Jumping the Shark, or is it a Cow?: Reply to Jeffrey

Without wanting to "jump" the bracing "Slovenly Slavoj" discussion, I thought I wound return us at the same time to Damien Hirst's shark-in-formaldehyde and to JJC's provocative questions there,

What's the difference between the skulls of history in the Museum of London and Hirst's aesthetically overloaded display of bone? Can curators be artists? Should they be?

And also to his further commentary,

The sacrifice of the animal is part of the power of the artwork. Again, if there were a mania for these things such that no living room were complete without a shark preserved in a tank, I'd have problems -- the same problems I'd have with a hundred green bioluminescent bunnies mass produced rather than one that remains anomalous. I also wouldn't buy the artwork (or sharkwork if you will). In fact I don't particularly want to even see it. But it doesn't seem wrong to me to have produced it, especially the sacrifice was -- at least in my perhaps too generous understanding -- acknowledged and in fact mandated by the conceptual piece, which yoked the loss of life to the challenge it attempted to mount.

All of the comments following the original post are very provocative to thought, and I myself expressed the concern there over what I would term "useless" or "unnecessary" deaths, to which JJC posted the comment just above. I find myself wanting to be very cautious when making so-called ethical pronouncements, I must admit, so as to not be hypocritical, I suppose--I eat meat, by the way, but live with a vegetarian who won't let me do so at home--but also because being ethical, for me, doesn't mean never doing "wrong," but is more a habit of being that strives to be attentive to all the ways in which each one of us is deeply flawed while also desiring to be "better" and trying very hard not to hurt others and being mindful as much as possible of others' feelings and life wishes, etc.

One of my favorite texts on this subject, which I think I've mentioned before, is Neil LaBute's play The Shape of Things, in which a college art student, Evelyn A. Thompson [code for: Eve, and also "e.a.t.": hint, hint], appropriates another student, Adam, as her master's thesis. Without telling him what she is doing, she woos him and slowly gets him to "shape up"--lose weight, get a nose job, change his clothing, get rid of his old friends, etc. The play culminates in the public presentation of the thesis, at which Adam is given the shock of the realization that Evelyn has been "using" him all along, whereas he thought they were in love and that everything he did was out of that mutual love [although much of what he did was downright ethically bad, as opposed to purely selfless: he gave up his friends, who had done nothing wrong except displease Evelyn, he rejected his own "natural" style and personality, he betrayed a friend by sleeping with his fiancee, etc.]. One of the arguments that Evelyn makes to Adam at the end of the film is that if he thought he was in love, even if she did not love him back, then what he felt was "real" at the time and nothing can change that. Furthermore, everyone's ethics are in direct proportion to how much you think you can get away with at any given moment, because all that really matters are "the surface of things, the shape of things" [so, as Adam got better looking, for example, he sensed the possibility of being able to sleep with his best friend's fiancee, and when he had the chance, he did it--something he could not have even imagined himself doing when he was an overweight, slovenly geek]. In other words, ethics are for people who can't, even if they wanted to, sleep with their best friends' wives or shark hunt. When Evelyn accuses Adam, sneeringly, of wanting her to be a "good person, like you" [implying: you are not good, and I proved that already], he replies, "no, just better" [implying that ethics is not, as I would agree, about achieving a state of perfect goodness but about simply trying to be better than you are--all very Aristotlean, actually].

Well, that was long-winded, but I love that play and teach it every year alongside Paradise Lost [for, I hope, obvious reasons]. I love Evelyn's and Adam's confrontation at the end because it is impossible to choose sides--to a certain extent, they are both right: their "love" was never "real," as Adam avers, although since he thought it was at the time, it was real, as Evelyn avers. The surface of things really do matter most of the time versus what is "inside," as Evelyn argues, and for most of us, ethical principles really are easy to wave around like sticks when we ourselves can't get away with much of anything. Although it wouldn't hurt, as Adam argues, to try to be "better" nevertheless, and to try, as hard as possible, not to "use" others, especially under the excuse, "I'm an artist and the only responsibility I have is to my art," as Evelyn says. You can't entirely gloss over some of LaBute's misogny in the play, since it is Evelyn's unbridled sexuality and provocative exhibitionism that prove to be Adam's main undoing, but I try not to let that unpleasant fact stand in the way of what I think is a brilliant meditation on art, ethics, and human relations. It's relevant in my mind to our discussion here, especially as JJC initially framed it in relation to commerce and the "superagency of lucre" and to a consideration of whether or not the display of once-living bodies and body parts is a type of de-sacralization that we should worry about. Well . . . .

of course money has something to do with all this, although, like JJC, to say that art hasn't always had something to do with money would be ridiculous [although just because art and commerce have always been connected doesn't mean anything goes if someone will pay for it, in my mind--it's just, the presence of money does not necessarily "taint" the artwork, although I do not believe, as some free market advocates do that the market is inherently impersonal and therefore morally neutral]. I made this exact same point in my essay, "What Counts is Not to Say, But to Say Again" [published in the Old English Newsletter], in which I tried to assuage the fears of certain Anglo-Saxonists over Anglo-Saxon artifacts being sold on eBay, and where I wrote that,

If it weren’t for the voracious collecting endeavors of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century antiquarians such as Sir Robert Cotton and Sir Robert Harley, who purchased books and artifacts with the zeal of black market scoundrels (Cotton was even briefly jailed in 1629 for owning state papers deemed seditious by the Crown), the British Museum would have lacked its chief founding collections.

I further wrote:

I would argue that it is precisely the cultural artifact’s free market circulation through the global agora that ensures the best possible forms of its future survival. This circulation allows the artifact to be freed from the traditional (and sometimes stifling) constraints of provincial, and even, nationalist “boxes” that ultimately limit the fullest possible range of its cultural appropriation and re-appropriation, without which the item is often either “dead on arrival” or placed into the service of suspect accounts of hegemonic historical memory that often gloss over the messy social relations inherent in the transmission and replication of material culture. I do not want to imply here that museums and libraries (whether private or state-funded) have not done an excellent, even heroic, job of rescuing, preserving, conserving, interpreting, and making publicly available important cultural treasures in a manner that allows us, quite literally, to both read and write history (to “see” the past, as it were, and to place it into meaningful critical and social dialectics); rather, I want to argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of what we think we mean by “original” cultural context, and why we think it is so important that we must worry over its displacement. Furthermore, if we are going to have a vigorous discussion about claims of ownership of the past, I would ask that we commit ourselves to a rigorous theoretical examination of how medieval artifacts circulate in the world both as “things” and as bearers of “cultural meaning.” This will mean joining a theoretical discussion regarding “cultural appropriations” long in progress in the fields of ethnography, sociology, archaeology, historiography, art history, and cultural studies, but also among medieval scholars in fields other than Anglo-Saxon studies. It will also mean recognizing, as Claire Sponsler has argued, that “[t]he tendency of medieval scholars to approach their task as one of salvage has privileged the ‘artifact’ as the focal point of study rather than the ‘process’ of cultural creation and transmission.” Additionally, if we want to talk about “original archaeological contexts,” then we are also going to have to talk about what we think we mean by cultural “origins,” and we will need to pay some attention to the debates over “ethnicity” and “ethnogenesis” that are currently raging among historians, archaeologists, and ethnographers of the proto-historical and early medieval periods. And as long as we are talking about ethics, I would also ask us to spend some time considering the ways in which our insistence on the maintenance of material artifacts within tightly-controlled cultural (and often, ethnically-defined) contexts unwittingly contributes to a process of historicism whereby extremely dangerous political movements—such as Nazism and Serbian nationalism—are able to use these “pristine” cultural objects (and the academic discourses built upon them) as powerfully creative tools for constructing specious collective identities, which identities are then deployed in the service of cultural destruction on a mass scale.

And a little further on:

The fact that the question of the “original context” of the artifact is always inextricably connected to multiple frames of reference and identity—personal and public, psychic and social, material and non-material—brings us right back to ethics. The Anglo-Saxon artifact sitting in its glass case at the British Library may seem fairly benign, and we would be hard pressed to imagine a controversy erupting over its supposed provenance and meaning, or its habitation in a national museum, partly because those who had the most to gain and lose from it are so far removed from us in time. But we would do well to consider the ramifications of some recent controversies over who should own and control the physical objects of the historical past. An illustrative case in point is the bitter international dispute that erupted in the spring and summer of 2001 when Yad Vashem, Israel’s main Holocaust museum, removed from a house in Drohobych, Ukraine five fragments of newly-discovered murals, depicting scenes from Grimm’s fairy tales, painted by the Polish Jewish writer and artist Bruno Schulz, who was shot to death by an SS officer in Nazi-occupied Drohobych (then part of Poland) in 1942. Many in Poland and Ukraine objected strongly to Yad Vashem’s removal of Schulz’s work, which they feel is a part of their living Polish and Central European Jewish heritage, but Yad Vashem insisted not only that Schulz’s work more properly belonged in their cultural and moral purview, but that they would also make the more able curators. It is often said of Schulz that he “was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died a Jew,” but to the representatives of Yad Vashem who defended the removal of the mural fragments, because Schulz “was a Jewish artist—forced to illustrate the walls of the home of a German SS officer as a Jewish prisoner during the Holocaust, and killed by an SS officer purely because he was a Jew—the correct and most suitable place to house the wall paintings he sketched during the Holocaust, is Yad Vashem.” Given Drohobych’s anti-Semitic history and the fact that the town contains no markers or monuments denoting its most famous son, perhaps Yad Vashem was right to take the murals; nevertheless, the debate raged through the fall and winter of 2001 and into the spring of 2002, with twenty-four American scholars of Central European history, art, and literature arguing in The New York Review of Books that Yad Vashem’s removal of the frescoes “represents an unconscionable statement of moral and cultural superiority” that is “an insult to the people of Central Europe,” as well as “doubly damaging to the local Jewish population which has remained in Drohobych.” Most important, these scholars worried that Yad Vashem’s actions were a dangerous assault on the history of both the artist’s and the region’s “pluralism,” and since all of his work is set in Drohobych, “is it not the best homage to him to salvage some part of the world he loved, in situ?” Here we see both the concern for honoring an “original” local context, as well as an attention to the multi-dimensional and “plural” nature of the historical artifact, which, perhaps, should not be “boxed in” too tightly, but how compatible are these objectives? Can the artifact, much like the individual who creates it, ever sit still? The answer is both “yes” and “no.”

So, I'm hoping that we can see some of the relevancy of what I was trying to say there, in relation to our discussion about Hirst's shark and those skulls in their glass case at the museum in London, although what I was discussing in my OEN essay were artifacts like belt clasps and helmets, not human or shark bodies, or parts thereof. And I think our consideration of whether or not it is okay to display grave remains in museums requires slightly different parameters than the ones I sketched out in my OEN essay, although they are hinted at with my example of the controversy over the Schulz wall murals, which has something to do with what we might call the curator-ship of memory, individual and more broadly cultural.

It doesn't take me too much effort to understand that the shark in formaldehyde or those human skulls, diamond-encrusted or not, have little to do with the living "persons" that once moved and expressed themselves by means of those bodies and body parts. In this sense, they are inanimate objects whose presence--whether at the bottom of an ocean in a shark graveyard or underneath a hillside somewhere in England or in a glass case in a museum--does nothing to "disturb," as it were the human and other living selves who once lived within their material "skins," and who can no longer be harmed. It is more to the question of memory that I believe we should direct our ethical concerns, or non-concerns. To those living in past histories, or even in present "alter-human" spaces like the sea, or to those, like a Barry Lopez, who take it as a personal concern to consider the sanctity of those species who cannot articulate, through speech or gesture, their own possible sacred-ness, and for whom the placement of the dead in particular places did, or does, matter, we might imagine--as historians but also as the artists of history--how some may have wished to have been left behind, in a certain place, close to their ancestors, their tribe, their home, etc. Obviously, everything is in motion all the time, and no one is safe from disturbance--from being moved from one place to another, and with no living representative to advocate otherwise, the question who cares? becomes significant. Which is kind of like another version of the old adage, "why should I care after I'm dead"? Which is another way of also saying, "now that the shark is dead, does it really matter where he ends up?" But does this mean our ethical considerations only ever extend to the question of who, sitting beside us or standing off to the side, in the present, might be hurt? Levinas once wrote that we do not have the right to leave anyone alone at his or her death, but what about after?

UPDATE: I hope that no one will think from the foregoing ruminations that I am of the unreconstructed viewpoint that no one and no thing culled from grave-sites is ever an appropriate object for an artwork, which might also be a museum exhibit. I am not. But I think the context matters a lot. So, if you dig up some Egyptian mummies and put them on display in the British Museum as artifacts of "antiquity," supposedly of interest to antiquarians, Egyptologists, and the like, and the idea behind it all is something like, "gee, weren't the Egyptians really neat?", I'm not sure I'm in favor of that, but if a group of Tibetan monks in Cambodia decide to artfully display mounds of skulls of Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge in their temples and invite visitors to view these and think about their history, as well as about the souls of their former possessors, or if the curators of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC decide to have, as one of their displays, a mound of shoes taken from German and Polish Jews as they were being herded into a concentration camp, and the purpose of this display, which is both art as well as historical testimony, is to call to the viewer's mind the memory of the singular persons who once wore those homely shoes, and to reflect upon their violent and untimely demise as well as upon the small and ordinary material things that "add up" to a person, whether alive or dead, then I can live with that. Indeed, these are examples of museum-ship as the maintenance of the sacred in history.