Ancient Anatomies
“Abstract” rendering of an Assyrian leg, gallery 401. “Conceptual” 3D digital lower leg.
The Assyrians are often critiqued for their artistic expressions of violence. I see only strength and beauty in the style. I love the anatomical languages of the Near East, regardless of interpretation.
“The anatomical landmarks and contours of the leg muscles are prominently depicted in an exaggerated manner (just like a bodybuilder’s), to convey the powerful nature of the creature. The skin folds on the right patella and the hypertrophied calf are well expressed (had the sculptor studied anatomy?). There is (or what appears to be) a prominent superficial vein “beneath” the skin of the lower right leg.” - Osama S. M. Amin, http://etc.ancient.eu/?s=Anatomy&submit=Search
“Fools that you are; you do not recognize that the limbs of your ancestors are still present therein.” - Montaigne
Detail: Statue of Montaigne by Paul Landowski, Square Paul Painlevé, Paris, France.
“ON THE POLYSEMY OF THE FIST”
Left: Copper Object in the form of clenched fist, ca. Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (Turkmenistan), late 3rd–early 2nd millennium B.C., gallery 403.
Center: Abecedario - https://phmuseum.com/francesca_seravalle/story/the-fist-photos-on-the-polysemy-of-the-fist-d883b7a49
Right: “The tiny hands measure 1-1/4" long (right fisted hand) and 1-1/2" long (left hand open palm) with a forearm circumference of 1-7/8" and diameter opening of 1/2". If you have a project requiring (lots of) little hands, this is a wonderful find!” - Etsy
There is no understanding of this ancient clenched fist - not its use or any related information. My speculative fist research led me to contradictory semantics, including black power and white supremacy, to the Masonic fist of capitalism to the communist fist of the Spanish Revolution.
Babies clench their fists for the first few months of life. A surprisingly similar number of explanations are available, from the palmar grasp reflex to the immaturity of the nervous system to “evolution” (primates hanging from their mothers in the trees).
I had a collection of plastic baby hands. In those days the avant-garde considered any found object art. More contradictory semantics.
Cylinder Seals: Identity Theft & Immortality
Top: Cylinder seal and impression: winged horse with claws and horns, Middle Assyrian, ca. 14th–13th B.C., gallery 403.
Left: Cancelled check stub J. Paul Getty.
Center: J. Paul Getty’s French Driving Permit, 1930. J. Paul Getty Family Collected Papers, The Getty Research Institute.
Right: A cancelled check for three million dollars from J.P. Morgan to the Northern Pacific Syndicate, 1896
“Some seals depicted one's occupation but others . . . revealed one's personal identity, even one's name. The seal was used to certify important transactions. It is no wonder that people worried over the loss of their seal: it would have been as serious to an ancient Mesopotamian as the loss of one's personal identification is today and the threat of "identity theft" just as great then as it is now.” - Ancient History Encyclopedia, https://www.ancient.eu/article/846/cylinder-seals-in-ancient-mesopotamia---their-hist/
There are complete cuneiform protocols for the process of reporting and replacing a lost seal. The bureaucracy is phenomenally similar to replacing a driver’s license at the DMV.
These seals are the first tools and documents of commerce and individual traders. Both JPs, Getty and Morgan, personally collected ancient cylinders. Morgan’s collection has 1,157 Near Eastern seals (within a total cuneiform tablet collection of 3,000 pieces).
Both collectors have been described as “art addicts”. Getty’s philosophy of collecting, for example, “inextricably linked art to business and business to immortality.” These seals must have resonated well with our famous traders. . . “PAID IN FULL”
Hair-Loom
“Rayyane Tabet's great-grandfather left behind a goat-hair rug given to him by the Bedouin of Tell Halaf in 1929. It was his wish that the sixty-five-foot-long rug be divided equally among his five children, with the request that they in turn divide it among their children, and so on, until the rug eventually disappeared. As of today, the rug has been divided into twenty-three pieces across five generations.” MetText, gallery 400.
Storage Jars and Fainting Goats
Storage jar with mountain goats, ca. 4,000-3,600 B.C., gallery 403.
The myotonic goat, otherwise known as the fainting goat, falling goat, stiff-legged goat, and nervous goat is a goat that temporarily seizes when it feels panic. The fainting episodes are known as "bizarre attacks of stiffness and rigidity" upon locomotion. See https://faintinggoat.com. Despite fainting, they have been bred continually, going back to the earliest goat herding days, for their generally superior qualities: they are alert, good-natured, and heavily muscled.
Twenty years ago, I had a fainting episode. No seizing, no panic. This happened to be during a dispute over brush clearance methods in our California neighborhood. “Can grazing goats prevent wildfires?” “Or are they inefficient?” I was given the “tilt-test”, strapped vertically on a board to induce fainting. Very inefficient diagnostic. Some art is admired as memory.
In relation to your fainting episode, Alec. Ten years ago, though it may have been twelve or fourteen, I can't remember, I had a fainting episode of my own. I was reading at the University of Texas, in Austin, at the library. I had traveled there from Illinois by train, because I love trains, but when I arrived very late at night I was sick. I read the next evening, still woozy. I started with a long poem, titled "The Night," by the very strange and mystic Bolivian writer Jaime Saenz, which I'd translated with poet Forrest Gander. Right after finishing the recitation, the room started to spin and I fell over, flat onto the ground, in front of a crowd of maybe fifty or sixty people. When I woke, there was an EMT hovering over me, and I could see the lights of an ambulance flashing outside. I felt as if this was something that had happened to me many times before, in previous lives. I insisted I was fine, and so I got up, against the EMT's counsel, and grabbed onto the podium, and continued the reading, finishing without incident, though I can't recall any of the rest of it. I have always considered it the best, certainly the most memorable, reading of my life.
Posted by: Kent Johnson | December 23, 2019 at 07:27 PM