SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs: The O2 / Millennium Dome, Greenwich, London15th November 2007 – 30 August 2008 (AVE)

“Welcome to the greatest comeback tour in 3000 years!” Tutankhamun Press Conference, 13.11.2007

<sup>“This time, when Tutankhamun returns to London, he also brings his family with him. Not only will people learn about the life and magic of the most famous boy king, but they will also have the opportunity to learn firsthand about this important period of time in ancient Egyptian history.” Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

“No other race has since been so incessantly obsessed with death as the Egyptians, or has so absurdly-wishfully accepted it as the true life. None lavished so much preparation on the art of dying, none paid so much attention to provision for the dead in the other world… A culture of death was thus completely sounded out in Egypt, by deep immersion in death." Ernst Bloch, 'Hopeful Images Against Death'; The Principle of Hope Vo 3, The MIT Press, 1995.

“Only when death is conceived in its full ontological essence can we have any methodological assurance in even asking what may be after death; only then can we do so with meaning and justification.” Martin Heidegger, Being & Time, 1927.</sup>

Minus his mummy and famous funerary mask, Tutankhamun is back in town for the first time since his solo appearance at the British Museum 35 years ago, and now making a come back with family in tow at the O2 Millennium Dome, London. The exhibition is billed as Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs and displays 130 artefacts, many which have never been seen before in the UK. They are presented in 11 low-lit galleries each focusing on a theme such as Daily Life in Ancient Egypt, Traditional Religion and Death, Burial and the Afterlife : after leaving them we come into the awful exhibition shop selling vulgar Tutankhamun trash like the meretricious Mummy CD rack and a grotesque sarcophagus tissue box that dispenses through its snout!

While many have criticised the reasonably priced £20 ticket entrance, Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, rightly defended it: "If you go to the cinema you pay £15, and maybe you go to sleep. Here you see beautiful artefacts, you learn…Egypt gave you a lot of free meals. When the Tutankhamun exhibition came to London 35 years ago, Egypt got zero money ... We didn't get a penny and the British Museum are still making money." Hawass also added: "There are no more free meals... This exhibition, and the next in five years' time, will make $140 million (67.5 million pounds) for Egypt," which will be invested straight back into the urgent excavation, restoration and conservation of Egyptian burial sites and monuments - and ticket sales have already topped 325,000 for the London show alone.

Waiting for the late starting press conference to begin,  I had an uncanny sensation that impending doom lay ahead: Hawass had been delayed in traffic for two hours and I was wondering if this was a sign of the ‘curse’ that accompanies our tampering with Tutankhamun? I felt somehow we shouldn’t be there and these artefacts should be back home and still buried - for the ancient Egyptians went to extraordinary lengths to keep their beings and things buried and hidden out of sight for the afterlife and not for our crass contemporary consumer consumption.

I was rather apprehensive about reviewing an exhibition on Tutankhamun since translated his name reads: In the Image of Amun – and Amun translated is: The Hidden One. To my mind Tutankhamun – being In the Image of the Hidden One should have remained hidden and buried. We have no right to disturb the dead and should allow them to rest in peace - not in pieces.

For on 26 November 1922, the raider Howard Carter burgled Tutankhamun's tomb and plundered and pillaged everything in sight, badly damaging the pharaoh’s body in the process as his greedy colonialist hands wrenched at the jewellery and relics covering the mummy. Even though the majority of the objects ended up in the Cairo Museum this was still blatant theft, grave robbing.

At the press conference Hawass also attacked the British Museum for stalling on its decision on whether to ‘lend’ the Rosetta Stone for the opening of Egypt's £300m Grand Museum in 2012: "The answer is not a straightforward yes or no from the British Museum. They say they must see the museum; but they know it is not finished until 2012 ... We are not trying to keep these artefacts forever. I am disappointed." Yet we tend to forget that Nelson’s troops plundered the Rosetta Stone in the first place so it is not ‘ours’ to ‘lend’ and it should now be returned back home.

The surrounding soundscape of eerie Egyptian muzak seemed to coalesce well with the subdued and sinister lighting, which worked wonderfully for the Balustrade Showing Akhenaten and Family Under the Aten (crystalline limestone) where light and shadow danced with delight in unison. The royal couple look like aliens making magical offerings to a solar spaceship, with its beaming rays of light bestowing the ankh (symbol of life) upon them.

Standing before the colossal Head of the Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) - the assumed father of Tutankhamun - one is stuck by his elongated and aquiline alien features and some people today believe (à la Stargate) that Akhenaten was actually an alien from out of space. Orthodox science of course, suggests that he suffered from Froehlich’s Syndrome, a glandular-hormonal disorder, or more likely from Marfan’s Syndrome, caused by an abnormal gene.

The most hypnotic work was Statue of Herwer (gilded wood) where the head of a hawk belongs ontologically to the body of man without looking out of place or merely attached afterwards. Nietzsche, Bataille, Bacon and Deleuze instinctively knew that the human is the animal in disguise and that there is no real distinction between being-human and being-animal. Thus the Brazilian Bororo tribesman's assertion: "I am a parrot" is no more absurd and arbitrary than asserting: "I am a man" - as Lacan argued. (Le Bororo dit "je suis un perroquet", nous disons "je suis moi" Jacques Lacan, 1978). According to this thinking, the human-being as being-animal was a logical and rational form of identification for ancient Egyptian mythology and ontology.

The most perfect portrait was the Face from a Composite Statue of Nefertiti (brown quartzite): the serenely sculptured mouth made me realise that Egyptian ‘art’ has never been surpassed. Her empty eyes see your death that has already come and her dry lips seem to make you freeze with their wet warmth; her eradicated ears still have a curious sense of being complete for even fragmented Egyptian sculpture has a sense of completeness and wholeness in which the very where fragmentation gives a sensation of fullness. Nefertiti's no-nose, empty eyebrows and hair that is not there are , paradoxically, still present - as ‘negative spaces’ breeding and becoming ‘positive forces’: we always fill in what is not there. (Dr. Hawass mentioned that his team were still searching for the burial site of Nefertiti as well as for Anthony and Cleopatra.)

Today, we cannot turn stone into spirit like the Egyptians could because the Egyptian’s ‘art’ was not a representation of being but rather being-in-itself as pure presentation where art is being and being is art. Of course, the ancient Egyptians had no concept of ‘art’ as such - nor did they need one: what we nominate as ‘Egyptian Art’ now was for them simply ‘Egyptian Being.’ This is one reason why ‘Egyptian art’ still looks so fresh and new and, ironically, much more modern than so-called ‘contemporary art’ which paradoxically always looks dated, dull and dreary. ‘Egyptian art’ has a frisson of freshness and newness because it shines the presence of being – as being-there - whilst ‘contemporary art’ is the absence of being – the absence of art - as nothing-there.

At the press conference nearly everyone was photographing and filming and I really wondered if such uncanny artefacts could really be recorded by our modern means of reproduction. Would we all be cursed for pillaging and plundering their ancient stolen images through such vile things as mobile phone cameras?

I also felt that many were recording simply as a strategy to avoid having to confront the artefacts face-to-face, many of which make us confront ourselves as our own death to come This is not a Heideggerian being-towards-death but an ancient Egyptian being-after-death as the afterlife that today we no longer know. The artefacts seemed to be saying: 'We do not want you taking images of us – we want to go back home." I realised there and then that it was essentially impossible to write about such enigmatic and elusive artefacts: they may remain but have a desire to be hidden and buried out of sight. So-called ‘Egyptian art’ does not require interpretation but contemplation for it has nothing to say: remaining silent, it wants only to shine ahead and protect the dead. The golden gleam of Egyptian art’s invisible shining, somehow blinds our sight like the sun, and we stand dazzled and dazed, shaken and stirred: ‘Egyptian art’ shimmers constantly with vacillating vibration, shuddering between life and death and becoming the afterlife. This 'art’ is the flux of being – the vibration of being - hovering between being-alive and being-dead.

As I left this rather eerie exhibition, bedazzled and dazed I came out into the clinical coldness of the tacky and tawdry O2 Millennium Dome, akin to a miserable American shopping mall full of ugly emptiness and a sign of our culture in decline. Displaying Tutankhamun's adorable artefacts in an abomination such as the O2 Dome is antithetical to the sacred and secret function of Egyptian burial – and the Dome was cursed before the exhibition arrived!


Alex Verney-Elliott

Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs is at The O2 Millennium Dome, London, until August 30, 2008. Details: 0844 844 0003.