by Kelly Presutti | 2 March 2011 | Journals
In the latest Art Bulletin, Fabio Barry traces the iconography of the famed Bocca della Verità – Rome’s Mouth of Truth. With visitors ranging from Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday to Freud, there is an enduring fascination with what Barry terms the “massive relic of antiquity… a terrible demon who cautioned against perjury on pain of amputation” – liars, upon putting their arm into the mouth of the Bocca, would have it bitten off. This leap between verbal and physical action, from idea to material, echoes the very nature of the Bocca. Barry convincingly argues that the Bocca represents Oceanus, a deity variously understood as “a moat, an endless ‘backflowing’ stream with no point of source except itself”, the “genesis of all the Gods” and “genesis of all” (Homer), and “the source and end of the gloomy world” (Hesiod). He determines the Bocca originally functioned as a drain, and would have been located in the Forum Boarium. It was possibly constructed by Hadrian, based on the association of Oceanus with Hercules, who faced Ocean in his tenth and eleventh labors. To fortify the identification of the Bocca as Oceanus, Barry eloquently examines the materiality of the Phrygian marble – a substance that in antiquity would have been associated with water. Marbles had watery origins; and poets exploited the closeness of “marmor” (marble) to “mar” (sea). Phrygian marble in particular, a cold white with violet streaks, resembled ice floes. Thus,
We can appreciate [the Bocca] not so much as a head carved on a slab as a face that wells up in a pool. Indeed, the sculptors responsible – just like the cameo cutters who prospected the veins in agates in search of latent images – chose the Bocca block so that the deity’s head would be contained within its “birthmark.” In so doing, they captured a paradox. Were this marble disk a frozen pool, the face would seal its thinnest part, where the surface showed darkest. And this darkness is where the stone becomes virtually transparent, so that when Oceanus reared his head in public he seemed not so much the tip of the iceberg as the face of the deep.
The slippage in antiquity between idea and material was brought up in a recent talk by Rachel Kousser at the Getty Villa. In her lecture, “Bound, Mutilated, Confined, Concealed: ‘Voodoo Dolls’ in Classical and Hellenistic Greece”, Kousser discussed fourteen known examples of small statues employed in ancient Greece in a manner similar to Haitian Voodoo (implying, of course, that many more examples linger, unpublished, in storage). The statues were rudimentary and their forms varied – some verged on representational, while others were nearly indistinct masses of lead or wax. Common to them all were bound arms, and often the figures’ heads and feet were reversed. Part of the understudied practice of magic in antiquity, they served primarily in issues of love and law – a patron commissioning a statue might stab its tongue in order to cause an adversary to flub his legal speech. Kousser presses the distinction between a literal reading of the statues, which could assume the user wanted his adversary to show up with a needle through his tongue, with the metaphorical way in which they were actually used. She then suggests, provocatively and insightfully, that the way the Greek viewer related to these figures should be invoked in our consideration of the relationship to so-called “high art” statuary. The metaphorical possibility of the voodoo dolls, and the ease with which the user would move from the physical to the verbal, urges us to reconsider depictions of offerings to statues and other ritual gestures.
The metaphoric potential of artifacts has been similarly underestimated, Richard Sharf argues in another Art Bulletin article, in relics of Buddha’s finger bones found in a crypt beneath the Ming dynasty pagoda at Famensi. While the ritual role and context of the reliquaries has been examined, the materiality of the relics themselves has been disregarded – a particularly striking omission when one notes, as Sharf does, the blatant falsity of the bones. The hollow tubes obviously do not resemble finger bones, and certainly not those of the Buddha. Rather than seeing this as a gesture of bad faith or naïveté, Sharf complicates the understanding of the Buddha’s “true body” – the “dharma” or transcendent body. One might argue, as Eugene Wang does, that the true body is no body at all. But Sharf suggests
The multivalent expression ‘true body’ deftly captures the dialectical or ‘self-emptying’ logic exhibited in the very design of the finger-bone relic. The term ‘true body’, like the relic itself, must be understood as sublimely ironic. In short, the Famensi finger-bone relics might be approached as sophisticated works of art. And this means coming to appreciate the creative, aesthetic, and playful dimensions of the crypt and its treasures.
Classifying the relationship between viewer and object as one of art “opens up new interpretative and analytic avenues.” This move also has significant consequences for “global art history,” a subject much-discussed at this year’s CAA. Throughout the conference, there were several calls to eliminate fraught terminology, including “art.” Sharf acknowledges the postcolonial implications of wresting ancient artifacts from their lived context and inscribing them within a “modern, ideologically laden” category. Yet,
Perhaps we have swung too far in the other direction, leaving us with relentlessly functional readings that are denatured and reductive…. In abandoning the rubric and logic of “art,” we become blind to the more playful dimensions of Buddhist material culture. To dismiss the category “art” as parochial, romantic, Orientalist or intellectually bankrupt may lead us into another rut that is equally parochial, romantic, Orientalist, or intellectually bankrupt.
