Why Should We Care? by Erin Irvin

Wiki Page about National Museum of Iraq and Background on its Looting

"Why Should We Care?" John Malcolm Russell's 2003 Article from Art Journal

Okay, this really affected me when I heard about it, which, sadly, was only very recently. Let’s talk about that second link, which is what introduced me to this issue. You can click through to access it from your local library, or purchase it for a paltry sum. John Malcolm Russell's "Why Should We Care", which, as you can see above, is a 2003 article in Art Journal that starts out as a this lament for the loss of ancient artifacts from the Iraq Museum, but soon becomes a lament for the loss of cultural definition thereby entailed. And he makes an interesting point—it's not about the stolen cult vase; it's about what the stolen cult vase represents.

Archeology has always fascinated me; I think if I wasn’t prone to words and music, I’d have been some sort of excavator. Discovery is the student of Creation. That’s what interests me about this kind of work. I mean, think about it. Within their environmental context, objects embody time. They are direct connections to the past, present, and even the future. Artists took time to hone their skills in order to tell a story and, moreover, structuralize the world through their creations.

But, that world is instantly fragmented when these objects are dispersed. Without them, these links in time are gone, or at least dulled beyond recognition.

And who are any of us if we can’t define ourselves by what's come before?

Russell argues that we aren't much and I have to say I agree. If we don't honor the past, we risk being what we're told we are, we allow ourselves to be filled with the ideals of consumerism and narrow nationalism, but, most importantly, we lose all sense of culture. That's the significance of these objects—the archaeological context surrounding them. The ultimate goal is to learn about our ancestors. And we can learn a lot from an artifact, as long as its environmental context is intact.

Russell's strongest evidence of this is his class experiment. When he’s professoring and not journalisting, he takes his class to a museum and splits the group in two. One half is sent to a gallery of excavated artifacts, the other to a gallery of market pieces, but none of them are told the difference. The students are told to study their respective galleries and then present what they learned about the past from the objects within. The perpetually identical results of the exercise don't lie: those who study the market gallery learn nothing beyond the visual, while those who study the excavated gallery talk about what they learned from the people who used those objects. We can always learn more about where we came from and the peoples of the past from the excavated gallery (where the entire display is made up of artifacts taken from the same excavation site, thus giving viewers a glimpse into the world those objects came from) as opposed to the market gallery (where lone, random artifacts are placed together in displays, thus giving viewers only traces of a glimpse into history). Objects, he points out, can’t speak for themselves—and, as keys to the past, they can’t function on their own; they need their surroundings.

He raises some interesting questions. How do we get people to care? You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Let’s suppose this article was spread heavily around the world. People may learn why they should care, but does that mean they will? What next? If there are people out there pillaging and plundering even now, what about ‘should’ is going to change their behavior? So, the question becomes what steps are we, the ones who do care, going to take to put an end to all this looting? Is the author a fatalist, spouting a woebegone rant that begins to sound very desperate, as if it’s too late? Or is it really, as the title would have us believe, a tool to incite any and all readers to action? If so, what do we do now?

This guy’s genuine fervor isn’t without merit, but it feels like it’s only the beginning. The good news is there seem to be a large number of people who do care about the past, or there wouldn’t be discussions on NPR, nor college degrees and professional work in this field. Perhaps it’s simply time for these troupes of caring students-of-the-world to rally, and secure the past for the future.

Thoughts?

xxErin