The Glyptotek Museum (II)
Today, I went back to the Glyptotek museum with my philosophy class, as a field study during our Core Course week. This is a week at DIS dedicated to diving deeper into the subject of your given Core Class, which in my case is Religious Mythos and Philosophical Logos. We have spent the first few days of the week focusing on theory of art and the relation between truth and art, and were now going to put these theories to the test. We were here to look at the Glyptotek's extensive collection of ancient greek sculptures, and to interpret them from Hegelian and Heideggerian lenses.
The first test was the collection of Egyptian artifacts. In these, we looked for Hegel's story of the transformation from "nature" to "spirit", and found it easily enough. Without going into too much depth, Hegel theorizes that we historically have progressed from being subjected to the forces of nature to conquering them through our intellectual spirit, and finds proof of this progress in art. These Egyptian artifacts moved from full representations of animals as deities, to half-animal and half-human, to fully human gods, which illustrates this progress from "nature" to "spirit".
Here is my classmate Maria comparing the colors of her sweater to those of two Egyptian rings. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We moved to the ancient greek wing and compared Hegel and Heideggerian theories against a a statue of Apollo. Professor Brian noted is the god of truth and revelation, which makes him especially central to our questions of truth. My classmates and I debated the ways in which it was an expression of the evolution of spirit in Hegelian terms. While this representation is now wholly human, it remains stiff and idealized, an abstracted form instead of a realistic one. In Heidergerrian terms, we can say that this statue has an 'after-life': it is no longer revealing the truth of its cultural moment, yet it continues to hold power over its viewer because of the impressive technical skill used in its production. We can sense that it once did 'work' and understand why it was venerated as divine. The gods may be gone, but their presence lingers.
My classmates and our professor Brian contemplating whether this statue of Apollo still 'works'.
Lastly, we looked at a few statues from the 19th century. We discussed Les Bourgeois de Calais by Rodin and Le Paradis Perdu by Jean Gautherin.
My classmates observing Les Bourgeois de Calais by Rodin.
When looking at Le Paradis Perdu, we all saw something slightly different. As an atheist with little knowledge of all things religion, I only saw a man and a woman, and so for me the sculpture was about male-female dynamics. For my classmates with religious upbringings, they saw biblical characters brought to life and humanized and a universalized depiction of the fall from eden. We each brought our individual world to the sculpture- and in projecting them onto a same object, were able to see the differences between them.
If anyone overheard that discussion about Le Paradis Perdu, they would have been left quite confused. We debated whether the sculpture was 'dead' or 'alive', if it 'worked' or didn't, what its 'after-life' was, if it belonged to this 'world' or not. To an outsider, all that means nothing. Or rather, all those words mean something very different from the way we were using them, and as a whole we must have made no sense. But that's philosophy for you.
Clearly my mode of seeing was affected, as I chose to only photograph the woman and not the man.
After class was over, I again lingered in the Glyptotek a while longer. I think I'm going to make it a habit to spend Tuesday afternoons in the museum. I strolled again through the ancient greek wing and admired the detailed modeling of the natural marble into spiritual body. I found busts of Odysseus, his ever faithful wife Penelope, and Homer, the bard himself, and reflected on how that ancient myth still impacts its new readers today, myself included. I then sat in the philosopher's room to prepare for my philosophy exam the next day, with the busts of Socrates and Plato watching over me, their after-life permeating the room, affecting how I see.
