by Jon Lackman | 2 March 2007 | Ancient, Books, Contemporary
The December 2006 issue of Antiquity includes a review by Leo S. Klejn of Colin Renfrew’s Figuring It Out, followed by a reply from Renfrew.
Klejn: “[Renfrew's book] is a remarkable phenomenon both in art criticism and archaeology. He poses the eternal questions (what are we? where do we come from?) and hopes to figure them out with the help of the parallel vision of archaeologists and artists. By artists, Renfrew … has in mind, rather exclusively, the artistic avant-garde, modern sculptors and painters practising abstractionism, cubism, symbolism, conceptualism and primitivism: those who make pop-art installations, indeed those who make any activity into art. It is this kind of work that he compares with the most ancient monuments of mankind … That the book is postmodernist is apparent. Renfrew states that our understanding of the past is very limited, we don’t know why statues and figurines were produced and probably never will and he complains that we suppress immediate impressions and senses in our reports, preserving only the dull and dry facts and reasonings … The point is, however … whether the experience [of Renfrew] is reproducible — whether any other archaeologist after looking at contemporary art long enough … can repeat the inferences made by Renfrew … Renfrew’s book can certainly be distinguised from the writings of such radical zealots of post-processualism such as Shanks, Tilley and Thomas … However, since there is no … proving and processing in the book … it is very difficult to appreciate these thin distinctions between Renfrew and the post-processualists … [T]he British leader of the New Archaeology … has appeared again as a great leader, a commander-in-chief, although of an entirely different army.”
Renfrew: “Only in the last section [of Klejn's review], where he identifies the book as ‘postmodernist’ would I wish to disagree … My own view of postmodernism is probably as critical as that of Professor Klejn, and certainly I have no desire to lead its ‘armies’ — and distinctly ragged battalions I would imagine them to be. But why the military metaphor? It seems to me that Klejn is re-living some of the battles of the 1980s and 1990s, when the self-styled ‘post-processual’ archaeologists (including Shanks and Tilley) delivered their robust critique of processual archaeology … Ultimately I think Klejn misunderstands the nature of science. My book deliberately sets out to use inspiration from the work of artists … in the field of science (meaning here systematic knowledge) … it is not the source of the inspiration but the use to which it is put that is crucial … [it was a] dream of whirling snakes experienced by the chemist Friedrich August von Kelkule which led him to formulate the cyclical structure of benzene … So my advice to Klejn is to chill out a little, go and see some more visual art, feel it, and experience it (as well as thinking about it), and return refreshed to the scientific workdesk of the contemporary archaeologist. Perhaps he will then escape those militarist nightmares, which were surely more suited to the Cold War of archaeological theory, a conflict from which we have perhaps now mercifully escaped.”
