Practice Wisdom: The Afghanistan Exhibit at the National Gallery of Art
July 27th, 2008I had several friends tell me that I should go see this exhibit - several friends and the Metro, which has shown itself as faithful of service and as mercurial of temperament as any companion. Then, when I was at the National Gallery on an unrelated errand, I saw this image (the poster for the exhibit) blazoned on a banner the size of a wall. Impressed that any object as small as the one in the picture was clearly designed to be should stand up so well under such extremities of magnification, I dropped everything else I was doing and went to take a look.
Now, the online resources on this exhibition are pretty comprehensive - presentations at the National Geographic site , a timeline at the NGA site - but the disadvantage of the flash and the slideshows and the video is that it’s going to be impossible for me to link individual images as I discuss them. So if you’re interested in something that I’m talking about, I suggest browsing around through those two sites, or obviously, if you are in the area, going to see it for yourself.
The very existence of this collection, a motley assemblage of archaeological pieces from four sites in northern Afghanistan, is due to a series of events which makes the exhibit’s explanatory film play like a spy thriller. Narrated by Khaled Hosseini, who has the most melancholy accent I’ve ever heard on anybody, the film describes the depradations first of the Soviets and then of the Taliban. The bombed and sacked Kabul museum, the dynamiting of the Bamyan Buddhas - the images filled me with horror. The latter, particularly, was almost obscene, as if they were documenting a murder.
Now, surely that is a classic case of misplaced priorities? If it’s murder I’m talking about, the world has plenty of real murder without worrying about cultural destruction. Stone and metal can and will be carved again, words rewritten, but a human life is irreplaceable. Yes, that’s true, but artifacts are more than merely material objects in a world of material objects; they are the links between present and past that populate a culture with a democracy of the dead. To kill a person is to end his life in the world, to destroy his creation is to end his immortality in it. There’s a reason that genocide is something other than mass murder: killing lots and lots of people is not the same as wiping out a culture from the face of the earth.
But the point is that not everything was destroyed, that hidden away in crates in the basement were works of gold and stone and ivory and glass. Greek and Indian, Chinese and Persian, nomadic finery and architectural flourishes, the past came tumbling out. The curators smiled and the journalists cheered and I could have cried with happiness. And it’s not even my culture.
Well, sort of not. I hadn’t realized just how Greek Afghanistan was in the days when it was Bactria and Alexander rolled his tanks across it. All that the exhibit offers of Balkh, mother of cities and capital of Bactria, is a battered pillar capital that was serving as a block of stone in a dam. And that speaks eloquently of lost glory, but the sturdy Strato, school principal, the astonishingly familiar little votive of Herakles, and the reconstruction of the city plan of Ai Khanum, speak not so much about lost glory as about the vividness of the past, at once immediate and remote. Though the digital reconstruction of Ai Khanum could use a bit of work. Everything looks so sterile and pristine! And the presentation could stand to take a page from video games and display a little map of the whole complex and the bottom of the screen while you’re zooming along through the smooth-walled, pixellated hallways.
From the storerooms at Begram came an assortment of objects that might have been hoards of private treasure or might have been intended for trade, and display Indian as well as Greek styles. There’s quite a shocking contrast between the Indian female figures and the Greek - the former have little wasp waists and enthusiastically amplified breasts and hips, while the latter barely have the long line from torso to toes interrupted by a hint of curvature. A little human-headed rooster figurine looks like something sketched by a modern political cartoonist, and a line along the skirt of a figure on a glass cup was either an unusually free gesture or revealed a momentary tremor in the artist’s hand. A sweet-faced Indian river goddess serves a furniture decoration, and a series of elaborate friezes of women beautifying themselves serve as a recursive beautification to a chair or a throne that has long since crumbled to dust.
Speaking of things that crumble to dust and leave their adornments behind, the last exhibit is that of a nomadic burial site; one man and five women. Their finery had rotted away completely, but the hundred of little gold ornaments remained, showing where the edges of the cloth had been. Most of the cases just stack these little decorations up in rows, but one shows the figure of a tiny woman, outlined in what can only be described as bling.
Most of the exhibit speaks through design, the curling gold and turquoise of the nomad belt buckles or the bronze novelty basin whose fish flapped their tails when the reservoir beneath was filled with water. One block from Ai Khanum, though, was inscribed with words in Greek, and of the lines, only one, “Practice wisdom” remains.