Status Updates From The Infinite Image: Art, Ti...

According to the Mesopotamian system of belief, the image was a valid substitute for the person, a place in which the essence of the represented person was manifest, the votive portrait [thus] became a double of the individual represented and could become a form of presence, a substitute, praying in place of that person, for all time. (211)

Profound implications for Torah-as-monument studies:

"The epilogue of the Codex Hammurabi states that Hammurabi set up his laws in Babylon, before his image as Sar Mišarim, King of Justice, thus presenting himself as one who dispenses the law...The Codex Hammurabi is therefore a monument that also reconfigures the relationship of the ruler to the law." (187)

Nineteenth-century classifications of Assyrian sculpture as uncreative or despotic, and impervious to change, continue to form the basis of the way that we view and study these works today, and these interpretations are still in need of a thorough reassessment. (118)

The past exists in the present, not just mediated through representationalism, as in a picture of the past, but directly through its existential materiality in things. Historical memory and forgetting are within the present; they require rituals, the telling of tales, the making of monuments. The past is perceptible in things, in physical objects that people come into contact with. (112)

This idea that the work of art is the uncovering of a reality of a historical truth, that it is the 'worlding of a world in the work', is shared by a generation of early twentieth-century thinkers and philosophers who wrote on aesthetics and representation. For the ancients, the found object, the ancient work of art and artefact, was likewise seen as a thing that embodies time and a world. (112)

Centuries before Plato, in ancient Mesopotamia, the complexity of images was already well understood and notions of representation were classified under specific words and concepts...there were in fact numerous words in use at the same time, from the eighth to the fourth centuries BC and these words had already been in circulation for well over a millennium. (61-62)

The aesthetic, whether it is taken to mean a type of dis-course, as philosophers understand it, or the intrinsic quality required of the artwork, as art historians and anthropologists use the term, is a notion that leads us back to the question of the ontological status of images. (48)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the twentieth-century philosopher, said that, in order to be art, a work of art must change your world—and ancient art, certainly ancient Near Eastern art, does that superbly. (47)

She is brilliant. They don't usually convince me when they bring Kafka's Trial and current habeas corpus in the US and UK into discussion of Hammurabi's monument of law.

'The Mesopotamians' deep scholarly engagement with, and investigation of, sign systems and their stress on hermeneutical readings can be described as Babylonian semiotics.'

She is a strong pro-Mesopotamian arguer.

It sounds an odd way to begin her book -- with Henry Moore and Georges Bataille -- but the Surrealists had an aesthetic appreciation of Sumerian art that has since been abandoned [as archaeology became a science and Marxist history took to the power & propaganda theme].

'Art is for eternity in Mesopotamia. It resists death. Yet it does so in an entirely different way from the ancient Egyptian arts, the arts that provide for time in death, for another extended cycle of existence in the afterlife. In Mesopotamia, rather, the image is a resistance. It counters annihilation in a more directly existential way.'
Existential Mesopotamians: must be why I like them.

This book follows on from Prof. Bahrani’s The Graven Image. There is a different starting point this time, with early 20C. avante guard art movements, but already the concept of Ancient Iraq concept of tsalmu has made a welcome re-appearence! I’m looking forward to reading more.

Follows on from Prof. Bahrani’s The Graven Image. Verrrrry interesting....