ART & CULTURAL HERITAGE:Destruction/Looting/Restitution

I. Destruction, Iconoclasm & the Erasure of Culture

II. Looting & the Appropriation of Objects

III. Restitution, Repatriation, Reconstruction, & Artistic Interventions

I. DESTRUCTION, ICONOCLASM, & THE ERASURE OF CULTURE

WHY? Ideology, neglect, or disregard.

A man takes a sledgehammer to a Neo-Assyrian relief in a video released by ISIS on April 11, 2015.

For a period of months last year, news of ISIS’ destruction of ancient cultural heritage sites in Iraq played widely in western media outlets. Between February 26 and April 11, 2015, the group

released three videos showing men carrying out the destruction of ancient artifacts and architecture at the Mosul Museum, Hatra, and the Northwest Palace at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu).

This campaign culminated over the summer with the drawn-out demolition of sites in the ancient city of Palmyra.

The UNESCO World Heritage Site also served as a backdrop for the public executions of ISIS prisoners including the site’s lead archaeologist, Khaled al-Asaad.

The videos ISIS has released to document and celebrate these exploits have revealed the role that art plays in contemporary discourses of identity and power.

Early in the video, the camera captures men unwrapping sculptures from their protective dust cloths. The video then cuts to shots lingering on the statue of a seated woman, a wall of plaques, and a case of artifacts. These shots recalled nothing more strongly than the shots of a slasher movie showing future murder victims in their final moments of ignorant happiness.

These stagey shots, meant to heighten the tension of the video, instead called my attention to its constructed nature. While the video was presented as documentation of destruction, viewing it as an art historian I could also see that this film, like all media, was produced to manipulate its viewers. I had to wonder: what was it trying to achieve?

Explosives were laid at the site and then detonated, according to the video

Ancient friezes were smashed, the video shows

Samuel Hardy of the conflict antiquities blog calls these films “B-Movies,” and indeed it’s what they are: low-budget flicks reveling in wanton violence and destruction in order to attract a maximum return on viewership.

While ISIS had been releasing videos for some time, it finally tapped in to a wider audience with its February 26 video showing the destruction of objects in the Mosul Museum’s Assyrian Collection and artifacts from Hatra and the Nergal Gate at Nineveh.

Clips from the video played on the BBC, CNN, and on the website of The New York Times, among other news outlets

April 11 video of Nimrud destruction: originally published on YouTube, now removed.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3035534/Video-Islamic-State-group-destroys-ancient-ruins-Nimrud.html

IS THIS ART?

An action shot from ISIS’s April 11, 2015 video: men in military gear break through a wall.

Filmed from the other side of the wall—a framing element meant to heighten the drama of the action, but which simultaneously reveals its gratuitousness.

Is this art, or propaganda? How do we draw a line between the two?

The videos created a global uproar, and deepened western animosity towards the Islamic State. However, according to recent reports the whole thing was a hoax, and the ancient statues and relics

were exact replicas of the real thing.

The suspicions were confirmed by Baghdad’s museum director who says that the originals are all safe and sound in the museum.

The human-headed winged beast or LAMASSU at the end of the clip showing the destruction of the Mosul Museum and Nergal Gate was among the few left in situ in Iraq.

The lamassu were located across the river from Mosul, guarding the Palace of Sennacherib’s Nergal Gate (c. 700 BCE) for the past 2700 years in ancient Nineveh, once the world’s largest city.

There are other lamassu that were removed from the country in the mid- and late-nineteenth centuries that are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, the British Museum, and the Louvre.

The most devastating losses from the Mosul Museum attack are the sculptures of the kings from Hatra since the majority of Hatrene work is still in Iraq, and the four destroyed here constitute roughly one-sixth of the known works. In addition, this period has been studied very little, and now we have lost much valuable information. Some artifacts that may have survived may be destined for the illicit antiquities market, because ISIS is funding many of their operations through such sales.

The DESTRUCTION of NIMRUD (Show the short video of ISIS at Ashurnasirpal II’s Palace in Nimrud.)

In what has been called one of the most egregious cases of deliberate destruction of cultural patrimony since WWII, ISIS members annihilated the physical history of Nimrud, one of the greatest cities of the 9th century BCE.

ISIS used bulldozers to tear down walls, then detonated barrel bombs.

Four tombs only discovered in 1991 were destroyed, raising questions about what else remained that might have been found in the future.

The Met’s reconstruction of the palace gives some idea of the grand size, location, and color of the lamassu and reliefs.

https://youtu.be/5VCldg1TdHc

WHY are these sites being targeted? ISIS’s ideological claim for demolishing cultural heritage, especially

sculpture, is toward THE PROHIBITION OF IDOLATRY. ISIS endeavors to ERASE A PRE-ISLAMIC PAST and any other belief

system except its own to try and bring into being a world where, with no visual records or historical texts, the past is forgotten and only ISIS’s own interpretation of it exists.

The group also BRINGS ATTENTION TO THEIR CAUSE, so they can

recruit more members. The objects they loot, rather than destroy, are economic goods given even

more value for their new scarcity in the market, where they can SELL THOSE OBJECTS TO FINANCE THEIR EXTREMIST ACTIVITIES.

The Destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas These two colossal

Buddhas were placed along the Silk Road.

Travelers could ascend a staircase to the level of the shoulders of the smaller of the two and follow a ledge allowing for circumambulation of the Buddha’s head.

Inside the niche that enclosed the head was a painting of a sun.

Why were they destroyed? A Taliban commander, Abdul Wahed,

announced his intention to blow up the Buddhas in 1997 prior to taking control of the valley.

Once he was in control of Bamiyan, he drilled holes in the Buddhas’s head for explosives.

He was prevented from moving his plan along, however, by a direct order from Mullah Omar.

In 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued a decree in favor of preserving the Buddhas.

He recognized that although the Afghans were no longer Buddhist, the statues could be a potential source of income from international visitors.

However, the radical clerics began a

campaign to crack down on “un-Islamic”

segments in society and soon banned all form of imagery, music, etc. in accordance with their strict interpretation of

Sharia.

Some reported that the statues were destroyed

in retaliation for the economic sanctions

imposed upon Afghanistan when the Taliban took control.

The statues were destroyed by artillery fire, guns, and dynamite over a series of several weeks staring on March 2, 2001.

A Taliban envoy said the Islamic government made its decision in a rage after a foreign delegation offered money to preserve the ancient works while a million Afghans faced starvation.

"When your children are dying in front of you, then you don't care about a piece of art," Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, the envoy, said in an interview.

Taliban commander, Abdul Wahed

A holographic Bamiyan Buddha monument projected into the niche where the stone one once stood.

Iconoclasm in the Byzantine EmpireAn historical ideological debate about images that led to their widespread destruction was the Iconoclastic Controversy between 726–843 CE in the Byzantine Empire.

At the heart of the argument was the concern that images of Christ and the saints might displease God, due to their potential to be misused as idols.

Images were destroyed in vast

numbers during the Iconoclastic Controversy. Paintings and mosaics were

whitewashed, others were chiseled away, and new, approved iconography, like

crosses, were inserted, as in the

apse mosaic in Saint Irene, Istanbul

(c. 740 CE).

Iconoclasm and the Protestant Reformation in The NetherlandsIconoclasm has not been confined to the Middle East, nor is it the province only of the Jewish or Islamic faiths or the Christian Byzantine Empire. Across Europe, including in the Netherlands and England, many Protestant reformers in the 1500s were not only concerned about the same abuses associated with imagery as the Byzantine Iconoclasts had been, but they were also appalled at the money spent on furnishing Catholic churches that could have gone instead to feeding and clothing the poor. The Heidelberg Catechism of 1562 both codified and disseminated the widely held belief that God did not want Christianity taught by “dumb images” but by the “lively preaching of His word.

Hieronymus Bosch:During the iconoclastic outbreaks, many of his works were destroyed, leaving us poorer for this gaping hole in his artistic body of work.

II. LOOTING & THE APPROPRIATION OF OBJECTSWHY? For purposes of propaganda & economic gain.

LOOTING AND THE APPROPRIATION OF OBJECTSWhile iconoclasts have destroyed images due to distrust or fear based around the idea that they are imbued with the power of what they depict, or because they are associated with a hated or repressive regime, other ideological stances have led people to take objects of material culture by force, stealth, or through suspect legal machinations.

The reasons for this are numerous:

“spoils of war” sell or trade for economic reasons enhance the prestige of their owner perpetuate cultural genocide on other groups

The contestation of images is ultimately about power & control.

LOOTING the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, 2003

The Warka Vase stands as the earliest known example of pictorial narrative and expresses the ordering of Sumerian society.

It and approximately 15,000 other objects were looted from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad during the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.

U.S. Marine Colonel Matthew BogdanosSecured nearly 10,000 items through community outreach, international cooperation, raids, seizures, and amnesty for looters with no questions asked and no payments given.

The irreplaceable Warka Vase, wrapped in a blanket, was brought in by three young men and handed to the museum guards in June of 2003.

Tips from locals resulted in discovering another work, the Warka Mask, buried on a farm, and many other items were located this way.

After being closed for 12 years for reconstruction and reinstallation of returned objects, the Iraq Museum reopened on February 28, 2015, earlier than planned, directly as a result of and as a symbol of opposition to ISIS’s destruction of the Mosul Museum and the cultural patrimony of the country’s and world’s citizens.

Looting in Ancient Rome

Looting of cultural objects has a history going back millennia, but the Romans were particularly avaricious. They plundered important heritage objects from other cultures that they subdued and assimilated, for example the Jews in Jerusalem. A sculptural panel on the Arch of Titus entitled The Spoils of the Temple of Jerusalem (81 CE) depicts the Triumph accorded to Vespasian and Titus in 71 CE upon their successful return from putting down the Jewish Revolt in 70 CE.

In his Italian campaign, Napoléon determined to “have everything that is beautiful in Italy.”

To this end, he forced the Treaty of Tolentino onto the Pope, which stipulated, among other things, that the French Commission would select 100 masterworks from the Vatican collections, 500 manuscripts from their library, and, from the Papal States, the art treasures of Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Ancona, Perugia, and Loreto.

Looting in Napoleon’s First French Empire

In Venice, French forces removed statues of the winged lion of Saint Mark and its four bronze horses.

The art from the Vatican was loaded on ships and taken over sea, canal, and land to its final journey, a triumphal public parade to the Altar of the Revolution in the Champ de Mars in Paris. The only unpacked crates were the four bronze horses (themselves looted by the Venetians from the Turks in Constantinople in the twelfth century, now destined for a triumphal arch in the Tuileries),

Looting and Destruction in the Third ReichNapoléon’s disruption to the cultural patrimony of countries he invaded had important ramifications in the twentieth century. It not only set a precedent and served as an example for looting and controlling visual art as part of the strategy for empire-building but also played a role in Hitler and the Nazi party’s agenda to retrieve works that had not been repatriated to Germany.This is addressed in the 2006 film The Rape of Europa, available online through Hulu.

Nine weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933, his director of the so-called Combat League for German Culture gave a speech explaining the new regime’s cultural theories: “It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic. It is above all cultural.” Formed in 1929, the Combat League’s objective was to “enlighten the German race about the connections between race, art and knowledge” and “defend German cultural values amidst the contemporary cultural decay,” by which the Third Reich’s culture ministers specifically meant modern art, including German Expressionism (Der Blaue Reiter and Die Brücke) , New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), Futurism, Cubism, Dada, and other key movements.

Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section of the U. S. Army (Monuments Men)While awaiting the construction of Hitler’s museum in the fall of 1944, the Nazis sent the Ghent Altarpiece from Neuschwanstein to a salt mine in Altaussee, Austria, only one hundred miles from Linz, for safe-keeping from Allied forces’ aerial bombing. In late March of 1945, several members of the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Section of the U.S. Army, more commonly known as the Monuments Men, were using Rose Valland’s information and frantically searching for sites where the Germans were depositing artwork. After an American unit secured the Neuschwanstein Castle, on May 4, 1945 two Monuments Men entered and found a tremendous trove of French patrimony and the meticulous records for the 21,000 objects confiscated and removed from France.

III. RESTITUTION, REPATRIATION, RECONSTRUCTION, & ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS

Napoléon, Hitler, the Taliban, and more recently ISIS have all resorted

to the theft and destruction of meaningful objects of cultural

heritage as a means, at least in part, of obliterating a culture’s identity and devastating the spirit of its people.

But conversely, an object’s repatriation, restoration, rebuilding, or restitution can play an important

role in reconciliation and in a culture’s resiliency.

In response to contemporary manmade political situations and natural disasters, new scholarship is beginning to examine and theorize culture as a “basic need,” and to propose that emergency cultural aid be conceptualized, managed, and reconciled with other “basic needs” for

survival.

Laws respecting the return of cultural patrimony or its restitution evolved out of treaties signed at congresses or conventions concluding war, beginning with the 1815 Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars. It was here that the idea that cultural heritage connects people and territories with significant artistic or cultural objects first became entwined with laws.

Restitution & Repatriation: Laws, Treaties, Conventions

Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict with Regulations for the Execution for the Convention, 1954 (Hague Convention and Protocols of 1954)

Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, 1970 UNESCO (1970 Convention on Illicit Traffic of Cultural Property)

Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, 1972 UNESCO

Even with laws in place, new circumstances arise that demand a

review or challenge to existing laws.

The recently released film, Woman in Gold, based on memoirs by Maria

Altmann, an heir of Adele Bloch-Bauer, whose portrait Klimt painted, and Randy

Schoenberg, her lawyer and the grandson of the musician Arnold Schoenberg, presents

the legal case they brought against the Austrian government that eventually went to

the U.S. Supreme Court and concluded in the plaintiff’s favor through arbitration in

Austria in 2006.

Restitution: Hopi Tribal Council

Other groups, such as the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP), continue efforts to reunite families and communities with their cultural inheritance. Recently, in 2015, they partnered with the Hopi Tribal Council to assist them in banning a French auction of the sacred “Katsinam” or “Friends.” The Hopi have been fighting to reclaim these mask-like objects they assert were stolen years ago, many of which found their way to French auctions. In 2013, the Annenberg Foundation secretly bid on twenty-four of the items and secured twenty-one of them to return to the Hopi. The objects are considered living entities with divine spirits and are used in spiritual ceremonies, then retired and left to naturally disintegrate.

The case of the Hopi “Katsinam” is not an isolated or even unusual incident. It is estimated that over 90% of American Indian archaeological sites have been destroyed or looted. It is, perhaps, more likely that we will interact outside of the bounds of museums with American Indian artifacts than other historical objects, and so it is important to consider our ethical obligations.

James Luna, Artifact Piece, 1987

DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTIONSNew technology also can play a role in digitally preserving or reconstructing cultural heritage sites. CyArk provides one example; it a non-profit organization that creates 3D digital records with the goal of saving five hundred sites in the next five years. CyArk has partnered with the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH),the National Science Foundation (NSF), the International Centre for the Study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), and many others. CyArk’s education tab has some great lesson plans. For example, one of their projects was to scan the Assyrian Collection of the British Museum.

This image was generated from laser scan data collected from the Assyrian Collection at

the British Museum

After the destruction of the Mosul Museum collection, Matthew Vincent, a cyber archaeologist, doctoral candidate from the University of California at San Diego, and current Fellow at the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage, and another Fellow, Chance Coughenour, initiated the digital cultural heritage Project Mosul.

The project gives power back to the global community through its mission to crowd-source photographs, digitally mesh them, and create a 3D replica of the no-longer extant works. While a team of experts works on the software, volunteers upload photographs, sort them, create point clouds to make a 3-D mesh and add texture, which makes the images. Anyone, including students, can go to this site and volunteer. Some tasks take very little technological know-how while others require some coding skills. Through the 3D reconstructions the public can actively counter the violence, loss, and sense of helplessness many feel upon watching the videos of the destruction.

Many contemporary artists feel compelled to create art that engages with historic and contemporary power struggles over cultural patrimony.

Through artistic interventions they can make us question our

beliefs or assumptions or grapple with divisive

topics. Good art can help us contemplate a life that is not ours and to break down stereotypes.

These particular artists use modern technologies

to bridge the past and present.

Tammam Azam's version of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa

Tammam Azzam is a Syrian-born artist who creates interventionist art that combines digital photograph and street art to protest the destruction rending the fabric of Syria’s physical structures as well as its society. His Freedom Graffiti (Syrian Museum) went viral in 2013, the image was ‘liked’ by over 20,000 people and shared 14,000 times in only 5 hours. It superimposed Gustave Klimt’s iconic painting The Kiss on the pock-marked and gapping structures of war-torn Damascus.

Francesco Goya’s Third of May, 1808 now takes place in a blitzed street,

Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night provides the only organic and natural spot amongst the grey wreckage of

buildings, and Henri Matisse’s Dancers in their fiery red improbably ring a

mound of debris.

Tammam Azzam, 'Dali‘Syrian Museum

In Azzam’s words, “the Syrian Museum series incorporates iconic subjects from the greatest European masters, paralleling the greatest achievements

of humanity with the destruction it is also capable of inflicting.” It also draws attention to the contrast between Syria’s world-class museums and

the regime that is obliterating its own cultural heritage.

Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian-born artist and activist who studied in Tehran and moved to the U.S. in 2007. She is currently an artist in residence at AutoDesk’s Pier 9 offices in San Francisco. Like the cyber archaeologists at Project Mosul, Allahyari is compelled to reconstruct the lost objects using advanced technologies situated at the edge of the future in order to repair the past and safeguard collective memory. She uses 3D printing to create transparent scaled versions of the sculptures of the Hatra King Uthar and the lamassu shattered at the Mosul Museum. Within them they contain technological DNA (a memory card and flash drive) imprinted with historical information, maps, and data needed to give birth to another Hatra King or lamassu, all without causing destruction to the original/copy. While ISIS attempts to rewrite history to suit their ideological agenda, Allahyari resists through her work, Material Speculation: ISIS.

CONCLUSION“I am keenly aware that in the

context of a tragic humanitarian crisis, the state of Syria’s cultural

heritage may seem secondary. However, I am convinced that

each dimension of this crisis must be addressed on its own terms and in its own right. There is no

choice between protecting human lives and safeguarding the dignity

of a people through its culture. Both must be protected, as the

one and same thing—there is no culture without people and no

society without culture.” Irina Bokova

, Director General UNESCO 2013