ACT, IDENTITY, AND AN ANCIENT GREEK VASE

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

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In all my articles for this column, I have shied away from talking about the Greeks and their plethora of erotic and nude artifacts that fill museum’s collections. I find their thousands years history rather daunting to tackle, and the complex homosocial, inter-generational sexual relationships between men that are equally well-documented even more so. But we’re opening that can of worms now, so let’s discuss this little pocket of history through this week’s object: an amphora from the British Museum’s collection, originally from Athens of Archaic Greece, circa 540 BCE.

Front side of an Archaic Greek Amphora (c) The Trustees of the British Museum | Source

Amphorai were typically used for the storage and transport of wine and food. To create black-figure pottery, a slip that turned black during firing was applied to the pottery in the shape of figures and ornamental motifs.

I first came across this artifact in a book called A Little Gay History by R.B. Parkinson. It’s a cute, quick look at same-sex desire across history, and an interesting read to see how this desire has manifested itself in material culture across time and civilizations. Parkinson discusses the culturally approved intimacy of boys & men in ancient Greece, how they were structured by age, and the inclusion of these relationships in scenes depicted on pottery.

Cover of R. B. Parkinson's Book. Courtesy of Caitlin McCurdy

Parkinson works as an Egyptology professor at Oxford University and is a former curator of the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan. He has written on the study of LGBT histories and ways in which to extend this historiography into ancient civilizations which carried different signifiers, gender roles, and meanings from our own. In an essay about his process for writing this book, he emphasized the potential social impact of engaging in the historiographic work. In other essays of his, he also describes the importance of not overextending modern labels and identities when studying behaviours and acts that feel familiar to our current moment, as in their original context they may have served a different purpose. As he states himself, “such historical interpretation is not a purely ‘academic’ matter, and research on such topics has to be irrefutably accurate or it risks a backward step.”

In my personal statement for admission to this program, I wrote that reaching into the past to find evidence of yourself can help legitimize your identity to a present that is looking for a reason to dismiss you. Museum exhibitions can help in this process, and I have had emotional moments in LGBT-themed exhibitions when confronted with effective framing of these artifacts. But it has to be done responsibly.

The treatment of these artifacts by the museums that hold them play an important part in how the public views the artifacts, and the people who created them. By framing the amphora within a context of same sex desire, questions of similarities between today's gay community and the pederastic relationships of ancient Greece come to mind.

Close Up on the British Museum Amphora. (c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

The homosocial relationships between men in ancient Greece are often discussed as being early representations of gay relationships, and having the amphora included in exhibitions about LGBT identities and histories adopts this perspective. Parkinson also frames the amphora as representative in this way. As depicted in this vase, bearded men are courting younger athletic youth, reflecting how these pederastic relationships served a function unique to ancient Greece. When I asked my friend & resident ancient Greece expert Sydney Rodrigues about this phenomenon, she had the following to say:

But when are representations of same sex desires ever a quick conversation?

As my parasocial dream professor Dr. Parkinson wrote, “I myself am not a historian of sexuality, but simply a gay Egyptologist who specialises in Middle Kingdom literature from around 1900–1650 BC.” I currently don’t think of myself as a historian of sexuality, but I think that’s slowly changing as more and more of my thesis is looking into queer theory and applying it to museums and Egyptology. But I am a gay Egyptologist, and the instinct to look at ancient Egypt and find myself there has been present since my 101 essay on Women in Egypt.

I focus on erotic artifacts because I am fascinated by what they reveal about humanity. The two things that are consistent across all cultures, from ancient Greece and Egypt into Medieval Europe, are death and sex. And we know about death: the funerary cult of Egypt, the Catholic rites of 15th century England. But death is also stagnant, it remains buried and preserved, waiting to be uncovered. Sex is elusive, a set of actions rarely depicted in material culture, and even more difficult to preserve through centuries of Western society creating taboos around discussion of such material.

(c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

This amphora is a glimpse into the life of ancient Greeks, both in its use to serve wine and its depictions of a moment of life — relationships between men. Currently, the online collections of the British Museum list the amphora as not on display, but it does have an extensive exhibition history. In 2018–2019 it was included in the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition titled Desire, love and identity: exploring LGBTQ identities. A decade earlier, in 2007–2008, the amphora was part of an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London called Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquities to Now. 

I am intrigued by the moment when a gay man wanders into these exhibitions and peers into a display case to see this amphora. Does he see himself reflected back at him? Or is the art style too foreign, the cultural context too different from his own? Do the years of colonial interference alter his understanding of the artifact? This phenomenon is described by Elizabeth Freeman as erotohistoriography, a queer theory concept which is currently taking up a lot of real estate in my brain, and it has huge applicability for museums. Maybe by the time I’m finished this program I’ll have some answers to these questions. But more likely, I’ll continue to study the past, and look for myself there. 

"FOR GENTLEMEN OF MATURE YEARS & SOUND MORALS": BODHISATTVA TARA IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM'S SECRET ROOM

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

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The centralization of Western sensibilities regarding sex when it comes to the treatment of non-Western artifacts is nothing new. When artifacts from one culture are usurped by another, the sensibilities of that new culture may cause some willful misinterpretations on the part of the interpreter, and the history of the usurped object becomes altered. This process is highlighted in the history of a statue of the Buddhist deity Tara, and its home in the British Museum’s Secretum, or as it is known by its more colloquial name, The British Museum Porn Room.

The statue is made of solid bronze, gilded in gold, and stands 143 cm high. It was made in the 7th-8th century AD in Sri Lanka. Her lower body is covered in a tight-fitting cloth knotted around the hips, her upper body is bare, revealing prominent breasts. It is this last detail that caused so much disruption upon its arrival at the British Museum. Despite Britain’s scandalization of her, Tara does not serve a sexual or erotic role in her original contexts in Medieval-era Buddhism. Tara is a spirit of generous compassion in Buddhism. Her origins can be traced to a Hindu mother goddess, eventually adopted by Buddhists. As a Bodhisattva, she guides worshippers along the spiritual path to enlightenment.

The Statue of Tara in it's current gallery at the British Museum. Source.

Tara was looted during the British annexation of Kandy in the early 19th century in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The British Governor of Ceylon, Robert Brownrigg donated it to the British Museum in 1830, where it would remain in storage for several decades due to the statue’s nudity, considered unacceptable by British standards. She was described as “dangerously erotic and voluptuous” and the British Museum determined this statue to be too obscene and sexual for public display, and only allowed approved men to view it and other artifacts housed in the same room. Tara is not a sexual entity in Buddhism, yet that understanding is now embedded in her history due to her presence in the Secretum.

Postcard Depicting 19th century Kandy. Source.

The 19th century in England saw a rise in Victorian sexual hysteria where it was believed that to protect an impressionable public from moral decay, the “moral perils of erotica” must be kept from them, which lead to the establishment of the Obscene Publications Act in 1857. This line of thought emerged while Britain was looting and pillaging countries across the world, in which they often found objects they determined to be of an “obscene” nature, but yet served no such purpose. This evidently led to complications when the artifacts were returned to Britain and distributed amongst their museums. With this act in mind, the British Museum established their Secretum where objects seen as too obscene or perverse were displayed for the viewing pleasure of “gentlemen of mature years and sound morals.” Men who wished to view this room had to prove that they met the arbitrary requirements to do so. Women and men of lower classes were denied access.

British Museum, 1857. Source.

What is sexual culture? And who decides who has access to the perceived obscene? The regulation of sexual culture is well documented in British history, even well before the establishment of the Obscene Publications Act or the Secretum. Considering this with the development of museums during the 19th century in Britain, clear distinctions were being drawn between art, material culture, and the obscene. The people in power decide what is obscene and what can and cannot be seen. This is directly tied to what artifacts can be held in museums and the narratives we choose to present them with as we put them in exhibitions. By collecting certain objects in one spot that gentlemen believed were for their eyes only, the British Museum decontextualized and redefined objects they stole.

While the statue of Tara is now housed in the British Museum’s China & South Asia gallery, it was not originally defined by its own culture, but rather what the colonial powers perceived it to be. That the nudity of a colonized and racialized deity was considered dangerous and erotic by the same museum that displayed and revered the nudity of Greco-Roman statues for their artistry exemplifies the long lasting and engrained Victorian sensibilities of Britain’s most identifiable museum.