Acropolismus

The opening of the new Acropolis Museum in June 2009 was one of the most important museological events of our century so far. Nick James paid it a visit (Antiquity 83: 114451) and we have pleasure in offering three more reactions from different viewpoints.

Behold the raking geison: the new Acropolis Museum and its context-free archaeologies
Dimitris Plantzos
New for old
In December 1834 Athens became the capital city of the newly founded Hellenic Kingdom. King Otto, the Bavarian prince whose political and cultural initiative shaped much of what modern Greece is today, sought to design the new city inspired by the heavily idealised model of Classical Hellas (see Bastea 2000). The emerging capital was from the outset conceived as a heterotopia of Hellenism, a Foucauldian other space devoted to Western Classicism in view of the Classical ruins it preserved. The Acropolis became, naturally, the focal point of this effort. At the same time, however, and as Greek nationalist strategies were beginning to unfold, Classical antiquity became a disputed topos, a cultural identity of sorts contested between Greece on the one hand and the Western world on the other (see Yalouri 2001: 77100). Archaeological sites thus became disputed spaces, claimed by various interested parties of national or supra-national authority wishing to impose their own views on how they should be managed and to what ends (Loukaki 2008). The Acropolis was duly cleansed from any non-Classical antiquities and began to be constructed as an authentic Classical space, a national project still in progress. As Artemis Leontis has argued in her discussion of Greece as a heterotopic culture of ruins, the Acropolis of Athens, now repossessed by architectural renovation and scholarly interest, functions as a symbol not of Greeces ancient glory but of its modern predicament (Leontis 1995: 4066; see also McNeal 1991; Hamilakis 2007: 8599). When we ascend to modern Greeces sacred rock today, we are faced with a vibrant landscape of modernity at work (Figure 1): cranes and scaffolds, architects, engineers and marble cutters, all striving to return the ruins to an imagined authentic state preMorosini (when, in 1687, Venetian artillery saw that the Parthenon be turned into a pile of ruins), though denitely post-Elgin (when, in 1801, the notorious Scot removed what he could from the standing monuments in order to make his own investment in Greeces Classical past). More to the point, we are faced with a simulacrum of a ruin, since a signicant percentage of what now stands on the Acropolis is newly cut in order to support the old

History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Dourouti Campus, Ioannina GR45110, Greece (Email: [email protected]) 85 (2011): 613630 http://antiquity.ac.uk/ant/085/ant0850613.htm

ANTIQUITY

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Figure 1. Constructing the ruin: a crane adding the nal touches along the north side of the Parthenon in summer 2010.

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remains (Figure 2). This is of course carried out according to international standards and state-of-the-art technology (cf. YSMA 2010), but it is nevertheless quite obvious that what is being produced on the Acropolis is a site restored to an idealised state of being, one only suitable to current tastes and ideologies. These ruins are indeed restored, enhanced and promoted as Greeces most recognizable modern signature (Leontis 1995: 66) and the new Acropolis Museum seems to have been designed as a further step in that direction. As weather and pollution threatened the condition of any sculptures still remaining on the Acropolis, their transfer to a secluded space became imperative and soon enough it was decided to move them, along with any other artefacts excavated on the Acropolis since the nineteenth century, to a museum off-site, a grander building that would replace the old museum, by then drastically running out of space. This accentuates the holographic properties of the site in its present state: a make-believe time (an idealised Classical age) and a make-believe place (a hitherto unseen Acropolis) with make-believe remains (since parts of the buildings are rebuilt and all sculptures are now moved elsewhere). A triumph of archaeology, certainly; as the champion of aesthetics on the one hand and politics on the other, since the Acropolis is still enlisted in the service of the nations international relations and economic strategies, not to mention the agonising efforts to establish Athens as a world-celebrated tourist destination. The Classical past is therefore declared under a state of emergency in order to be rebuilt, modernised and placed in the service of Greeces tourist-based heritage industry. Re-inventing the past as spectacle, however, had been a project instrumental to Western modernity long before the time when Greece, as a edgling nation-state, decided to forge its national identity based on its perceived Classical past. Through excavation, reconstruction and exhibition European archaeology managed to represent the ancient world as a picture, in order to paraphrase Heidegger to achieve its conquest. By promoting Greeces Classical past, Western archaeology eliminated anything that was created after the end of the ancient world, thus subordinating modern Greeks to their phantasmic forefathers. (Needless to say, pretending not to notice any Greek after Perikles made Lord Elgins job a lot easier). Talking about a countrys past enabled its colonisation and the disciplining of its inhabitants. Hence, this past had to be cleansed in order to suit the project at hand: Classicist as in the case of Greece (see McNeal 1991), Orientalist as in colonised Egypt (Mitchell 1991), and so on. These newly created presences organised sites, rebuilt temples, massive museums serve to this day to generate particular value systems and aesthetic or political hierarchies, though in such a way as to render this act of representation totally invisible. Hence, the modern Greek state is happily usurping the same Classicist agenda that was once deployed against its own political standing; through the systematic creation of virtual ruins such as the Parthenon and the other monuments on the Athenian Acropolis, Greece attempts the instrumentalisation of its Classical heritage for the edication of its citizens as well as its visitors.

Modernity at large
The new Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi between 2001 and 2009 (Figure 3), has to be seen as a sub-plot to the strategies outlined above, as a conrmation of Greeces dedication to modernity while at the same time promoting the timeless quality of its
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Figure 2. The west side of the Parthenon, during its restoration in 2010: all sculpted decoration (pediment, metopes and frieze) is modern.

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Figure 3. The new Acropolis Museum in 2009 (photograph: Nikos Daniilidis. c Acropolis Museum).

Classical past (Bernard Tschumi Architects 2010). Mass rearrangement of the natural and social environment has become a means to demonstrate the strength such as it is of the modern state as a techno-economic power (Mitchell 2002: 21) and Greece seems to have exerted itself, in the last decade or so, in an effort to prove that modernisation is the thing Greeks do best, after all. Celebrated as a member of an international elite of (st)architects (who are often criticised for sacricing their clients needs to their own intellectual pursuits), Tschumi has created a deconstructivist modern landmark in Athens, with sharp lines and imposing fabrics, though one that has already managed to create some controversy (Fouseki 2006, 2007; Plantzos 2008: 1417; James 2009). Half-asphyxiated by its surroundings, the lthy, untidy Athenian polykatoikies that seem to be piled on one another (Figure 4), the new Acropolis Museum appears as an alien creature landed in the heart of Athens, determined to ght for its vital space. Be that as it may, my purpose in this paper is not to critique its architectural merits but its exhibition design, a result of both Tschumis own approach to what we generally refer to as heritage and the policies of the Greek state regarding the reception of Classical culture and its management. The issues raised by James (2009), as well as those explored here, have not yet been given the attention they deserve by the Greek authorities. The new museum was designed by the Greek state as a new arc for the nation, and the then Greek prime minister, K. Karamanlis, said as much at its inauguration: symbol of our condence; proof that culture and history unite Greek society; eternal source of inspiration for the future (see Plantzos 2009 for a survey of Greek and international press at the time of the
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Figure 4. Vital space: the new Acropolis Museum in its neighbourhood, seen from the south-west (2010).

museums opening). Adopted and promoted by the Greek press, this type of millennialist rhetoric conrmed that the new museum was built in an effort to give the nationalist struggle something to revive and admire (Said 1993: 16). The association of the museum project with Greeces national cause par excellence, the repatriation of the Elgin/Parthenon marbles (see Hamilakis 2007: 24386), suggests that the museum is expected to full a very specic agenda. This, I think, is quite obvious in both its declared and its undisclosed exhibition principles.

Neither bold nor beautiful

The idealist paradigm is dominant in both the conception of the new Acropolis Museum and its reception by the public. Harmony, beauty and perfection are the key words throughout the Greek press as journalists invite the public to pay their undisrupted attention so that the mystery and aesthetic perfection hiding in every drapery-fold [of the marble sculptures] may be revealed (Tsiros 2009: 4). For some of its admirers, the visit to the Museum becomes an act of faith, like listening to a fairytale or a prayer (Lianis 2009)! Classical antiquity thus becomes timeless and ahistorical, even though stylistic chronology and connoisseurship, Classical archaeologys favoured taxonomic devices, maintain a historicist approach to the past. This idealised history of art was the outcome of the systematic work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (17171768), who, through his quest for the essence of art ended up equating a culture with its aesthetics (Potts 1994). Winckelmanns discourse, recognising the incontestable authority of the antique over the modern by praising the essential simplicity and idealised innocence of Classical art in contrast with the decline of art in later times is a concession both to humanism and romanticism, especially when it
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Figure 5. Conversation pieces: the Archaic Gallery in 2009 (photograph: Nikos Daniilidis. c Acropolis Museum).

promotes a synaesthetic, un-indoctrinated approach to the (art of the) past as it really was. Classical antiquity becomes therefore modern idealisms arch-paradigm (Greenhalgh 2005). Many people, including its makers and managers, emphasise how the new exhibition allows the viewer to enjoy the Classical masterpieces under the natural light of Attica, as they were originally viewed in their own time (Katimertzi 2009; Tsiros 2009; see also Plantzos 2009: 1415). According to Tschumi, the light of Attica is different from the light anywhere else in the world... Only under this light may one view the Marbles properly. Indeed... one sees the Marbles differently, as one would if they were still intact on the Parthenon (Tsiros 2009: 20). Be that as it may, such views pay homage to environmental determinism, a celebrated offspring of German nationalism, according to which culture and climate are organically tied. Transplanted to Greece in the late nineteenth century, environmentalist theories were used to promote Greek exceptionalism as well as champion Greek emancipation from an unnatural modernity imposed by the West. Thus, for example, in literature the short story was endorsed as a native Greek form that thrived like a wild herb on Greek soil, as opposed to the novel which was a foreign import, and excessive exposure to Western-sent modernity threatened the integrity of timeless Greece (Peckham 2001: 7688). Similarly, direct visual contact with the masterpieces in the new Acropolis Museum, as well as with the Acropolis itself, is what it takes to satisfy and inform the visitor, without too much information regarding their historical or social signicance (Figure 5). The museums director, D. Pantermalis, hinted as much in a recent interview published in the Danish paper Jyllands Posten, suggesting that the new museum promotes a face-to-face dialogue between the artefact and the viewer, by showing Classicism without the dust of Classicism (Pantermalis
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2010). One feels that the museum authorities, as well as most of the museums admirers, believe that Classical taste is both self-evident and self-contained so much so that it does not require the clutter necessary for a modern approach to heritage management: wall texts and any other sort of information is kept to an absolute minimum, as if contextualisation might belittle the glory that was Greece. This is where the exhibits talk directly to the viewer, repeated Pantermalis on the museums rst anniversary (Adamopoulou 2010). Classicism is at its best, for example, when no reference is made to the extensive traces of ancient pigments still surviving on many sculptured surfaces throughout the museum, pigments that would certainly shock the aesthetes still taken by the pristine whiteness of Classical marbles as idolised by Winckelmann & co. In that sense, it is easy to understand why many authorities, as well as intellectuals of various denominations, insist on referring to the Acropolis as the sacred rock and to the museums exhibits as holy (see Yalouri 2001: 13786; Plantzos 2009). In the museums ofcial agenda, the Classical is a unique phenomenon, timeless and supra-historical, not to be studied but revered, addressed to the spirit rather than the intellect. And, in case anyone might think otherwise, a thoroughly Hellenic one.

Mind the gap

Since the nineteenth century, archaeology has been considered as the primary tool for the discovery, study, interpretation, display and promotion of the material remains of the past. Reading material culture is in many ways conducted on a one-to-one basis, whereby signs of the past are treated as privileged, monosemantic signiers. In the last couple of decades or so, however, it has been realised that archaeologys constituent essentialism threatens the integrity of its narratives (Olsen 1990). In a discipline where context is everything, we begin to suspect that single-dimensional, quasi-authoritative representations undermine the very contextuality we mean to investigate. The new Acropolis Museum does not seem to ponder over such questions. On the contrary, it appears to push further backwards: the self-satisfying parading of masterpieces precludes any interaction with the public at large and suggests a structural inefciency concerning the fullment of its mission (James 2009). Its much advertised breakthroughs (the visual dialogue with the Acropolis, the exhibition of its holdings under the natural light of Attica and so on) are but an improvised retrospective of German romanticism; at the same time, such notions serve the national narrative for the construction of a single, indigenous and continuous Hellenism. Beneath them, however, lies a far more conservative, if not reactionary, discourse. By claiming we let the exhibits speak for themselves, we pretend not to notice the thick network of reception strategies surrounding them. On the contrary, we claim that the exhibit and the (presumed) cultural information it carries are inexorably and one-dimensionally bound, safe from any external mediation. As a result, the information is annihilated by the overbearing presence of the exhibit, which is thus turned into a self-referring signied. Archaeological discourse then replaces the cultural meaning presumably sought by the spectator: as the visitors reach the famous Archaic pediment from the Acropolis displayed in the new museum, they read a cryptic label identifying the artefact as a sima and raking geison, the English-language text being an exact translation of the Greek-language; needless to say, neither means anything to anyone caring to read
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them (unless they are a card-carrying member of the archaeology clan or a particularly conscientious undergraduate). This hardcore approach to scientic integrity seems to have been designed in order to keep the non-initiated at bay rather than inviting the layman to partake of any knowledge the museum has to offer. Such scholarly solipsism, recalling the seemingly objective (empiricist rather than rationalist) ritual of archaeological classication, is typical of all good bureaucrats, who, as Gellner once remarked commenting on Weber, support the mainframe of the nation-state in the post-industrialisation era (Gellner 1983: 1924). As archaeologists we deconstruct material culture in order to reconstruct a simulacrum of it in our scientic meta-language (Olsen 1990: 195). Ignoring this reality turns our exhibitions into dull, unimaginative and inefcient piles of stuff, unable to interact with the multi-semantic and multi-focal societies which we ostensibly address. Exhibits thus trap their viewer into an always already present narrative of authoritative interpretation. Having convinced ourselves that the real (as in the exhibit) is self-evidently, one-dimensionally, and unquestionably there, we choose to ignore the multiplicity of meanings it may be found to contain. Through its simplistic museological approach (a sort of what you see is what you get approach to Classical culture at large) the new Acropolis Museum pretends to be cutting the mediation of the (con)text. A seemingly invisible curator invites the non-initiate visitor to seek information through a meta-physical experience developing as a self-awareness trip. Fair enough, but isnt there a better way to organise a museum exhibition? Objects react with their users through tactility, visuality, usability etc. and these qualities form a thick network of contextual mediation usually untraceable by archaeologys standard approach. The contemporary visitor to the Acropolis Museum expects to see and to hear (not just to read) more on the artefacts interaction with the community that produced and beheld them as its sacred idols, as gifts, as social and cultural agents. Instead, we get the same old sterilised approach produced by a quasi-scientic paradigm in desperate need of rethinking. The obsession with an artefacts identity as an archaeological object (inventory numbers, taxonomy and so on) and its poetic genealogy (made by so and so, attributed to so and so by so and so) places a grossly undue emphasis on the artefacts career within the ancient workshop (and the modern library, certainly) but fails to elucidate its interaction within its own cultural context(s). What could be the meaning, for example, for the contemporary viewer, of the information solely accompanying a voluminous Greek pot sitting prominently in its case in the Archaic Gallery of the Acropolis Museum, that the pot in question is a signed work by the Painter of Acropolis 606? Fair enough, this is a simple mistake in translating the Greek-language original label identifying the pot as the name-vase of the so-called Painter, but even so, what could this actually mean to people who have never heard of Beazley and connoisseurship, nor were ever interested in the art worlds arcane dealings? These tedious labels, dry in their relentless scientism, in fact signpost the institutional pedantry of Greek archaeology. The urge to surrender to the genius of the author/artist (even when one needs to be invented), in particular, remains a formidable tendency in Classical archaeology, turning museum curation into hard labour carried out by jaded bureaucrats. Trapped in its idealist maxims, the museum keeps repeating itself, idly recycling the outdated epistemological paradigm in the heart of its convictions.
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Figure 6. The Parthenon Gallery (west). Parts of the pediment, metopes and the frieze, including casts standing in for pieces taken abroad.

The stones he left behind

Yet, this inertia is not accidental. Despite its volume and ample space, the new Acropolis Museum becomes rapidly famous for the things it does not show or mention. Athenss Ottoman history is an obvious entirely planned omission, and so are many others, failing to contextualise the precious exhibits lest they lose their Classicist allure. In terms of absences, of course, one cannot but take the hint of the plaster casts standing in lieu of the marbles taken to London by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s. Planned to a great extent as a counter-argument against the British Museums claim that the Greeks had no suitable museum for the Parthenon marbles even if they ever returned to Athens, the new Acropolis Museum seems to deal with this matter quite effectively though for an audience that is bound not to include the British Museum Trustees any day soon. In what seems to be the new museums only section actually designed by a professional, the Parthenon Gallery, the temples three main sculptural groups (the pediments, the frieze and the metopes) are exhibited under the much-advertised visual contact with the monument itself (Figure 6). The by now familiar masses of concrete and corrugated metal are used here to support what is left of the Parthenon marbles (and drapes and blinds are sensibly placed on the glass walls, as an afterthought perhaps, in order to obscure the view to the surrounding polykatoikies, commanding our gaze north, towards the newly restored Parthenon). The
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whole museum plan, such as it is, urges the visitor to the climactic top oor, following a sequence of one-ways and escalators (though not neglecting, of course, the all-important gift shop and the restaurant, also endowed with a view towards the Parthenon). The exhibition narrative in the Parthenon Gallery is, however, completed with casts of what is missing (the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, of course, as well as pieces in the Louvre and elsewhere), a step ostensibly taken in order to suggest to the viewer how the monument might look like when complete, though in fact used to generate anti-Elgin sentiment among the visitors. The Greeks are not alone in viewing the Elgin marbles debate as yet another battle in the post-colonial wars. The British Museum rhetoric, with all its salvationist (we saved them from neglect and destruction) and conservationist (only the British Museum can offer the marbles the scientic care they require) overtones reeks of colonialist arrogance and dilettantism the conviction that only an Enlightenment institution such as the British Museum can offer lessons in aesthetic taste and historical appreciation that serve as civilizing rituals for museum visitors (Colla 2007: 5; on the seemingly endless debate, see Beard 2003: 15581; Hamilakis 2007: 24386). This view is not conned to the British Museums Neoclassical premises as one might have hoped, if we are to judge by publications such as Simon Jenkinss 2009 article in The Guardian (Jenkins 2009), where the new museum is seen t to be [a] banana republic police headquarters (thus killing once and for all any Greek allusion to Athenian democracy and such like) rather than a home for the Elgin marbles. Reminding everyone of the conservation shortcomings of the Greeks (thus repeating, in true Orientalist fashion, the well-rehearsed argument that the West reserves the right to own and acquire artefacts based on its superior technologies of representation and preservation), Mr Jenkins attributes the new museums failure to the gods of modern museology. As it happens, Mr Jenkins is right. Even though no museologist, modern or other, seems ever to have set foot on its premises, the new Acropolis Museum is intentionally bound to a thoroughly modern predicament. By promoting its exhibits as the unquestionable paragons of Classical taste, the museum attempts to overcome the Greek handicap against the British and other Europeans who seem to have gone there rst. At the same time, the emphasis on bureaucratic archaeological scientism, inherent in Greek modernity as it may be, also serves as a performative reference to Western modernity as such. The obscure archaeological jargon on the labels is the counterpart of the massive metal and concrete surfaces and oblique shapes in the museums architecture, its escalators and noisy ticket-control checkpoints, as well as the sophisticated machinery on the Acropolis itself, an orchestrated reminder to the world that Greeks can be moderns too despite their antiquity, at once celebrated and slyly usurped by the West. By reversing the salvationist and conservationist tactics of its rivals, the museum was conceived as a weapon in Greeces effort to claim new ways of centrality in the world cultural system: its exhibits are thus modernised, treated as ends in themselves as well as fragments of a wider narrative: nationalist, exceptionalist, anti-colonial. The Acropolis Museum, with its hi-tech outlook and tedious disposition, modernises the Parthenon marbles following the old example of the Elgin marbles, whereby the aesthetic pleasure principle of the eighteenth century is combined with the quasi-scientic empiricist approach of the nineteenth. This process, recently dubbed artifaction (Colla 2007: 23 66), was deployed as a means of claiming ownership of the/other peoples pasts while at the
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same time suggesting a clear art-history narrative to a presumably enlightened, exclusively Western, public. As Homi Bhabha has shown, however, when these founding objects of the Western world are taken back to the margins of metropolitan desire, rather than proving the centrality of their new owners or the marginality of their old usurpers, they become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvs of the colonial discourse (Bhabha 1994: 121 e 31, this quotation, p. 131). Hence, this inversion of the colonisation process cancels any representational authority its instigator might claim. In effect, the new Acropolis Museum ends up being a representation of what modernity ought to look like, or in fact a parody of what modernity actually is. Rather than mimicking outdated practices of appropriating the past, its texts and its contexts (no matter how effective in their time), I would have expected the Acropolis Museum to cast a new, knowingly mediated and deantly un-Western or un-modern look to the Acropolis, its histories and its remains. One that would also take into account the signicance of the Acropolis and its monuments as symbols of Western aesthetics as well as a reection of the Greek nationalist dream in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (by now ably illustrated by authorities such as Yalouri 2001; Fouseki 2006; Loukaki 2008). Instead, the new museum presumes to act as an unmediated voice of the nations Classical past, awkwardly and implausibly out of context. References
ADAMOPOULOU, M. 2010. Neo Mouseio Akropolis. Ta Nea (19 June 2010). BASTEA, E. 2000. The creation of modern Athens. Planning the myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BEARD, M. 2003. The Parthenon. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Bernard Tschumi Architects. 2010. Acropolis Museum. Available at: http://www.tschumi.com/projects/2/ (accessed 10 July 2010). BHABHA, H. 1994. The location of culture. London & New York: Routledge. COLLA, E. 2007. Conicted antiquities. Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian modernity. Durham (NC) & London: Duke University Press. FOUSEKI, K. 2006. Conicting discourses on the construction of the new Acropolis Museum: past and present. European Review of History 13(4): 53348. 2007. Developing and integrating a conict management model into the heritage management process: the case of the new Acropolis Museum, in S. Grabow, D. Hull, E. Waterton (ed.) Which past, whose future: treatments of the past at the start of the 21st century: an international perspective: proceedings of a conference held at the University of York, 2021 May 2005 (British Archaeological Reports international series 1633): 12736. Oxford: Archaeopress. GELLNER, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press. GREENHALGH, P. 2005. The modern ideal. The rise and collapse of idealism in the visual arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism. London: V&A Publications. HAMILAKIS, Y. 2007. The nation and its ruins: antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. JAMES, N. 2009. The Acropolis and its new museum. Antiquity 83: 114451. JENKINS, S. 2009. A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles. The Guardian (22 October 2009). KATIMERTZI, P. 2009. Akropoli. Apo ta Mnimeia sto Mouseio. Special Edition. Athens: Ta Nea. LIANIS, G. 2009. Pente simeia gia tin teleti egkaineion. Ta Nea (24 June 2009). LEONTIS, A. 1995. Topographies of Hellenism: mapping the homeland. Ithaca (NY) & London: Cornell University Press. LOUKAKI, A. 2008. Living ruins, value conicts. Aldershot: Ashgate. MCNEAL, R.A. 1991. Archaeology and the destruction of the later Athenian Acropolis. Antiquity 65: 4963. MITCHELL, T. 1991. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley (CA) & London: University of California Press. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley (CA) & London: University of California Press.

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OLSEN, B. 1990. Roland Barthes: from sign to text, in C. Tilley (ed.) Reading material culture: 163205. Oxford: Blackwell. PANTERMALIS, D. 2010. Denmark Professor D. Pantermalis is interviewed on the new Acropolis Museum. Available at: http://omogeneia.ana-mpa.gr/press.php?id=10417 (accessed 10 July 2010) (in Greek). PECKHAM, R.S. 2001. National histories, natural states. Nationalism and the politics of place in Greece. London & New York: I.B. Tauris. PLANTZOS, D. 2008. Archaeology and Hellenic identity, 18962004: the frustrated vision, in D. Damaskos & D. Plantzos (ed.) A singular antiquity. Archaeology and Hellenic identity in twentieth-century Greece: 1030. Athens: Benaki Museum. 2009. I Kivotos kai to Ethnos: ena sholio gia tin ipodochi tou Neou Mouseiou Akropoleos. Sichrona Themata 106: 1418. POTTS, A. 1994. Flesh and the ideal. Winckelmann and the origins of art history. New Haven (CT) & London: Yale University Press. SAID, E.W. 1993. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. TSIROS, G. 2009. Mouseio Akropolis. Oi horoi, ta ekthemata, oi syntelestes. Kathimerini (special edition K321, 26 July 2009). YALOURI, E. 2001. The Acropolis: global fame, local claim. Oxford & New York: Berg. YSMA. 2010. Service for the conservation of the Acropolis monuments. Available at: http://www.ysma.gr/En/index.asp (accessed 10 July 2010).

Museums of oblivion
Yannis Hamilakis
The relationship between antiquity, archaeology and national imagination in Greece, the sacralisation of the Classical past, and the recasting of the Western Hellenism into an indigenous Hellenism have been extensively studied in the last 15 years or so (see e.g. Hamilakis 2007, 2009). In fact, Greece has proved a rich source of insights for other cases of nation-state heritage politics. The new Acropolis Museum project was bound to be shaped by the poetics of nationhood right from the start, given that its prime referent is the most sacred object of the Hellenic national imagination, the Acropolis of Athens. This site is at the same time, however, an object of veneration within the Western imagination (you only have to look at the UNESCO logo), a pilgrimage destination for millions of global tourists, with all its revenue implications, and an endlessly reproduced and modied global icon (in both senses of the word). There is not one but many Acropoleis, on the hill in central Athens, in museums all over the world, in literature, art and cinema, in photography, and on the internet (cf. the photo-blog, www.theotheracropolis.com). There is not one but many stories that this materiality tells, and many claims and causes that this object and icon has lent itself to, some ofcial and top-down, several unofcial, bottom-up, clandestine and intentionally provocative and controversial. And while I concur with many of the valid and interesting points that Plantzos raises in his article, I contend that the exhibition logic of the new museum, its architectural and museographic bodily affordances, cannot be understood in isolation, cannot be critiqued and deconstructed effectively, if not linked with contemporary global museum claims to the material past, and if all the other voices, interventions and provocations, beyond the ofcial, are not taken into account.

Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton, Avenue Campus, Higheld, Southampton SO17 1BF, UK (Email: [email protected])

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The new museum, before it was even built, from the moment when it was simply a vision in Melina Mercouris head, and later, a text for an international architectural competition, was linked to the cause for the restitution of the Parthenon marbles (cf. Lending 2009). The outcome, at least in its present conguration, is certainly a missed opportunity to evoke, through materiality, the multi-faceted biography of the Acropolis from the Neolithic to the present, including the history of the multiple contemporary claims and counterclaims over the site. It is a missed opportunity to display, for example, that evocative and wonderfully multi-temporal architectural fragment from the Classical Erechtheion with its 1805 Ottoman inscription in Arabic, a piece that speaks in different tongues, and across ethnic, religious and national boundaries, a living monument to a contemporary multi-cultural and multi-ethnic European capital such as Athens (Figure 1). At present, the few pre- and post-Classical remnants in the museum are drowned in the sea of Classical glory, and almost disappear under the weight of Western Classicist ideals. They are victims perhaps of the misguided belief on the part of the archaeologists in charge, that it is this Classical glory that should be projected as a primary national weapon in the global negotiations of power (To do otherwise, the director of the museum told a journalist in 2007, would have approached the highest level of castration Eleftherotypia, 2 September 2007). I would further suggest, however, that what Plantzos identies, rightly, as the lack of archaeological context in the exhibition is also to do with the sacralisation of Classical objects (relics and sacred icons do not need captions, after all), but also with the perception, prevalent in the national imagination, that antiquities (especially anthropomorphic ones), have the status, the autonomy and the agency of persons, and they can thus speak for themselves; they do not need the archaeologist and the museum curator to speak for them (cf. Hamilakis 2007). This museum will need to be understood primarily as a material intervention within the politics of vision. A direct visual link with the Parthenon and the Acropolis was the main argument for its current location, on the top of the important Classical, post-Classical and medieval material remnants that it has partly destroyed, and partly incorporated in its own design. The management of the gaze is the primary concern of its archaeological and museographic apparatus. Glass architecture enables visual contact with the monument and lets light in, but it can have another advantage: it makes the control of viewsheds from the vantage point of the museum possible, and the vistas experienced by the visitors, changeable (hence the drapes and blinds Plantzos refers to, which hide ugly modern blocks, and direct the gaze towards the Acropolis). Buildings such as the Neoclassical and art nouveau structures between the museum and the Acropolis were to be demolished, because they obscured the view towards the hill, or rather they did not t in within the new monumental landscape that the museum has produced. During the opening ceremony, the walls of the museum and of the surrounding buildings became projection screens, where an animation movie was projected (called Reections) in which statues and themes from Classical vases came to life. Surveillance and the tight control of the dissemination of visual signiers are the obverse side of the spectacular politics of the museum: entry is subject to X-ray and metal-detecting monitoring technology for visitors and their possessions, and photography is prohibited inside the building. I was stopped even when I attempted to photograph the Acropolis from inside the museum. When I protested, I was told that this is because when,
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Figure 1. Architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Athenian Acropolis with an 1805 Ottoman inscription in Arabic (photograph: Fotis Ifantidis, 2007, reproduced with permission).

in its rst days of operation, photography was allowed, visitors would pose in front of the objects and turn the whole space into a Hollywood set. Aesthetics as sensory perception, says Ranci`re (2004), is inherently political, because it is to do with the distribution of the e sensible, with what is allowed to be seen and what is not, what is deemed appropriate to
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be experienced bodily and multi-sensorially, and what is not. The creation of this museum was seen by many as a national success, a matter of national pride, and at the same time, as providing a space that would allow more objects to be shown to the public, and also enjoyed in a three-dimensional, kinaesthetic manner. And yet, this whole aesthetic-cum-political project has also been challenged from its start, and continues to be so: activists would lm the construction of the museum to protest against the destruction of the antiquities underneath, and upload the video on YouTube; the attempted demolition of the art nouveau buildings faced huge opposition in the courts, on the streets, as well as on the internet, and has been successfully stopped, at least at present; visitors (including myself ) take their own clandestine photographs inside the museum; and artists (e.g. Eva Stefani) produce installations and video art that challenges the whole ideological basis of this project. In other words, these unofcial renderings, produce a dissensus, to evoke Ranci`re again (2004), e they enable alternative sensorial experiences of the materiality of antiquity. What perhaps the ofcial promoters of this project have not fully appreciated yet, is how the goalposts of the global heritage political terrain have moved. Rather than arguing over ownership rights, custodianship, context, and proper exhibition conditions, or even the primacy of the Classical, some global players posit instead the desire and the ability to articulate universal narratives on people, things and history. The Acropolis Museums tacit partner in this dialogue, the British Museum, attempts to counteract restitution claims and challenges to its authority by proclaiming itself a universal museum, which can hold the whole world in its hands (MacGregor 2004). It can tell the history of the whole world with the objects that it currently houses, a history that, the museum claims, can unify and show commonalities in an increasingly fragmented world. Yet this rhetoric, which attempts to project a specic, totalising version of human history as seen from Bloomsbury, comes straight from the nineteenth-century imperial grand fairs and exhibitions; they too wanted to hold the globe in their hands; and to rule over it (cf. Abungu 2004; Curtis 2006; Sandis 2008). And while in radio programmes such as the British Museums History of the World in 100 Objects (broadcast by the BBC in 2010), the evocation and power of materiality was fully appreciated, and transmitted successfully to millions, the logic behind the whole project can thinly disguise its neo-colonial undertones, especially since the nationalist and colonialist heritage of institutions such as the British Museum are not confronted head on. It is a logic that, as some reviewers of the radio programme and of the accompanying book have noted (approvingly, it seems), attempts to forget colonialism (Beard 2010) and perform an image makeover (Holland 2010), an image without history and politics. Forgetting the multi-temporal and multi-cultural life of the Acropolis in Athens; forgetting past and present colonialism and imperialist appropriation in Bloomsbury. These are museums of forgetting, of oblivion. As in Athens, in Bloomsbury too, this top-down, ofcial view of material history needs to be challenged. References
ABUNGU, G. 2004. The declaration: a contested issue. ICOM News 1: 4. BEARD, M. 2010. Review of the History of the World in One Hundred Objects by N. MacGregor. The Guardian, 13 November 2010. CURTIS, N.G.W. 2006. Universal Museums, museum objects, and repatriation: the tangled stories of things. Museum Management and Curatorship 21: 11728.

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HAMILAKIS, Y. 2007. The nation and its ruins: Antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. Indigenous Hellenisms/indigenous modernities: classical antiquity, materiality, and modern Greek society, in G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi & Ph. Vasunia (ed.) The Oxford handbook of Hellenic studies: 1931. Oxford: Oxford University Press. HOLLAND, T. 2010. Review of the History of the World in One Hundred Objects, by N. MacGregor. The Observer, 7 November 2010. LENDING, M. 2009. Negotiating absence: Bernard Tschumis new Acropolis Museum in Athens. Journal of Architecture 14(5): 56789. MCGREGOR, N. 2004. The whole world in our hands. The Guardian, 24 July 2004. ` RANCIERE, J. 2004. The politics of aesthetics. London: Continuum. SANDIS, C. 2008. Two tales of one city: cultural understanding and the Parthenon sculptures. Museum Management and Curatorship 23(1): 521.

Soft targets and no-win dilemmas: response to Dimitris Plantzos

Anthony Snodgrass
Most of the opposition directed at the new Acropolis Museum (herafter NAM), both before and since its opening in June 2009, has turned out to be politically motivated, mainly from the Left in Greece, mainly from the Right in Britain (the Daily Telegraph called it a hideous visitor centre in modern Athens before it was even built [Wilson 2006]). Dimitris Plantzos comes at the museum from a different angle, but he too is determinedly on the attack. A rst sign of this is his total silence about the protection and exhibition of the archaeological site underlying the museum, one of its major positive (and innovatory) features. His opening salvo is anyway aimed not at the NAM at all but at the Acropolis itself and its long-running restoration programme. Recent progress made with this huge project (work on the Propylaia drawing to a close in 2010, the Parthenon itself kept scaffolding-free for a spell in the summer) has impressed even the British Museum, which has been hosting a presentation on it. Plantzos, concerned here as elsewhere to emphasise the scale of modern interventionism, can only say of the restored stonework that a signicant percentage... is newly cut, to the point of generating make-believe remains. This is a grossly overblown claim, and he illustrates it, oddly, by showing (his g. 2) the modern replacements for the sculptures. For the Greek authorities, these pose a classic no-win dilemma: leave the originals in place and get abused for neglect; replace them, and attract this kind of gibe. From the architectural profession, the NAM has won a chorus of praise and, wisely, Plantzos does not engage (much) with this aspect. But his claim that the museum is halfasphyxiated by its surroundings, the lthy, untidy Athenian polykatoikies is supported by a much-foreshortened photograph (his g. 4) which entirely supresses the attractive plantings of grass and olives that ring the building. His real target, though, is a museological one: the displays inside. They are context-free, unmediated , with wall texts... kept to an absolute minimum: their claim to talk directly to the viewer is cover for an authoritarian, monosemantic promotion exercise, a reactionary

McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK (Email: [email protected])

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discourse. This is supported by bureaucratic archaeological scientism: when background information is provided, it uses stuffy technical jargon or commits a translation howler. From a sophisticated or specialist viewpoint these points may look valid enough. But Plantzos is not entitled to subsume, under his critique, the needs of the wide and heterogeneous client`le e for whom the museums designers knew they had to cater, and for whom masterpieces is a word that can be used without Plantzos inverted commas. Some of his discourse is just as far over the heads of the general public as is any talk of the raking geison. As it turns out, it is the same (world) public who, by voting with their feet, have shown that they do not feel patronised or excluded by this presentation, and have repeatedly singled out this very directness for praise. In its rst year, the NAM attracted over 2 million visitors, already many more than have entered the Duveen Gallery in London in any year (though the British Museum can hide this by citing only its total annual visitor numbers). Then, to disparage the agonising efforts to establish Athens as a world-celebrated tourist destination is, for any country in Greeces present economic situation, to snipe at too soft a target. Yannis Hamilakiss response is also very critical of the museum, notably of its exclusive presentation of the ofcial line, of its neglect (again) of archaeological context and of its failure to take account of the recent claims to universal narratives on the past of certain museums elsewhere. Admittedly, there has been little attempt to match those other museum displays that show the possibility of a multivalent, multi-layered presentation, with the unofcial and provocative dissensus also given its place. But was this really the right place for that? And would it have been compatible with providing, simultaneously, a lot more contextual information (information which is anyway in very short supply for a display centred on sculptures unearthed some 150 years ago, as both writers well know)? These critics are asking a lot. At least Hamilakis, unlike Plantzos, does mention the archaeological site underneath the museum, but only in the context of the pre-emptive protests against its destruction, and without adding that these protests proved empty of justication. Then there is the universal museum rhetoric, which Hamilakis rightly denounces for trying to disown colonialism, but to which he nevertheless feels the NAM should somehow have shown a more sensitive response. It is not at all clear how this could have been done; nor that the doctrine deserves sensitive acknowledgment. Its full disingenuousness was clear to see in 2002 when, in its founding document, the Declaration of the importance and value of universal museums, the statement was made to ride piggy-back on a denunciation of the trade in illicit antiquities (this over the signatures of the Metropolitan Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum and others); and its full deviousness also made clear by the omission of the name of the drafting institution, the British Museum, from among the signatories. There have been some effective rejoinders to the doctrine, but I do not think it was fair to ask a museum display, on its own, to offer another one, on top of all the other demands made of it here. Of course, the NAM is not, and should not be, above criticism. But with fellow-citizen critics like these, who needs hostile foreigners? Reference
WILSON, A.N. 2006. Artefacts are safer in Western hands. Daily Telegraph (14 April 2006).

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