I was recently in a small town in the desert, near Palmdale, called Littlerock. There is an emporium there called Charlie Brown’s Farm. They have a huge and odd assortment of ... well, crap. The sort of things that if you hijacked a truck and found in back you’d have no idea where to unload, except at Charlie Brown’s Farm. I noticed a young family, tourists probably passing through on their way to or from Las Vegas, carrying items, statues and various knick knacks that looked ancient Egyptian. Both parents and the two kids had their arms full of Egyptian... crap. Apparently this style is still in style after 3400 years and knowing how particular young mothers are about their home furnishings, I was impressed the wife was going to decorate her house with these items. They weren’t inexpensive or childrens toys but rather substantial figurines, book ends, decanters and the like. However, I must believe that the appeal of the Egyptian style is based on the romance, mystery and sense of adventure that is conjured up by the reminders of a distant time and a foreign and exotic land rather than any current taste or trend. This style is inseparable from the time and place of its origin.
I attended the King Tut exhibit while it was in Los Angeles and was disappointed to find that I was not transported back in time to 3400 years ago, but rather to 1922. I could place myself in the company of Howard Carter and vividly imagine how I would have felt had I entered the tomb when it was first opened. What I could not do was place myself in the palace of Tutankhamen thousands of years earlier. I believe this is because the artifacts I was viewing seemed to be from the 1920s and certainly not old enough to be from Tut’s time. These items didn’t appear any older than the plastic replicas a street vendor had for sale on the sidewalk in front of the museum. The lady from Charlie Brown’s Farm could have used these actual treasures to decorate her condo and no one would have been able to tell the difference. There was even a rattan chair that had the woven reeds of the seat still in perfect condition. I had a rattan chair in the Seventies that completely disintegrated by the Eighties.
The large stone carved head of Ahkenaten looked somewhat cartoony and something that Disneyland might have used to decorate a ride. Maybe even have it talk. The one thing that did stand out to me was how “hand made” the artifacts looked. Although very beautiful and worth a fortune based on the value of the materials alone, they still were imperfect. Especially the ceramics that were just barely uneven. This was before the invention of the potter’s wheel which allows even amateur sculptors the ability to make a perfectly smooth and symmetrical bowl or vase, so even the Pharaoh’s top craftsman still had to eyeball everything he made.
I could see where a tiny hammer pounded a small piece of gold into a delicate necklace and realized how times have changed, even relatively recently, when “handmade” was a sign of quality and not a flaw. Even the street vendor’s knock-off vases were more “perfect” as far as shape and evenness of the thickness of the rims. What took a few seconds to produce by pouring plastic into a mold now seems better crafted than something hand carved from a solid block of marble. Technology has destroyed art by devaluing the process of producing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment