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Contributor:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Babble On. | Login
Babble On. | Login
0:04:44
Views: 672
License
Channels: Sculpture
Themes: Learning to LookObjectsPerception
My name is Navina Haidar and my job is that of a curator in the Islamic department.
We live in a world, as art historians, of half-completed things
or damaged objects, but I had never articulated to myself
that in fact there were times quite often that I preferred the objects that way. We
always long for the complete object or the final, perfect condition of an object, but
when I actually just took a step back and said, objects can be
wonderful when they're fragmentary and intense and exciting and
evocative and stimulating because of the fact that they're not
complete or they're broken or they're abbreviated in some form.
So it's a journey into a world of fragments, but one that I think
leaves a lot of room for the imagination, for the inner eye to fill
in that space. The idea first came to me when our department acquired
the elephant drawing. The artist didn't complete the drawing and the paper underwent some
kind of trauma. The result is that you see the face and the foreparts of the elephant emerging
from almost a mist, and it allows you to focus on the wonderful, loving study of the elephant's
profile, and everything else fades away and sort of intensifies that elephant's face.
You sometimes get very amusing effects and that really comes across
with this appealing drawing of an Indian nobleman who is seated upon
an invisible chair as he reads a book.
This very well-known series from Mughal India is actually known as The Burned Edge
Series. I think it's better broken because what you're really looking at here is the
scene of the passing of a great emperor and his three widows grieving next to him. And
the intensification of emotion takes place very effectively, because the burn and the
irregular shape of the page gives a sort of highlight to the atmosphere of the scene.
One of my favorite objects in the museum is that Egyptian sculpture of a high
ranking general. It has a very dramatically diagonal break, and it makes you really
appreciate the incredible polish and the articulation of the surface, so much
more when you see it in contrast against the grainy interior of that stone.
The other thing I found is that you always think of men of war or noble
figures often wearing a strap or something across their body in a diagonal.
I mean, there is that psychological association with that kind of a line.
And the fact that there's nothing there but you have the sense of a diagonal
going across the body, to me accentuates the regal bearing of the figure.
This Torso of a Bodhisattva, the fact that it's missing so many elements actually
to me makes it very close to the original ideas of Buddhism, the feeling that the
icon really doesn't matter. It's what the icon symbolizes, it's the Way that's
revealed to you through these human aids of beautiful sculpture. But that the deity
itself, the icon itself, is just a symbol of something that's profoundly without form.
When an object is completed, it carries often with it a whole cultural context. It bears
an emperor's identity, or a craftsman's finished signature
or a function, and those become intrinsically part of
the finished work of art. However, when works of art are
broken, they quite often lose that context and essentially
take us right back to the much more basic human quality of
an act of creation, the hand of an artist, a universal
impulse in people to create things in a certain way.
And just that essential closeness and stripping away of most of the other contexts and
taking us right back to the very heart of the
creative moment is one of the things that is often revealed when the object is broken.
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