A History of the Interior 003

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A HISTORY HISTORY OF OF A THE INTERIOR INTERIOR THE

On 24 August, a date that nobody predicted, the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD wiped out Pompeii, Herculaneum and several other surrounding towns, killing thousands of Romans.

The vast majority of citizens choked to death, asphyxiating on the noxious gases and clouds of ash spewing from the raging summit. At least a few brains would have boiled over, at least a few skulls would have cracked in the intense heat of the raging lava flows.

The only citizens of Herculaneum who managed to survive would have had to jump into ships at the harbour within the first 10 minutes to avoid the speeding hot ash and lava fragments of the pyroclastic flows, that obliterated the whole town in two hours.

If they magically managed to escape the ash, survivors were then confronted with a massive tsunami and the shattering earthquakes and aftershocks that followed.

Pompeii was so far buried that within a few years, nobody even knew where the city actually stood.

But this isn’t that story.

Let’s go back a few days to when Pompeii lived, blissfully unaware, in the shade of the large dormant volcano and patiently tolerated its occasional rumblings.

The excavations at Pompeii have yielded a rich treasure trove of clues about life in the Roman empire, including richly decorated private homes.

The upper classes populated the ‘domus’, large structures reaching almost 3000 square metres in size.

The houses of the middle classes were predictably smaller and simpler in construction.

Urban villas had porticoes, and living and dining rooms, and enjoyed beautiful views of the surrounding countryside. Art and murals adorned most homes and offered fascinating peeks into the residents’ lives.

Discovered amongst the Ruins of Pompeii in November 1824, the House of the Tragic Poet has interested scholars and writers for generations.

What makes this particular house truly stand out is not it’s size, but the numerous and exceptionally high quality of frescoes and mosaics that cover almost all it’s surfaces.

In the elaborate mosaics, actors gather backstage preparing for a performance. One character dresses, another plays a flute, and a few others surround a box of masks to be used during the performance.

A painting depicted a poet reciting his poetry, resulting in the name the ‘House of the Tragic Poet.’

Art historians and scholars have long been fascinated by the House of the Tragic Poet because of the unique way in which it juxtaposes images from different periods and locations throughout mythological Greece.

While famous for its Roman past, Pompeii was, in fact, earlier a Greek city, a history discernible through older excavations. No single angle within the villa allows one to view all of the images present. Instead, one is required to move around the villa, looking at different combinations of pieces.

This logistical fact allows viewers to draw on larger themes of Greek mythology, especially on the relationships between the powerful men and women and also the deities of ancient Greece.

Our Relationship with Art

In contemporary homes, the homeowner has little or no connection with the art on their walls. We do not produce or even commission art any more. Art is sometimes selected because it matches the ‘theme’ of a room, or shares a base colour palette, or adds a much needed ‘pop’.

The creation process usually excludes a specific end-owner and is (in the best case) a poignant and nuanced depiction of the zeitgeist of its times.

In its very worst avatar, art is made specifically for an art market. We are surrounded by the detritus of this depleted relationship in a crowded marketplace of Ganesha impressions, sleeping Buddhas and pleasing Bamboo groves.

Golden heads and sleeping bulls, shiny marketplace objects montaged into pop-culture flotsam and jetsam.

We don’t know the artist who makes the pieces.

And we usually don’t care.

Art comes to us through an elaborately curated and highly regulated marketplace that controls demand and supply. This market tells us what is cool and what is not, what may make a good ‘investment’ and which art is a ‘waste of money’.

The value of art is judged less by any deep impression on us but by the market-worthiness of the artist. Is she still productive? Is she producing pieces regularly to feed potential demand? When must a work of art be released?

How old is she? Is she nearing the end of her career?

There is even a documented study on price rise in the recent book The Economics of American Art, where the authors lay down the case for a “betting on a forthcoming funeral effect”.

By examining auction records for 17 postwar American artists, they found that, on average, prices rose steadily in the five years preceding an artist’s death and sharply dropped the year she or he died.

In the art market, a complex interplay of factors governs the market value, ranging from critical reception, showings in museums and galleries, and which other institutions own the artist’s work.

The art may have a diminishing ‘personal’ relevance. We may buy it because we like its colour, shape or theme. It may be an investment, like a fossil fuel stock. It may be an out-of-favour heirloom.

We may buy it from a market like the other anonymous items in our refrigerators.

It was made by someone else, for something else.

It has a decreasingly rare connection with our lives that unfold in front of it.

It was made by someone else, for something else. What is its performative function? What is it for?

And, how is this paradigm of Art different from the paradigm of Pompeii? To trace the origins of the deep functionality of the frescoes and murals of Pompeii, we must go back to ancient Roman neuroscience.

The Roman orator was adept at memorising large speeches, complicated deductions and holding large amounts of content in his head. Memory was valued more than the ability to read.

To be able to grapple with vast reservoirs of oratory, they developed sophisticated mnemonic devices, such as The Method of Loci or the Roman Room technique.

The Roman Room is a memory technique for spatialising (mapping to physical space) varied points of a complex narrative and then conjuring them up at will by ‘walking’ through this space mentally.

This entire construct was mapped to familiar spaces and called into their speeches by mentally wandering through it. This technique involves visualising a house, complete with all its details.

There are even guidelines from Cicero and Quintillian from the first century BC on selecting the right space, with adequate lighting, and how far back one needs to stand, in order to remember all the details.

They recommend using a variety of spacious rooms, where the mind can run freely. You first fix this home in your memory and then place all the ideas, stories, details, characters and elements of your oratory along with a long walkthrough of the house.

To then recount this piece, you need to walk through the house, recollecting details along the way, piecing your narrative together bit by bit.

The Home is a Memory palace, and each piece of Art on the wall is an Anchor.

This powerful technique survives to this day. Memory responds to deep training, constant practice, and can be expanded through rigorous practice, a device that survives to this day.

The 2006 World Memory Champion, Clemens Mayer, used a 300-point-long journey through his house to memorise 1040 random digits in a half hour. Another memory champion Gary Shang used the Method of Loci to memorise the value of Pi to 65,536 digits.

Romans made memory a centrepiece of the education in Rhetoric, and it was a fundamental part of almost all schooling of the time. Trained in this amazing art of oratory, a Roman thinker would close his eyes, walk through this mental construct, and simultaneously construct his oratory.

The murals in the House of the Tragic Poet may well have been an elaborate Memory palace, allowing its homeowner to attach memories, points of narrative discourse, mental notes, vocational clues and even values for the family, to the decoration of his house.

The art of the walls served a deeply performative purpose, with the homeowner enjoying a fundamentally different relationship with the artists executing the work.

Each panel was carefully conceived, drawn to size, and executed with a level of meticulousness that was the hallmark of the Roman artist. The sections of its walls show layers upon layers of expensive pigments, built up as per the Vitruvian guidelines of the age.

Kids of the 90s will vividly remember the Boombox.

The earliest Boomboxes featured one or two cassette tape recorders and an AM/FM radio. This translated to a generation of mix-tapes, glitchy recordings, and lightning fast finger reflexes ( to catch the beginning of your favourite song exactly after the RJ stopped her long winded introduction. ) Later, a CD player ( and even LP players ) got added on, fuelling the desire for even louder and heavier bass. These “Ghetto blasters” slowly got super heavy and unwieldy, some of the larger ones weighing in at over 12 Kg.

In ancient culture, Memoria was one of the primary means of transmission from one generation to another, and the key example, the ‘exemplum’ or paradigm, was the common vehicle through which tradition was transmitted.

The frescoes and mosaics had to be done ‘in-situ’ and they would have been deeply autobiographical and closely supervised.

This allowed a wealth of nuance and detail to enter the process of creation, in an involved, symbiotic relationship between Artist and Patron.

This deep relationship between the ancient Artist and Patron served a highly functional purpose. Beyond any aesthetic considerations, the art on the walls enabled its owner to hold complex narratives in his head, and complemented his entire working life.

It echoed themes of importance for him and his family, and became an active participant in his psyche. Externalised value systems, communications to patrons and clients, ideas of home and self, of varied roles in the family, all were coded into the frescoes.

The home then becomes a real world anchor to a vast shared mental ‘Memory palace’ that the family operates in. Shared memories facilitated the transfer of traditions, values and culture.

The Art on the walls facilitated a familial continuity, both in shared memory and shared worldview.

When we deplete the transcendental relationship between artist and patron to the vagaries of a speculative marketplace, something invaluable is lost.

The art on the wall depletes into purely a sign of conspicuous consumption.

Devoid of meaning, its only purpose is to complement the colour palette of the room in which it hangs.

This relationship fails to demand more from the patron or the artist.

The Market values only Art that sells, not Art that “means”.

Maybe there is a crying need for a new relationship. We have relegated most of our mundane mnemonic tasks to our phones and other gadgetry. If we had to build physical homes that create a theatre for deeply performative art, what might that art mean to us?

What art would you commission that elevates your own existence? What art would allow you to enjoy a new relationship with the artist apart from the one the market dictates?

What is the Art you would hang in your Memory palace?