Andrew Hazewinkel

Taking its title from the series of photographs it presents, the exhibition Journeys in the Lifeworld of Stones (Displacements I–X) 2010-2020 comprised ten photographic compositions each 116 x 158 cm.

Each of the ten works focuses on a displaced cultural artefact now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Met) and traces that object’s journey from its place and culture of origin to the galleries of the Met.

The lower right margin of these large chromogenic prints is where each pictorial journey mapping begins. There we find a digitised reproduction of an archivally sourced late 19th century photographic negative that represents each artwork’s ancient subject.

The presence of these small images is pivotal to understanding this suite of works. As is the knowledge that these images, and others like them, were generated during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to meet the needs of the commercial apparatus associated with the (now dubious) trade and acquisition of cultural artefacts by some of today’s largest and most well-known universal museums. These small images are thus associated with contemporarily maligned policies, practices and politics associated with what is sometimes called the great collecting age, during which new world institutions scrambled for old world cultural legitimacy.

It is relevant to note that these archivally sourced images are drawn from the John Marshall Photographic Archive, which is held at the British School at Rome, a contemporary interdisciplinary research centre that yes hosts artists undertaking experimental research, but whose core business focuses on [1]more traditional historical and archaeological subjects. John Marshall (1862 – 1928) was a British scholar of classical art, with expertise in Greek and Roman sculpture. Between 1906 and 1928 he was also the European agent for the acquisition of antiquities to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; by today’s standards these two professional functions can be described as ethically conflicting roles.

The small archival image in the lower right margin of each work is inextricably linked to the contemporary museum interior image that occupies a more central position in each composition. That image represents the same commercially captured cultural artefact that features at lower right margin of each composition as it stands today in the grand, enormously profitable, tourist teeming, galleries of the Met. All the contemporary tensions that are strung tight between those two inextricably linked images are then more broadly contextualised by landscapes, seascapes, and atmospheric conditions, bringing to mind the palpable, sensible, aesthetic qualities,¹ the material, environmental, spatial, and cultural contexts of the ancient and more recent Mediterranean territories and cultures from which they emerged and belonged to.

The following passages are from the essay Presence Elsewhere by Paul. G. Johnston, commissioned by Sumer, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the occassion of the exhibition Journeys in The Lifeworld of Stones (Displacements I-X) February 2022.

How do we make meaning out of the objects we unearth? Who controls this process—and who should? Where has the right to? The Met is one of the most visited museums in the world. The strength of its collection in all kinds of areas is undeniable. But in the case of its antiquities collections, at least, the stories that it is able to tell are often constrained by the lack of reliable information about context and provenance. Amidst his institutional critique of the limitations of the Met and other encyclopaedic museums, Hazewinkel seems to advocate for a kind of knowledge and appreciation of ancient objects that is properly situated, grounded in the unique sensorial characteristics of the places that they were found. How might these objects resonate differently if they had been kept closer to home? What would change if they were held in the small local archaeological museums that are dotted all across the Mediterranean, rather than on the other side of the Atlantic?

Debates about the return of antiquities—not to mention the treasures of indigenous peoples—to their places of origin are often couched in legal and ethical arguments: were they obtained through legitimate and lawful means? is there a moral duty to return objects to cultural or ethnic groups that maintain a historical geographical connection to them? do these legal and ethical factors supersede the value that comes from them being publicly accessible in the museum that owns them? The claims made on archaeological materials in particular can often have nationalistic implications—the Elgin marbles “belong” to the Greek people as an inalienable part of their present-day identity, despite the huge discontinuities between the ancient Athens where they were made and the modern Greek nation state that now lays claim to them. Such approaches can sometimes feed into ethnocentricism, reinforcing divisions and giving support to the notion that culture and history can and should be laid claim to by national communities rather than made broadly available to all.

Yet on the other side of the coin is a genuinely liberational potential that heritage and tradition are able to unlock, especially for subordinated communities, in the face of the homogenising effects of imperialism and globalization.² It is through the renewal of the past, as Bhabha suggests, that cultural production can truly innovate, interrupting “the performance of the present,”³ and making possible new ways of being in the world that can work against existing power structures. Ultimately, there are no easy answers to questions like these: the troubling imperial legacies of encyclopaedic museums must be balanced against the cosmopolitan and inclusive ideals they embody; the claims of ownership that contemporary peoples and nations make over museum collections must be considered with some awareness of their tendency towards more limited understandings of who culture belongs to. Neither the universalising tendency of the encyclopaedic museum nor the exclusionism of the nationalist or ethnocentric paradigm is without its flaws.⁴ Who do antiquities belong to? Who ought they belong to? Is “ownership” even the right way to think about it?

In any case, as urgent as these issues may be, the ethics and legalities of museum collection practices are not a central focus of Journeys in the Lifeworld of Stones (displacements I–X). These problems are there in the background, but ultimately Hazewinkel directs us to pay attention to something that often gets passed over entirely in these debates. As such, his work constitutes a valuable contribution in its own right to urgent and ongoing discussions about museums and their roles in the twenty-first century. Whatever the legalities, whatever the ethics attending to the Met’s antiquities collections, Journeys in the Lifeworld of Stones (displacements I–X) reminds us that there is—inevitably and unavoidably—a loss associated with these objects’ display in a North American museum. Sunlight, breezes, rain, snowfall, dust, sea spray, birdsong, cicadas: these were a part of the lifeworld of these stone sculptures for so many centuries. But once they were unearthed and shipped off on their roundabout journeys to New York, this aspect of their materiality was lost forever. What is more, any meanings they might have come to hold within the cultural context of their original locale were stripped away.

^{1. My use of the term aesthetic here does not refer to conceptions of beauty or taste, rather it invokes its Classical Greek etymological origins ‘aisthetikos’: perceptible by the senses.’
2. Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), James Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), and within the specific context of contemporary art, Joselit, Heritage and Debt.
3. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 10.
4. Joselit’s very recent analysis of the landscape of global contemporary art in Heritage and Debt brings into relief the recurrent tension between cosmopolitan and nationalist impulses in contemporary artistic production that is grounded in heritage.}