[MSN] Greeks Go for All the Marbles In Effort to Get Back Artifacts

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Greeks Go for All the Marbles In Effort to Get Back Artifacts
A New Museum's Goal: To Press the British to Return Parthenon Sculptures

By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 7, 2007; R12



ATHENS -- On Saturday, huge cranes will begin lifting ancient statues,
carvings and architectural fragments off the Acropolis, down to a new museum
built at the base of the most famous citadel in the world. For the vast
majority of these stone remnants of the great age of Athens, it will be the
first time they have ever left this rocky summit.

Even as the forces of history washed over this city for millennia, making
and unmaking it according to the dictates of three major religions and at
least a half-dozen empires, these stone gods and heroes, which once
decorated its temples and public spaces, have remained close to their
original home. That makes them the lucky ones.

The new museum, designed by architect Bernard Tschumi, has proved
controversial from the start. The old Acropolis museum, a low and ugly space
built next to the Parthenon, has long been deemed inadequate. Three earlier
efforts to build a new museum, in 1976, 1979 and 1989, failed after becoming
mired in legal, archaeological and political conflicts. The current museum,
which required the expropriation of 25 buildings, has been in the works
since 1997, and again legal difficulties delayed it -- so much so that the
plan to open in time for the 2004 Athens Summer Olympics is now ancient
history.

But Dimitrios Pandermalis, the president of the museum project, says the
first visitors will be allowed in early next year, and the museum will have
a grand opening sometime in early 2009. At which point, perhaps, arguments
about the building will give way to the building's basic argument. Which is
simple: Greece wants the marble sculptures that the English ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, chiseled off the Parthenon more than 200
years ago. From the ground up, the building is designed to emphasize the
Greek claim that the "Elgin marbles" should be returned to Athens, to join
together in one place as much of the surviving Parthenon statuary as can be
assembled.

Architecture has been used to establish civic identity since at least the
time of the Parthenon. But Tschumi's new museum is an attempt to use
architecture to shift the terms of a debate about who should possess one of
the world's most cherished collection of antiquities. Whether it is an
Egyptian artifact looted from a grave during the swashbuckling days of early
20th-century archaeology, or antiquities from Peru sitting in an Ivy League
museum, or a Native American object that still has sacred power within a
living cultural tradition, there is increasing pressure on established
museums to consider the return of art that, in many cases, has helped define
them as institutions for decades.

Rarely can the problem be solved easily through legal remedies. Very often
the pressure for repatriation is diplomatic, or part of a not-so-subtle
public relations campaign. The longer an object sits in one place, however,
the more likely it is to become part of a new, and perhaps equally
meaningful cultural context.

For many people, a visit to the British Museum means a visit to the Elgin
marbles -- and to remove them from London would be to sever one kind of
emotional bond in favor of another. And in relatively new countries, such as
the United States, the repatriation of art would mean the dissolution of
powerful markers of Western and European-derived identity, even if those
markers were secured with the fortunes of robber barons or by outright
appropriation and even theft.

Tschumi's museum, an austere building, is designed to cut through the
complexity of arguments about purloined art and make a direct emotional
appeal. It is a large object wedged into a crowded old neighborhood. The
entire museum is centered on a concrete core, the same length and width as
the core of the Parthenon. On the lowest level of the museum, there are
pillars over ruins. On the next two levels there are trapezoid-shaped shaped
floors with gallery spaces built around the concrete core. But on the top,
the concrete core emerges with a glass box around it, echoing the temple's
shape on the hill above. From here, visitors will be able to look up to the
Parthenon, with which the new, glass-walled Parthenon Gallery is exactly
aligned.

In the Parthenon Gallery, the concrete box becomes a stand-in for the temple
itself. Visitors will see the Parthenon frieze running around it, like a
belt of marble, illuminated by light flowing through the glass walls.
Fragments of the Parthenon's elaborate pediment sculptures, which once sat
inside the triangular roof spaces at both ends of the temple, will be placed
at the east and west ends of the new gallery, arrayed just as they were
2,500 years ago.

The Elgin marbles, which represent roughly 60 percent of the surviving
sculpture that was originally on the Parthenon, will be represented by
plaster casts made from the originals now in the British Museum. These casts
will be covered by wire mesh veils, to partially obscure them. The idea,
according to Pandermalis, is to allow visitors to see the marbles in their
original narrative sequence.

"The concept was to restore the continuity of the narrative," says Tschumi,
a Swiss-born architect, speaking by telephone from his New York office. And
with the veils, which emphasize the absence of the marbles that are in
London, the gallery raises a larger question: "Would the building, and the
display, be convincing enough so that there would be -- how can I describe
it? -- a desire to get those marbles back, on the part of the British?"

Not according to the British.

Jonathan Williams, a curator who oversees the British Museum's European
department, praises the new Athens museum as "an extraordinary achievement."
But he adds, "The position of the trustees essentially remains that the
current distribution in Athens and London provides an important opportunity
for different stories about this monument to be told."

This is a slight variation on the museum's formal argument about possession
of the marbles, articulated on its Web site. There the emphasis is on the
international importance of the sculptures, the number of visitors who see
them in London (6 million a year, the museum estimates) and the excellent
quality of British stewardship.

"The sculptures from the Parthenon have come to act as a focus for Western
European culture and civilization, and have found a home in a museum that
grew out of the eighteenth-century 'Enlightenment,' whereby culture is seen
to transcend national boundaries," reads a museum statement.

It is a strange use of the word Enlightenment, and a rather galling
association of imperial plundering with universal, transnational values. The
marbles "transcend national boundaries" in part because Lord Elgin used the
Royal Navy to spirit them out of Greece. And while Elgin's gusto for all
things classical certainly marked him as a man of the Enlightenment, his
removal of the marbles also involved dubious legal dealings and an arrogant
disregard for the integrity of the building. It was baldly colonialist
behavior by a man who figured Britain, as a great power, simply deserved to
own the marbles no matter the cost or the consequences.

And yet, Lord Elgin may have been one of the most hapless imperialists of
his time. When he set out in 1799 as the British representative to the
Ottoman Empire (which controlled Greece at the time), he planned only to
make plaster casts and drawings of the marbles in Athens. His stated goal
was the elevation of British taste in art and architecture, not the
expansion of England's collection.

Actually taking the marbles was an act of opportunism, justified by a very
loose and liberal reading of a short phrase in the legal permission he
secured to work on the Acropolis ("and when they wish to take away some
pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures, that no opposition be
made"). The phrase "some pieces" became, in the event, everything that he
could get his hands on, and the most infamous act of artistic pillage in
history.

At the time, France and England were engaged in a long series of wars that
would end only with Napoleon's rustication to the remote island of St.
Helena in 1815. Both countries were hungry for antiquities. Napoleon was
stuffing the Louvre in Paris with the best world art that conquest could
assemble. The French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire told his agents in
Athens, "Take all you can. Do not neglect any opportunity to pillage
anything that is pillageable."

Arguments in Elgin's defense have run like this: The marbles would have been
stolen anyway; the British appropriation of them secured them against
neglect and dispersal; and the Turks, at the time, showed little or no
interest in saving these vital works. Even the art-loving Venetians had done
serious damage to the legacy of the Greeks when they blasted the Parthenon
into roughly the shape we know it today while firing on a Turkish ammunition
dump in 1687. Elgin had sound reasons to believe he was acting in the best
interests of the art.

But Elgin could never have anticipated the writings of Lord Byron, the
romantic poet, who fell in love with Greece (and Greek boys) shortly after
the marbles were stripped off.

"Dull is the eye that will not weep to see/Thy walls defaced," wrote Byron
of the Parthenon in his first great poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." And
he made no mistake about the culprit, Lord Elgin, whom he derided as a
hardhearted Scotsman with a barren mind. The poem made Byron famous and
confirmed Elgin as a scoundrel in much of the popular imagination.

And in many ways, it laid the groundwork for the modern preservation
movement, and ultimately, Tschumi's new museum. When seen simply as
functional objects, there's no reason not to update, change or tear down
buildings depending on the needs of the moment. Byron was making an argument
about preserving a building, as an object with historical and aesthetic
integrity, for entirely emotional and sentimental reasons. His poem
suggested that some buildings have poetic, even sacred, qualities that
transcend time and function.

Which is essentially the argument that the Greeks, and Tschumi's building,
are making today. Elena Korka, director of prehistoric and classical
antiquities at the Greek Ministry of Culture, says that the Greek position
on the marbles' repatriation has evolved over the years.

When the current campaign for restitution began in 1982, the Greek argument
was based on grievance and nationalism. The Greeks deserved the marbles back
because they were fundamental to Greek identity. But, implicitly at least
with all their talk of being the source and origin of all things Western,
the Greeks were also arguing that Greek culture had universal, international
importance, so much so that one might assume that it should be
internationally held.

And the modern Greek connection to the classical past was also, some argued,
a fairly arbitrary use of history to forge national identity. Too many
centuries of change and cultural intermingling and linguistic and religious
evolution had severed the connection between scruffy shepherds of the
Peloponnesus, when Byron visited, and the penetrating wisdom of Socrates.

Today, Korka says, the argument is about making the Parthenon whole, not
about the Greeks. The Parthenon is "a symbol for Western civilization, a
point of reference for the whole world," she says. Therefore, it is in the
interests of the world to see its marbles reunited. The Greek culture
ministry now publishes a little book that shows, for instance, the body of
the goddess Iris on one page (from a frieze held in London), her head on
another (a chunk of marble currently in Athens), and the two pieces reunited
on a third.

"There is a very large part of the museum which has nothing to do with the
marbles," insists Tschumi. Which is true. But the tone -- the fundamental
atmosphere of the building -- is set by their absence. The museum emphasizes
the need to transcend fracturedness through its proximity, its alignment,
and its gallery with mourning veils draped over the casts of the hostage
marbles in London. It is a severe building, and a very simple one (in its
effect, if not in the architectural challenges it posed).

* * *

The Acropolis Museum rises on more than 100 large concrete pillars, set into
the earth like archaic columns. The challenge that thwarted earlier attempts
at a new museum -- how to build in an ancient neighborhood without
destroying ruins -- was finally solved by raising most of the structure off
the ground.

As you enter the museum and prepare to ascend a slowly rising hall into the
first-floor exhibition space, glass floor panels reveal what Pandermalis
says is a tiled floor from a 4th or 5th century B.C. banquet room. Even
after a trip through the Athens subway, in which one station has a Roman-era
sewer system preserved as if in a museum, this direct view into the most
storied age of Athens is strangely titillating.