ancients did.
That's extraordinary.
0:14:13.3
Yeah. So, the question is, what do we do with them when they are architectural ornament and antiquarian curiosity turned into art object. Athens is often praised for its contextual display of the Parthenon sculptures in the Acropolis Museum, but they have exactly the same problems that we have and have had to accommodate sculpture designed for a building in a room and there is …
[Interruption]
0:15:07.4
I can really relate to this idea of the humanity in … I think that's what I am very interested in looking for in sculpture. It's interesting now with Rodin's show that you really can identify his visits to the museum and how they inspired his work, and gave him direction with his practice in his sculptures and drawings.
What I like about this idea of humanity is that we leave … Because I'm very interested in what we leave in this world and how it will be read. Maybe we make things, and they'll get lost because you'll never know what happens to a sculpture. It can end up in a collection, and then someone inherits it or doesn't have … And throws it away, and somebody else can find it in the earth one day and try and figure out what it is – and this idea of, through an object, trying to figure out what was here before, for me, is very much like, as a child, going through a journey in, say, the museum and, as a child, I would not read the labels. I would see something from Assyria – a small clay sculpture – and then I would see a Greek sculpture next to it, and I'd have to make sense of all this, and that sense of trying to figure something out, creates a great degree of space for imagination. We just …
0:17:11.5
Recording 2
Daniel Silver: I'm interested in thinking with you, or trying to understand this idea of the relationship between walking through the museum – the British Museum – and you walk and you see different objects from different times left by people. Left, found, you know, and displayed in a very particular way, but these relationships with things which were not from the same place.
Ian Jenkins: No. The museum has always tried to tell a story – the story of the whole of humanity – and when Rodin came, he would have walked through the Cradle of Civilisation of Egypt onto the Assyrians and then, eventually, he would emerge in the Parthenon Gallery where culture and art were thought to have surpassed all previous attempts to match the idea of the world as place where great art can flourish, and in Athens in the fifth century BC, there were, undoubtedly, great advances in the development of theatre, the development of the idea of philosophy, the idea of history, and drama and song, and Rodin would have been impressed by the sense of the progress of civilisation as a model way of presenting the sculptures.
0:01:49.8
The pediment sculpture over the entrance into the museum is called The Progress of Civilisation by Richard Westmacott and it reflects his Whig tendencies.
He was promoted early on by the Duke of Bedford who was a great Whig peer and Charles James Fox whose administration was the great Whig government of its day. If you stand with your back to Bloomsbury Square and you look up Beaufort Way, you see the Duke of Bedford looking at you from the end of the street, and if you turn around, you'll see Charles James Fox and these are all by Westmacott. Westmacott did both of those sculptures, and he did the triangular pediment composition – so, there is a strong, self-conscious urge in the museum to take the cultures of the past and use them as a paradigm and a set of images with which to mark the potential of contemporary society for self-improvement.
0:02:59.7
There were two political positions in the eighteenth century and early nineteenth. One was that people were; and that they needed to be kept in their place. We call those the Tories. The other was that people were, and they could be improved by social and political education and they were called the Whigs, and the museum was staffed by people of a Whig tendency.
0:03:36.7
When you walk into your office every day, do you find that you look at the same works, or does it change your … Because, when I walk into my studio, I like to have sculptures around which I'm working on. I don't tend to work on one sculpture at once because it's too much of a kind of a dialogue. I prefer to have a group, and come in, in the morning, and look at that in the corner of my eye, and look at that in the corner of my eye, and over time, it becomes a much more natural relationship.
So, I'm wondering, when you walk into your office, and you pass through the galleries – are there works that stand out on a daily basis, or do you tend to take a different walk into the office because, there are rooms that I go to, to visit. When I'm in a certain kind of space I need to open up my mind a bit or reflect or … I think the Greeks upstairs. Is it Room 67, or Room 69 upstairs? I really like going there, and just …
A room with ancient Greek …
0:04:51.6
Yeah. And just kind of walking through it. Not looking, but just kind of … And then you see a kind of a hand, a mark of something on some terracotta clay or a drawing, and you can really …
Breathe in the ideal of the ancient Greece from things which are relatively lowly in their status.
I have different days for different objects, different galleries. I'm arrested, occasionally, by the sheer drama of seeing the lion from Ashurbanipal's hunt, or the seated figure of Ramesses II, or the Nyssian sculptures with their fantastic draperies that reveal the body beneath, and the battle scenes, and chronicling of the story of the dynasts that ruled – and, of course, I have different experiences.
The great thing about the British Museum, it's not mono-cultural. It's not a mirror in which you see yourself reflected. It's a window through which you look at other worlds and other cultures. That's something which people come from all over the world to experience.
0:06:13.7
Yup. I took the kids down to the African … And they loved the fabrics and the masks there, and they were running around and …
Yes, [______] sculptures are timeless.
Yup. Children can take in something like this information, and recreate different ideas, or thoughts, drawings, in their own minds.
You mentioned drapery. When I work with the mannequins, what happens, I dress them in fabric, but I don't usually leave the fabric as fabric. Sometimes I dip it in plaster and the recent ones which I'm going to show in September have then been carved from that into the marble – so, in the marble you do see a bit of drapery, but it's like shape as well.
And this relationship between sculpture, drapery, and fabric is something that is very fascinating. Do we have many fabrics left from Greek time?
0:07:23.2
Just before I answer that question … Let's continue your train of thought, but a different relation …
[Talking together]
Because Rodin did this.
I know. Rodin did this. What he would do, he would sculpt the body from a model, and then he would go and he would cover it in a fabric. I'm using a very similar technique, but I'm taking these Adel Rootstein mannequins.
Did I tell you the story of these Rootstein mannequins?
No.
0:07:54.5
Three or four years ago, I went and bought a mannequin because every time people would come to my studio, they would ask me to explain Greek sculpture – so, I explained my relationship to Greek sculpture – to the relic, to how it evolved, how it was made, to the Greek relationship to humanity – but then I would say – and I don't know if this wrong or right – but I would say it was like a mannequin. It was about the perfect body; it was about … And a lot of the mannequins' poses are very similar to Greek sculptures – so, I went with my son on a Sunday afternoon and we bought a mannequin, and then I copied the mannequin in marble here.
But then I did some research and found out that my grandmother's cousin, Adel Rootstein, was a very important lady in the mannequin world. She came here from South Africa in the fifties; was a window dresser, and was very unhappy with the mannequins – so, she opened her own company.
Now, it relates to Greek sculpture in the way that she chose real people, and she had a sculptor, and he would sculpt those people. They would have – I don't know – three sessions a week over three or four weeks, and he would sculpt them, and then they would be cast – but they are very human, these mannequins. They are of real people. Today's mannequin is of Yasmin le Bon, but there are mannequins of just people that Adel would meet in a coffee shop, or Adel would meet in a discotheque – and these people don't have a Facebook page or a website because this was from the seventies and eighties – so, the similarities between these mannequins and the Greek sculptors are very interesting because they have this sense of humanity; they have the poses; they have the perfect body – so, I put the fabric on them in the same way that Rodin did, and I always try to question it because just having fabric on its own never really works for me.
0:10:02.0
No … Uhm. The Balzac figure was eventually dressed in its own [______] …
Dressed in his …?
His own [______] – evening coat. But I'm just looking for my [mobile]. In Budapest …
Do you want me to help you?
No. … there are amazing images of fat mannequins for the modern man.
Fat men?
Fat mannequins – yeah. Unbelievable, but here we are.
[Silence – looking at images(?)]
Extraordinary.
0:11:04.1
So this is in Budapest?
Hm Hmm. [______] And like that man there – see?
Were there many fat Greek sculptures? Not too many …
Very few, actually.
Can you see the relationship between the sculptor sculpting the model or the person from the café who was chosen to hold the clothes in the most apparent way for that moment in time to these Greek sculptures.
What I really am looking for is this relationship to our personal history and the movement from Greek … It allows you to dress them with your thoughts – the Greek sculptures.
0:12:06.5
You asked me about drapery …
Yeah, yeah.
… and the survival of textile.
Yeah, yeah.
There are some remarkable survivors, for example, the [linen] garment which is funerary thing which was excavated in a shrine and dated to the tenth century BC and with this there was a gold and purple textile – tapestry woven. The Greeks used the warp-weighted loom like the Laplanders and they had [header] rods and they were reversed in them and fixed them over so that they could build patterns and narratives, and textiles become a vehicle for communicating the narrative of Greek psyche.
0:13:03.7
For example, in the famous purple-treading scene of Aeschylus's [______] Agamemnon in the first instalment of the Oresteia, Clytaemnestra spews the precious woven textiles dyed with expensive purple dye before the feet of her husband who's come back after ten years' absence from Troy, and she says, "Walk, husband, walk." [______]. [______] dried up. She's referring to the blood feud that the purple tapestries evoke and then she shows her husband into the palace, and he goes to the bathroom, and there's a Psycho moment where she contemplates what's going to happen next, and she speaks in a very strange and oblique way. She says how important to the house is the tree that has its branches growing up into the rafters and the roots anchor themselves in the earth. We know that [______] Clytaemnestra, the lumberjack is about to axe that tree and bring down the house of [______].
0:14:34.0
All of this is part of the language of textiles which, again, in the person of Penelope has an intelligence whereby she unpicks by night what she weaves by day, and men cannot see what she's doing. They don't understand the techne – the skills – they are not able to measure how long this robe that she's weaving should take because she says after she's finished it, she will then make a decision about which of the suitors (because they installed themselves in Odysseus's house in his absence) will marry her and claim the territory – the lands of Ithaca.
0:15:31.8
So, there she is, and she's betrayed eventually, not by a man, but by one of her own gender who understands what she's doing and has access to the intelligence of women.
This idea of textiles as media for conveying stories and narrative in general, is reflected in the Parthenon frieze where you see the peplos – the robe that was given to Athena every year, woven by the [girls] of the best families. This robe is tapestry-woven with scenes of strife between gods and giants – so, at the heart of the frieze, although the frieze is an utopian idyll of ideal citizens of an ideal state, nonetheless, at the heart of it, there is this confrontation with chaos and chaos is represented by the giants who attack the world of Logos which is the world that the Olympian gods have ushered in by the previous defeat of the Titans.
This idea that order is constantly in strife with disorder, is very Greek and very important to the understanding of the Greek mind.
0:17:16.2
There is a feeling that we are very much in a time when order and chaos are, you know, meeting each other now, the world is changing so much. I often think of those times when they had these similar kinds of energies or … [We're at the door front.]
You know I'm very interested in Sigmund Freud's ideas and his perception, or his investigation into our soul or different parts of us that make us work as human beings.
He found Greek mythology a field where he could go and pick and choose and a playground for his ideas.
0:18:14.1
Hmm – archetypal images.
Yeah. And he would have, obviously, on his desk these sculptures which he would play around with which related to different times. And sometimes he would take things which were not exactly right and play around with. I think it must happen a lot – sculptures that had certain meanings then, today, we understand them in different ways which is a certain kind of archaeology which is more of our understanding, not exactly what every object meant, but more how it felt to be there. Do you know …?
0:19:07.4
I do know what you mean. I think this is where we've been heading a lot this morning, and one of the things that our new (or not so new) director is keen on, is giving the opportunity to people who are not archaeologists – even people who are not born to the Western tradition of art and the Enlightenment culture – that people who have an emotional response or attachment to the things of the museum, should feel comfortable and at home, and not be excluded.
So, when the Marquis de Nointe rediscovered the Parthenon sculptures, they entered the world as a paradigm of a new set of values which seemed to represent us as our own best selves, and we were no longer constrained by the petty rules and regulations of an Athenian imperial city. We are citizens of the universe and the cosmos and this is something we share.
0:20:20.4
I think the show gets under the skin of the ancient Greeks, and it gets behind the mind of Rodin. I think Rodin was highly subversive and one of the things that I recognise in him, and I admire him for, is his complete disregard for establishment. By creating The Age of Bronze, he changed the physical ideal of the human body and, instead of pectorals and six-packs and iliac crests and all those detailed well-mapped and [______] bodies of the beau ideal tradition which is founded on the idea of Polykleitos's and Myron's sculptures of the fifth century and, in place of that, we have the intuition of a mind which is not constrained by the limits of rules. And this is Phidias too, I think. Rodin admires and identifies with Phidias in a way that he can't with the works of Polykleitos or Myron.
0:21:42.9
He had this idea of intuition as very important. Rodin would have shared the idea of imagination as the vehicle by which gods and heroes and ordinary mortals were shown. So, he thought that Phidias could beckon the gods from Mount Olympus and place them in front of the spectator and the spectator is overwhelmed by the enormity of the sense of majesty – of divinity – and becomes smothered – immersed – in an almost completely absorbing experience of confrontation between god and man.
0:22:38.6
Yeah, you know, it's strange. When I visit the British Museum, or … It is a place where I can put my intuition into check, in a strange way, because the structure is there. Usually it's the same rooms I go to. The set-up is very similar, so I can play around in that imaginary space and reflect on it, and look back on the same objects which I've looked back on over many years and then come back to the studio, and that kind of reflection … It feeds into the making.
Sometimes I use tricks of display, but at other times it's very much about that nose, or the relationship between, say, that sculpture, and that sculpture, and how it broke, and how it leads …
At times it's a very dream space because you are very … Your arms are not at work, you know. It's more your imagination. You can't control it so much. I try to … I don't do it forcefully, but when I'm back in the studio, I try and rediscover those spaces – those moments, those relationships.
What we didn't talk about in relation to fabric and draperies – that we live most of our lives in fabric. We sleep in fabric, we consume … It's very much us. I think, covering the sculptures in it, and when you go into the show now – the drapery is so light. When you're looking at a sculpture which weighs – I don't know – three or four tonnes, but really, it feels like it's … And that lightness is very important because it feeds into one's mind, I think.
0:24:56.3
If it's a very heavy piece of metal, it's not the same relationship. If you've got this object which is marble, which is … And I have this idea that marble is very … I'll come back to that – but this drapery and this freeness really feeds into one's imagination.
And the relationship with marble is very interesting because I think marble – particular marble. I'm talking about the white marble that's maybe stuck to our room – but that's Roman – but it's very similar to bone. It's very similar to the structure of what we are made out of. I think that … And it has this very deep relationship to skin – even now that the colour has come off and it's got this kind of stony … And it's got marks like our skin has, and it's aged like our skin – so those add to the humanity.
0:25:53.3
Yes, you can read the surface of sculpture. What you say about being immersed in drapery most of our lives is very true.
Diaphanous drapery is what comes to mind with the Parthenon sculptures. Sometimes I find the representation of draperies – especially that worn by the gods – so intense, I begin to feel uncomfortable …
Really?
… because it seethes. It seems alive like so many worms or snakes, as though I'm having a bad come-down from [______] LSD trip. I think you can go mad looking at the drapery.
0:26:40.1
The explicitness of the drapery is actually predicated on a really very simple set of formulae. It's all woven on a rectangular loon which determines the shape of the garment, and you pin and tuck and fold, and you create these elegant tunics and mantles out of a very small amount of sewing or tailoring of any kind. So, the naturalness of classical drapery is based on the simplicity of the production process.
And what colours do you think they were? If we were in Greece two thousand – two and a half thousand … Would they wear a white toga like we imagine, or were they wearing pink, blue, yellow?
0:27:36.7
Well, the linen was very difficult to dye without modern mordants … Their tunics would have been largely natural, but light-coloured.
Off-white?
Yeah. And then you will have a mantle in a fine wool which would be of any kind. It could be [picture] woven and have a multiplicity of colours and narrative stories going on.
But weaving is a female art and Athena is the goddess who invents weaving. It's one of those things to think …
I wrote a book – an article – called The Ambiguity of Greek Textiles which is all about the featuring of textiles in Greek myth as duplicitous. I explored the raw and the cooked …
'The raw and the …'?
0:28:42.7
The cooked. And the [______] of drapery and saw the Golden Fleece as something which was already cooked by virtue of its gold and purple. Purple, white, and gold are the most popular of …
… the fabrics.
And it's also the colour of royalty.
But if you were walking down the street, most people would be wearing an off-white …
Yes, and tunic. The trouble is, we have the concept of Greeks as naked, but …
That's what I wanted to ask you if they wore anything underneath.
The women did. They had brassieres and pants, but men didn't. But the naked body was the uniform of the righteous. If you were naked, you could practise with your peers in the gymnasia, and if you were [______], you were fair of face and sound of heart.
0:30:04.5
And this is completely naked?
Yeah – I mean, they have willy-wobble problems, so they pierced it or pin it, and tie it, and roll it, and do anything to prevent the embarrassment of an erection while they're …
… working out.
Yeah, while they're performing. They're not supposed to be sexually self-conscious. The nudity is not about sex, it's about being part of an elite club.
Did they have the six-pack, or was that something …
0:30:46.1
That developed later. Hellenistic athletes concentrate on building muscles to project into particular events, but the old idea – the old education of young men in modesty in all things went out of the window when big prize money allowed you to become a professional athlete in the Hellenistic period.
So, they became like a six-pack Nike sportsman.
Yeah, there is that. Heavily-muscled Heracles is the ultimate late kind of pugnacious …
0:31:38.6
We've got the strong young … And how did they relate … Let's think about the deterioration of the body, when the body gets old and loses its muscle. Did they have time for that, or was that not part of the …
It's really the outside … Once you lost the elastic, it's downhill all the way. [______].
That's quite sad.
It is sad, but it is very [limited], the few years you have of being attractive. It's also sexually connected to the relationships of men and boys – so, the idea was that the older man would be a companion and mentor for the younger, and that when they went into battle, the younger man fought to please the mentor and the mentor fought to defend the younger man, and when the three hundred were defeated at Thermopylae, they are, in fact, one hundred and fifty homosexual couples.
0:33:22.3
Two things have come to mind, and I'll throw them both, and you can choose. Do you think they were interested in how we would see them two thousand years later?
Posterity.
And then, the other one is … I never really looked into this. How did they treat … How did they bury … What did they do? Did they give it to the gods? Can you tell us a bit about the story of this?
So, if we spoke about the great body, and now the deterioration of the body – how did they take it to the next level – stage?
0:33:55.7
The Greeks don't have, like the Egyptians, a developed sense of life after death. They were actually so engaged with life, they can't cope with death. And death is an amorphous and inconsistent collection of images of people wandering the earth, or the underworld …
Daniel Silver: People wandering the underworld?
Ian Jenkins: Yeah – and so, for example, Agamemnon and Odysseus come together in the underworld and Agamemnon says, "It's alright for you, Odysseus, you had that paragon of virtue, Penelope. I had the bitch, Clytemnestra." And [______] is encountered by Diogenes, and they have a chat about the idea of legacy and Diogenes says, "You bought that great [______] which is now weighing down upon you, while I am free of such burdens of constraint."
And, of course, they had a great passion to be remembered. To be remembered among their peers was immortality. There's a wonderful story of [______], the architect of the great temple of Artemis going into the temple of Athena at [______] and dedicating a votive, which is a stone plan – engraved marble plan of the temple – and his purpose is not to try to please the goddess or Pytheos, the architect. His intention is to establish his superiority over the temple which Pytheos designed two hundred years before, and he's saying, "Fuck you, Pytheos. You think you're good. Look at me; look at how much better I am than you."
And there's constant antagonism between the present and the past and the attempts to grab the future is very Greek. Everything is in competition; everything is essentially angst-driven.
0:36:29.0
And that was legacy – wasn't it?
And the other question was about …
You spoke about the first one, about death, and then legacy. What do you think they would make of today? If we could time-travel …
I asked that question when I went to China with the Greeks for the first time in … What is the name of the city? Where we showed the Olympic games as a prototype of the Body Beautiful. Anyway – it was very interesting, and I asked the question at the press launch – what would happen if one of the young men on a plinth through there was to walk through into here, and what would we say them, and what would he say to us? And we would ask him to put some clothes on. [DS laughing]
0:37:38.7
So, you're in China, and you're asking what would happen if this Greek … So you said, put some clothes on him – first. And what would he make of us?
We'd take him to the silk-making factory. [______]. It's a standard [______] where silk comes from. He knows silk. It's already in the archaeological record. In the fifth century BC they would not have had the concept of China. They knew about India, but not China. So, then you take him to the Nissan side of the MG in Nanjing – MG sportscar factory, and he's completely thrown by the use of the words '818 brake horsepower', and he can't see any horses, and it looks bizarre. And then he goes to the doctor, and the doctor is very familiar, and that's fine. He understands that – the settling of various humours in the body and the idea of holistic medicine and well-being, and finally we take him to the practise ground for athletic competitions, and he is delighted to see that his ancient culture of athletics has lasted all these years. He wouldn't have any concept of the break and then the reemergence of the revival of the Games by de Coubertin in 1896 – but he's alarmed to see women practising with men, and also that everybody is clothed.
He would feel very like, but also very unlike us.
0:39:55.3
You know, often when making sculptures … Often, when I make a sculpture, I start from where I start, and then I come full-circle and the sculpture is finished. Then the idea of placing the sculpture – say, in a museum, or in a gallery – they would place their work in a very geometric kind of order. They wouldn't create, more like discussions or …
0:40:34.4
I think, actually, the Olympiad, within the [______] – within the sacred precinct, sculpture was like walking into a crowded room. It was full of older dedications. [______] adjusting elbow room with the next.
I think you would have this idea whereby [______] is filled up with dedications and then they had to be cleared and the sculptures were thrown into pits and then sealed over, and the sanctuary rededicated.
0:41:28.0
This plaster sculpture I made over the weekend. It's showing the mannequins as mannequins … They need to transport themselves into something else. This is a beginning. It's not a finished work, but you can understand what's going on there. Most of my sculptures don't have arms, which relates to Greek sculpture which, most of the time, has lost its arms, but as well to the space where you're … It's quite totemic but, as well, at the same time, you're kind of transported and you can't really … It's maybe a dream because, in a dream you can't really change the direction of the dream, and here you can't really … So, it's a strange relationship.
With the clay sculptures it's very much, you can feel the tactility of the [______].
0:42:34.7
The idea of the armless sculpture is very Rodiny.
Yes.
That last room, where we have the striding man and the seated woman plays on the headless, armlessness of both works.
And that beautiful sculpture where you've got the head of the woman on the block of the marble. What is that work called?
[______].
0:43:01.6
Yes, she doesn't have arms either.
No. I think that is a post-Platonic or neo-Platonic statement about the idea of the artist as intuitive creator of artworks that are comparable with the products of nature.
There was, as you remember, in fifth century BC Athens, there was a grand debate about what sculpture – what art – was for, and the philosophers were alarmed at the extent of the march to naturalism and realism that was exhibited in painting and in sculpture – and so, when it comes to a head with Socrates and the ideal Republic of Plato where he says, "Art has no place in the ideal city because it's a copy of a copy." A copy of nature which is itself a copy of the hidden abstract forms that can only be accessed by pure thought. All of this is a plea for an an-material world of abstract forms.
0:44:22.7
[______] is a vehicle by which Plato communicates his censure of the artist is, itself, a wonderful, instructive book which is an artwork in itself.
Anyway, the artists and their patrons and their city, monument builders, can't live with the idea of art as an abandoned and forbidden subject – so, they get together and they devise a way of explaining what the artist is, and the artist becomes a hero; becomes a magician; becomes a conjurer of visions which only he can anticipate. He sees the body locked in the stone; reveals – peels back – the unwanted excess and reveals the inner core of the human body. I think that's what's going on there.
0:45:43.0
You know, working with marble … Because, you know, I went to the Slade here in London, and you don't learn to carve marble. I came … I did it very strangely by going to Italy to buy found relics and rework them.
But working with the material now … I think I've been doing it over ten years. It has its history; it's got its shape; it was made by nature. There's a piece there (I'll show it to you afterwards) – it's got purple and green, and that's just made by the tectonic plates moving and how strange is that – but it does have so much information in it, so that when you're working with it, it's there! You just have to help it come out.
0:46:46.2
It's something you can't repeat – can you – in basalt?
No, no. No.
The Egyptians are limited.
Because they worked with those …
They had to pound and grind their sculptures out of basalt – no chisels. And the Greeks draw with their chisels – the nuance and varied …
But their sculptures transform because they're not depicting; they are very human, you know. They're not a drawing of a human in marble; they become that human in marble.
Hmmm …
Yes, so – working with stone and marble is like … You meditate as well when you work because it takes a long time and you're moving up and down and sideways – but then you get these surprises. You see, when you look at the black marble there which I like very much because they have a relationship to fabric.
0:47:57.3
Yeah, they're called 'buntem Marmor' in German [______]. It's a fashion of the later [______].
What is it called?
'Buntem Marmor.' Colourful …
Veins …
It's very [______] drapery which is in one material, and then the [______] flesh in another [______].
0:48:28.2
But the Greeks didn't do that. It's more of a Roman thing, right?
You need to be careful what we say about the Romans because it's a Roman period, but the workmen continued to be Greek. And the Romans have a chip on their shoulder about the Greek legacy. They see themselves as rightful owners of the Greek inheritance, but they have all sorts of problems with it like captured Greeks took a [______] so [______] and so brought the arts to rustic [______] [about the fact that Romans were conquered by the conquered].
0:49:26.3
And then there's the saying, 'ars longa, vita brevis' – art is forever, but life is short.
But there is a point when you look at Roman sculptures … I know …
Rome has its own material culture.
But they don't have that sense of humanity that is as strong as the sculptures from … They look more … They have a kitschness to them – a plasticness to the shapes. They're not as immediate, and you can see it. It's very clear, and I wonder if that's because it was a different tradition of copying, or did they feel that they were more contemporary in the way that they were sculpting because they do seem less human. They seem more, maybe, copies …
0:50:17.6
It's interesting you say that. I think, actually, it is about copying.
Copying …?
I think you're on to something here because I think the idea of copying a sculpture as a figure of nature, and so the Romans, literally, are copying copies. But they took the line in the eighteenth century – the antiquary that Napoleon took with him from Rome to Visconti to look after the marbles in the Louvre. He took the view that the Romans improved on the Greek statues. They copied them, but they also made them more perfect than they were as final essays in perfection.
0:51:07.9
I think the relationship with philosophy to art is a critical point of understanding and I do think that we need to constantly refer back to the text if we were to make a sense of the world, and Winckelmann was constructing his narrative of the development of Greek art and from text which we then re-apply to material culture.
0:51:46.4
Can you say that again?
Well, Winckelmann is the recognised founder of the modern art history as far as antiquity is concerned and Winckelmann takes the Roman copies of Greek, marble, and bronze sculpture that he finds in the Villa Albani and the Vatican, and works them into a narrative that gives them a status far beyond what we would now give them because we now work with a different set of data, but he constructed his narrative using copies. And when confronted with the copying nature of these Roman replicas, Visconti (a bit later than Winckelmann) – Visconti would say, "Yes, but they are improvements" – they are 'imitazioni perfette'. They are improved by what we give them, which they didn't get the first time around.
0:53:05.1
We've got a bit of time … Things which are coming up which I would like to reflect with you upon them are things like … So, Freud chose earthy objects and mythology as a ground for his ideas. How did the Greeks see that? Do we know – or do you know – about how the Greeks saw the unperfect person – the mad man? Schizophrenia was there as well, but they didn't know what to call it, but – you know … Or depression. They didn't give that a place, obviously, in sculpture or in art – but how did they, as a people, treat that side of society? The ones which are not beautiful and standing on a pedestal or running naked with their willies tied in a knot.
0:54:09.7
Well, they are the great unwashed. Diogenes is their champion. Diogenes lives in a barrel and he is one of the great sights of Athens. People go to converse with him. He is one of those people, like certain restaurateurs, who insult the public, you know, and he famously is not impressed with Alexander the Great when he comes to Athens with the ashes of those who've been conquered, and been killed in resistance against the Macedonians taking over Greece.
Then there is Demosthenes who is again, in his portraits a picture of anxiety, frustration and resentment of emotional excess. They think that the gods drive men into craziness and they possess, and take possession of, the mind and knead it into all sorts of …
0:55:21.7
Yes, and obviously, all the famous [Oedipus] … All these stories show the other side of humanity which …
Yeah – the dark side of the Parthenon, and there are plenty of shamans and werewolves and demons. Although Socrates talks of his daemon – his abiding spirit.
0:55:49.6
Shall we just do a very small walk-around because I just want to show you … We're going to walk around the studio. So, we've got these sculptures that we spoke about.
You just have to touch this, don't you? It's so lovely. I love it with the white inset.
So, this in onyx, and the good thing about the onyx is that you've got the sense of depth which I like because it's got a bit of soul to it. So, do we know when they started doing this to materials?
0:56:32.9
It's a thing of the East – of the eastern empire. I think there is a group of statues. We've got examples of it. They probably reflect a Hellenistic tradition, but they are Roman.
And then we go here. This is what I wanted to show you.
It's fabulous, isn't it? It's unbelievable. Look at that!
The purple and the green, and it does look like a woven fabric.
Yes, it's something that's acquired a textile-like persona. I imagine this is fossilised trees – beech, perhaps – but I love it with the insertion of these wisterias around. And, actually, the heads are like the heads of The Kiss. They don't really have developed personalities. They're headless, in a way – and in a way in which Rodin would have understood them.
They're looking in.
Yeah, they are. They are.
And I'm going to leave them and [sand [them]] so they'll have this drawing here.
They're really special, aren't they?
0:58:04.5
And then we go … I think this would be a Greek hairstyle.
I don't know. I think the crafting of these is so beautiful. Brilliant. I love them.
And then we go here. This would be in another space.
Assemblage.
These are … I kind of call them 'reflections', but if they were in a museum they would be more like Assyrian … They're very tactile. They're mass-produced sculptures. They are obviously fired clay which goes really black.
I think that was blue.
0:58:50.4
This is just different colours of …
Ceramic?
Yeah, it's all ceramic.
It's wonderful.
I need to choose the better ones. I need to go back to them – but they were done with the dancers. So, I had dancers at the back and I'd sculpt them – but this is … The sense of scale is …
Your idea of form is the sort of thing that's really out of this world. They're new forms, but they cohere, and they hang together very well.
0:59:25.9
They have a relationship to form.
Yeah. Rodin would be popping them into ancient vases and creating a mise en scène. Also, the way the combination of statuettes that create the tomb of [Philip the Good] [Court of Burgundy – Philip the Bold and John the Fearless?] – sixteenth century alabaster and they stand in mourning, and each one is different; each one possesses his own reflection upon the nature of death. They stand with their hands sometimes just held out in front of them, unable to know what to do with their hands which suddenly become an embarrassment. They're very interesting.
1:00:15.6
I was thinking about this the other day. I was at a Nick Cage concert and, what do you do …? Some people pick up their hands and dance with their hands, but I … You know, what do you do with your hands? Even when you dance, you know. I think they, as you said, possess this awkwardness of where do they put their hands? So, he holds his hands like that, or …
1:00:38.7
Rodin was very interested in the language of south-east Asian dancers had in their telling of stories through the gestures of hands, and he connected it with the Greeks who called it [______] – the way of using the hands as a way of telling mythical tales. You could tell whole stories through [______].
I think it's something we've lost. The Age of Bronze does this, and it appears in Parthenon friezes. You see that coupled in the Parthenon frieze with The Age of Bronze in order to bring out the relative similarity – but these are great.
1:01:28.3
And here, in relation to the block of … So, this is a block of Statuario marble from Italy, from the quarry that Michelangelo used – but I left, and I'm going to leave, the hole of the machine that was cutting it, and it's got a crack as well which stays. I fixed it, but … And here's a bit as if it's going to fall off.
Yes, the plinth becomes part of …
Yeah. And they'll be on the floor. So, they'll be sitting on the floor.
I love them. They're great. What's this? And what are you going to show in Warsaw?
In Warsaw, I'm going to show … And this is important, because this is what we have to choose in relation to things from the collection. I'm going to show those ones which are more like the relics. And these.
It's plaster.
It's plaster and sanded and the mannequin is inside, and that's the head of … This is what is left from the whole body. I made the whole body in marble. I wasn't happy, so I knocked it off.
It's fabulous. This is amazing. That's very clever.
1:03:05.1
But these are stones which came down from the quarry, maybe sixty or eighty years ago – aged. Now, we don't know why they came from the quarry. You see that they were chiselled by hand.
Amazing – yeah.
And then I found them. That's how they came. All I did was cut at the bottom there to make them straight and the same with here – so, that sense of a relic that someone started – did something with.
This is exactly what Rodin did. He leaves these unresolved surfaces which somebody has punched a hole into it – a riven bit of stone at the back of [______] sculpture where he did a wonderful, natural polychrome finish to the riven sculpture that he punctures around the top of it just to show that nature is about to be converted by culture.
There is always something slightly unsettling about your work. It induces a sense of melancholy which is a sign of its depth, I think.
1:04:31.7
I'll tell you a secret. I always try and work away from it, but I always end up at the same place! I [______] work which is more … Then I end up at the same place.
Hmm. Rodin didn't [______], of course. [______] structure of his work [______]. But these are fabulous.
1:04:50.6
