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ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Thank you for coming. Now, my first thing is I need to understand how to use this thing, OK. And of course, thanks to a whole community of people at Cornell. And these are the only ones I can mention here who have helped me to work and think through the casts. These include my co-curator Verity Platt, a lot of students, and Dean Peter Lepage, who asked me to take care of the cats in 2008 and many others in the museum and beyond. I can't mention everybody. But this is to show you how much of a collaborative effort this is. And it really helped me to grow, to learn, and unlearn as you will here.
So what I want to do today, is briefly to give it a little bit of an intro into the genealogy of this edited volume. And then an overview of how we have organized that give you a quick intro for those who are not familiar with plaster casts, what they are, a short history of Cornell's cast collection. I know this sounds like a lot, but I try to be quick.
And then pick out a few of the articles that have illuminate certain problems, let's say, with the cats. I'm very grateful for Hannah, hi. He's going to join us. And I think also, on Zoom, is my Berlin colleague Lawrence Winkler [INAUDIBLE], who is also the co-editor of the Volume Lawrence. I hope you can hear me. OK, let's start.
The genealogy is that Lawrence and I were co-teaching, teaching together at the University of Rostock in Germany for many years and had to deal with the plastic cast collection there, which was in ruins. And this is the former German East, and so we immediately thought of the destruction of cast collections in the political sense.
We have both learned classical archeology. I should say this. We are both classical archeologists, so teach Greek and Roman art and archeology. And in Germany, these plaster cast collections of, usually, only Greek and Roman sculpture, are an asset, like a default asset of any institute of classical archeology, period.
And so we are used to these beautiful collections. And but then had to deal with their destruction. And thought this has to do with the communist East and the capitalist West maybe, things like this. And having this in mind, I come to Cornell and Dean Peter Lepage asked me to take care of the Cornell cast collection, what I see is this. You see it here on the right hand side.
And I thought, oh, maybe it's not so easy to map this kind of destruction onto this kind of political context. And so we thought we really need to investigate this questions. We were very dissatisfied with the typical way history of cast collections is being told. This is a whole subfield of classical archeology, classical studies with their own conferences, publication volumes, et cetera.
And the usual narrative is very linear from rise and fall, and then eventually falling from grace and eventually revival, but that's it. And we thought that does not give justice to the complexity of plaster casts.
And so we thought we wanted to understand the moment of destruction as a meaningful moment in the reception of both classical, the classical world and of plaster casts. That's why we organized a first conference here at Cornell in 2010 and with people from Japan, Australia, and of course, Europe. And for the first time then, we realized eurocentric as we had been, that of course, we need to think much more globally, and also, we need to think in terms of the colonialist heritage and tradition of these collections, which was completely out of our horizon or had been completely out of our horizon at this point.
So we thought, OK, we need a second conference, which we organized in Berlin in 2015, where this colonialist site was new to many and also met with some resistance, I have to say. And then you realize it has taken us a long time to publish this volume because we kind of started to learn and again unlearn. And I don't think we are completely done with the questions that came up.
And so I'm very grateful, I should have mentioned this also in my first slide, to all the contributors to the volume who stood with us and remained loyal to the project. Although, it took us quite a while to finally come to grips with it.
So the way we have organized it, and I realize it's not easy to see, we have different-- all the themes are interconnected, but we wanted to start with this colonial and post-colonial context of plaster cast collections that I still think is the most important field to be investigated.
Then we looked at contested classification art versus archeology versus anthropology. We'll see that one of the issues and problems with casts is that they are so difficult to classify, and then contingencies of value, contingencies of authenticity, and then finally, revolution and iconoclasm.
And what I want to do here, I mean first a little intro, but then I want to go back. I want to start with iconoclasm, and then sort of in a way, trace the way we thought and our thinking proceeded, and then end with this the post-colonial contexts.
So for those of you who are not familiar with the plaster cast, what is a plaster cast? A plaster cast is a 1 to 1, almost, replica of a three dimensional object in plaster. To that purpose, you take a mold from the surface of your prototype. I give you an example here of a 19th century mold of the so-called Uno Ludovisi that you see here.
On the left hand side, this would be the original in marble, in Rome. You make a mold. In the 19th century, the molds would be made of plaster too. Today, it's silica et cetera. Make this mold, and then you often have to do it in pieces, put the mold together and fill it with plaster gypsum dissolved in water. Fill the hole with this liquid plaster, let it harden, and then if you take off the mold, you have the 1 to 1 replica in plaster.
And this process can be repeated many times. I used to say, once the mold is done, it's pretty easy. But making the mold is already a very difficult endeavor. It's usually sculptors who do this. You have to think. You have to plan this kind of it's like a puzzle in 3D but in the negative.
And as you can see, especially in the 19th century, you cannot-- I mean, a sculpture has a complex surface. So you have to really, in order to capture it in the full, you have to work with so-called piece molds that you then put together in a kind of shell, and then from there, you can produce the three dimensional model.
Plaster cast collections, as I said before, very important for teaching classical art, of course, especially in places where there was no art, I mean original art, so to speak, available, like Cornell, for example. But apart from that, I think the reasons why they have become so important to us our days is that they, the casts conserve objects that sometimes do not exist any longer.
To give you an example from the Cornell collection that was where the original was destroyed in World War II, but we have the cast. Sometimes, the objects have changed over time due to again, war or natural the environment, et cetera. I'll give you an example again on the left of part from the Parthenon frieze in Cornell's collection here photographed in our warehouse. And on the right hand side, the way the original looks today. After the cast was taken, the head was already it was chipped off or the surface of the original was destroyed.
So the casts keep a lot of information. They also help us, eventually, to retrieve looted objects. In this case, there was a suspicion that the Boston Museum had bought the piece on the right hand side that belonged to a sculpture in Turkey. And by making casts and fitting those, it was before moving the originals, it was clear that the two belonged to each other.
Finally, you can do experiments with the casts. The whole polychromy can be tried out on plaster casts. You wouldn't do this with the original. So these are not only instruments for teaching but also for research and experiments if you want.
And then also, and that's something that I learned more and more actually while being at Cornell, they do not only trace the history of the original but also, eventually, capture different-- depending on when they were made --different stages in the biography of an object.
So here these are plaster casts on the bottom of the pediment of the Temple of Athena, Athena Aphaia in Aegina. The originals are in Munich. And when they were brought to Munich, were completed by the classicist, neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen and his team.
And this is 19th century, people wanted to see a complete pediment. In the 1970s, all these additions were taken off again because people thought, first of all, they were wrong, and they also looked awful. But the Cornell casts, that you see below, capture this 19th century stage of the collection.
So they interestingly-- it shows us that these casts also have more than one meaning. They do not only stand in for their prototype. And this would have been the way I was educated, but being a classical archaeologist, they are almost synonymous with their prototype.
This here made me think, OK, they also have a history, and they trace different layers of the prototype itself, or as we see, eventually, have their own history. And that's what the history of the Cornell casts can teach us.
And I also want to say when we started that, and sort of a shout out to the library, when we started to do a database of all the fragments of the cast we had, the Decamps team made me think really hard through all the different layers. I would always say, well, this is like the Parthenon frieze from fifth century. And there was, no, this is a 19th-century copy of-- a 19th-century copy of a Roman copy of a Greek original.
And while this was maddening, it made me really think through the fact that how complex and more interesting and multifaceted these casts are. So they speak to more people.
The Cornell collection was founded in 1892 or opened in 1892, the so-called Sage Collection by a donation, William Sage. And I think that Henry Sage, the first archaeologist Alfred Emerson was the one who was mostly involved in choosing the casts. Emerson had-- that's very emotional for me --had in Munich, and so I think he was aware of the or had learned with the plaster cast in Munich and thought how useful or knew how useful it is to have such a collection here.
And so he brought hundreds of casts to Cornell, which were first exhibited in McCraw. That's what you see here is the first museum of classical archeology that moved at the beginning of the 20th century to Goldwin Smith Hall. When Goldwin Smith Hall was built, the whole basement was devoted to the plaster cast collection, you can see him was based but also a little bit more bleak, I feel the other are little, what, charming, anyhow.
But over time, when of course, classics lost in importance and space was needed for other things, these rooms and places were repurposed. The north wing of the cast collection, north wing of Goldwin Smith became you see this on the upper left, the first Temple of Zeus cafe. You see the casts still, temple of Zeus casts still in place, but then a cafe.
Whereas then when this room was turned into Kauffman Auditorium on the bottom left, the Temple of Zeus cafe moved to another room. And the casts, bottom right, moved up to what at this time was the BNN Corp Advising Center now Career Center. And then finally, in 2015 or '16 when Klarman Hall received this atrium, some of the casts that we had conserved and restored went up for a new exhibition that Verity Platt curated.
And the only thing that reminds us of the fact of the reason for the name of the Temple of Zeus cafe, is the little miniature models of the pediments of this temple. What this history tells us, again, I mean it gives us, again, different layers of the casts. And to take the Temple of Zeus figures, as an example, they stand in for an important monument of classical archeology also myth, central Roman key.
The Olympia is the site of the Olympic games. So you can relate this to modern times. They stand in as plaster casts for an important moment in the history of casts collections and also in history of archeology.
Because at this time, when they were excavated, 1875, the Greek state, this was a landmark treaty, stipulated that the excavating nation, Germany in this case, was not allowed to take the originals to Germany. They had to remain in Greece. But the Germans were allowed to had sort of the monopoly on making molds and making casts and sell those. So the Cornell casts come from Berlin. We found the order in the ledgers in Berlin.
And then the next story is the Temple of Zeus story. This is very unique to Cornell. And that's usually the entry point for our students. It has nothing to do with Olympia or whatever. It is the cafe on campus. And we need to take this seriously too.
OK, so let me start go a little bit through the different aspects of the friction it was destruction of casts. And I start with revolution and iconoclasm. I cannot talk about every article, of course, but one aspect of destruction, and that was one that, of course, shaped our perception too very much, is, of course, destruction at war.
I give you two examples. And I show the slides with, I captured that from the book. Because this is being recorded, I wanted to make sure that this it's clear that these are from the book and all the references et cetera. So for example, here, the plaster cast museum in North Sea University destroyed by the Germans in World War I and then the Munich cast collection of the Fine Arts Academy after World War II.
But then there were, of course, destructions. And I have to say, destruction and iconoclasm happened throughout time only for different reasons. And it wasn't always easy to really pinpoint them. And we'll see why because the casts have such a different-- or are so complex.
But the most dramatic, and sort of most iconic, if you want, moment of iconoclasm is usually what happened after World War II in art academies. And the most famous one is, of course, the Paris Ecoles Bazar in 1968, where the student revolution also started or had it's most sort of, again, iconic moment in destroying the very old cast collection of the Ecoles Bazar.
And similar things happened in Munich. There you have two examples on the right hand side, where, for example, the one figure here on the lower right makes it clear that the destruction of the collection is a political act. It talks about the Brown Academy. The Brown Academy meaning Brown like the uniforms of the Nazis.
So here the 1968 reaction is against the old structures. Students had discovered that many of their professors had been Nazis, et cetera. But as for the French, too, the connection is that destruction is a symbolic act that meant a reaction against petrified structures education, the state, eventually, in very vague terms, any kind of imperialism, et cetera.
But it was very difficult too often for us to really pinpoint whether what really was the target. In this case, it's the only moment where we have some sort of documentation that gives us some sense of what was the program behind this. Otherwise, yeah, the reasons can be multiple and often afterwards, in some of the more oral documentation, we feel that people regret that they destroyed the casts. So they are kind of bodies. And there is a reaction or relation to them.
Other examples from Paris here, not from the Ecoles Bazar but in the Universities Bordeaux and Strasbourg. On the right hand side is probably difficult to read, but the guy with the shield, again, of one of the Igenar figures has the letter CRS. I've forgotten, Lauren, you might know. It's like the French National police, right?
And SS like the Storm Staffel, like that, again, the Nazi organization. And on the left hand side, some more funny graffiti in the Archaeological Institute in Paris, where the casts act out lifting-- these figures act out lifting the casts or jumping from them or falling down.
The next point or the next area that we discussed contested-- I mean, there are other themes, but the one that I wanted to focus on, contested classification art versus archeology versus anthropology, is probably the key to why casts-- as why it's so difficult to pinpoint the reason behind the destruction of casts because they are so difficult to classify.
On the one side, there's a long tradition that showed us that casts were considered more valuable than the originals. They were white, pure, not as dirty and messy as the originals, clear form, et cetera. On the other side, they could also be merely archaeological objects, historical if you want scientific objects.
So how does that square, art versus archeology? In anthropological collections, sometimes, they interestingly sort of were subsumed in a broader narrative comparatively, whatever history of religions. And then the classical castes would eventually play a role there, which often saved them from destruction because they in a way, became invisible and were not as prominent.
On the other side, that's something we also haven't had the chance to completely explore, but I think this deserves further investigation, casts were also, on the one side, really an instrument of democratization of art if you want. The canonical figures were available everywhere. That was certainly a reason for Cornell to have these cats.
And on the other side, is also meant a sort of commodification of the casts. You could have them also in different dimensions as your home decoration if you want. And so this constant sort of oscillating between art and scientific objects or scientific object and freak show, casts would be decoration for panopticons or some pageants, et cetera. Between the expensive and priceless document and then cheap plaster thing, really made them difficult to grasp.
And I think this might also have been the reason here, at Cornell, why they were at a certain point discarded because if they don't have-- the moment to conserve them is there is a strong institutional framework that makes sense of them. And it made sense of it here at the beginning, with the archaeological context, but at the moment that the discipline is no longer so important or classical is no longer so important, then, of course, these things become weird. And Hannah will later talk more about it where to the students, at a certain point they appeared as monstrous or absurd. And nobody could make sense of them anymore.
What I show here is a scheme that our colleague Adam Rabinowitz from UT Austin, Texas at Austin has developed. Where and that sort of in a way, the article with which I found peace with what happened to the Cornell collection, here it shows the advantages of a cast collection that has lost its institutional framework. And it was no longer the classical collection became interesting for other people on campus, especially the body builders.
[LAUGHTER]
And so they got their-- yeah, and it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger has a whole encyclopedia. And they were interested in getting the casts to their Institute of [INAUDIBLE] et cetera like an aesthetics, et cetera. And as you see, students drawing from them. And they were really like models for sports students and bodybuilders.
And whereas at the beginning, coming from a classical, archaeological, Eurocentric background I would have thought of this as a disgrace.
[LAUGHTER]
Now I think it's wonderful. This is the moment to make it interesting. Adam also came up with an alternative to the linear story of success and rise and then fall. He thinks of it, and he's totally right, in a more spiral way. There's often the discovery and then discarding, rediscovery, et cetera. So and then also in different-- it's just more complicated. And I think his scheme, and I'm happy to talk more about it, gives you a good idea of this.
And I'm not going to talk about this a lot. This is Hannah Hume's article about the Cornell collection. So I skip that and Hannah can talk about her article. And we realized, and that was sort of the aspect that we had completely left out of our conversations before, that in our initial excitement about the fact that cast collections are everywhere in the world, we had forgotten about the really politically dark sides of it.
Namely, casts, and especially plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, as instruments of colonialism, settler colonialism, where these cats would be sent to, especially, Australia or South Africa et cetera to either civilized, uncivilized. Or confirm the exclusive society of the settlers, who had their own museums and where the non-settlers, the natives, were not admitted to.
And so we looked at different examples. One that was particularly interesting, in a way, also less dire or can I say, terrible. Japan is a sort of semi-colonized context where the cast did not come-- were not imposed by a colonizing nations, buy Japan, in the modernizing moment of the late 19th century, invited Italian sculptors and cast makers to bring and come to Japan, bring casts so that their students could learn naturalism.
They were not supposed to sculpt from these casts, but they were supposed to draw them. And that continued over and over again for a long time, even at the point when casts were no longer in favor in other institutions in Europe or even in the United States.
In Japan, they continued to draw these casts, which at the time, Shina Araki, who went through this training also said it created a kind of love-hate relationship of students with these casts that then if not in the big art academies, continue to be exposed and then taught in smaller art schools, which also led to the very funny and again, conceptually very interesting, phenomenon that these plaster casts, of course, sometimes they fall off or they get damaged. You need to make a new cast.
There were no forms. So they had to make forms of-- take forms from a mold from the casts, which we call after casts. And so over the years, you have a cast of a cast of a cast of a cast. If you know about the casting process, it means that way that it uses imprecision, the cast become a little more fluffy. They look a little bit deformed and transformed. So that also means that these figures look a little bit differently.
And the other thing is that translation helped to also transform these figures in weird ways. The terms, so what these figures represented where the example on the left hand side, for example, would be a back end, if I pronounce this correctly, in English. And this then had to be translated into Japanese, transcribed, and then was re transcribed from Japanese into English, and so the back end became pageant, this figure here.
So in event then, also what these figures were described to be had nothing to do with what they actually represented. So but it's a wonderful way of transforming them. And then the one reaction of the artists at the time, would be to playfully produce them in miniature.
You see this in the center. You could actually get them in kind of surprise eggs. And I've brought two of them with me. You can look at them later. For $2, you could get them in some-- or they have become the stars of an anime show. These are casts they are totally misbehaving. They have to appear in shows and don't know how to behave correctly, anyway, the so-called second boys.
So this is a way of embracing the copying and also the fetishism and the, how can I say, the commodity aspect of the cast but really turn it. And I find it's a kind of a iconoclasm from within in a very interesting way. The more-- oops, sorry.
The more dark side came through to us, actually, in a presentation by Henrik Cohn, at the time, curator of the Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen, who really showed us how important it is to not dislodge the cast collection from the places in which they are displayed. And in Copenhagen, the Royal Cast Collection, which I always loved and thought it a great location, the location is a warehouse for trade with the former Danish West Indies. So an area where also slaves came to Copenhagen.
And Henrik had the great idea to invite artists systematize exactly that aspect. And you see two examples here, Victoria Mingo, half-Caribbean artist, in a way, shocked by the fact of realized that her ancestors had gone through this house, created this kind of jewelry that was meant to also remember the cane sugar trade, et cetera, and combine this with the plaster casts.
Or in a similar way, Janet [INAUDIBLE] in a very-- I only have a photograph, but you can look it up on YouTube, a very powerful performance that she staged at several places but also in the cast collection, she herself of half-Caribbean descent, whips a white canvas with this whip that is in charcoal like whipped in charcoal. And then whips it in front of these casts. And that makes these casts also speak differently. Also in an interesting way, there are scenes of suffering also in classical casts. And you see them differently when you get this kind of context.
So that made me also think more-- and this is my contribution to the volume --more rigorously about what does it mean to do research with cats collections. We always thought, this is sort of the most positive aspect and the most innocent aspect of cast collections to think of them in terms of research instruments.
And then it was Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith's book, Decolonizing Methodologies that made me understand how fraught even the term "research" can be especially from the point of view of the colonized, for whom this was always a moment of murder, betrayal, exploitation, et cetera.
And so that's why I started to look closer at the way research with cast collections was done, especially in the 18th and 19th century. And then you realize how the cats were used to, again, prove the racial superiority of the white European body. Often, I would not think of the casts as-- we would always say, well, they are white because it's abstract. And it's just the form. You see the form better in the white plastic casts.
Here, this made me understand how the abstraction is exactly this universalist manner. This makes these classical figures appear as men as such. So I give you the famous Apollo Belvedere who by the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall was used to prove the superiority of the Europeans because of their skull.
So in a way, shaved the casts, of course, you cannot do that, by representing the head without hair. The same thing with the beauty of the Europeans. In this case, it's the scholar Blumebach in Gottingen, who had this wonderful, beautiful skull of a woman from Georgia, the Caucasian race.
And in order to make people understand how beautiful this one must have been, because we got a cast of this. so-called Clytia that you see here in this picture. And in all these schemes, you see that they go from the ape or monkey to-- here on the bottom right --to the Apollo. Apollo, the sculpted artwork is put on the same level as living beings to a point that you realize that in art academies, the ideal and the real really merged.
These are two examples from the association in Amsterdam, the Felix Meredith Society, where a doctor, Andreas Bonn gives a lecture to artists about human anatomy. And you see this the picture on the left hand side, the model is a living model but imitates the pose of the Apollo Belvedere, so the statue, which you could see next door, picture on the right hand side, in the cast collection.
So things were so merged and next to each other that things-- what seem to mind is a total bogus thing. And it's clear that these were not-- even the artists at the time would say these are artistic not real proportions, but the constantly being exposed to this, really fostered the idea that these idealized bodies our real bodies.
And that's sort of the dark side. Before I said, that's the democratizing aspect of the plaster casts is that they are available to everybody or easily. That's the dark side that what Cornell Professor James Cutting calls the mere exposure being exposed to the same things over and over and over again without being really always aware of where they come from, what they mean. These petrify and sort of reify certain ideas about the human body. And I think this is a problem that we still haven't really grappled with.
So the question would be, what is the future of cast collections in view of this problematic heritage? I'll give you two examples. I honestly don't know what we can do. But one is sort of art and fashion show. And this is an example from Berlin on the left hand side with a combination of sustainable fashion and the plastic casts.
And the one that I like more, on the right hand side, again, Copenhagen there Henrik Cohn had an artist destroy a cast. They smashed it. And the remnants were put together and then dissolved in water. And from the new plaster gypsum the artist made this cylindrical roll here on the floor. So that has nothing to do with the classical form. And so that has nothing to do with the classical sculpture anymore.
Here at Cornell, and I want to end with this, we tried to do this with two exhibitions many years ago where on the one side, we stigmatized the manipulated painted-over casts and the destruction and thinking about the political message behind this. And then on the other side, the Johnson-- this was at Beebe Lake at the chilled water plant.
And on the right hand side, an exhibition at the Johnson Museum where we really talked about the artistic canon and what the casts contributed to establishing a canon. Namely, the kind of reproduction over and over again that again, the canon has nothing to do or very little to do with the eventual quality of works of art. It's just the fact that they are being reproduced over and over again.
So that's the power of the casts in a very bad sense. Thank you, and now, I think Hannah should eventually give her little spiel on the Cornell Collection. Do you want to--
HANNAH HUME: Yes, hi, everyone. Yes, my name is Hannah Hume. I was a contributor to this really wonderful-- well, part one of this really wonderful series of articles about casts. And thank you so much for inviting me to join you all and that I appreciate it.
So I conducted research, first as an undergraduate student, in 2013, 2014 largely focused on a more anthropological view of how the Cornell Casts Collection was viewed. At the time, as I noted, we were going through a bit of a phase at Cornell of trying to find, identify, and document and exhibit these casts once again.
And so you can see here on this slide, a frieze that is, I believe, it's still up in a staircase in Goldwin Smith Hall. And someone at some point, most likely in the past 30, 20 years, wrote what kills your creativity and made you-- and we can't see the rest, unfortunately. And then of course, here on the right, is what now is a relatively famous photograph, of the I'm Art on the [INAUDIBLE] from Olympia.
And so my research, again, like I said, focused not necessarily on classifying or really delving into the casts themselves, more onto how they were displayed and how students interacted with them from the past, present and future. So I was very glad to have the access to the fantastic Cornell Library system because a lot of the works of previous journal entries, previous letters of students, the registers, the lists of classes, and things like that were digitized and available at the time, even in 2013, which seems like quite a long time ago.
And so I was able to look at letters home, like, I mentioned, from students at the time, who were talking about visiting McGraw Hall and seeing armadillos, and a, I think it was like a bust of an elephant and the casts. And then later on, exploring the Museum of Casts at Goldwin Smith Hall.
So it was a very interesting history to peruse. In 2013, we, meaning me, I conducted some surveys and some interviews as well for about, it was about 45 students at the time, to see what their perspective was, and perception was on the casts that they were seeing daily but perhaps not even noticing, and came up with some, somewhat surprising, results. That most people, regardless of whether they thought these were art objects, felt that they were very valuable and very important to Cornell.
So that's really where my research ended. And then of course, through this beautiful publication, was able to revisit some of that material while I was a master's student in history and archeology. But I'm happy to say, Annetta. wouldn't you agree that now, the casts at Cornell have a much more prominent role and a bit more exhibition and a bit more opportunity for folks to actually view them. So grateful for that.
But was there anything, any question specifically, Annetta, you wanted me to touch on. Or should I just wait for Q&A?
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: No, I think we can open-- exactly, open it up to the audience. Thank you, thank you, Hannah. It's great.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, and Hannah too, thank you. I have two questions, one for each. Annetta, you talked about the moment when the intellectual infrastructure around these statues disappeared or disintegrated or lessened anyway or around the casts. So I'd love to know a little more about the time scale of that when do you see the critical shift in the arts college, say, when maybe classical archeology was considered less a kind of central part of the curriculum? When exactly does that happen?
And Hannah, I'd love to hear more about why the students valued the casts. The students you spoke to, relatively recently, what was their impression of the importance of these for the institution? Thank you so much.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Thank you, Robert, that's a wonderful occasion to be a little bit more specific. And what we also learned, again, is that these moments can be-- whereas we have a general sense that the best moment for the plaster cast was the late 19th century. And the fall from grace is sort of, let's say, the 1960s.
In looking at these histories more specifically, then they can be very different. At Cornell, I would think that the casts for the art school were different, but had a different story than those for classical archeology. Those for classical archeology came in the late 19th century, that's the high point, and certainly used to be still part of the museum.
But I think with Alfred Emerson leaving pretty early, in the late 19th century, he went to Chicago, and then Berkeley. So he actually figures at several moments in the book. And Cornell wasn't so much of a classical archeology-- I mean, his successor taught this in a more traditional way, I would think.
And I think this was already the end pretty early of the cast collection that it didn't make sense anymore, or it only made sense in more artistic terms. Whereas what Emerson had wanted to be-- had wanted this to be a very scholarly collection with inscriptions and mundane things, not the big artworks.
These are lost now because they probably were totally meaningless. And so in other places, this happened at different moments in time. And I think that's, again, it was important for us to realize how we need to also differentiate by, honestly, even within Europe nations. Again, Germany would constantly-- because the casts by such an important role in reconstructing ancient sculpture, et cetera they would, no matter the state of destruction, they would start trying to reconstruct everything and sort of make this moment disappear in the history of the collections, as the French, as cliche as it sounds, totally political.
And you keep the smashed casts. And they have a document and the painted over casts. So yeah, it's actually it leads us against this sort of broader background into the more specific histories. One could also say, that the end of the-- starts already in the late 19th century, where there is just too much of these plaster casts all over. And that's the moment where people felt a certain nausea, interestingly.
Again, that's a threat that comes through often. People were shocked at the casts in a museum, not originals. And it's often the art historians as opposed to the archeologists who are used to more less valuable objects, maybe. And but they would say, famously, as critic Anne Boleyn said, well, somebody in a fully Cesarean manner, should throw them into the river Spree altogether. Or give them to the departments of art history and archeology. There they do the least harm, right?
[LAUGHTER]
So there you see also that this entered different disciplinary in a way, context. Anyway, Hannah.
HANNAH HUME: No, I agree completely. And it's interesting, your dating as well is something that I also saw reflected in those historic notes and historic letters. It does seem to be around the 1920s is when the cast collection is no longer written about in the registers.
And by the 1930s, they're being talked about as reproductions and students are saying that visiting them is like going to a morgue. And so it really is, perhaps earlier than maybe you would anticipate, that they are falling out of favor after that 1904 fluorescents in Goldwin Smith Hall when they have the huge exhibition space.
To talk to the point about why were they seen as valuable. And I think it's a very interesting question. And like Annetta mentioned, the fact that they were preserved, though broken, is I think a lot to do with it. So I was speaking to one student who, and I can read a little bit of her interview answer, but she said that she felt they were valuable because they were broken and yet they were kept on site. And so that proves that they were something that needed to be taken care of and had a history and had a story that should be told.
And I think the other aspect of it is, because they are within this overall context of a neoclassical building, they're seen as part of that space for a lot of students. And so most students, not all, of course, have respect for the place that they go to school. And so I think part of it is that they believe that it is part of this history of the institution. So that's valuable to them as someone who is excited to be in college, for instance.
And then thirdly, when I was speaking to many people, especially those who felt that they were a little odd or uncanny, the idea that these faces were staring at them that had this presence, this really strong aura if you will, within the environments that they were being seen, gave them a gravity that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise.
I don't think if it was small plaster casts of dogs, for instance, you might have the same reaction. But that these are large-scale people looking at you, seemed to have a lot to do with that value that was assumed.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: If I can add, it's wonderful, the cast as bodies. Again, that the idea that these are ghosts or dead bodies is something we already find in the Romantic era. This is an up and down. But on the other side, what happens to the Cornell casts showed me that they were real bodies. I mean, [INAUDIBLE] they're not casts, maybe if you are there, and I hope you can tell the story, I've written it in the book anyway, and they assaulted, the plaster casts.
The most famous example is one of the Venus figures that we restored or have cleaned for the exhibition at the d'Orsay Museum. It was in Sibley Hall. They had all the vaginas sort of scribblings with pencil et cetera.
HANNAH HUME: The Swiss master cast, right?
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Yeah, and then we had Kaja clean it because there were all these drippings. And she said, why are glue, but it was also urine and semen? And that was, of course, fantastic because there are all these stories about, again, agalmatophilia, sex with statues in antiquity.
And it makes total sense to me that these plaster casts were bodies. Or another famous example that happened when I was here. A huge lying reclining Ariana figure was in Sibley Hall at the time. I mean, like tons it weights. And when they was gone, Henry Krantz told me, well, some frat boys took it, well, and I wasn't really, well, pay, make them pay. And he said, no, this is like a spring break amnesty.
But it was found, I mean this huge colossal sculpture, apparently by staff on the bar of the frat house with beer bottles. And I'm pretty sure they had sat on this body of this woman reclining one breast exposed and had sort of scratched things in her arms, et cetera. As terrible as it is, on the other side, it shows that these things, even if it's plaster, they are bodies. There's a different reaction to them.
And that goes against this idea that these were just cheap replicas. In individual context, people made sense of them. And if you go through our colleagues' offices, some of them have real, I feel, personal relationships with their casts. They also they don't want to give them up.
AUDIENCE: We had a question online. It's from Robin Whitehouse. Thank you for your talk. It's very interesting to hear a perspective of this from the United States. I'm interested, as I'm conducting a research about the disposed cast collection of the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague in Netherlands.
Does a smashed cast collection still belong to the Academy that used to own them? Considering the Academy accepted the fact that they were being smashed in the 1960s, does the Academy still own the smashed fragments?
HANNAH HUME: That's quite the question.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Difficult question. I mean, we have this problem sometimes here where, honestly, I don't think we once asked, at the time, Gretchen Ritter, to whom do our casts actually belong? To the University in its entirety or just so the College? And nobody knew.
And I think nobody wants to know. And that's a point that you also brought up, Hannah. And some of the articles talk about these casts collections as white elephants. They are, for any kind of administration, and you don't need to feel bad about it, and through the ages, they are a nuisance because they take so much space and they are difficult to transport, et cetera.
On the other side, you don't want to throw them out. They seem kind of important. And I mean, it's far it's absurd. If you go to the warehouse, all these references will never ever will they be put together again. I think the point is you can tell interesting stories.
Now, to the question, I think it's maybe not so much a question of to whom it belongs but what you make of it. Here at Cornell, some individuals took plaster casts to their homes when they were sort of lying on the ground somewhere disposed of. And some of them are happy to give them back, others aren't. Because they say exactly that, you threw them out. I'm not going to give it back.
So yeah, I don't have an answer, but I wish you good luck with your project in The Hague. And I hope you keep in touch, and you tell me more about it. Yeah, Sophia.
AUDIENCE: Wait, oh, sorry. You're going to have to do the microphone for recording. Thank you so much. Is this loud enough?
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you, so I was wondering, you mentioned that people regretted destroying the cats. If you could say more about why? Is it just because they seemed like bodies? Did they regret it in the moment of destruction or years later? Yeah.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Yeah, thank you. It's a great question because it also gives me a little bit of an occasion to talk more about-- I mean, in the end, we were not able to always really figure out what was the target. And we felt that certainly Greco-Roman art was not the target. And often the cast were, certainly, also not the general target.
Only maybe in this moment, I feel, of course, if the cats is destroyed, it's spectacular. It's pretty easy compared to marble. And if it cracks, I mean, I've seen it happen, it's satisfying, for sure.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I also say, there's a certain liberating aspect of it. I won't deny it. But it's often-- and interesting, also at Cornell this often relies on these kind of more rumors. Here at Cornell, and then several of the colleagues at the conference would tell the same stories. There's somebody who, I know who destroyed them. But I can't release the names. As if it had been a murder or something.
And then in Ireland, they are students then have destroyed the casts but then released a letter that they did not want this to happen. But in the end, they must also must have held either these are precious objects or real bodies. I don't know. But they kind of felt that this was too much.
It's really funny. There is an-- and again, I don't know. this kind of white elephant. The other thing with iconoclasm, especially in the context of the casts, of course, it's totally futile. I mean, you can destroy this one cast, but there are thousands of others. You will never be able to erase this thing, right? So right? And it's very interesting--
HANNAH HUME: It's almost performative.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: --that they become so individualized.
HANNAH HUME: It really strikes me as performative because I think, since the 1920s, 1930s, at least at Cornell, with the fact that the institution itself was putting the cafe into the cast collection, it sort of demoted, in a sense, the objects from being art. So it's almost just it seems to me very much like an activist's performance.
Because it seems halfway-- it's halfway there, right? It's not destroying something that is "unique," quote unquote. So I think some of the thought processes, at least that I was seeing when I was doing some of the research was, a way to make a statement without, perhaps, getting expelled. It was almost it's this way to make an impact without making a full impact if that makes sense.
Odd psychology, I'm not a psychologist. I'm a psychiatrist. So I wonder what someone would say about that. But interesting to note in the history too.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: I mean, I also found it interesting, Hannah, that you said this before, the students found they were precious because they were broken. Certainly, it seems more ancient. I always have the impression when I teach classes now with classics, I feel kind of a little bit-- I mean I give the whole spiel of how problematic the casts are and what they did, et cetera.
But the students often don't think that's an issue. And I think what they like about the casts is the fact that here that they were once acquired for them, for students to be taught. Even if now it doesn't make sense anymore, but anyway, that's a way to appropriate them or make them their own to a certain extent.
But even if we encourage them to be critical et cetera, it has an emotional value. I mean no question, right?
AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have one last question. This is from online from Peter Hertel. The Chroma Exhibit at the Met is shaking up how we think about classical sculpture. Would coloring all of the plaster casts at Cornell be an appropriate action?
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: That's a super interesting and very good question. And it gives me also the occasion to go back to Munich. I basically grew up with this Chroma Project that exhibitors tried this out already when I was a grad student in Munich. And I don't think that coloring the casts is a solution.
On the one side, I mean, we thought about it, and I've talked about it with the students about, we think maybe projecting colors onto them or in a way make it a more flexible thing. That would certainly make sense. But I would not want the plaster cast to appear in color because when they were made, they were white. And they were supposed to be white. And that's part of their also nefarious history.
And I wouldn't want to erase that part of the history, this neoclassicist aesthetic. I mean a lot of the reaction against the classical past is a reaction against neoclassicism. And in particular, also interesting it deserves more investigation. I think that the reaction, or the story history between Europe and the United States is so different.
In the United States, it's neoclassicism aesthetics belongs to the foundation of this country. That's very different in Germany, where neoclassicism is not really an issue. So I think, and again, this needs more investigation. But for that very reason, also, I don't think we should gloss over that history.
We should show. I mean, as I showed us with these experiments, that's a possibility. If you talk about the one side of the cast, in which it represents the prototype. But we should keep it open that it has so many other layers. And it's much more complicated.
So coloring them forever, so to speak, I don't think it's a good solution. We should keep it flexible.
HANNAH HUME: The Met's exhibit is a good potential topic for someone to investigate further because some of those are not casts that they already had. They created new casts to then color. So that's also interesting because they do still have some cast displayed as white casts alongside of the chromatic casts, so.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: That's it, right?
AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you, everyone.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Thank you, guys. Thank you.
AUDIENCE: And we're out of time, so let's--
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: Thank you, Hannah.
HANNAH HUME: Thank you.
ANNETTA ALEXANDRIDIS: So if you want to see the Little made in China casts. They are super. OK, open this for them.
The destruction of sculptural plaster cast collections, whether through simple neglect or targeted demolition, sheds light on the aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, and ideas of race that underpin these decisions, according to Annetta Alexandridis, associate professor in the Classics and History of Art and Visual Studies departments. In a live, hybrid Chats in the Stacks book talk, Alexandridis discusses Destroy the Copy - Plaster Cast Collections in the 19th-20th Centuries (De Gruyter, 2022) which is the first volume to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. The volume has gathered art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar to explore how different museum and academic traditions, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism have impacted the fate of collections. Alexandridis was joined in the closing Q&A by Hannah Hume ’14, a former anthropology major now at the Newark Museum of Art, and author of the article on Cornell’s own plaster cast collection which is featured in the book. This talk was hosted by Olin Library.
