Émile Gilliéron, fils, Blue Monkey and Papyrus. Watercolor on paper. H. 45 cm; W. 66 cm. After a fresco from the House of the Frescoes, Knossos. Sir Arthur Evans Archive, Evans Fresco Drawing A/8, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

NEW YORK, NY.- The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World continues its efforts to illuminate ancient cultures and their interpretation through the lens of contemporary art with Restoring the Minoans: Elizabeth Price and Sir Arthur Evans. The exhibition presents A Restoration, an immersive video by artist Elizabeth Price in which images drawn largely from Evans’s excavation, on Crete, of the Bronze Age culture of the Minoans are transformed into a work of art for the digital age. The video, made in response to a commission by the London-based Contemporary Art Society to create an artwork based on the collection of the University’s Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, has been contextualized and complemented by some 60 objects. These comprise select original artifacts unearthed during Evans’s excavation and later restored by Evans and his team, as well as related watercolors, drawings, photographs, and archival materials. Many of these objects have never been publicly exhibited prior to this exhibition. 

In A Restoration, Price explores critical questions about how archaeologists, artists, curators, and others make long-silent civilizations speak to contemporary audiences, how reliable those interpretations are, and how contemporary conditions influence the way we understand the ancient past. These are all questions that go to the heart of ISAW’s work and mission. 

Terracotta jar with three handles, Late Minoan I, ca. 1600–1500 B.C. Terracotta, 13 9/16 × 10 3/4 in. (34.4 × 27.3 cm) Diam. of foot: 4 3/4 in. (12.1 cm) Diam. of rim: 5 13/16 in. (14.8 cm), Rogers Fund, 1922, 22.139.76 © 2000–2017 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

ISAW Exhibitions Director Jennifer Chi states, “Once discovered, archaeological artifacts have an active life, as they are unearthed, recorded, reconstructed, and today—as illuminated in Elizabeth Price’s brilliant and compelling A Restoration—digitized. It is, in fact, a journey that takes the material evidence of ancient cultures from excavation to dematerialization. It is an important transformation, and one that reflects contemporary culture, much as various ways of presenting these objects in the past reflected cultures before ours. ISAW is thrilled to be presenting an exhibition that explores so many fascinating issues. We are grateful to Elizabeth Price for her invaluable input and assistance in shaping both the exhibition as a whole and the presentation of her brilliant work, and to Alexander Sturgis, director of the Ashmolean Museum, for introducing me to Elizabeth’s work and loaning us the material that helps illuminate Evans and his methodology.” 

The exhibition has been curated by Jennifer Chi, Exhibitions Director and Chief Curator, ISAW, Rachel Herschman, Curatorial Assistant, ISAW, and Kenneth Lapatin, Associate Curator of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum. 

Ornamental frieze.

A RESTORATION 
Price’s brilliantly imaginative 18-minute video, shown in a gallery of its own, is at once serious and humorous, conceptual and visual, and powerfully engaging as it raises questions about our views of the past, including how we arrive at them, what they tell us about our own era, and how—and if—we can distinguish the known from the unknown. The video is narrated by a digital chorus of unseen female “museum administrators” who describe the process through which they organize and re-imagine ancient objects, including but not limited to those from Evans’s work at Knossos. Their very first words summon the complex layering of meanings and questions in the work: “We are cultivating a garden,” they say, at once eliciting Evans’s idyllic view of Knossos and using it as a point of departure for what they themselves will be creating within the confines of their museum’s computer server. 

As the administrators examine Evans’s work, they describe how he frequently re-imagined, rather than restored, archaeological artifacts. They note that “it is unusual…for restoration to be quite so indiscreet,” but add that “we have resolved to extort its ribald energy for our own ends, and cultivate a further germination.” This they do. With percussive, driving, music; images that may tumble across the screen, or morph into new forms with a stroke of gouache, or be layered one on top of another; and with their ever-present narrative voice, Price’s administrators use Evans’s practice as a point of departure to build, bit by bit, a contemporary digital paradise that contains within it a reconstruction of the Knossos labyrinth. 

In doing this, A Restoration also looks at how Evans organized knowledge, categorizing by form, and the way that knowledge is organized today, into digital folders living on museum servers. They acknowledge that the act of organizing these folders is repetitive and so they tell us how, like Evans, they take liberties, copying files into different locations, “roll[ing] their thumbs” and “extend[ing their] “middle fingers a little further than is necessary.” 

Throughout A Restoration, the images, music, and voices inhere to one another, creating a multi-layered, resonant whole with tremendous narrative drive, simultaneously questioning what we know, or think we know, and how we know it. It is a story without an ending.

Unidentified Artist, Saffron Gatherer Restoration. Watercolor on paper, H. 27 cm; W. 47.5 cm. After a fresco from Area of Early Keep, Knossos, ca. 1921, The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, Bequeathed by Sir Arthur Evans: Evans Fresco Drawing L/3.