Brutus magazine (Feb 1) celebrates the museum – and why not? A museum is itself a celebration – of art, of genius, of life, of death, of the old and the new, the emerging and the probably-never-to-emerge (one never knows of course); the mundane and the fantastic; ordinary living-room and office furniture, art because an artist calls it art, or a journey to the outer limits of the imagination and beyond. What draws us museum-ward? Peace? Quiet? The invitation to contemplate? One wonders what went on in the minds of the world’s first museum-goers in the world’s first-ever museum.
There actually is a place believed to be such – the remains of it. It is known as Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum and dates to circa 530 BC. “The curator,” records Wikipedia, “was Ennigaldi, the daughter of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire… The museum was discovered in 1925 when archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated portions of the palace and temple complex at Ur,” the ancient Sumerian city located in modern Iraq. “He found dozens of artifacts, neatly arranged side by side, whose ages varied by centuries” – labeled with “clay drums written in three different languages, including Sumerian.”
UNESCO estimates the number of museums in the world today at 104,000. Brutus’ 114 pages, text-light and illustration-heavy, profile, naturally, a mere handful – enough, however, to give us a sense of the almost limitless scope of what we might call humankind’s museum impulse. We are collectors, classifiers and displayers by nature – as we are viewers and contemplators of classified and displayed collections.
What interests you? Somewhere in the world there’s a museum for it. The distances separating them are unfortunate. If we could step out of one museum into another, out of one, say, of ancient Egyptian art into one of Japanese Edo Period (1603-1867) ukiyoe (pictures of the “floating world”), it would make for a most instructive exercise in comparison – another human instinct, teaching us what? – how vastly different human beings are across time and space, or how similar? Both, maybe. Imagine a day’s walking tour of all the museums in the world. Is there a preconceived notion it would leave intact? (You can almost do something of the kind. There’s the British Museum, for instance, with its collection so vast as to make it in effect all museums, or all kinds of museums, in one. In 2023 it drew nearly 6 million visitors.)
One haunting similarity links Egypt and Japan: their shared changelessness across millennia. Art historians speak with awe of thousands of years of stylistic continuity in ancient Egyptian sculpture – and in similar terms of the sculpted figures of Japan’s prehistoric Jomon Period (c. 10,000 BC – c. 300 AD). And this, too, incidentally, the two vastly different cultures share, and not only them, it’s probably universal: their art was buried with their dead. The very first museums were not palaces or temples or buildings open to the general public. They were graves.
The Jomon people over an unimaginably vast stretch of time never progressed – if progress it is – to agriculture, government, writing, or that other concomitant of civilization, war. They remained as they began – hunter-gatherers in unending struggle, often losing, with death, their one defense being prolific birth, their chief means to that end the most fantastic and wonderfully primitive sculptural art, buried in fertility rituals, archaeologists believe, today lining the display cases of museums throughout Japan.
The sculptures, known as dogu, portray almost exclusively pregnant women, the earliest no more than a lump of clay representing a head mounted on a lump of clay representing a torso, later productions growing more individual and, one might almost say, psychological – you can almost see a mind lurking behind the wide-open eyes and the open mouths – trying to tell us something? What? you wonder, in vain but never futilely, for wonder is its own reward. A thought flashes in the brain of the beholder: is this modern avant-garde sculpture in embryo?
What is art? Surveying Brutus’ survey, we touch every art form there is – no, that’s impossible; every art form that has been, maybe; the art of the future may depart as radically (or is the departure already underway?) from all past and present forms as modern science has departed from science as Isaac Newton, let alone Aristotle, knew it – or politics from Plato’s and George Washington’s lofty notions.
Let us close these speculations with an image, and since Brutus is warm in its appreciation of ukiyoe, let it be of that genre: one of the Edo beauties of Kitagawa Utamaro, say, raising the question: what is beauty? One thing to the Jomon, another to an Egyptian, something else to Edo and something altogether different to us? Or fundamentally the same to all of us, only the outward manifestation being different? Imagine a Jomon schooled in dogu appreciation beholding his or her first ukiyoe and thinking… what?
Michael Hoffman is the author of “Arimasen.”
© Japan Today
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1glenn
Is there a museum for felons who became President of the US?