Yesterday I went to the Royal Ontario Museum’s Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit which the ROM has mounted with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority and which will continue until January 3rd, 2010. As an educational experience, it’s first-rate, top-drawer stuff, the perfect follow-up to last year’s Darwin exhibit. But then again, being the perverse person that I am, I don’t think I got out of the exhibit quite what the exhibitors intended. Let me explain by recounting my visit as a bit of a narrative that begins with me reading a book on a bench outside the ROM and ends a few hours later with me reading the same book on the subway ride home.
The book in question is an out-of-print collection of essays by Brian Fawcett which I picked up from a used book store a little further west from the ROM along Bloor Street. The book is Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times and Other Impolite Interventions and I was reading a piece titled: “East Van Über Alles?” which purports to be a review of a poetry anthology from East Vancouver. It’s a continuation of Fawcett’s long-standing rant against contemporary poets as either effete or downright flatulent purveyors of cultural irrelevance. Poets, he says, have abdicated their social responsibility to reveal the lies which power tells to the world. To put it in quasi-religious terms (since I was about to see an exhibit on ancient scriptural materials): poets have surrendered their prophetic voice.
However, I wasn’t able to finish the article because my wife arrived and so we went inside, surrendered our tickets, and went downstairs to the exhibit hall. Things are tightly controlled there. People enter the exhibit at measured intervals and, like rats in a maze, they follow a twisting path that leads inevitably to the gift shop where they can purchase a full-colour soft-cover keepsake for $70. At each turn of the maze, there’s a bottleneck where people crane their necks and stand on tip-toe to read the neatly printed blurbs on the wall. Along the way are cases displaying oil lamps and ossuaries.
In historical terms, we patrons are poured into a funnel. First, we encounter a generalized summary of geopolitical realities on the east coast of the Mediterranean in the period pre-dating the most celebrated of all characters in our poetic output—Jesus of Nazareth. We learn about various archeological sites and the scarcity of written materials to establish the presence of Jews in these locations. Part of the reason is the climate—it’s too harsh for the survival of scrolls or parchments. Part of the reason, too, is the constant political upheaval which gripped the region (and persists today). The Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom (Israel) in 722 B.C.E. and scattered the ten tribes throughout its kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar led the Babylonians against the Southern Kingdom (Judah) in 597 B.C.E. and again in 586 B.C.E. When the Persian empire conquered Babylon in 539 B.C.E., Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return from the Diaspora. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered the region and introduced a Hellenizing influence which persisted as a cultural phenomenon long after the Greeks had relinquished political control. Then came the Seleucids (a successor of Alexander’s empire) which prompted the Maccabean revolt and Jewish independence from 164-63 B.C.E. This takes us to the Roman empire which controlled the region for 400 years including the period when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.
Moving further through the rat maze, we squeak our way past Jerusalem, where we know unequivocally that Jews were a significant presence. The exhibit reminds us that the Temple was destroyed twice, first in 586 B.C.E. when Nebuchadnezzar marched on Jerusalem, and again in 70 C.E. when the Romans got sick and tired of Jewish revolts and messianic caterwauling and thoroughly crushed the whole region. Of particular interest is an inscription which Herod placed outside the temple to satisfy his concern for purity. It was in Latin and Greek (and not in Hebrew) because it was directed at non-Jews, who were prohibited from entering the temple on pain of death. Imagine that! People in Israel wanting to kill foreigners. But that was 2000 years ago. Surely we’ve progressed some since then.
The maze takes us even closer to our destination, this time heading southeast from Jerusalem to a tiny community overlooking the Dead Sea—Qumran—now part of the occupied West Bank of Palestine. Here, the archeological questions pile up. Is this where the scrolls were written. Who lived here? Was it an exclusive sect of Essenes as one of the earliest investigators, Fr Roland de Vaux, theorized? Were these the people who stashed the scrolls in oversized clay jars and hid them in the caves surrounding Qumran? Why did they do this? Were they trying to protect these documents from advancing Roman armies?
Next, we encounter media presentations of experts who tell about the amazing discovery. In 1947, a Bedouin boy named Mohamed el-Dib threw a rock into a cave and heard the shatter of a clay jar. There’s a curious moment in one of the videos when the narrator says that de Vaux and his team worked in adverse conditions because of the “Bedouin problem.” Oops. Did I hear that correctly? The Bedouin problem?
A little further into the maze, things start to get dark. The scrolls are just ahead. To protect them, it’s necessary to keep lights low. As we approach, several panels describe the ensuing struggle to gain possession of the scrolls. At one point, some of the scrolls almost ended up as part of the permanent collection at McGill University in Montreal, but the Jordanian government cancelled the deal at the last minute, and so the scrolls continued to sit on the Jordanian side of Jerusalem—until 1967, that is—but wait! There’s no mention of this in the exhibit. As Robert Fisk has pointed out, the ROM quietly omits an important part of the story. As the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs web site illustrates, a few days after the Six-Day War, the Israeli Parliament changed the boundaries of Jerusalem. Despite the silence, we can infer that this is when the scrolls found a new owner.
Finally, we get to see the scrolls, a sampling of ancient scraps kept under glass in temperature- and humidity-controlled containers. The room is dark. It is—I have to confess—the least interesting part of the maze. I don’t read Hebrew, so I can’t pore over the scratchings, and even if I could, I doubt I’d be able to make any sense of it. We move to the other side of a wide screen, into a well-lit area where we are invited to ponder the fruits of these scrolls. Here, the ROM has assembled medieval samples of the Torah, Latin and Koine Bibles, and a couple Qur’ans for good measure. Then, of course, the obligatory passage through the gift shop.
But that’s not the end of it. We meander to the museum’s third floor where, just off from the Egyptian exhibit, there’s an installation by Joshua Neustein titled Margins: Contemporary art unraveling the Dead Sea Scrolls presented by the Institute for Contemporary Culture (a ROM thing) and the Koffler Centre of the Arts. There’s a chandelier partially embedded in a wall—like an archeological artifact embedded in the dirt? On another wall is charcoal back-and-forth and framed. There are plexiglass panels scattered across the floor. One plexiglass panel leans against the wall and writing inscribed on the panel continues onto the floor—an obvious (and by 2009, hackneyed) blurring of the limits of text. Then, of course, there’s the description of the work on another panel. Is it part of the installation? Or is it an “official” description? Given that the description also appears on the ROM website, I’m going to assume that the description was not intended to be part of the installation. The description on display differs slightly from the web site. It reads:
Positioning the themes of the Scrolls within a contemporary discussion about cultural traditions, Margins references prominent Jewish poet Edmond Jabès (Cairo, 1912 – Paris, 1991) and his critical works concerned with the nature of writing, silence, God, and the Book. Neustein recognizes in Jabès’s relationship to writing a parallel to his own artistic process. Living and creating between countries and languages, both artists express themselves from a position of displacement. Instead of a sense of belonging to a land, they both trace their roots to a deeper connection to the word and to a tradition of reading and questioning the Book. In the installation, Jabès’s mysterious meditations and the revealed knowledge of the historical texts converge with Neustein’s own visual vocabulary to convey the passion and impossibility of writing.
Okay, I get the identification with the Diaspora experience. This was amply attested in the basement rat maze we had just visited. The Assyrians scattered the ten northern tribes. Nebuchadnezzar forced the Jews into exile. And before either of these, there was the story of Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt in search of the Promised Land. Historically, mythically, spiritually, culturally, psychically, possession of land has never been part of the Jewish narrative. The remarkable cohesiveness of the Jewish identity comes from its embeddedness in the Book. I get all that—as much as your average WASP is ever likely to get it. What I don’t get is how any of this conveys “the passion and impossibility of writing.” What the hell does this mean? I’m going to give you a hint: I don’t think it means a damn thing. It’s just one more example of that effete and flatulant stuff that Fawcett has been complaining about. But more about that in a minute.
By this time, we were getting hungry, so we decided to skip across the road for a bite to eat. Stepping onto Bloor Street, we saw Palestinian flags waving from the opposite sidewalk and protesters were carrying signs with statements like: “Stollen Scrolls” and “Spoils of War.”
We continued to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Yorkville, nothing fancy (I was in my usual shorts and running shoes). Further along Cumberland Avenue, we decided to pop into a Starbucks for a coffee. A man stepped in behind us with a handful of change. He was loud and jumpy. His clothes were dirty and he hadn’t shaved in a couple days. He plunked his change on the counter and asked for a ten dollar bill in exchange. The cashier couldn’t open the till unless someone else in line was paying cash, but we all held prepaid cards so the man stomped out frustrated. The encounter reminded me of Neustein’s “position of displacement.” I wonder if a Jew living in Israel post-1948, as Neustein did, is any better placed to speak about the “position of displacement” than anyone else in the world. Than, say, a homeless man who stumbles into Starbucks on an upscale street in Toronto. Does a meditation upon a state of affairs that ended more than sixty years ago qualify as “contemporary culture?” I mean, is Neustein fucking serious? Or is he just trapped in time, like a fossil? Maybe the ROM has accidentally mounted his installation in the wrong wing of the museum.
But back to Brian Fawcett. I opened his book on the subway and continued to read the review I had started while sitting on a bench outside the ROM. He was offering some hard words to those poets who identified with an arcane theoretical niche called “language centred writing” (LCW). To explain LCW, Fawcett quotes some of its proponents, including Bruce Andrews, who says that LCW “resembles a creation of a community and of a world-view by once-divided-but-now-fused Reader and Writer.” As Fawcett points out, these are weasel words. How can a movement be anything if all it ever claims to do is resemble something else. Or as he parodically asks: “Well, isn’t this just a super-complicated attempt to make poetry a public act without demanding that it also be socially interactive communication?” One might ask the same question of Neustein. As his installation sits tucked away in a dry institution, the only socially interactive communication worth mentioning is marching back and forth on the sidewalk three floors below. But Fawcett isn’t done:
The trouble is that LCW begins and ends, it seems to me, with a betrayal of the artist’s fundamental responsibility to communicate and to resist the alienation of meaning. It is a betrayal similar to that of the surrealists after the Great War. For the surrealists, the capitulation of responsibility was brought about by the technology-induced trauma of trench warfare, and the recognition that millions of human beings could be and were sacrificed to the hormonal and hegemonal dictates of a few senile generals, and to the greed of a corrupt political and banking system. LCW, in its turn, seems to be a capitulation brought about by the collapse of history and ideology in the face of Disney and the Global Village—a withdrawal into sentimental and free-floating labyrinths of the self from the recognition that our civilization and most of its subsystems are on a terminal trajectory.
If we substitute “Neustein” for LCW and “internet” for Global Village, then we’ve pretty much nailed what’s wrong with the Margins installation and the ROM’s bogus appendage erroneously named the Institute for Contemporary Culture. In light of events in December 08/January 09, one wonders if the “dictates of a few senile generals” have been systematically forcing artists into increasingly banal boxes. From his installation’s title, we know that Neustein is a liar. His is not an art of the margins. It isn’t art at all because it does nothing more than give voice to the power it serves, funded by sponsors with obvious interests, doing its part to legitimize a state of affairs that inflicts untold misery on millions of people.