I enjoy art and museums, though I don't get out to partake of them nearly as often as I'd like to. I did this week though, and on Tuesday I went with the IG to see a touring show of Afghanistan art treasures.
This one, and I advise you to enjoy this quote, since the backstory is a lot better than the show itself.
In 1978, on windswept plains of northern Afghanistan, archaeologists unearthed tombs of ancient nomads that had been sealed for two thousand years and discovered an extraordinary trove: some 22,000 individual pieces of gold buried with the remains of six Bactrian Central Asian nomads. Within months of this discovery at Tillya Tepe, the country descended into war, and the so-called Bactrian Hoard disappeared into legend once more. Twenty-five years later, in 2003, Afghanistan surprised the world by announcing that the priceless artifacts had been located intact in the presidential palace bank vault in Kabul. They had been rescued, along with other masterpieces of the National Museum, Kabul, and protected in the intervening years of turmoil by a group of selfless Afghan heroes who have come to be known as "the key holders."
That anything is left is amazing, as various
news articles about the recovery make clear. The museum staff hid everything they could in 1979, when the Soviets were poised to invade. Other stuff was hidden years later, before the Taliban took power, and everything that wasn't hidden has since been destroyed or looted. Most of the original "key-holders" were long since dead, but they had passed on their burdens to friends or relatives, and much of the collection was reassembled in 2004, after the US invasion/liberation had largely settled into place. Other stuff was discovered after the Soviets rolled in, when they had some archeologists rooting around the country.
I don't know how much of it is in the traveling exhibition that's now at the SF Asian Art Museum, but I'm going to throw in the "
bear riding a bicycle" metaphor again, since the amazing thing about the show is that it exists at all. It's inspiring that anything was saved, but at the same time, it's a pretty disappointing collection, on artistic or historic merits.
Most of the pieces are very small, or are just fragments. Or both. There are a bunch of vases and bowls and cups that are jigsaw'ed together from dozens of shards, and they're far from complete. The carved statues are tiny, wooden, and half-rotted. The pieces of gold are just in loose piles. Captions say they were all sewn onto glorious gowns, but those are long since gone, so now they've got these glass-topped, coffin-like display cases that you
expect to see Lenin in, in which all the gold bits are spread out in a vaguely dress-like shape. All the gold bits are identical, and were clearly mass-produced in some sort of mold. They looked like something you'd buy in a
bag of 25 from Michael's.
The preservation aside, most of the art isn't very good. There weren't any great Afghan artists, and though there was some prosperity and cultured cities in the Roman days, the area was a trade route, and their cities weren't rich or powerful or established enough to nurture their own artesians. As a result there's nothing original or unique; just imported Roman stuff from Italy or Egypt or elsewhere along the Mediterranean (so say the captions on the pieces). There were some locally-produced pieces, but they were indistinguishable from the imports, and none of it was notably gorgeous. Broken chunks of pillars with Roman writing scratched into it, shattered vases, miscellaneous rings and bracelets that would have looked cheap in a pawn store window, piles of coins, etc.
The less-broken stuff was even simpler. They had a bunch of earthenware treasures, but they were just clay pots and lids. I'm willing to grant their age and preciousness, but they would not have stood out from anything in the rejects drawer in a ceramics class at a community college.
All this said, it wasn't a horrible show, and I didn't regret going. Nor did I heckle the Bronze Age swap meet quality of things while there. In fact, though the IG and I amused each other with some whispers at the time, it wasn't until we left the Afghanistan area and rode the escalator up to the third floor, where the permanent exhibits begin, that she broached the, "That sort of sucked, eh?" issue.
One thing I did like; the leogryphs. Those mythical animals figured on several pieces, and the caption describing them was funny enough that I took a moment to text it to myself so I'd remember to blog about it. No, not a
hippogryph, which have an eagle's wings, talons, and head, with a horse's body. The Afghanistan art had
leogryphs, which vary in their descriptions online, but are either
stylized lions, or are
lions with eagle heads and sometimes wings.
The ones in the art show were better, and also funnier. They were described as lions with parrot beaks and eagle wings. Think about that. Parrot beaks and eagle wings? They couldn't be like, really large parrot wings? And if you were picking your animal body parts, wouldn't you rather have a sharp, deadly eagle's beak and slightly slower parrot wings, rather than the other way around? I pointed out that description to the IG, then spent the rest of the day cracking her up by pointing out other art, like the statue with a horse that had zebra legs, or the mural in the Indian wing that featured elephants with the hips of a rhino.
One sad postscript: while looking at the articles from back in 2004 on the art discovery,
I saw this picture in the gallery attached to the National Geographic article. I frowned and thought, "pity they didn't have anything that nice in the show." But then I clicked back to that image a second later, and remembered that they actually did have that piece. It's just been smashed now; the entire face is gone, and there's just a stump of a neck and the rest of the round frame. The caption on the piece said it had been vandalized and destroyed beyond repair, but I assumed that was long ago, or by the Soviets or the Taliban during the early 2000s.
Apparently not; the piece was I perfect repair in 2004, so at some time since then, perhaps during one of the Taliban uprisings that have erupted since Bush removed most of the troops from Afghanistan and sent them to Iraq, they wrecked some portion of the museum and destroyed this one gorgeous piece.
On that front, one last note. Everyone's heard of, and recoiled at, the barbarity and stupidity of the Taliban destroying all the ancient art and statues in Afghanistan; most notably when they
blew up those millennia-old Buddhas carved into a mountain. But few know why they did it. They were following Islamic law, by taking a very fundamentalist interpretation of
the Second Commandment. (Or the first, depending on which religion's sorting you go by.) The one about not making or worshiping any idols. That's the same reason most modern day Muslims consider depictions of the Prophet verboten.
It's funny how different religions (and their sub-cults) interpret the same ancient texts, and how those beliefs evolve over time. Catholics, for instance, have made an intense fetish of idol worship, especially of the Virgin Mary. They're also quite fond of every sort of religious art, elaborate crucifixes, etc, as the Vatican's treasuries demonstrate. Yet Muslims, whose religion is a slightly more modern rewriting of the same ancient Talmudic traditions, have come to an entirely different conclusion, one they feel strongly enough about to blow up priceless ancient treasures, or burn Danish embassies over. And yeah, there's a ton of politics and culture overlaid on that, and Islam didn't forbid artwork of Mohammad until several centuries after his death, etc. But still, this sort of human application of ambiguous ancient writings is what makes the study of religions interesting. Rather than just depressing.
After the museum, we went back to the IG's new apartment to hang out for a while, and play with her pussy. She drove me to my car in Berkeley, since she'd driven into the city in the morning and I'd parked and taken BART over in the afternoon. So by the time I got to her apt she'd changed out of the black leggings, denim mini, black jacket she'd worn all day, and was wearing a t-shirt and red house pants. Tight, butt-hugging house pants that made me all too aware of exactly
what I was missing.
As for her pussy... predictably enough, now that he's settled in, the lack of regular visitors to the IG's apt has turned him into Jinx. The first day he was there, when I helped the IG bring home the kitty, he was scared for an hour, but then walked around everywhere, exploring and sniffing. After that he gained confidence, and spent the last half hour of my visit rubbing the IG, me, and the floor between us. He was like tennis spectator kitty, moving from side to side constantly, rubbing everything, sprawling, purring like a motor boat, etc.
Since then he's seen few people other than the IG, and has taken to spending most of his time under her bed, at least when visitors arrive. Jinx-like. The IG didn't like his slave-name, so her sister re-christened him "Sid" when she met the cat a couple of weeks ago. I approved of the name, despite my usual aversion to giving human names to animals. However, I immediately elaborated on his moniker, giving him a title. "Sir Sidney of the Underbed" is what I call him, and he certainly lived up to that billing during my visit. Like Jinx, he doesn't seem to be frightened: he's not recoiling or hissing or anything. He just prefers to be not seen and not heard and not touched while anyone other than the IG is in the apartment. And he's found that moving to the rear corner of the bed and crouching there, in silence, accomplishes all three goals fairly well. If people just didn't have that habit of dropping down and peering at him, all would be well.
Actually, he's not so adverse to being touched. I was able to lie on the bed (insert "on the IG's bed, stroking her pussy" joke here) and reach down the back side by the wall, and could easily pet Sid from there. He didn't object, or even move. He just sat there, and even arched his back into my hand. He just didn't want to come out and be petted properly. The IG dragged him out eventually, and we spent a few minutes stroking and cooing over her new cute little pussy, but as soon as we let him go he eased his way back under the bed, returned to the corner, rotated, and settled down, positioning himself where he could best keep an eye on our feet.
I don't think his behavior will last forever; he's been out of the pound for less than a month, and is still settling in. Plus he's an adult cat; he lived his first 5 or 6 years with a different family, and then spent 3 months at the pound in a tiny cage in a room with lots of other cats and weird people who poked at him. In another month or two he might have adjusted and then I'll be able to visit the IG's apartment, and will find her pussy ready, willing, and eager to submit to my affections.
Labels: art, cats, the I.G.
