Exhibition vs. Ritual: Olmec Heads by Nick Urbano

Before the observatories of the Maya and the pyramids of the Aztec, one civilization flourished in South America.  The “mother culture” of Mesoamerica, the Olmec, is the oldest civilization of the Americas.  While the Olmec civilization is recognized for setting the blueprint for subsequent civilizations with its innovations ranging from culture such as religious systems and temples to sport like Mesoamerican ballgame, it is especially recognized for its art, mainly the colossal Olmec heads.  The heads, carved out of various types of stone, were found all throughout the area near the Mexican Gulf Coast, the origin of the Olmec civilization.  While researchers have speculated for some time what and/or who the heads represent, one obvious thing we can take from the heads is that they were of great importance to the Olmec people and a great deal of labor was put into carving the colossal heads.  At the same time, we should also think about how the discovery and exhibition of these heads helps us learn about ancient civilizations and how their display in museums may affect how we perceive them. 

To date, seventeen colossal Olmec heads have been discovered.  However, according to researchers, there is a good possibility that there are still dozens of undiscovered heads around the Mexican Gulf Coast area that have yet to be dug up.  In just San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, an area in the southeast portion of the Mexican state Veracruz, ten of the colossal heads were found.  Researchers and archaeologists were astounded by the stone heads, mainly because of their massive size.  One video played in the exhibit included some facts related to the stone heads that were quite interesting.  For example, researchers have been able to determine that the rocks used for the heads came from almost forty miles away from their origin.  Additionally, the process of carving the colossal heads was an innovative one.  The carvers and artists first made their way to the stone and began the sculpting on site.  When it approached completion, researchers say, approximately one thousand people were needed to transport the colossal head to its final resting place. 

Part of the discovery of art is attempting to decipher the meaning of a work.  Doing this is easy for some works of art such as paintings and carvings on walls and pottery.  However, determining the meaning and importance of the colossal Olmec heads has been a challenge for some researchers.  Some believed the heads represented supernatural beings, perhaps gods.  Others believed the heads represented the Mesoamerican ball players.  Now, though, it has been agreed by many that the heads are representative of rulers and important people of the Olmec civilization.  In a way, the theory of the heads representing gods is not completely incorrect, since rulers in Mesoamerican civilizations were also sometimes seen as gods.  Furthermore, the colossal heads were described as having the “face of a god and the likeness of a king”.  While they were sculpted to symbolize and commemorate rulers, the colossal Olmec heads were not originally carved out of a raw piece of rock.  The backs of many of the heads are flat and polished.  At the time, Olmec artists were known for “recycling” artwork and monuments.  As a result, researchers came to the conclusion that many of the colossal heads were originally used as thrones.  One thing I thought of while at the exhibit which I did not see written on any of the descriptions was that the thrones could have been connected to the rulers.  I thought to myself that since many of the heads were carved from thrones, then the thrones must have belonged to the person for whom the head was being sculpted after their death.  The medium of the colossal heads is also indicative of the importance of the people they portrayed.  The colossal heads were sculpted from basalt, a volcanic rock.  The idea of basalt being “born from fire” gives the impression that the person the sculpture portrays should be held in high regards because of their monument’s origin.               

Seeing the colossal Olmec heads in person was a truly awe inspiring experience.  Witnessing the actual size of the heads in person instead of through a computer screen was an amazing experience in and of itself.  The details of the sculptures, like the almond shaped eyes, the flat noses, and the porosity of the basalt are only observable and able to be appreciated in person.  While I was admiring the majesty of the colossal Olmec heads, I began to think to myself at what price I was enjoying this artwork.  Besides the $25 ticket, it occurred to me that the heads I was looking at were sacred monuments taken away from a sacred site thousands of miles away from San Francisco.  These colossal heads were unearthed from the scorching jungles of central Mexico and taken around the world, ending up in the jungle of Golden Gate Park in a climate controlled room sitting under ambient lights.

It began to seem to me at that point that these works of art had no business being in a museum.  They do help us learn and give us insight to a civilization we know little about, but in the process, as Walter Benjamin says, we have pried an object from its shell and destroyed its aura.  I am very appreciative of the opportunity to be able to witness these works of art first hand, but I also feel a feeling of guilt, knowing that I am enjoying these heads which were taken away from their sacred sites to be exhibited in museums around the world.  “The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”  To me, this quote from Walter Benjamin means that over time, the purpose and meaning of an artwork is subject to change.  To the Olmec civilization, the colossal heads were probably used as monuments to praise rulers who had died.  To us, the heads represent an ancient civilization’s culture and we see it as an opportunity to learn about the oldest civilization of the Americas.  While we do benefit from the discovery of the colossal heads, we also take away from their natural aura by taking them out of the jungles of Mexico and putting them in museums.  According to Benjamin, this is the way things are supposed to be.  “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.”  Maybe we were meant to discover these colossal heads.  Maybe the Olmecs sculpted these heads not only to honor their rulers but left them to be discovered by future civilizations to show how they lived.  With the colossal heads and other ancient artworks and artifacts, I believe that we benefit from their discoveries and can learn about the civilizations that they came from, even if it does take away from the aura of the artwork.                      

Exhibition vs. Ritual: Olmec Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico. by Ekaterina Sabieva

 

       Olmec civilization, which flourished over 3000 years ago in the tropical rain-forests and watery savannahs of Mexico’s southern Gulf lowlands, is acknowledged as the oldest civilization in the America to create monumental art and architecture. They flourished from 1200 B.C.E. to about 400 B.C.E., and then somehow disappeared. In this essay I will talk about the art of the Olmec civilization and magnificence of colossal heads in particular. We will find out who were the people they represent, how many of them were found, the purpose of their existence and of how the setting of this particular artwork influences our perception about it.

      Today the Olmec civilization is best known for the creation of colossal heads that were crated in the second millennium B.C. What strikes me the most about the Colossal Heads is the size, how they were made, the tool that were used and how material was delivered without the use of wheels or any modern technology we have today.

      In the middle of the Nineteenth Century seventeen Colossal Heads were discovered all over Mexico and Mesoamerica. Four of them were found in La Venta, one in Cabata, ten heads were found in San Lorenzo, and two in Tres Zapotez. The heads are truly massive, ranging from almost 5 feet to 11 feet in height, and weighing many tons. The stone that the heads are carved out of is basalt, a volcanic stone, a stone that is born from fire that was extracted in boulders weighing thousands of pounds. Some were transported from Tuxtla Mountains; some from Cerro Cintepec; others from San Martin Volcano. It has been estimated that moving a colossal head required the efforts of 1,500 people for three to four months. No iron or copper has been found in the area, so these heads were most likely carved with stone, sand and water (with techniques unknown today) which most likely was incredibly time consuming. Basalt rock is very hard to work even with the modern technology we have today. Considering the size of the stone, it’s weight, the distance from the source to the villages and the amount of man power it required in order to be moved, makes one wonder about the significance of people whose heads were carved of.

      Some scholars believe these sculptures to be head portraits that memorialized rulers and therefore constitute the first royal portraits of ancient Mexico. Each portrait is distinguished by size, expression, and personal adornment. Their gigantic scale asserts the ruler’s power and authority, but their expressive faces are realistic portraits of specific individuals. All of the portrait heads wear helmet-like headgear, each of which bears distinctive motifs that may have identified the portrayed ruler. The helmet on Colossal Head sculpture (number 5) from San Lorenzo displays typical elements found on other San Lorenzo portrait heads, such as the horizontal band topped by a woven motif with circular forms. The woven-mat design is used to symbolize royalty, and the three-toed bird feet or feline paws, each with a talon, may represent the figure’s name or lineage. While the front of the sculpture shows the rounded face of a ruler, the back of it is flat and polished, suggesting its former use as a throne. Monolithic carved thrones and colossal portrait heads publicly proclaimed the ruler’s importance and authority, which were also expressed through specific regalia emphasizing the ruler’s ability to ensure prosperity for his community. Many Olmec heads had the symbol of the jaguar in different headpieces. Olmecs believed that the jaguar was the living and the dead.

       Almost all of the colossal heads bear the same features, flattened nose, full lips, and capping headpiece. These characteristics have caused some debate due to their apparent resemblance to African facial characteristics. Based on this comparison, some have insisted that the Olmecs were Africans who had immigrated to Mesoamerica long ago. However, claims of pre-Columbian contacts with Africa are rejected by the majority of archeologists and other Mesoamerican scholars. Some of the heads, and many other monuments, have been variously mutilated, buried and disinterred, reset in new locations and/or reburied. It is known that some monuments, and at least two heads, were recycled or re-carved, but it is not known whether this was simply due to the scarcity of stone or whether these actions had ritual or other implications. It is also suspected that some mutilation had significance beyond mere destruction. These deliberate alterations may have been performed after the reign of the ruler to diminish his powers. Explanations for the facial features of the colossal heads include possibility that the heads were carved in this manner due to the shallow space allowed on the basalt boulders. Others note that in addition to the broad noses and thick lips, the heads have the Asian eye-fold, and that all these characteristics can still be found in modern Mesoamerican Indians.

        Today, we view these colossal heads indoors, in a museum setting, with dimmed lighting, standing on a platform surrounded by plain, empty walls and other museum artifacts. To some it may be just another piece of art from 3,000 years ago discovered somewhere in Mexico, as an enormous rock with someone’s face carved into it. However, when these monuments were made, viewers probably saw the heads in bright sunshine or rain, surrounded by the greenery of jungles and the sounds of wild life.

This type of monument marks the beginning of a tradition of honoring the ruler and his figural representation. Rulers were represented in large cities throughout Mesoamerica. Their feats were recorded and their lineages were associated with patron deities. The power of the ruler was legitimized by both ancestral and sacred authority, a concept that seems to be the principal message of the Olmec monoliths. Olmec people were probably looking at these sculptures with a different perspective then we do today. Olmec heads may have been the portraits of their rulers, someone whom they adored, whom they believed to be as mighty as their gods. Also, these monuments might have been made for ritual purposes, they might have been head portraits of those rulers that passed away, like a memorial. Maybe it was a way they were remembered after their death, like a photograph we keep today of our loved ones who have passed away and of those who are still alive.

Leaving behind a mysterious history and an advanced civilization, the Olmecs have literally carved their place in history. It’s been more than 3,000 years since the early inhabitants of Mexico created their first monumental sculptures deep in the heart of North America’s jungles and their art still remains a mystery for us all.  

Exhibition VS. Ritual by Mark Pedruco

Classics are timeless, meaning that different generations who experience a classic will probably be affected in the same way as the generation that experienced the classic first.  This is also true for the Olmec exhibit at the De Young Museum.  Sixteen heads have been discovered so far, and at least ten of them are thought to memorialize rulers.  Composite eyes with deep incisions, a broad nose, and a mouth facing downward are iconic Olmec-style features that can be seen on each head.  They all have helmets decorated with animal insignia which may have possibly served as the governor’s emblem.  Some of these heads were carved from pre-existing thrones, the exact reason behind this is still unknown.  Two possibilities include: stone as a material was scarce and they had to re-use what they had, or the throne was a sentimental piece and it was a symbolic act.  Evidence for throne use comes from the fact that the back of the heads are flat instead of round like the rest of the head.  Also, the fact that these heads were found in the Olmec capital further emphasizes their importance.

            A man known as Walter Benjamin compares the purpose of ritualistic art with exhibition or mass reproduction of art.  Interestingly the Olmec heads appear to be a combination of both, we assume their creation is to ritually depict governors and even though each head has its own unique characteristics, they all are similar in that they are giant heads carved from stone to immortalize certain individuals in Olman history.  Another factor is present among the Olmec heads which echoes a point brought up by Benjamin, “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice- politics” (Chaper IV).  Even though these are great works of art, their primary purpose is political because of the people who they represent, governors.  The advertising campaign to promote the Olmec heads can also be considered political, increased awareness of the Olmec Exhibit will in turn increase income for the De Young Museum as well as its prestige.  Benjamin also explains how a work of art never loses its exclusive ‘aura’ even when seen from different perspectives.  The Olmec heads represented powerful individuals when the Olman society was still alive, and in modern times people will still see it as powerful, but instead as a representation of all Olmans instead of just their governers.

            Benjamin also compares the ability of certain works of art being open to the public with exclusive secretive works of art.  Some of the reasons for exclusivity include specific individuals who inherit the right to witness the work of art, or it may simply be due to the weight or foundation of a work of art that it cannot be moved without compromising the work of art itself.  Considering this idea with the Olmec heads, technology has allowed the transportation of these massive heads, when in the past moving these objects is considered impossible.

            The Olmec heads are slightly intimidating but also simultaneously intriguing because of their overwhelming size.  The opportunity to actually see an Olmec head in person is deeply humbling with the knowledge that ancient people were able to sculpt such objects without the use of metal tools.  The museum setting containing the works of art centered in displays with lights and information evokes imagination and wonder from the observer.  The sterile environment helps isolate the figure into focus but also forces the observer to guess about what it was like to see these figures in their original environment.  The optional headphones for the exhibit explains certain information about the Olman society and also provides some tribal background music to help immerse the observer.  Even with the music and lights however, the exhibit cannot recreate the smells and sounds of water, plants, and dirt from the tropical locale of the Olmec head, nor can it authentically recreate the “natural pose” it was found in.  Witnessing the Olmec head in its original environment will probably be exponentially more powerful than the same Olmec head presented at the De Young Musuem.  It is the same as trying to teach someone how to do something by only telling them what to do, the best thing is to actually try it for themselves so they know the feeling personally.  The same goes for seeing the Olmec head in the museum, we are told objective information through third parties such as information cards and tour guides, but it does not compare to the experience of coming across these masterpieces in their homeland while all of your senses are engaged.  People remember things better when it is a personal experience instead of forced learning.

            Overall, experiencing the Olman artworks is sort of paradoxical.  The size of the heads are so large that it does not matter if you see it in a museum or the natural environment, they simply have a powerful presence.  However, at the same time each location has its advantages and disadvantages.  The museum helps you learn about the history behind the artworks and the people who created them, but the environment has the indescribable sensory experience which the Olman society felt as well as the archaeologists which rediscovered them.  The presentation utilizing a stage and lights helps keep the piece in focus for the observer to examine but the environment also compliments the piece with a history of its own (being the environment that the Olman people lived in).  Objective information from the museum concludes the observer’s questions about the piece, but the natural environment envelopes the piece with an infinite curiosity.  In the end it all depends on the individual for what is preferred, everything has a good and bad side and it is up to the individual to decide what they perceive as ultimately good or bad.

Exhibition VS. Ritual by Justin Edwards

   In 1938 the respected Yale archaeologist Michael Coe reports that “there was strongly grounded suspicions that an entirely new civilization, somehow related to the Maya but different from it, and of an unknown age, was to be discovered in the jungle strongholds of the southern Gulf Coast plain."  Coe’s theory was in fact true; this mysterious civilization was that of the Olmec people.  The Olmec civilization is considered to be the mother of all Mesoamerican cultures.  They arose around 1600bce. and disappeared around 400bce. 

   The Olmec society still holds a large cloud of mystery over modern day archaeology.  One reason behind this fact is the discovery that many materials used in the Olmec society were imported from elsewhere.  "Everything at La Venta is exotic," reports Coe "in the sense that it was brought from somewhere else.  Even the brightly colored clays had been specially selected and brought to the island, for they are not indigenous.  Likewise, the jade and serpentine (ton after ton of the latter) came from a distant and as yet unknown source."  Obsidian was yet another material that the Olmecs used to perfection but was imported from an unknown source.  Perhaps the most fascinating imported material was that of the gigantic basaltic stones.  For these massive stones would be carved down to create some of the Olmec’s most prized artworks; the Colossal Olmec Heads.    

   As I turned the corner in the basement of the De Young Museum I stared down a long dark corridor and at the other end a gigantic head was staring right back.  The De Young Museum was fortunate enough to incorporate two of the seventeen known Olmec Heads into their exhibit.  As I approached the massive head sculpture I stood in awe at the sheer magnitude and presence it immediately demanded.  The head had a large flat, broad nose and thick lips and a seemingly expressionless face.  The head was adorned with a large round helmet and it was adorned with various jewelry and materials.  If I had not known that the exhibit was of the Olmec people I would have guessed the head was of Mesoamerican descent.  To me it was a large sculpture that resembled that of the Mayan’s or Aztec’s artworks.  This is probably why the Olmec’s are considered the mother civilization to both ancient cultures.  As I strolled through the halls of the exhibit I was witness to many other Olmec artworks.  I saw an antique jar that resembled a large lizard or possibly a dragon.  The head and tail of the creature were the handles of the jar.  I also saw various statues carved from what seemed to be different material than the basaltic heads.  Many of these statues were carved with the same flat, broad nose, thick lips, and expressionless face as that of the colossal heads.  However, not all the statues shared the same physical appearances.  But by far the most dominating display of the Olmec society was that of the giant Olmec heads.  In our age of Skyscrapers these heads may not seem that large but compared to ancient times they must have been ten times as colossal.  I believe that all the hundreds of other Olmec artworks in the exhibit could have been stuffed to fit inside one of the gigantic heads.  I believe that the museum was trying to exhibit the ancient yet sophisticated artwork of these people.  Expertly crafted yet each creation was that of the natural world.  The entire exhibit screamed “jungle peoples.”

   Many theories surround the shroud of mystery that we call the Olmec people.  Due to the recurring theme of flat, broad nosed and thick lipped sculptures in this society some believe that these people must have been migrants and not native to the lands.  One theory believes that the Olmec’s were originally Africans.  Egyptians had built large barges almost 1500 years earlier that could successfully navigate the sometimes rough waters of the Nile.  Also if a bottle was dropped into the ocean off the coast of east Africa it could more than likely end up on the western coast of Central America.  So if Africans could construct a vessel capable of surviving the Atlantic Ocean they would essentially need no navigational tools for the voyage since the current brings them directly to Mesoamerica.  But even with all this speculation most modern day scholars dismiss this theory.  A more excepted theory is that the ancestors of the Olmecs migrated from Asian during the last ice age around twenty-five thousand years ago.  They crossed the land bride of the Bering Strait and traveled down the western coast of North America into the Mexican “heartland.”

Another more accepted theory is that each of seventeen discovered heads represents an Olmec ruler.  Each head is slightly different in facial structure (all still retaining the broad nose, thick lips) than the other.  Each head is also adorned with a rounded helmet with sometimes lavish decorations.  A common speculator could easily assume it to be a crown of a ruler or helmet used in war.  One leading theory in the scholarly world states that these helmets are helmets used in the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame.  This theory is not at all farfetched because the ballgame of Central America is so prevalent among other ancient societies such as the Aztecs and Mayans.  Also in the Nahuatl language of the ancient Aztecs the word Olmec means “rubber people.”

   All in all the colossal basalt heads are a gigantic testament to the Olmec civilization however, as an audience in San Francisco, thousands of miles away from the original resting place of the sculptures, we receive only a fraction of the heads’ true aura.  While describing an artworks “aura” Walter Benjamin states “…the desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.”  We see the colossal heads, but we do not see them in the same fashion that the Olmec people did.  It is merely a reproduction of the original.  Benjamin also states, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”  We were not witness to the heads unearthing in the various Olmec sites deep within the jungles of Central America.  We witness them in a controlled exhibition.  The exhibition at De Young is merely displaying the artwork of yet another ancient peoples.  One of the world’s many civilizations.  The artworks may not be the same as an Egyptian exhibition at De Young by the process of displaying them is quite the same; glass cases, paragraphs underneath each work explaining the art, and of course gallery lighting.  Although we see the same artworks we view them on a completely different universal plane.  The Olmecs were a society deeply entrenched in the jungle setting.  The heads in their time could have been worshipped or even used in ceremonies.  Or possibly used for something completely different.  Archaeologists have yet another perception of these artworks.  In their minds it is yet another piece of the gigantic puzzle of civilization. 

   Even photography of the Olmec excavations is creating another plane on which to perceive the artwork and of course is merely a reproduction of the original.  When viewing the photograph can you fully perceive the size and enormity of the colossal basaltic head?  Can one feel the intense humidity of the jungle? Is one able to look around the excavation site and picture the Olmec structures of ancient times?  The answer to all of these questions in ‘no.’  At this point in time it is impossible to fully capture the ‘aura’ and originality of the Olmec heads.  We may perceive the Olmec heads in person or in photographs but our perception is skewed not only by the environment surrounding us, but also by thousands of years of ever evolving society. 

PAPER 1 ASSIGNMENT

De Young Museum visit - Olmec Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico

3 page Formal Analysis of  Olmec Exhibition and how it relates to the topics of exhibition vs. ritual in  the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

 http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

http://www.thephylaxis.org/williams/olmecs.php

 

Colossal Head, Olmec, La Venta, Mexico, ca. 900 - 400 BCE. Basalt.

Exhibition VS. Ritual:

cult objects witnessed through contemporary perspectives

Discuss from personal experience the "witnessing" of the Olmec Heads within the museum setting vs. the documented (photographs) cite to where they were originally deposited and buried.

•How many have been discovered? 

•Who are they? 

•What was their original purpose? 

•How does the environment in which they occupy and 'rest' influence our perception and what Walter Benjamin coins as the 'aura' of an artwork?

Word Document, 3 typed pages, Font: Times size 12 - 1.5 line spacing
Due Friday March 11

"It’s Always the Urban Pot That Boils Over" By EDWARD L. GLAESER

 Edward L. Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming book “Triumph of the City.”

 Will the conflict in Cairo end with a free and peaceful Egypt? Or is it Tehran 1979 all over again, where anti-American theocracy trumped secularism and freedom?

Whatever course history will follows, the momentous changes in North Africa remind us that our world is shaped by its cities. The poorer and less democratic parts of the planet have become increasingly urban and that makes change, full of hope and fear, inevitable.

That recent uprisings have been assisted by electronic technologies like Facebook and Twitter only reinforces the point that technological change is making cities more, not less, important.

Cities aren’t just places of economic productivity and cultural innovation. For millennia, they have also been the epicenters of dramatic political upheaval.

The Dutch revolt that led to Europe’s first modern republic began in urban Flanders in 1566 with icon-bashing mobs. The American Revolution had roots in the rowdy crowds of Boston, with its tea party and its “Boston massacre,” a street fight that left five colonists dead. Urban agitators toppled regimes in Paris in 1789 (and 1830 and 1848), Wuchang in 1911, St. Petersburg in 1917, Leipzig in 1989 and now Tunis in 2011.

These uprisings aren’t just accidentally urban; they would be unthinkable at low densities. Cities connect agitators, like Sam Adams and John Hancock. Riots require a certain kind of urban congestion; police power must be overwhelmed by a sea of humanity.

A protester who engages in some extralegal activity on his own, like throwing a rock at a police officer or solider or yelling out calls to topple a dictator, has a pretty good chance of being arrested. The same protester undertaking the same action has almost no chance of being locked up if he is one of thousands.

Because the cost of rioting (the probability of arrest) falls with the number of rioters, riots are a classic tipping-point phenomenon that can sustain themselves only if they reach a certain scale.

Riots can achieve this scale through a pre-existing crowd, such as the hundreds who gathered to watch a white highway patrolman impound the car of an African-American arrested for drunken driving in the Watts section of Los Angeles in 1965. With the strength of numbers, “the mob stoned automobiles, pulled Caucasian motorists out of their cars and beat them, and menaced a police field command post which had been set up in the area,” according to the report of a state commission.

Organizers can also pull together the scale needed for a successful riot. The deadliest riot in American history seems to have planned during the weekend before Monday, July 14, 1863, when organized mobs marched across New York to protest the draft.

In the Spartacist Uprising of Berlin 1919, an initially small fracas expanded dramatically when political leaders, including Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, prodded their allies to turn out en masse.

The most puzzling riots form after some mysterious signal that people interpret as sign that their city will rise up — that signal then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The acquittal of the four policemen charged in the Rodney King beating began the 1992 Los Angeles riot. A similar acquittal began the 1980 Miami riot.

In Tunisia, the focal event was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Sidi Bouzid. The uprising was unplanned: people just took to the streets knowing that others would be there. As news of the uprising spread, more and more people took to the streets.

Despite the mysterious power that some events have to conjure a riot, urban upheaval is not exactly random. Across countries, urbanization and ethnic heterogeneity increase the frequency of riots. Dictatorships have fewer riots. Across cities in the United States in the 1960s, riots’ frequency and intensity increased with the unemployment rate, not poverty.

While neither Tunisia nor Egypt are particular poor, by world standards, they have high rates of unemployment.

Typically, riots are repressed after overwhelmed local police forces get significant external support, such as the Union Army that came to New York City in 1863. When riots can often overwhelm police forces, most modern governments have more than enough military might to repress any riot, if the army is willing to slaughter civilians.

The key moment in an urban revolution is the point when it becomes clear whether the army will fight to defend the existing government. The uprising in Cairo reached that point yesterday, when the Army said that it would not fire on the protesters.

The end of the Ancien Régime became obvious when the Gardes Françaises, who had often lived with civilians, were unwilling to fire on Parisians in July 1789. The czar’s rule was over in March 1917 when his troops mutinied rather than suppress the St. Petersburg demonstrations.

In Tunisia, “it was General Ammar’s refusal to fire on civilians that led to Mr. Ben Ali’s final exit,” Arab newspapers reported.

By contrast, the United States has maintained political stability through countless riots by summoning troops with little empathy for the rioters, like the farm-boy soldiers who surely had little fondness for the urban, often immigrant, draft resisters of 1863 New York.

Cities are places of revolution, because urban proximity connects organizers of opposition. Large urban populations create the scale needed to initially overwhelm local law enforcement. The physical barriers that occur in cities make it difficult for troops to maneuver and disperse demonstrators.

And the economic importance of cities means that citywide demonstrations can disrupt the economic heart of a nation. Cities also create the social exchanges between soldiers and citizens, such as the food-sharing between protesters and the military, that can be so fatal for military discipline.

Isolated farms are stable; cities are not. The constant interaction of human energy in dense clusters creates innovations in every area of human life, including politics. Instability is scary, especially for people who already enjoy freedom, peace and prosperity and therefore have much to lose.

But a status quo full of repression and poverty is bad. Change brings hope, as it has to Tunisia, which is feeling the warmth of first freedom. The risk inherent in urban life is still far better than the pharaonic solution of rural poverty and dictatorship.

Taken from Michel Foucault's "Panopticism"

Bentham's Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

To begin with, this made it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64).

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

'Aural Spaces from Prehistory to the Present' from Blesser and Salter's "Spaces speak, are you listening?"

Acoustic Archaeologists Interpret Ancient Spaces
Archaeologists and anthropologists convincingly argue that sacred caves, as sites of mystical experience where ancient rituals were performed, constituted a special shamanic cosmos.

The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interactions of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and the chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and, in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst - the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes. (Clottes and Lewis-Wiliams, 1996)

The cave wall paintings at Altamaira, dating from the Upper Paleolithic period some 20,000 years ago and discovered at the end of the nineteenth century, shifted our conception of paleolithic humans, who would no longer be labeled as "primitive." Indeed, the Altamira cave has been called the "Sistine Chapel of Quatemary art" (Beltrain, 1998) With their limited tools and materials, Stone Age artists created works of art that modern painters can only envy. Picasso himself has been quoted saying that  "not one of us could paint like that." Later, in the twentieth century, several thousand sites with wall art were discovered in hundreds of countries; some  in eastern Germany have been dated as fare back as 300,000 years ago. David Coulson and Alec Campbell (2001) estimate that there are perhaps a million cave art images in southern Africa alone. Although, as evidenced by the written reports of the Chinese philosopher Hanfei-tzu, 2,300 years ago, cave art is not a recent discovery (Bahn 1988), only recently has it become a prominent contributor to our understanding of human nature and the origins of civilization. Clearly, prehistoric humans were artistically sophisticated.

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Steven J. Waller (1993), a pioneer of acoustic archaeology, suggested that the paleolithic art found in the caves of Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume was influenced by the acoustic character of the chambers in which it was created. Pictures of bulls, bison, and deer were more likely to be found in chambers with strong echoes, spaces whose acoustics created percussive sounds similar to the hoofbeats of a stampeding herd. In contrast, acoustically silent chambers are more likely to contain drawings of felines. Cave art may well have incorporated echos as supernatural phenomenon that brought life into visual images. Waller and others speculate that multisensory art was part of the hunters' rituals to summon game. Extensive observations of prehistoric sites support the notion that the subjects of cave wall pictures and the acoustics of their locations were deliberately related. After having personally studied over 150 sites around the world, Waller (2002) observed that pictures of animals whose movements generated loud sounds were frequently place in spaces having enhanced echoes resonances, and reverberation. When such spaces are excited by sound, the animal portraits seem to come aurally alive.

The concept of a cave wall surface as a veil that separates the spirit world from that of ordinary mortals is evident in South African rock painting (Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1990. In this regard, borrowing from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1871), Waller (2001) has advanced a compelling theory about the aural perception of echoes in caves. Just as Alice, when viewing a reflection in a mirror, felt she was seeing another world behind the mirror's surface so early humans, when exposed to echoes (sound reflection) in a cave, would have felt they were hearing the sounds or even voices of spirits from a world beyond the cave wall.

Aside from echoes, numerous other acoustic attributes would have been experienced within caves. Sonic "hot spots", regions of resonances where certain frequencies are amplified, also have also been correlated with cave wall images. Similarly, Michel Dauvois and Xavier Boutillon (1990) found a relationship between cave art and lithophones, natural stalactites and stalagmites that produce marimba-like sounds. Indeed, any object or space with a strong resonance had the ability to acquire spiritual meaning.

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Extending this hypothesis to more complex prehistoric monuments in Scotland, Aaron Watson and David Keating (1999) observed a wide range of acoustic attributes in the chambers of these monuments that could have had social and religious meaning. At different frequencies, sounds appeared to originate form different locations, and in some cases, the seemed to come from inside the heads of the listeners. Small head motions changed the perceived pitch and intensity. Listeners within the chamber could detect the approach of others from the acoustic disturbance their bodies made as they moved through long passageways. At certain locations inside a chamber, listeners would hear unexpected tremolos, periodic changes in the intensity of sounds; their speech would acquire an unusual quality, often becoming unintelligible. Watson and Keating explored the acoustical properties of these spaces using musical instruments that might have existed at the time, in effect, re-creating their speculative concept of early soundscapes. Curiously, the long passageways combined with a large enclosed blouse produced a Helmholtz resonator, an acoustic structure that amplifies narrow bands of frequencies, in this case at about 4Hz, well below the lower limit of audibility. Rhythmic drumming would have excited a Helmholtz resonance at this frequency strong enough to be felt. Such infrasounds have been associated with otherworldly experiences and, if sufficiently intense, produce discomfort, disorientation, and sensory distortion.

From 'Strange Beginnings' in E.H. Gombarich's "The Story of Art"

We cannot hope to understand these strange beginnings of art unless we try to enter into the mind of the primitive peoples and find out what kind of experience it is which makes them think of pictures, not as something  nice to look at, but as something powerful to use. I do not think it is really so difficult to recapture this feeling. All that is needed is the will to be absolutely honest with ourselves and see whether we, too, do not retain something of the 'primitive' in us. Instead of beginning with the Ice Age, let us begin with ourselves. Suppose we take a picture of our favorite champion from today's paper - would we enjoy taking a needle and poking out the eyes? Would we feel as indifferent about it as if we poked a hole anywhere else in the paper?  I do not think so. However well I know with my waking thoughts that what I do to his picture makes no difference to my friend or hero, I still feel a vague reluctance to harm it. Somewhere there remains the absurd feeling that what one does to the picture is done to the person it represents. Now, if I am right there, if the this queer and unreasonable idea really survives, even among us, into the age of atomic power, it is perhaps less surprising that such ideas existed almost everywhere among the so-called primitive peoples. In all parts of the world medicine men or witches have tried to work magic in some such way - they have made little images of an enemy and have then pierced the heart of the wretched doll, or burnt it, and hoped that their enemy would suffer. Even the guy we burn in Britain on Guy Fawkes Day is a remnant of such a superstition. The primitives are sometimes even more vague about what is real and what is a picture. On one occasion, when a European artist made drawings of cattle in an African village, the inhabitants were distressed: "If you take them away with you, what are we to live on?"

E.H. Grombrich The Story of Art

 

Goddess, Mural painting from the Tetitla apartment complex at Teotihuacan, Mexico, 650-750 CE. Pigments over clay and plaster

Looking back is a head

"History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments. It is never stilled. It is ever in movement, like the generation observing it. Its totality cannot be embraced: History bares itself only in facets, which fluctuate with the vantage point of the observer.
Facts may occasionally be bridled within a date or a name, but not their more complex significance. The meaning of history arises in the uncovering of relationships. That is why the writing of history has less to do with the facts as such than with their relations."

 - Siegfried Giedion "Mechanization Takes Command"