History Museum Blog Guest Post

This week a post I wrote for the Missouri History Museum has been published on their blog, History Happens Here. While I was condition reporting for an exhibition called Fire! Friend and Foe I came across an object that took me on a trip down nostalgia way. You can read about it here.

A Small Promotion

I am happy to report that I have made a small but significant advancement this week. I recently managed to get a promotion at my part-time job at the Kemper Art Museum. I have gone from security guard to a security captain, which basically means that I help manage the security guards as directed by the security manager and two assistant security managers. Okay, so there is no corner office and permission to use the company plane, but I am really glad about this. It provides me with more experience as a supervisor and it makes me feel like I must be doing something right. What I want right now is more to do and more responsibility, which is what this job gives me. One day I hope to have much, much more responsibility, but this will do for now. I have to admit, the duration of my job hunt has been very long and very tiring. So I celebrate every interview and every little promotion as a step in the right direction. I have been doing this Cirque du Soleil juggling act for six months now and I've got a lot of balls up in the air at the moment. Now I must admit, I am a lousy juggler but I should be able to catch just one. Something is going to work out, and soon. But until then, I will continue working hard at the jobs that I have and I will continue to put forth my greatest effort.

Mythology and Modern Art

Currently on view at the Kemper Art Museum is an exhibition entitled The Persistence of Myth. This show displays ancient pottery depicting scenes from Greek mythology alongside 20th century artworks likewise displaying classical themes. Now, as a card-carrying member (and former Vice President) of Truman State's Eta Sigma Phi (Classics Honors Society), I have to release my inner geek and allow her to prate on about this show for a bit.

I would like to begin with the five ancient, painted pots we have on display. Hercules (or Herakles), who is a very popular figure in mythology, appears on two of the earthenware, black-figure pieces. On the Long-Nose Painter's amphora he subdues the three-headed guard dog of the underworld, Cerberus, with the aid of Hermes, while Hades and Persephone watch and protest. In a nearby case Hercules is seen battling again, this time across the face of the Athena Painter's lekythos, with another famous monster, the Nemean lion. In both of these images, Hercules is depicted as a mature and bearded man, though the figure depicted by the Long-Nose Painter is much older. His age is apparent by his slightly fatigued stoop and the fact that he is wearing the lion skin which he combats for on the lekythos. It is actually really interesting that these two images were chosen for this show, because in addition to displaying popular motifs and technique, they also display the very first and the very last of the famous Labors of Hercules.

On other pots the monsters and titans of myth dominate the scene. The lekythos of the Diosphos Painter depicts a battle between the Olympian gods and the giant offspring of the earth mother goddess, Gaia, who were sent forth to avenge the fallen Titans. This scene is referred to as a Gigantomachy, with the preceding battle with the Titans similarly called the Titanomachy. This was a popular theme where the gods represented the cosmic order and the giants personified the destructive forces of chaos. Essentially, one of the earliest forms of the struggle of good vs. evil, heaven vs. hell. A very popular theme in Greece, especially after the defeat of the invading Persian Empire in 449 BC. The other famous monster present in the show is the half-woman, half-lion who guards the gates of Thebes with her riddles. The sphinx, which was a popular image and considered protective, found its way into Greek mythology from the Ancient Near East. She appears as a decorative form in the company of some lions, a griffin, and a siren on the Lotus Cross Painter's pyxis.

The last pot is the Nolan Amphora of the Hermonax Painter. Here two red-figure images are caught in a popular chase motif, showing a mature, bearded man chasing an adolescent boy. Though it is not certain, this is possibly a depiction of Zeus's abduction of Ganymede, a beautiful young mortal that the king of the gods wished to have as his cupbearer on Mount Olympus. In the legend, though, Zeus comes down and scoops up the young man in the form of an eagle, so this could just be a reference to the customary Greek social relationship between older men and young boys known as the paiderastia.

What all these pots and ancient subjects have in common is the apparent desire of the artists to tell stories that represented the social mores, fears, and ideals of their time. Stories about good vs. evil, heroes that represent the ideal man, riddling monsters that harken from foreign lands, and scenes of edifying male relationships, are all attempts to explain, justify, and come to terms with the world around them. In this way, art has not changed in the last 7,000 years, and the contemporary pieces in the exhibition demonstrate this. The 20th century pieces in the show recount popular myths to represent modern ideals and anxieties, and thus create connections between the world of the ancient Greeks and our prevailing times.  

There are more modern artworks in the show than there are pots, so I will just focus on a couple. A very modern political and social application of the ancient myth of a certain Greek king from Ithaca sounds out from Fritz Scholder's The Odyssey #2. In this lithograph from 1981, a Native American is depicted with his back to the viewer, wearing a simple deerskin flap and leaning against a long staff. The man seems down-trodden and more weary than the mature Hercules on the nearby amphora. His hand is raised up to his brow to shield the sun from his eyes as he gazes across the Great Plains looking for what he has lost; his land and his home. Unlike Odysseus, whose bravery and persistence meant he would eventually find his way home, the viewer senses this red man will never pass across his threshold into the familiar ever again. Scholder entitled his artwork after the blind bard's famous epic king to draw connections between the long journey home of Greek heroes and the unending search for the lost lands of the Native Americans. The Odysseus figure thus becomes a sort of poster-child for all men who are searching for what has vanished.

On the wall just opposite of the red Odysseus there is a engraving by Andre Racz entitled Perseus Beheading Medusa VIII. This image, with a dull brown background enlivened by the figures' bold black lines, violent reds, and nimbus-like white highlights, shows a victorious Perseus holding up the head of the recently slain gorgon. With his artwork, Racz wanted to depict the conquest of good over evil following the end of the Second World War. So the triumph of Perseus becomes the triumph of the Allied Armies and the defeated gorgon the end of the domineering and threatening National Socialist Party in Germany. Very similar to the way the Greeks used the Gigantomachy to represent their victory in the Greco-Persian wars.

There are many more pieces in the show that all share equally relevant themes from our present and our past, which I am certain will remain relevant in the future. I really enjoy this particular exhibit, from both a Classics geek's perspective and from the vantage point of a young woman who admires resonance and modern art.

Can you think of any modern pieces that reference ancient myth? How do these artworks illustrate modern themes or events?

An acknowledgement to Heather Read, PhD student in the department of Art History and Archaeology, and Elizabeth Wolfson, MA student in the department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. I referenced the leaflet they jointly composed for both art and artists' information as well as modern views and interpretations throughout this post. This leaflet can be found in the Teaching Gallery where the exhibition is currently on display.

Weekly Reading Assignment: The 1970 Convention Past and Future

Today I have been reading the The Fight Against the Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Objects, The 1970 Convention: Past and Future. Released by UNESCO in March 2011, this Information Kit presents trafficking and recovery statistics, current and updated policies, information about different conventions, and more. You will be floored when you read the numbers and values of objects that have been looted throughout the world. I certainly was. It may take a while to get through, but reading an information kit like this is important because it keeps you up-to-date with policies and makes you aware of what items have a higher chance of possessing an illicit provenance.

Moving Objects

Just wanted to share a couple things I have learned from transporting objects.

1.) Sprinters > Cargo Vans
2.) Gator board boxes are the best
3.) You can never have enough tissue paper and boxes, but most of the time there actually won't be enough tissue paper and boxes; so you'll just have to get creative!
4.) Packing foam is not only good for padding boxes but also for putting some cushion between aching knees and concrete floors
5.) Always wear comfy shoes
6.) You can never have too many flatbed karts
7.) Large rolls of bubble wrap are very hug-able, especially when you are fatigued and you need something to lean against
8.) Packing tape is a necessary and stinky evil
9.) Plastic sheets are gigantic and packing blankets are comparatively tiny
10.) Keep track of your pink slips!   
11.) Always take the precaution to make sure you don't load karts and object boxes into the freight elevator in such a way that they trap the interns
12.) It takes SO much more time to pack than it does to unpack, which does make the end of the day feel a bit anticlimactic so you'll have to celebrate with a lunch to perk things up a bit

Museum Heists in Movies

Recently, as I was flipping through the TV channels, I came across the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. Now I love Pierce Brosnan just as much as the next girl with an over-enthusiasm for Celtic actors and I love it even more when major scenes in a film take place in a museum. Even so, I have to admit that the first ten minutes of the movie, which is the big art heist scene, just made me laugh at the improbability of the whole situation. The security depicted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art consists of the kinds of high-tech gadgets, heavy security gates, and taser-wielding guards that only Hollywood could dream up. Let me talk a little about each one.

One of the first things Mr. Crown's decoy thieves do is disable the electronic bolts that hold the paintings to the walls. I can think of no museum that would use a system like this. For one thing, such bolts would have to be set to one specific point on the wall, which is very inflexible. Museums need to be able to rotate artworks of various dimensions, which makes the point on the wall where they are hung different each time. Most museums just attach their paintings to the walls with security screws, which may not be as fancy as electric locks, but they certainly make it easier to rearrange the elevation of the artworks. Next, the thieves disable the air-conditioning in the targeted rooms so the thermal cameras would not be able to detect their body heat. Thermal cameras? Really? No museum would utilize thermal cameras when regular cameras will do. Then there is the heavy gate, which they apparently borrowed from the creators of Jurassic Park, that drops to prevent thieves from leaving the galleries. Now it may have been able to trap a velociraptor, but Mr. Crown was able to escape with the aid of his titanium-lined briefcase. Sorry folks, no gates. Then there was my favorite aspect of the movie-imagined museum security, and that was the liberal use of tasers by the security guards. I have been a security guard for quite some time now and no one has issued me a taser. In fact, I believe only officers of the law are permitted to taze perpetrators. Though I have to admit, the idea does have a certain appeal.

Now I realize that this is a movie and movies are rarely rooted in reality. Films are meant to be fun and over-the-top because that is what entertains. Even though I am completely aware of this, inaccurate events in a motion picture do tend to get me ranting, and I know I'm not the only one. I remember an evening when I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with two of my classmates, and all of us started shrieking when Harrison Ford began wiping off the surface of a centuries-old tablet with champagne. Okay folks, we all do it. So while I'm on a roll, I thought of some more movies to talk about.

Another famous art heist film that comes to mind is the 1999 Entrapment, starring Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones. One of the big scenes is set in a castle that is actually utilized like a museum in its display, but not so much in its security. It is here we find one of Hollywood's most shamelessly over-used security measures: the web of laser beams. It amazes me that these complex and high-tech security systems are somehow always traversable so long as a women is able to do some yoga and lift her derriere high up off the ground. Of course, the only other way to cross a laser field would be to dance through using capoeira skills like Vincent Cassel in Ocean's Twelve. There are no laser beams, but a lot of museums do have motion detectors. A detector that monitors the movement throughout an entire space makes much more sense then a series of thin beams with huge gaps for thieves to boogie through. And then there are the pressure switches, which require the thief to remove the item quickly and hold down the button so an alarm doesn't go off and to prevent the large round stone from rolling down and crushing them. Sorry folks, no pressure switches.

The last film I am going to talk about is the ever-so-slightly more realistic art theft comedy, The Maiden Heist from 2009. The realism comes from a complete lack of high-tech and fancy gadgets. In this film there are three security guards who cannot bare to be separated from their favorite artworks, which the museum is planning to sell to another institution in Denmark. In order to keep them in the country, they plan a complex and covert inside-job heist in order to take possession of two paintings and a sculpture. Their methods are pretty clever and their blunders comical, right down to a nude William H. Macy stuck in the back of an art courier's van. But the involvement of security guards, as far as actually handling and moving the art, is completely unlikely. Security just stands and watches as preparators and professional art movers handle the artworks and the crates, so the characters would not have had the opportunities they did in the film to steal the artworks.

From these films, it is apparent there are two popular themes in Hollywood art heist movies. One is the use of flashy security systems that guide the action in more entertaining directions. These heists require lots of skill, high-tech equipment, and planning on the part of the thieves. The other popular concept in art theft is the idea of the "inside job," and that the only way anyone could take an artwork is to have someone working from within the institution. As far as the reality goes, both these concepts are false. The vast majority of successful museum thefts have been smash-and-grab affairs with a small number of non-museum related people involved. Usually, thefts are committed during daylight hours, and even when the museum is open. Thieves will use force and the element of surprise to grab and go. Since artworks are usually screwed to the walls, robbers are not hesitant to damage a piece by cutting it out of its frame. In the instances where objects that are not paintings, cases can be smashed open, as they were in the Iraqi Museum, or some items torn out of their displays, such as the case with the white rhinoceros horn in France. You can read about some of the more famous thefts on the FBI Art Theft page here.

The fact of the matter is real museum thefts aren't that entertaining. They require no tight black outfits or thermal sensors. They usually just entail speed and brute force, and they happen too quickly for drawn-out shots of impressive dances through laser fields. Perhaps that is my real problem with Hollywood art heist films; they make something hasty and loutish seem thrilling and cunning.

Can you think of any other movies with complex and high-tech heist scenes? What do you think of the depiction of museums in film?