Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality (Ashmolean, April 2023)

Theseus and the Minotaur: Roman copies of Greek originals, National Archaeological Museum, Athens (although you won't find Theseus in this exhibition) 

“Labyrinth” is a good word to describe this exhibition. For anyone like me, coming to Knossos for the first time, the exhibition does not clarify much. By the end of the exhibition, just three or four rooms, I felt more in a muddle about Knossos than when I started. Now I have bought the guide, and I am reading the Wikipedia entry, and I hope to have a better idea of the subject at some point. But I don’t expect exhibitions to push me back to the literature to try to establish what was going on. The exhibition lacked: 

• a chronology of main events 
• a comparison of how Minoan civilization related to other ancient societies such as ancient Athens or Egypt 
• a full assessment of what Arthur Evans did at the site that was controversial, and how archaeologists might do things differently today 
• detail about many of the locations and objects. 

For example, the throne room of the palace is the subject of many debates, but these were barely mentioned in the exhibition. This was a show that left you wanting more. You could say the exhibition was trying to cover too much, but it wasted some of the resources it had. There was a looping video that purported to be an account by curators to manage collections, but that seemed so tendentious that I skipped it. It was by Elisabeth Price, and is listed in the Exhibition catalogue but without any description. There was a video of the computer game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, but no explanation of why this might be relevant to the myth of Knossos (apart from it being set in a mythical palace resembling the Minoan city). All in all, this was a paradox: an exhibition about a topic that the Ashmolean could cover better than any other institution (given that Arthur Evans was keeper at the Ashmolean for many years, and many of the notes from the excavation are held by the Ashmolean. Yet the exhibition left you wanting more information. Perhaps what was lacking was an overall theme. Was this the story of Arthur Evans? Was it the story of Knossos? Was it the fascinating of a myth (the bull and the labyrinth) even in the modern world? Was it a comparison of how archaeological techniques have changed in the last 125 years? The combination of all these simply caused confusion. 

The Exhibition Catalogue 

I didn’t find the catalogue very helpful. It begins with an irrelevant paragraph about Arthur Evans as Ashmolean director, rather than excavator of Knossos, and then goes on to state “hundreds of thousands of visitors … [will] know Knossos as the location of the Labyrinth” [introduction, page 16]. Is this established? Was Knossos really the site of labyrinth? I thought this was by no means certain. The next section of the guide, “Introducing Knossos” begins with a chapter on the conservation of the site – what happened to the background and overview of Minoan civilization? We have to piece together for ourselves that Evans studied one small part of Knossos pre-history. None of the essays in this section introduce Minoan Knossos; they are all about conservation and museology (despite the Ashmolean’s director asserting on page 7 that “museum organisation and management … is not the stuff of exhibitions” – it certainly seems to be more important in this catalogue than anything telling you what Minoan civilization was. Typical of the catalogue is the statement: Regardless of the various interpretive approaches followed over the course of time [ref 34], the material remains of the Minoan world and the masterpieces of its art continue to enchant and fascinate all who visit. [Catalogue, p33] Quite what the “interpretive approaches” might be are relegated to a footnote – not worth discussing here, clearly. Even the depictions of the Minotaur cause confusion. Picasso’s etching La Minotauromachie “seems to represent the artist’s own inner turmoil” - what is meant by this? Later, the description of the impressive sculpture of the Minotaur, by Despina Ignatiadou, from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, replicates word for word her own text on the NAM website. However, on the NAM website, both the Minotaur and Theseus are illustrated, while in this exhibition, the text refers to both figures, but there is an illustration of only one.

Mr Deeds goes to Town (1936)

 

Deeds held high by his many supporters

Watching this film struck a note of horror in my brain. I’ve always been wary of Hollywood populism, but this film, which seemed almost to replicate scenes of the storming of Congress following the Trump defeat, made me feel very uneasy indeed.

I have complaints about the film as film, and about the story. Let’s begin with the story:

• We are expected to believe that a small-town poet can outsmart the best legal brains in America simply by the conviction that he is right. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) embodies the American values most praised by Hollywood: simple, unsophisticated, uncultured, belief in instinct rather than reason, belief in fists rather than argument. In other words, “right” overcomes “might”.
• At the same time, the simpleton Deeds has to demonstrate to that he can size people up w
• A lawyer claiming to represent the common-law wife of the deceased is literally sent kicking; yet Deeds accepts at face value hundreds of people waiting at his front door in the expectation that he will give them a hand-out. There is no suggestion that Deeds might want to take advice before he gives his fortune away. There is no suggestion that those requesting funds might not really be in need. No, under the film’s populist ethos, if Deeds thinks they are honest, they are honest.

·       There is a revealing scene where Deeds is elected chair of the opera company. When he learns they have a deficit, he says they should trade so as to make a profit. He doesn’t have any time for the argument that opera is the kind of cultural activity that requires some kind of financial support to survive. Funny that small-town Deeds nevertheless has a very clear attachment to American capitalism, as if there were no subsidies in the United States. The Metropolitan Opera, by the way, has more than half its funding via private donations. No doubt if Deeds were running the Met he would increase ticket prices further.  

And now for my comments on the film:

·       Gary Cooper looked far too intelligent to be playing this role James Stewart could have done it better.

·       A film that is supposed to be screamingly funny had some surprisingly dull moments. The courtroom scene at the end dragged, unsurprisingly, since the leading actor said nothing for almost the entire duration of the scene.

·       We are expected to believe, for the resolution of the plot, that Longfellow Deeds overcomes his abhorrence for the reporter Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur) who has shamelessly exploited him and made money from his behaviour. A few days later, he marries the very same reporter.

·       The story of Babe Bennett is so full of holes it is impossible to believe. She appears as a homeless down-and-out in front of Longfellow Deeds, who looks after her. 24 hours later she is revealed to be a stenographer in a steady job, and a few hours after that Deeds visits her house and her ‘sister’. None of this tallies with her purported background as related to Deeds.

·       It’s never clear how Deeds got his money in the first place. He doesn’t appear to do much other than write poor poems and play tuba in the local town band. Perhaps, like Trump, he inherited money, which enabled him not to have to worry about earning a living.

·       The film is full of inconsistencies. Deeds is adamant that nobody should bend down to help him put on his trousers – a very egalitarian idea. But Deeds subsequently has no problems being waited on by not one but two servants. Not so egalitarian, then.

Overall, Mr Deeds goes to Town demonstrated the truth of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony: that the United States produces more powerful propaganda in defence of its system than repressive states where any dissent is punished. To think, people paid to watch this film! To be honest, I watched the film for free on YouTube, via an excellent copy that had been restored thanks to some funding, something we all benefitted from.