Week 3: A Greek Perfume Jar

Monday 9/22
We begin class by passing around some ancient pottery (you know, five to seven thousand year old pottery)

This week's focus is going to assess archeology in terms of design studies -> assess ancient objects in terms of their engineering and aesthetic qualities.

8th Century BCE
Often described as a period of revolution -> demographic explosion: more settlements, higher population density.

Within a few decades in the 8th century, we have the cystalization of the concept of the polis.

Also, an expansion of greek culture towards Sicily.

Each polis has a favored deity and sanctuary dedicated to them.

Artistic practices and warfare are also intensely progressed/innovated.

Democracy is often said to be related to progressions in agriculture.

Agricultural increases in:


 * Olive production
 * Number of granaries (wheat)

Associated with agricultural development comes the idea of property rights

Polis
City of some size, often situated around an acropolis, a position of worship/defense.

Two qualities:


 * Political separation from its neighbors
 * Claim of ownership to the land around it

Ethnos are small hamlet-like structures that are largely autonomous farmers coming together.

When we talk about the Polis & Democracy, we're really talking about land-owning men as the privileged class.

The polis is architecturally articulated/defined by the emergence of city walls defining a space of inclusion (the polis).

Argos
With the proliferation of sanctuary, new assessments of their value to the Greek Culture.

It has been argued that the religious sanctuaries became essential values to demonstrate the emergence of the polis, they needed such structures to define their right to existence.

Geometric Period ending in 700 BC, is a period of artistic production that includes pieces whose defining qualities are simplistic, linear compositions that do not attempt to produce much detail. Seem to stress shape over form.

The Herion & Pera Hora

Important as political structures to be claimed by city-states.

Also important as sites for votives, objects that are "sacrificed" to the god/goddess associated with the sanctuary.

At Argos, the votives are from around the ancient world, demonstrating its cosmopolitan qualities.

Corinth
Razed in 140 BCE by Marius a Roman General.

Featured a higher citadel, "Acrocorinth"

Corinthian Potters in the 8th Century begin to set the standard for Grecian aesthetic production.

Corinth dominated the important crossroads of the Pelephoneses. They actually built a road to move boats across the isthismus.

Potter's Quarter an ancient industrial center that formed the heart of Corinth's pottery production.

Pottery
Geometric pottery: characterized by detailed shaped patterns, but without any distinct detail.

Orientalizing pottery: ornate, eye-catching design, done a larger scale.

With orientalizing, Greek art became more fascinated on narrative, and depicting myth.

The name orientalizing comes from the fact that the Corinthians were heavily influenced by Egyptian, Persian, and Levantine artifacts imported by trade.

Parallel brushwork done by applying paint as the pottery spins.

Archaic Period of Greece
700 - 480 BCE

Precedes the classical period, Greece's most iconic age/cultural period.

Chigi vase (650 BCE): beginning of horizontal narratives wrapped around the piece.

The Chigi vase includes an image of The Hoplite Phlanx

The Hoplite
Heavily armored infantryman

Shinguards, breast plate, helmet, shield (hoplon)

The hoplite was part of the phlanx unit, wherein each individual was responsible for his neighbor.

The development of the phlanx is considered to be a part of the development of democracy (as it stressed interconnectedness within a community, mutual responsibility for your life and the life of your comrades)

Artistic Revolution
Not just in pottery.

Also in statuary field.

3-Step firing process:

First you paint the piece


 * 1) Oxidation, allow air into the kiln, everything achieves single color
 * 2) Reduction, close up the kilm causes the paint to become a distinctly different set of colors.
 * 3) Re-Oxygenization, causes the clay to produce its natural coloring.

Wednesday 9/24
8th Century Revolution (or is it a renaissance?)

Black Figure Technique (three-step firing process listed above)

BFT uses an updraft kiln which used an "up draft" to fire the clay.

Development Sequence
Typological sequence is informed by it's form, material, and decoration.

Example would be to trace a motorola cellphone and trace out it's morphing from large box to sleek razr.

Typological sequence locate artifacts in spatial, temporal progression (i.e. Corinth, Greece 650 BCE)

Development Sequence of Protocorinthian Aryballos

Ornament begins with merely applied paint ("slip")

Becomes inscribed (actually cut into the clay, less room for error)

Globular aryballos (580 BCE, so significantly later)

Owl-shaped aryballos (630 BCE) demonstrates that progression is not simply liner (but multidirectional)

Sir John Beazley

 * 1885 - 1970
 * Went around to the pots through Europe's museum record/collections
 * Wanted to attribute pots to individual artists
 * Did so by focusing on the details of ornament and very specific elements of the composition
 * Look at parts like hands or neck, common depictions that require/reveal individual stylistic devices
 * In this way, Beazley was able to determine/develop named artists
 * By developing a nomenclature, an artist culture -> Beazley sets up a new conisseurship, culture of fandom & value.

Depentos are written names for figues shown in Greek pottery

Winklemann
(a 18th Century German art historian) classified classical statuary into four phases:


 * 1) hard & straight
 * 2) grand & square
 * 3) beautiful & following (hellinistic)
 * 4) Imitative (Mimetic sculptures of Roman copies of Greek sculpture)

One of the problems with this schematic is that suggests a zenith of art (revealing a bias, proclivity towards that form of art) after which all art is oriented and must imitate.

As a result, Europe develops a imitation culture for this art (best exemplified by Wedgewood & Sons)

The Greek Pot as Skeumorph
It has been argued by some archeologists that greek pots were cheap (3 drakmas = $9.50, while metal cups would cost $650) so this means that current art market love of Greek pottery is a modern conceit.

The metalwork is actually believed to be the source of pottery styling

pottery is thus a Skeumorph which means an imitation, or anachronistic reproduction.

Gold & Silver of ancient world often melted down and reshaped -> not much left over in the archeological record.



Connecting back to Michael Shanks
Is the clay/pottery artist a second class artist?

Shanks would probably argue no. Though the artist was considered in his own time imitative, it's possible that his work represents the most indicative of the Greek culture.

Material Dialectics "making things makes people"

Bronze also used for Greek object productions

Big question: Where is the past? Is it in an object of the present from the past?

Friday 9/26
Starting up again with Winkelmann & his taxonomy of sculpture.

Now returning to the Aryballos...

Who can write about the aryballos? How will they write about it?

Generally, people treat it as a precious object, and as a fossil.

When you come to an object like the aryballos you find that thing has been black-boxed, that it has been closed down to discussion.

How does Shanks deconstruct the object?
Considers it in relationship to other aryballoi.

Considers it as a semiotic object -> both a signifier & and a signified?

Considers it as something that has been concluded but might not be a static dialog?

Comes with key themes:

If it's an aryballos what does that mean:


 * Minitaurization
 * Figurative Design
 * Geometric vs. Risk
 * Skeumorphism
 * Lifecycle
 * Production to Consumption to Burying to Discovery
 * Problem of lifecycle is that the object is not really "essential" it escapes it's own temporal designations

Essentialism problem -> forwards Cartesian mind-body distinction

Even the phenomenlogical approach is varied -> human size begets different readings

Does the aryballos have it's own agency?

Essential Structure of the Course

People-Thing-Relationship

Lifecycle
Site-specificity important

If you have a thing and it "progresses" then that necessitates a change to the person involved in the technology.

What is the motivation of risk?


 * Economic incentive?
 * To make the object more innovative (higher sales potential)
 * Or is that from our own society imagined back upon the period?

The danger of reading into a architectural study.

Hoplites
The only group of people potters are willing to overlap (clearly stressing their grouping)

But each shield is different, has immense detail -> perhaps this is to recuperate individual identity within the group

Particularly as we know that the painters could abstract the hoplites, could have a common stylistic approach.

But had to create individual, highly detailed works on each shield (at the very least it betrays an important aesthetic touch)

Votive
Consider the ways the objects had value through their presence in grave sites and funerary rites

Mass Reproduction vs. Greek Uniquity
Reconsidering the mass reproduced object (the current mass object such as a water bottle) and a greek pot.

Are they both common objects that are/were unconsidered by the contemporary society?

Is there a Benjaminian Aura within the pot-object? Because of it's singularity?