Monday, March 08, 2004

Give the Dog a Bone

Kel came home from the Asian agog about their archaeology exhibit.  The museum had mounted a fascinating pair of shows of classical and modern Korean art, including many pieces never seen outside of Asia, such as pottery so precious that it had been repaired, when broken, with pure gold; and also a number of large contemporary works of stunning subtlty and beauty. But the thing that really impressed her was the dig in the back.  According to exhibit materials, when the museum site was excavated a few years ago during the renovation of the old main library into a museum, they’d found a cache of ancient cast-bronze dogs - most likely made in what is now Korea, about 2,000 years ago.  These figures are exceedingly rare even in the far east and their presence in a pit in San Francisco’s Civic Center was a fascinating archaeological mystery, which several local historians discussed in detail and enthusiastically on a video loop that played next to the dig.  Truly incredible.

I went to the museum about a month or so ago to check it out.  It’s a fake. 

The exhibit was a concept piece by Korean artist Cho Duck-Hyun, who fabricates artifacts, buries them, and then guides the unearthing of them a year or so later as pseudo-archaeology.  His artistic media, he says, are history and imagination.  His work was thorough and convincing and I had to read the fine print carefully to see through it. 

I therefore take morbid glee in a recent front-page story in the local paper that bones actually disinterred during the rehab of that site five years ago are almost ready to be re-buried.  Ninety-seven sets of earthly remains have lain at the site since gold rush days, when the area, then a graveyard, was cleared out to be the site of the city’s first specially-built city hall, a grand domed (and doomed) structure that first occupied the lot.  Bodies were dug up and moved to a new final resting place, but apparently not all of them - City Hall was destroyed in 1906 (along with all records of who was buried where) and got rebuilt one block to the west; the site of the old city hall was cleared for a new main library and this process turned up plenty more bodies.  In the 90s they built a new library next door and rebuilt the old main into the new Asian - finding even more bodies. 

So who needs fake artifacts?  The mystery that Cho tried to evoke with his artful ploy exists among us in real life.  Pioneer bones, nameless and ancient (by west coast standards, anyway) lay hidden in cardboard boxes even as tourists gawked in ignorant amusement at make-believe relics from just a year or two ago. 

Art imitates life - and sometimes, art imitates death.  We walk daily through inspirational and ghastly galleries, and the exhibits are changed on an hourly basis.