Bothroi at Centocamere

In 2007 I was spending my time exploring Los Angeles, culling materials from the great sloughing off that was happening from the latest economic bust and forming them into big knots of material. When I was invited to do a project for an exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art, I proposed monumentalizing my everyday practice of gleaning: a monthlong circumnavigation of California, with the museum as the repository of the materials I collected. My proposal accepted, I embarked on this trip, moving through suburbs, industrial landscapes, abundant coastal habitats, and volcanic desert wastelands. The puzzle quickly became what to take and what to leave, what was detritus and what was landscape, what was the object and what were its surroundings. As I continued, I became aware, slowly and hypnotically, of a horizon that was always present and which defined the object in space—myself and my truck included. What laid on top of this horizon I took, what sank into or beneath it I left behind.

Between 1950 and 1956, a team led by Gaspare Oliverio, director of the National School of Anthropology in Rome, assisted by archaeologist Elisa Lissi, conducted an excavation at Centocamere, the former site of a temple devoted to Aphrodite, located near the city of Locri in Reggio Calabria. Despite the fact that this area had already been the subject of a number of major excavations, they discovered a massive complex of bothroi, or pits associated with ritual feasting. Lissi described this excavation in a short article accompanied by a few photographs, which is the most substantial publicly available documentation of what was found.

The bothroi are described in the catalog of the excavations as “burial sites” of sacred materials, which has some logic, if one has spent significant time reconstructing the lives of people from the deep past primarily through their necroculture. This definition, though, takes the idea of resolution perhaps too far and fails to ask what other meanings are suggested by the forms themselves. There is for example no consideration of these hard-to-categorize objects as sculpture, though this is a possibility, given a generalized designation of sculpture as upright, totemic, durable representations. The bothroi did contain variations on totemic figures, albeit in fragile ceramic rather than stone or bronze, but the documentation treats them as parts within a larger formal and conceptual practice of assemblage rather than as an end unto themselves.

For archaeologists working in the 1950s, there was very little in this assemblage practice to suggest sculpture, or even art. Italian artworks with clear votive referents, like Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), wouldn’t be made until 1961, and the Arte Povera movement was even further down the road. But from our vantage point, the emphasis on totemic fragments, ritual programmatic processes, and ephemeral, organic materials—all markers of the conceptual shift that has come to define art practice—were already available in the bothroi at Centocamere.

In photographs taken during the excavation, we can see that the first encounter with the bothroi was of an irregular cluster of forms in an otherwise featureless field. The excavations then took a surprising turn: Rather than removing the bothroi layer by layer, the earth around each deposit was carefully removed, so that in subsequent photographs we see these pits transformed, briefly, into freestanding forms, and to a degree totemic objects. This interstitial form, recorded only in photographs, embodies a collision of conceptual practices—the votive and the archaeological. In the space of this image these chthonic forms are forced, briefly, to perform an ouranic function, one we might recognize for example in the sculptural remnants of various ritual feasts that have been staged as art.

After documenting the bounded forms they had created, the archaeologists deconstructed the bothroi. The next available image is of objects spread out on a black field, carefully cleaned and displayed in an artfully chaotic arrangement. One imagines that there was a stage beyond this, when the various component parts were catalogued and subsumed within a taxonomic framework.

This path from objects entangled in landscape to objects within a taxonomic order recalls the production of the bothroi, but in reverse. The ceramic serving dishes and cookware, domestic totems and domesticated animals, were part of quotidian life before they were consumed in a ritual feast. Somewhere during or after the feast, many of them were deliberately broken or inscribed with devotional graffiti. On the horizon stage in which this took place, earth would need to be displaced to create a chthonic chamber into which the ritual space and feast energy were compressed, and the elements of quotidian life dissolved into a single mass. Over a period of approximately two hundred years, from the mid-sixth to the mid-fourth century BCE, within the boundaries of this chamber, this process was repeated 371 times.

How do we understand monumentality in relation to these objects? Are they individual works laid throughout an exhibition space, or do they constitute one single object of many parts, full of variance and mutation? Lissi described the structure of the works this way:

According to their surface arrangement they are divided into:

1) those that have no special markings and are distinguished from the rest of the layer by a different coloration of the earth, almost always very dark due to the presence of charcoal;

2) those with a total or partial covering of neatly arranged pebbles;

3) those with an amphora bottom, perforated, arranged vertically almost in the center of the surface of the bothros. One of them was contained in a wide-mouthed vessel.

According to their arrangement inside they are divided into:

1) those that present no order;

2) those that present a deliberate internal order, which generally consists of a dividing plane formed by roof tiles. Sometimes there is a plane of bones arranged with order.

This catalog of gestures allows that these “pits” were in fact deliberately formed, built from boundary to core, and ending always at the horizon. The apparent chaos of a haphazardly filled hole is only one of several approaches, perhaps no more chaotic than the archaeologists’ careful arrangement. Reading the simple lexicon of the work described by Lissi, one can think of alternatives to the notion that these are symbolic burials; perhaps they point instead to the practice since ancient times of preserving food in chambers underground, or to acts of planting or soil renewal, which these agricultural people would have been intimately familiar with. When I suggested to votive scholars Jessica Hughes and E. J. Graham that burying votives might be a form of conservation, solidifying boundaries in a museological sense, they objected, pointing out that in the mythos of this place and time, the world belowground was not static but rather a site of radical change and possibility. A gesture does not end belowground. If anything, it may be a trigger for an explosion of activity.

In early Greek cosmology/topography, there was a split between the world above the horizon and the world below. Though not a strict boundary, there was the world of the ouranic and the world of the chthonic, the world of air and the world of earth. Both were active spaces, with their own rules and attributes. We might think of the ouranic as the standing work, on a pedestal or leveled ground. It is the singular form visible from all angles and fixed in its boundaries. It is covered in light, photographable. It is the thought that aspired to being iconic. It is authored. Chthonic is submerged. It enters some part of the planet, concealed within earth or water. It is seen and then gradually and deliberately hidden from view. It becomes a story to share, a location to reveal. Its material form is metabolized. It is experienced mainly by its makers.

The photograph bridges these spaces, embodying perhaps the inherent shifting of the boundary we imagine between them. Like the documents of conceptual art, they are a means of capturing otherwise-ephemeral materials, recognizing and harnessing the discursive power of the image as “proof.” We might then view this archaeological practice of excavating votive deposits as an exhibition, one that exists on two levels: as a temporally finite set of actions, and as a document of the same that is widely available. The first mode is a discrete, intimate space that happens for the excavators, between the time in which the votives are uncovered and when they are removed from their context. Like Robert Barry standing off frame as the released gas expands into the atmosphere, or Ana Mendieta watching the fire slowly dissipate or waves washing away her marks, there is an experiential component to this work that quickly dematerializes.

The photographs produced during the excavation of votives in situ are a document of the excavators’ complex participation in these acts of viewing set in motion many hundreds or thousands of years ago, through objects activated by rituals to perform in perpetuity. In documenting their own in situ practice, the archaeologists generated this second kind of exhibition, one that is available to us as a general audience. By viewing these images, I project myself into the space as a participant. All this is further complicated by the fact that the votive deposits are themselves a record of complex ritual actions, with their own formal syntax and cultural resonances, and the photographic archives, when seen as a whole, themselves form a complex, almost cinematic assemblage.

I propose this entangled form of exhibition and practice not to explain votive practitioners and their methodologies, but rather to make apparent the complexity of our engagement with the vast temporal and material structure in which we are entangled, and to see these votive objects/actions as continually generative. It is probably too much to claim these works and others like them as proto-monumental sculptures laying a foundation for our current engagement with ideas of collectivity, ephemerality, metabolized forms, and deep time. But exploring the contradictions inherent in these objects that are so deeply entangled in their site, and the rituals of excavation that seek to extract them, has given me a framework for thinking about the fraught negotiation of form running through our imaginary horizon lines—our mania for living on solid ground and seeming need to disavow the space beneath us, yet simultaneous desire to be immersed in the loamy space just beyond our perception.