From Afar

By Linda Brogan

‘For its 6th season, the Petite Galerie offers a journey through time and around the world with the exhibition ‘From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects’

This exhibition describes exchanges between distant worlds – exchanges often far more ancient than the explorations of the 16th century. From deepest antiquity, carnelian, lapis lazuli, ebony and ivory circulated along trade routes: these materials were even more precious because they came from afar.

Their fascination was enriched by the myths surrounding their origin. Not only stones, shells and plants travelled between continents; so did live animals, often for political ends. The populace as well as artists discovered ostriches, giraffes and elephants. Man made objects followed the same routes and, beyond Europeans’ well-known yen for the exotic, this exhibition shows that these multiple round trips wove a more complex history: forms, techniques and themes intertwined to create new objects, reflecting all the complexity of our world as it could be perceived in Europe from the late Middle Ages on.’

I was expecting a huge space. It was small. I was disappointed – to begin with. Just like I was disappointed with the Bastille. Gone. Not a shred. Not even a feeling of people running on the street, murdering the rich. I love this time in French history. I loved them, dishevelled, the rich, on the back of the poor’s wagons, being driven to the guillotine, their wigs a total mess. I had to give it a nod. I had to stop off. I had to see the place. I realise I can’t trust the place now because Paris has been felled and resurrected in straight lines. I’m not an expert. (I’m not an expert on anything.) I just know what I see, what I feel, what appeals to me, what makes me flip over, in my mind, the accepted narrative and start to dig around in it with questions. And that always entails my actual journey. 

You have to give it to the French. They killed their rich – there’s an ashtray in my bedroom – and here on the first plaque in the exhibition I read ‘Cornelian Platter. 1730. Tortoise shell. Gold. Mother-of-pearl. Attributed to Giuseppe Sarao. Naples… Technical brilliance at the service of frivolity’. Still makes me smile. It is indeed frivolity. Ugly. The wording sets the tone for my visit. The French, unlike the English museums I’m used to visiting, have no reverence for greed, as demonstrated by the cutting off of the greedy bastards’ heads who would have adorned their tasteless tables with this tasteless plate. 

‘The goldsmiths enjoyed the whimsy of the irregular pearls.’ Egypt. Constantinople. Italy. Germany. Netherlands. Goa. Southern China. Spain. Cordoba. Mass produced Jesuses made from ivory. Brazil. Germany. One even takes up the whole tusk. ‘Trivial objects concealing a rich spiritual content.’ ‘Amazing craftsmen.’ This French institution appreciates the work, the worker, rather than the owner. I like that. It kind of goes with their egalitarian café Paul, a chain where you can buy a reasonable sandwich and good coffee. 

Then I hit the maps. Beautiful. Simple. Invasions. Time lapsed. Conqueror.  Date.  Journeys in red lines traverse a simplified globe on the wall-mounted screen. I sit transfixed. The visuals helping me for the first time understand how we became a global community.  

1. Rome. 7th century BC — 476 AD.
2. Silk Road. 2nd century BC.
3. Arabs 7th century AD conquer much of the Roman Empire.
4. Columbus. 1492. 
5. Vasco de Gama. 1495.
6. Manila. 1565 colonised by the British.
7. Atlantic. 1600. Slave trade.
8. James Cook. 1728 — 1779. Australia.
9. La Perouse. 1774. Pacific islands. 

There is something about the French lack of apology, frankness, simplicity of line that makes me accept that islands becoming larders for those with better technology was inevitable. 

 

I resume the tour. ‘Sri Lanka. 1530. Water jug. Rock Crystal. Gold. Ruby.’ They have respect for the maker again, the work of the individual. ‘Sierra Leone. Ivory. Craftsmen commissioned by Portugal. 1510.’ I love the idea that they have been paid for their work. Japan. Persia. Oh look, the Antilles in the Caribbean, a calabash, silver-mounted in Germany in the 17th century. Again, I see the hands of the maker and the reverence given to their art. And then it happens.

 

‘Two silver sugar bowls in the shape of slaves. Paris. 1730 – 1740. Before the sugar industry developed in America, sugar produced in Asia was imported to the West at staggering prices, like other Eastern luxury products, it arrived in Venice, Genoa, Italy and Spain. It was thus a priority to plant sugar cane in America from the time of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage … Thus, men and women were imported like merchandise from West Africa in what is known as the transatlantic slave trade. This did not discourage sugar lovers, as demonstrated by these sugar bowls showing slaves harvesting cane in the Antilles.’

 

Cig time.  

 

It takes me an age to reach the exit. Through the alleyway of Louvre shops full of overpriced frivolity and whimsy.  Shop after shop after shop after shop you can’t avoid. On the way back in, I notice for the first time the restaurant for the elite. Hidden behind a huge hoarding across the entrance’s stone terrace, 20 Euros a starter on the menu, both signs say to people like me, the proletariat, ‘Stay the fuck out.’ 

 

I’m tempted. Just cos I shouldn’t. But I’ve seen a lovely authentic restaurant on the other side of the Pont Neuf in Saint-Germain’s thin streets from which we would have stormed these buildings. Probably jeered Marie Antoinette who was imprisoned in Place de la Concorde, round the corner from the Louvre. ‘This did not discourage sugar lovers.’ I’m back. I’m not sure if this is French fairness, pointing at the wrongdoing, or French apathy. 

 

Then it is all over. ‘Pedlar. 1702 – 1703. Elephant ivory, diamonds, gold, silver, gilt. Some great fairs of the early 18th century specialised in luxury items, such as this ivory figurine mounted in gold and diamonds. It was purchased by Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici wife of the Elector Palatine, possibly in Frankfurt. The statuette entered the imperial collections in Vienna then went with Marie Antoinette to Paris. In his trunk the pedlar carries exotic merchandise, the booty of the naval battle of Vigo in 1702. The English and the Dutch captured a convoy from America at the mouth of the Galician Port. The cargo surely included American products, tobacco, silver, sugar, but also Asian merchandise that came to America from the Philippines on the Manila Galleon.’  

 

And there we have it, all the major perpetrators in one place. Captured in one item. Does no one get the irony? The laborious life of a pedlar probably not far from a beggar immortalised for your frivolous whim in majestic materials he probably never owned in his lifetime. I stare at him for a long time from every angle. And think about the minds that look through non-seeing eyes at this trinket every day. Probably never see it. Why would they even want it? 

 

 

We’re back to Jesus Christ again. More Irony. 

 

 

‘Mexico, 1530 – 1570. Feathers, gold leaf, painted highlights, wood, leather. This triptych was made from feathers in the workshops established by the Franciscan orders in Mexico in the 16th century. Its shape and composition immediately recall its model, a painted Flemish triptych. The first Franciscans to arrive in Mexico were struck by the Aztecs’ extraordinary technical and artistic skill in feather work. They made clothing and shields of multi-coloured feathers, sometimes collected as far abroad as Central America. This art was profoundly transformed by the missionaries, who applied European mosaic technique to feather work: cut into units of different colours. The juxtaposed feathers created compositions whose delicacy and brilliance could rival painting.’

 

 

 

Their – the Europeans – best export, the sanctified narrative. I wonder what the real meanings behind the Aztecs’ handed from generation-to-generation feather technique was? What did a blue feather mean before it became Mary’s cloak? What has been stripped from my feathers?

 

I stopped taking notes after this. The shine was gone. I seem to have experienced a time when there was respect for the craft of other, non-white nations. It seems to have stopped with the slave trade.

1. Is the French curator manipulating me? 
2. Is the French curator even aware of this reading? 
3. Am I fitting everything within the narrative I carry around?  
4. Did Christ get transported to salve their guilt at the moment of their theft? 
5. Did they even give a fuck? 
6. How could you not give a fuck? 
7. Then an ugly story enters my head. I’m in Spain visiting my daughter. She’s sat with her mates, all white, all ex-pats, in a bar. I’m stood. I’ve got loads of beach crap in my arms, and two bags on my shoulder because I’ve just bought one. I’m laughing with the friends closest to me. When one on the other side of the table, a fluffy-sleeved, silver and rhinestone necklace, frivolous whimsy blonde, demands, ‘What’s going on? Is she a Lucky-Lucky man?’

‘Wow, that’s really racist.’ But I say it with a smile because they all live in Spain’s sun to avoid the real world. And my pale daughter will kill me if I use the moment for political gain. Let’s put it in context. A Lucky-Lucky man in Spain, African, visits bars, restaurant tables trying to sell fake designer handbags. Both he and his prospective buyers know on no account is he allowed to sit at their table. I always feel bad for them.   

1. And did that all start with the slave trade when they had to believe he was an animal, a beast of burden, in the eyes of Christ?

 

Though I was taken with this little frog, symbolising Enki, the god of waters and wisdom. Carved from lapis lazuli – one of my favourite words, favourite mystic elements – in the Sumerian city of Eshnunna, Iraq. 2900 – 2340 before Christ.  

 

Three hours after entering this tiny room I leave. Cross the Pont Neuf. Sit in my promised restaurant. Beside me is a mixed-race lad, like me. He never shuts up. French. Clearly educated. She’s batting her eyelids. He’s winning her over. He’s won over something in himself. Then I realise it was never there to overcome. Some French slave owners sent their mixed-race sons back to France to be educated. He is sanctified in their narrative. He belongs at this table. Historically he was given a place. 

https://presse.louvre.fr/from-afar-travelling-materials-and-objects/