Treasures from the Wreck of 2020
Incredulous man viewing sculpture
Image | Rainer Metzger
I passed through the turnstile and took an exhibition program. It read:
“In 2008, a vast wreckage site was discovered off the coast of East Africa. The finding lent credence to the legend of Cif Amotan II, a freed slave from Antioch (north-west Turkey), who lived between the mid-first and early-second centuries CE… [and built] a lavish collection of artifacts deriving from the lengths and breadths of the ancient world.
“The collection lay submerged in the Indian Ocean for some two thousand years before the site was discovered in 2008… Almost a decade after excavations began, this exhibition brings together the works recovered in this extraordinary find.”
Looking up from the program, I watched this story unfold in a documentary video projected against the museum foyer wall. Scuba divers floated through an undersea abyss, silhouettes of dancing figures, serpents, and beasts stood on the ocean floor, a salvage ship hoisted mythical statues aboard. Divers dug artifacts from the seabed, their wetsuits emblazoned with a “Salvage” logo.
Turning a corner, I stepped into a covered courtyard and was stunned to see one of the silhouettes in the video, a colossal statue, completely filling the space. “Demon with a Bowl” was several stories tall, leaning back in exaggerated contraposto, muscular and headless, fused with bits of coral and sea life. Its scale dwarfed we mortal museum-goers.
Colossal demon statue
Image | Rainer Metzer
This art exhibit, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable by British artist Damien Hirst, was displayed in Venice in 2017. Like I sometimes do with a buzz-worthy movie, I had avoided all talk about the show in order to experience it without preconceptions. Hirst is famous for his interventions with natural objects, his diamond encrusted skull, his shark in formaldehyde. His work is often eye-candy so I figured the best way to approach Treasures was just to take it as-is and have fun with it.
If you similarly want to experience this story unspoiled by my retrospective review, there is a film of the same title telling the story of the shipwreck discovery, narrated in part by Hirst himself. It was on Netflix in 2018 but now is now unavailable from major streaming services, except for a free version on YouTube. Watch it and then, if you like, return here for the second half of the story.
Back in the courtyard, I struggled to make sense of the colossal statue. Was it submerged two thousand years? Is it pagan? Is it Bronze? The figure and coral were rendered in the same material and color, the ancient Romans didn’t say much about demons, and the statue’s label said resin, not bronze. It seemed Demon could only be Hirst’s creation, perhaps an attempt to introduce the works in the galleries by building up the legend of the shipwreck. Exchanging looks with other wide-eyed visitors, everyone seemed in varying states of (dis)belief.
This same process played out across the rest of the exhibit: viewing a work of art and trying to square it with the freed slave art collector narrative and the video seen at the entrance. How did chrome survive salt water? Must have been from the eclectic provinces. Can fine detail be that crisp? That warrior god looks like a Transformer. Is that Rhianna?
Forgive me for not revealing how long it took to realize the truth (Mickey Mouse got me) but I have to admit: I tried my best to reconcile what I was seeing with the show’s storyline. At a certain point in the visit, when I Googled art critic takes and read mostly scathing reviews, I chuckled and delighted in watching for everyone else’s a-has. Now the spotlight was on the viewers. People tended to love it or hate it. The vitriol from some critics seemed right on cue. Zuckerberg would be proud.
Why look back on this art show three years later, in 2020? Wreck of the Unbelievable opened a few months after the Trump inauguration. The term “fake news” was still a novelty and still barely funny as the butt of jokes. Hirst’s fake treasures took nearly ten years to make, so let’s give him credit for anticipating the Facebook driven media environment in which the show opened. His timing was good. Now at the end of Trump’s term, it’s worth revisiting—Why did it take as long as it did to understand the show was fiction? How do we come to believe what we believe?
Travel played a big part in it. Tourists are perhaps the most credulous of human species, far removed from the certainty of their lives, unfamiliar with their surroundings. Venice played a part too, its miraculously watery existence gave credence to the discovery of an ancient treasure lost at sea. Collected by a freed slave. In the Indian Ocean. In shallow water.
Ouch.
Travel, being a significant expense for most people, gives us incentive to find a return on our time and money. Could it be that a newly unearthed collection of unbelievable ancient art was a good way to justify my trip, as any “authentic” collection of cultural artifacts would be? Looking back, it was clear that I wanted to believe in what I was seeing despite all the clues to the contrary (up close, that sea coral was pretty low-grade Hollywood production set). It’s helpful to examine the biases that hooked me to the story—art, Roman, freed-slave, eclectic, Venice—to crack them open, and call them out. Myths and legends work this way: they require not just a willing believer, but a wanting one too. They are very much chicken and egg.
Now in 2020, a year with limited travel, we appreciate it more than ever. Travel memories are full of it-wasn’t-what-it-seemed kind of stories. It’s much easier to see our own desires to believe when we travel than it is when we’re at home, cocooned by our cultures, inside our bubbles. Fake news depends on us not seeing the things we want to believe. Travel taught me that. Kitsch pop art did too. What is it that you want to believe and aren’t ancient Roman Transformers pretty cool?
