The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs

The eleventh section of Daode jing (Tao Te Ching), the foundational text of Taoism, reads: . . . Thirty spokes share a hub; Because [the wheel] is empty, it can be used in a cart. Knead clay to make a vessel. Because it is empty, it can function as a vessel. Carve out doors and windows to make a room. Because they are empty, they make a room usable. Thus we possess things and benefit from them, But it is their emptiness that makes them useful. . . This section has always been appreciated as a supreme piece of rhetoric on the powers of nothingness, a philosophical concept fiercely articulated in the Daode jing. Whereas that may indeed be the author’s intention, the empirical evidence evoked to demonstrate this concept reveals an alternative way of seeing manufactured objects by focusing on their immaterial aspects. This way of looking at things has important implications for archaeological and art historical scholarship on ancient artifacts and architecture precisely because these two disciplines identify themselves with the study of physical remains of the past so firmly that tangibility has become an undisputed condition of academic research in these fields. Archaeologists routinely classify objects from an excavation into categories based on material and then inventory their sizes, shapes, and decoration. Art historians typically start their interpretation of images, objects, and monuments by identifying their formal attributes. Whereas such trained attention to material and formal evidence will surely persist for good reasons, the Daode jing section cautions us of the danger of ignoring the immaterial aspects of man-made forms, which, though eluding conventional typological classification and visual analysis, are nevertheless indispensible to their existence as objects and buildings. The current chapter incorporates this approach into a study of ancient Chinese art and visual culture by arguing that constructed empty spaces on artifacts and structures—holes, vacuums, doors, and windows—possess vital significance to understanding the minds and hands that created them and thus deserve a serious look into their meaning.

Introduction

What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for an artifact or a work of art to be visible as such? At some level the answer is simple: the lights must be on. Quickly, however, the issues become more complex and turn out to vary from discipline to discipline. Not everything is visible at every time, which means that not every research program can see the same things. Material conditions are certainly important, but so are perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. Archaeology is, among other things, the science of making things visible. It does so by digging them out of the ground; what time has hidden, the archaeologist reveals. The discipline is, as a result, keenly attuned to the material conditions under which such visibility becomes possible. Those conditions can be institutional, practical, and technological—funding, permits, and tools, be they picks and shovels or ground penetrating radar. But the conditions that archaeology investigates can also be historical, in the sense that, even in the distant past, visibility was neither uniform nor given. Historical agents, no less than time, may do the work of concealment: burying things, hiding them, rendering them variously obscure. It follows that archaeologists excavate more than artifacts. Equally, they excavate the conditions of each artifact’s potential visibility: the material conditions under which entities in a past world could be conspicuous and obtrusive, or recede into an unremarkable background. In short, they excavate relations no less than things—hence, by extension, a potential stratification in who saw what and at what time. Art history, on the other hand, tends to take visibility for granted. Integral to the discipline is a vast infrastructure of imaging and autopsy, from ArtSTOR to high-quality printing to travel grants—all committed to what Michael Fried has called “the primordial convention” that pictures and sculptures are meant to be beheld. This commitment exceeds the requirements of empirical research: even the most thorough technical documentation and the most meticulous description will, by broad consensus, be no substitute for seeing the object with one’s own eyes.

Concealment and Revelation: The Pola Casket and the Visuality of Early Christian Relics

The archaeological artefact is typically unearthed. It comes to us marked by the depredations of time, tarnished by burial, reclaimed from loss. Yet the perspective of excavation, according to which all objects are disinterred and salvaged for the collection or the museum, with more or less of a contextual history arising from their unearthing, may risk simplifying or ignoring the conditions of their original interment. The differences between the kinds of burial, between the multiple processes at stake in the loss of objects to the earth in the past—insofar as they can be reconstructed—are interesting. For example, the amazingly well-preserved statue of Flavius Palmatus, Consular Governor of Caria and acting Vicar of Asiana at some point before 536 CE, was discovered toppled beside its inscribed base at the west colonnade of the square adjoining the theater of the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, in the mid-twentieth century. It fell in the course of time, we have no idea when—probably as the result of an earthquake—in a city virtually abandoned after the seventh century and was subsequently covered by debris and soil until its excavation in modernity. By contrast, the Meroe head, an over-life-size bronze head of Augustus, which was excavated by the British in Sudan in the teens of the twentieth century, was probably cut from the statue of which it was part and buried by barbarian tribesmen beneath steps leading to the native temple of Victory in the Kushite capital of Meroe in the Sudan. Far from falling where it stood, it was the victim of deliberate iconoclasm and burial by the enemies of the Roman empire, probably shortly after its erection when the Kushites invaded Roman Egypt in 25 BCE. In its buried form it lay as a hidden trophy permanently trampled by the Kushites—a sign of independence from Rome, autonomy, and hatred of the Roman emperor even when the tribesmen had forgotten that it was hidden there. Other kinds of deliberate burial, however, were made by those who owned the objects interred, rather than thieves or rampagers.

What Lies Beneath: Carving on the Underside of Aztec Sculpture

Not all ancient art was made to be seen. Consider, for example, a sculpture of a rattlesnake, today in the British Museum. Its visible body is smooth and simple, coiled into three highly polished circuits. The mouth is daubed with red paint, open to reveal fierce fangs and an elongated forked tongue; the body terminates in thirteen rounded rattles. In between, the only decoration is the varied coloration of the gleaming stone. On the underside, the carving is far more elaborate. The rattles and then the ventral scales of the serpent are lavishly detailed as they spiral upwards. At regular intervals, dots of red pigment have been added to these hidden coils, ornamenting the rattlesnake’s belly. The three-dimensionality of this sculpture challenges display; photographs, casts, or ingeniously rigged mirrors can simultaneously make both the top and bottom of the sculpture visible for modern audiences, but it is likely that in Aztec times the serpent’s coils were invisible, only hinted at by the rounded forms at the base of the sculpture. One of over one hundred Aztec sculptures with documented carving on its underside, this coiled serpent was not an isolated caprice but part of a coherent and meaningful practice. Much ancient art was difficult to see in its original context. From the dedicatory inscription on the back of a Neo-Assyrian sculpture such as the Lamassu in Chicago’s Oriental Institute to the surface of the Column of Trajan spiraling out of sight or the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, ancient art frequently thwarted the gaze. Many objects alternated between moments of visibility and concealment: displayed briefly, but crucially, at a funeral ceremony before being sealed within a tomb, for example; or stored in darkness between moments of exposure in procession or performance. Other images ended up hidden after complex histories of reuse and recycling. Still other examples hovered at the edge of a gradient of diminishing visibility—possible to see, perhaps, if only one’s gaze were powerful enough.

Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens

Classical Greek monuments were meant to be seen. The poet Pindar often refers to the conspicuousness of architecture: “When a work is begun,” he declares, “it is necessary to make its façade far-beaming” (Olympian 6.3–4), and a sacred precinct can be tēlephantos, “shining from afar” (fr. 5 SM). According to Plato, the works of Pheidias were made “conspicuously” (periphanōs), literally, “so as to seen round about,” a term that can also be used to distinguish freestanding sculpture from relief (Meno 91d). The philosopher may have been thinking of Pheidias’ great bronze Athena on the Acropolis of Athens, the spear and helmet of which, we are told, were visible to ships at sea. The conspicuousness of Greek architecture was integral to its function. The Acropolis itself, for instance, was the supreme monument of the most powerful and long-lived democracy of Classical antiquity. Soaring over Athens, its great buildings—the temple of Athena Nike, the Parthenon, the Erechtheum—were statements of the official ideology of the Athenian empire and testaments to its glory. Clustered around them were numerous private and public dedications: statues, objets d’art, and inscriptions on stone. Today these monuments are landmarks of art history and magnets for tourism. Curiously, however, many of the Acropolis monuments were more or less invisible in the 400s BCE. Visibility was circumstantial and contingent, in ways that I shall elaborate below. From this starting point flow two questions: what does it mean for a democracy that its most glorious public monuments should be, to a greater or lesser degree, unseen? And what are the consequences for art history? The Acropolis monuments were subject to at least three distinct types of invisibility. First, literal invisibility, in the sense of occlusion or concealment. In this case, any light that strikes the object does not bounce back and hit an observer’s eye. Were one to bury a statue in a hole, it would be occluded in this sense; the statue would be, literally, invisible.