 Okay, without further ado, I'll introduce our speaker and let him tell us what he has to say. Our speaker today is Doug Bailey, Professor of Visual Archaeology, correct? In the Department of Anthropology at San Francisco State University. He probably would not object if I said he's a determinately eccentric archeologist because while he does the standard things like field work in the Balkans, including with Ruth early on in Bulgaria and then in Romania and all kinds of interesting and creative ways and has interest in things like neolithic settlement and figurines. It's probably fair to say that what really is his intellectual passion maybe more centrally is expanding archeology and trying to find new work for archeology. And we'll hear about a lot of that today, but particularly the boundary between archeology and our history and how archeologists can be doing sorts of things that actually involve new sorts of production in our own society. Maybe that's a fair way to put it. But we'll hear all about that because he's going to give us the intriguingly entitled talk, art slash archeology, a space beyond explanation, the ineligible project. So before the police come and declare an alto, I better turn things over to Doug so that he can tell us what he's been up to. All right, great, thank you very much. Thank you, fabulous. It's always interesting to hear one's introductions. Yeah, let's kill those lights, fabulous. Okay, so I was just saying to Ruth that the first sort of paper I ever gave at a invited paper was here at Berkeley and my son was eight weeks old and he sat in the corner and stole the show. He's now 27, so that's a little bit of a time check. All right, so what you're gonna get today is fresh right out of the birthing pool about a project I'm working on, well, other people in this room are working on called actually the title of the project is Ineligible. Although we tried to get some funding recently and they approved the application, but the title, because the title was called Ineligible, they didn't contact us because they thought we were ineligible. We did get the money eventually. All right, here we go. So I'm fascinated by the relationships between art and archeology and they're all kinds of relationships. So there's a good history of artists who've been working with archeologists or working as archeologists. There's also a pretty good history of archeologists making art. There's nothing new about that. And much of the work that they do is like, ooh, that's quite cool and I'll show you some examples in a minute. But I'm suggesting, I've suggested in a couple of publications in the last three or four years that this is subject bounded and I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute. And so what I've been investigating, exploring, examining, experimenting with is a series of projects that move beyond those boundaries. And trying to come towards something which I'm calling an art archeology, which is an effective political practice. So we could all do an archeology of art. In fact, I made my career starting out as someone studying prehistoric art and we could do this and fabulous work, really important work. We could, here's Mark Dion's tape. Time is big, if you know about this work. Mark Dion, artist, went along the banks of the Thames when the tide was down, collected objects and created a faux archeology, pretended to be an archeologist. In fact, he talks about this as being a dilettante. I'm not talking about this work. We could look at this guy's work, Simon Calary, an artist, British artist. I went and worked with archeologists on a site in Britain and was fascinated by the trenches that archeologists were digging. And so he filled in one of these, or surfaced one of these trenches with plaster. Then took that plaster away and made an artwork, made a piece of art that is a representation of that site. And I find this interesting. This is interesting work. Not quite curious, it's exciting, it's a different take on the past. But it still sits within boundaries, disciplinary boundaries. We could look at Aaron Watson's interesting photographic work. This is his representation of a prehistoric stone circle in Britain. Again, I'm fascinated by the way in which he is manipulating or mediating or remediating that site in a way which is outside the boundaries of how we usually understand archeological description and certainly archeological explanation and interpretation. But really the aha moment, which I didn't realize I was having it when I was having it, was in Portugal in 2000 at an EAA conference. And there was a paper, it wasn't a paper actually, it was a sound event. And this is really hard to hear. We've got it cranked all the way up and I'm, so if you just stop chewing your Pringles for a second. You all hear that? This is a composition made from sounds of prehistoric stone tools. So there's no attempt here to say this is what happened in prehistory, although Ian Cross and Ezra Zubro do publish about that. They call them lithophones. This is actually making creative work today using objects from the past. And I heard this and I was like, whoa. This is not about explanation or interpretation. This is creating something brand new, which sits outside of the boundaries, both of archeology and I would suggest of music and of art. It sort of works in a third space. Here's another piece of work by the British artist, Claude Heath, who does something he calls blind drawing. I don't know if that's a politically correct way to call it, but that's his term. He takes objects, he gets blindfolded and he gets an object in one hand, he can't see it and he draws it with his other hand. So his sense of that object is only through touch. This is his reading of the Venus of Billendorf. His interpretation of it, if you will. It's an artistic output. It's creative. Doesn't intend any interpretation or explanation, but this excites me. I have weird interests, as you can see. We took Claude to Romania on a project we were running funded by the EU and we asked him, we let him loose in the museum and he made a series of works doing this technique of blind or unsighted drawing. So this is his artwork based on that half, that half did Neolithic ads, the lithic ads from 6,000 or 4,500, 5,000 BC. We came back from the field one day and he'd taken early Neolithic core, beautiful blade core, probably 5,900 Cal BC. He put it in a bowl of ink and then took it out and started making art with it. We were worried the museum were gonna throw us out. They didn't. Luckily, they were into it as well. So there are lots of other examples I can show you of Claude's work. Some of you will know a project I worked on 2009, 2010 called On Earthed based in the UK at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, which we were trying to work with figurines, my area of interest, specialism, both Balkan, East European, but also Japanese Jomon prehistoric figurines. But the goal was really to do it in a different way, not to just write a catalog of an exhibition and present explanations and chronologies and typologies. So we had an exhibition in which we mixed and matched prehistoric artifacts and modern cultural material like Barbie dolls, bonsai trees. We had an exhibition, published a book, and I won't spend too much time talking about that because I've done that here before, but just to give you one example, this is the work of Sean Caiton, a British performance artist. We gave him to hold these Jomon Japanese prehistoric artifacts and said, go for it, make work. And he made these beautiful paintings and pastels and gouache and all kinds of things. And he also wrote this wild narrative. Heavy, filmy eyes, fervid and gluey slumber. Then the bottom, blood spirals, milk spirals, sperm spirals, mix and spin. Well, the museum there wasn't into this. Good thing they didn't control the publication. So the book exists as this strange mixture. So things are starting in my mind of ways, new ways of working with materials. Same project, Unearthed in the Norwich exhibition on the book. We gave some of these figurines to a Japanese photographer, Kuo Shimatsunaki, and he decided to make negative prints of them. Sure, why not? But the coolest thing is that he sort of activates these objects in ways which they've never been activated before. They seem to have life and light spilling out of them. Unexpected result. Doesn't have any interpretive explanatory. It's not about publishing a journal article, but it's actually fascinating work, which I think Probe pushes us beyond boundaries. Other work, I've published a bunch of weird montage chapters in otherwise traditional archeological anthologies and played with ideas of text and image. Again, not to make an argument in text, but to probe and expand the dimensions of what we do and how we think. And the most recent of those, there are four or five of them in publication. The most recent one came out in this book. Has anyone seen this book? It's out recently. Time and history and prehistory. I did something really strange with how different animals perceive the passage of time. And then throughout the article, all these footprints, it's crazy. Just check it out. I'm not gonna waste our time with this today. And I wanna show you one other project which I worked on before I get onto this new project. So I'm just trying to set the scene now a little bit. I was running a project in Eastern Europe, in Romania working in early Neolithic pit houses or pit structures, funded major project. But as we moved through the project, I felt less and less confident that what we were doing, it's perhaps held any validity. That I can write a book and articles about what happened 6,100 CalBC years ago. So I ended up writing a very different book in which I looked not at pit houses but at the process of cutting holes. And I looked at three major artists, Lucio Fontana, Italian post-war artists who was famous for slashing and puncturing canvases, Gordon Matta-Clark, American artists in the 60s and 70s, and his work in Paris, Conical Intersect, in which he cut holes through buildings, and the work of Ron Athe, whose performance art in Minneapolis, St. Paul in 1994, in which he cut the back of African-American man who was HIV positive with a razor blade, and symbols loosely tied to African tribal marks, blotted the blood with paper towels, then ran the paper towels on clothesline out over the audience. Almost led to the defunding of the National Endowment for Arts, but fabulous work. So all three of these artists work on cutting holes and surfaces, and that's another project. There's a book out there which you can check out if you want to. So I wrote the book, you know, you do that, and there's the book, and there's the table of contents, all nice, big press, yay, all that stuff, you're excited about. But I realized that this really wasn't enough. I'm still within the boundaries of my discipline. I'm still within the limits. Since the book was about cutting holes in the surface, in the ground, whether you're in the Neolithic, or whether you're in post-war Italy, or whether you're in Paris, I decided I had to cut the book. So I made 50 artist versions of this book, which I cut holes, various holes through different parts of the book to make the point that we can write and talk about these things a lot, but until we start doing stuff, making things, we're still within our disciplinary boundaries. And there's nothing wrong with our discipline. I'm just trying to look over that wall. And so I sent a bunch of these out, and Ruth, you have one of these, don't you? How is that possible? I'm sure, I offered to send you one. I cut her out, thank you, that's excellent. Perfect, man. But then I realized I needed to do something else. Because I think if we write about stuff, like action, agency, whatever you wanna talk about it, you gotta find some way to do it. See, if we're writing about the impact holes have in the ground, or in a building, you should put some holes in your work and see what happens and see what the effect is. I found that a lot of what I wanted to do involved going out and making things happen, as opposed to just perhaps talking about it. Okay, enough about me. Had an email from a Portuguese sculptor about four or five years ago. She was doing a dissertation, PhD dissertation on the interaction of art and archeology. And she'd read a few of my things and she sent me this email and said, would you mind looking at my application for my PhD? Happy to have, you know, we get these things a lot. And depending what time of day they come in and what day of the week it is, you say sure or not. And I think for all graduate students and young academics, always say yes. Because you never know what's gonna happen. So this woman is making these outrageous over life-sized versions of these prehistoric Romanian figurines. And that in itself was cool enough. But she and I are now curating an exhibition which opens in Portugal on March 6th, runs to the end of June. Which is gonna have three installations. One of them is of her work. So check this out. She made this incredible figurine incredibly complex. If you're a ceramicist, try to make something that large. Before she found, before she tried even to fire it, she decided she should break it into pieces and cut it up. So she did that and then she's fired the pieces. And part of her installation is gonna be about the pieces of this figurine which never got fired. Don't know what's going on there. But I'm excited about the stimulation that that brings to me in thinking about what we do. We'll get back to Sara Navarra's work in a minute. More recently, anybody go to tag in Syracuse? Excellent, I can say anything I want. No one will. Was it a session about art and archeology? So I said, well, what should we do? I had started working with artifacts from San Francisco. Specifically those excavated before they built the Trans Bay Transit Center. And had been given 52 boxes of these objects. And we'll talk more about that in a second. Anyway, this amphora came from the excavations. Paleo West, I think the company's called Paleo West now. I think it was called something else before or it's changed its name. We didn't sell it. That was before, thank you. Anyway, so a bunch of artifacts they gave to our university as teaching our research tools. And this is one of them. So I took this to Syracuse and I just wanna play the little video that's on Vimeo at the moment. I can see it's a real-term storage vessel. Oh, no, why is it not on the screen? Oh, because it's a link. Oh my God, another of these links is gonna show up. That would really be a bummer. But if not, don't worry. Well, I, so, yes, and then run it here. Drag it out of the window. If I come out of PowerPoint, which I'm out of. Okay, and then I drag the other screen. If I go to my, there we go. There, how's this? Turned storage vessel from shipping. So we can look at in terms of World West Park and Law School study. We can look at the issues of trade and transportation in terms of materiality. But as I lived in San Francisco, and as I was flying out from a mess or oh, I don't know if you guys can fly around a lot, but this is like a new luggage. This is like an, almost like an amphora today. So when you go here to the baggage point, you see these things come out full, full of stuff. People are picking home. So I thought what we should do is insert one of these amphora into another. And I think that that's in the beginning, but I also feel that what we should do is perhaps do something else. And I think what I want to do is I'm excited by all the work I've been releasing things. So I don't want to write too long to suggest what I'm doing for you. Okay, we don't need any more of that. I think you get the idea. Let's pop back to here. Slide show, play from current slide. And what we did with the amphora, we're on, is that people at the session adopted shards and took them home and then started to respond and send in, in fact, Ruth, I think this is your- That's my Sophie. That's your little shard there. There's one looking over the Hudson. I'm not quite sure. I think that's Randy up in, Randy and Ruth up in Binghamton. And there's a Facebook page where people send in their pictures about what their shards are doing today. Yeah, I don't know. So all of this was sort of interesting and exciting, but it really didn't get me to the place, I mean there was something missing. So I went back to some work I was just publishing at the time. This is an article that came out in 2017 in the Cambridge Archeological Journal, which I've tried to define this thing called art archeology, which I'm interested in doing. And it has three principle moments. Disarticulation, you break the object from its past. You remove it from that currency. You say it's no longer of value as an artifact or even an element of the past. You then repurpose that material. You treat the result, the broken shards of that pot, as raw material. As if you're an artist. As if you're using pigment or plaster or marble. And then you make a piece of work. You create something which has some disruptive potential. You make work that intervenes politically in some issue or debate. And perhaps the best example of this, although it's not archeological, comes from Kent Monkman's work. Does anyone know about Kent Monkman's work? Okay, thank you, good. So if you went to Stanford Cantor Museum two or three years ago, you would have seen this beautiful painting on the wall. And we're used to this sort of art historical tradition, right? And this is Monkman's work, history is painted by the victors. It's this huge landscape, American West. Yeah, 18th, 19th century. And if you walked in and you looked at it, if you didn't look too closely, you say, oh, look at the trees and the mountains and the water. This is of this incredible tradition of the empty landscape of the West. But if you look a little closer, there's some weird stuff going on here. Now Monkman took an original object, Albert Bierstadt's painting, disarticulated from its context, repurposed it to make his own painting, which then had a really quite specific political intention. Because if you zoom in at the strange painter in his or her, hip-high almost leather boots, and you look at the screen, or the painting, this, well, Miss Chief Egotistical. Miss Chief Egotistical. This is Kent Monkman's alter ego in his art. And among many other issues which Kent Monkman has engaged has been the Euro-American destruction of this continent, specifically in terms of sexuality. And this painting is important because it's the Sue Artists Red Horses, 1881, work about the victory by the Lakota at the Battle of Greasy Grass, which we may also know as the Battle of Little Bighorn. But of course the painting is ripped through with all kinds of other imagery, which make important statements about homoeroticism, about the exclusion of native and non-traditional sexual categories of gender. So Monkman is a really good example of doing this three-part thing. Disarticulation, repurposing, and disrupting. Let me show you another project, and this I talked about at length two years ago when I was here, so I'll just give you a couple slides, literally slides. It's a box of our archive from San Francisco State had a huge ethnographic anthropological archive there. Much very long story about how it was closed down through incompetence and lack of funding, but there was a set of slides which someone tried to throw away when this museum got closed. And we took those slides and looked at them and realized that the slides had been selected for a really specific set of, one might say, disturbing image sets. To do with, as an anthropologist, as a visual anthropologist, a tradition of anthropology, which we no longer practice, of head shapes and face shapes and ethnographic origin or sexual orientation, dissections of animals, x-rays of nine-month pregnant women, very disturbing dissections up at the top. And the question was, what do we do with these objects? And one of the result over the thing that one of the ways in which I dealt with this is to take these objects just like that on fora and to suggest that we needed to release them from the context, from the containers in which they were being held. And so at a project funded by the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in Oslo in 2017, we dissolved in bleach a lot of the images off of the plastic supports of these slides in a way of trying to liberate those individuals who had been trapped within that archive. And there's a whole literature on archives and releasing, which we can talk about perhaps some other time. But what we realized when we were doing this, and this was not our intention, we had no idea, but as the bleach removed or liberated that pigment, the dyes from the plastic support of the slide, it was almost as if that individual was being transposed into another medium, into a liquid. And the more we thought about this, the more we started to think about how that individual was being released back into some other format out of that entrapment in an anthropological study. All right, so that's been 30 minutes of getting us set up. Now I wanna talk about this new, so all that stuff is done, we can talk about that some other time, there are publications out there. I wanna now talk about this project called Ineligible. Now as all of you who live here know, there's something called the Transbake Transit Center, which is now reopened. But of course, in advance of its construction, there was a series of archeological excavations. In fact, there's an image from one of the trenches. And the material from that excavation was processed appropriately, detailed report written up. In fact, that's the offices of Peleo West in Walnut Creek a year and a half ago. All the boxes, many of the boxes from this site. And in working with these materials, and this is not something that would be new to many of you, there were determinations made by authorities, by people with archeological knowledge and experience, but what objects should be retained for study and those which could be stored or gotten rid of? And those that could be stored or gotten rid of were deemed not to have historic value or duplicates, and they were called Ineligible. Christina Alonso, who had done the master's degree at San Francisco State, was working at Peleo West and offered us some of these materials as teaching aids, fabulous resource. So we took loads of them. In fact, I'm here, I'm not in the picture, but I'm loading 52 of these boxes in the back of the U-Haul van to drive across the bay to put into a room in our department. And then we started working with the students about how you categorize these objects, how do you process them? And here we are, we're now in San Francisco State, we've got a group of students, in fact, there's the Amphora, you can see it. Yep, right there. But there are lots of other, lots of interesting objects, but all these deemed to be ineligible, not of importance for the report or for the knowledge of San Francisco, et cetera. At about the same time, I had another email from my Portuguese sculptor friend, Sara Navarro, she said, I've just been contacted by the museum, this museum, it's the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture in Santo Terço in northern Portugal. Would you like to co-curate an exhibition with me? Something to do with ineligible? I said, absolutely, absolutely. I said, what are the constraints? She said, there are no constraints, you can do anything you want. So quickly, we put together a set of kits, assemblages of those objects, and sent them out to people, to artists, to archeologists, to creators, to interested parties. And we said, here's the list, the instructions that went out with the objects. We asked people to take these objects and treat them as raw material, as if they are pigments, or sand, or marble, or wood, or acrylic, or oils. And to make any work you want, but it has to engage in some way, either with San Francisco and its current energies and problems, like the tech revolution, disenfranchisement, homelessness, or houselessness, or it has to engage with one of your own personal reaction to the assemblage, or to your own personal, professional, or local political experiences, desires, and frustrations. We said, I want you to make new work using these objects as raw materials. Had no idea what's gonna happen. No idea. Expected most people to say, this is ridiculous. So I'm not gonna spend the last part of our talk showing you the stuff that's just come back. And literally, some of these images came in by email yesterday, so I hope I got it in order. We sent some work to Lena Host Madsen and Thomas Anderson is an artist, both in Denmark. In the assemblage they got were a bunch of pipes. And as you're gonna see, those students working in our lab at San Francisco State processing the materials, I said to them, rip them out of their context, throw away the tags. I want you to rearrange them just by material. So what did Lena Host Madsen and Thomas Anderson do? Well, they had a bunch of pipes and they're medium with sculpture, so they made something called pipe fruit. And I'm gonna read out what they said. This is all they said about it. I said, I got a number of old pipes from the train station. The result was this fruit from the pipe tree known to grow in Central America. They're now pretty rare. Okay, I'm sort of in an interesting shape. I can see something like that in all the galleries in Berkeley and other places. Next set, sent out to Vanessa Woods. Vanessa Woods is an artist here in San Francisco. And there's some of the artifacts, the assemblage we sent out. And she made these collages. And I'll read what she said. This is her text writing about her work. So she treats herself in the third person. The collages that Vanessa Woods created for an eligible played with subversion, classification, and fantasy to imagine a lost civilization that lived where the San Francisco Trans Bay Terminal is today. To create this work, Woods combined collage material from diverse histories, cultures, and populations with high resolution scans of the archeological artifacts and bones. Using anthropological methodologies, the work also aims to explore the idea of other and the tradition of Western ethnographic interpretation poised between scientific objectivity and moralistic storytelling. Invented idols, imagined rituals, and reconfigured symbols collapse fact and fiction. Here's an assemblage we sent out to Cynthia Nunzio, an independent artist in Lisbon. A bunch of rusted pieces of metal. She's a weaver, so she created a tapestry in which she inserted many of these materials. Here's another set of objects sent out to someone in this room who made a work called The Passage of Moving Through. It's Ruth's work. And I'll read one short quote from Ruth's extended text that she sent me. Obviously I'm thinking about the challenges and disappointments of immigrants globally and especially in the US. The 1913 newspaper skin contains articles that mirror this and other issues, such as the glass ceiling of employment promotion and career paths for women and other minorities in the workplace. In which a hopeful start and apparent progress are stifled by locked doors through which only a few, those who can reach the keys can pass. Here's another set of work sent out to Gavin McGregor. Gavin McGregor is a British archeologist. Should I find my notes? Here we are. Yes. Gavin McGregor took these objects and of course he broke them up and smashed them, created a piece of work. You may recognize this image. The snow globe, playful, a light mesmeric flurry, perhaps evoking childhood memories, but the material is too dense to float. It rapidly sinks to the base and affronts the promise of cost-free pleasures. May lead to short-term disappointments of frustration. He goes on to write in more detail about the role of the snow globe and the imagery he uses. Here's another one called Decadence by Jessica Bariña, who is at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon. Now I'm wondering whether this is gonna run, whether I need to come out of. So Jessica Bang mashes up these ceramics, mixes them with cement and other materials and is making a series of building materials, bricks and pillars. And she writes in detail, I won't read out now for lack of, we don't have enough time, about the ways in which buildings and walls in Lisbon are being torn down and rebuilt to erase local historical traditions. Here's another one, Colleen Morgan of this institution but who's now at the University of York. She received this object and, whoops, let's see if this plays. Now it doesn't hang on time out, so I'll come out of this and let's go into this and let's hit it here. Children's art and more of a different art. She took the leather fragments. And gave them to different people to speak about them, to tell stories about them. In fact, by the end, she is, so Colleen Morgan's work is a piece of video, a bit of performance, if you will. And there's a longer text that goes with it, which I won't spend the time to read out in full at the moment. Okay, I'm gonna skip one or two of these just for time. So I wanna get to this guy. Remember the person who did those strange drawings in pastel with the words about blood and sperm, Sean Caton, sent him this set of dolls. And this is the work he made, and I'll read out if I can find it. Yeah, he says, this is a short film loop, which uses figurines called frozen charlots made in Germany in the mid-19th century. He talks a lot about the ways in which bodies, female bodies, children's bodies are exploited and presented through different media. A couple more I wanna show you. Alfredo Gonzales Ribao, for many of you who followed his work, I hope. And I will read out the text for his, if I can just put my hands on it. Yes, I can. So Alfredo takes these keys, I'll just paraphrase for you, and he takes them out into the landscape. And if you know Alfredo's work about the Spanish Civil War, he takes these keys and works on this concept of key. It goes to a famous site of massacre in the Spanish Civil War, breaks the keys up and buries them in the ground. And there's a much longer text and a much longer, so there are 18 different photographs. So again, took an object, disarticulated it, made new work which had political importance in state. Okay, two more examples. This is a work by a Finnish, I guess a PhD student actually at the moment, Marco Merila. And his work is called The Hum. We sent him these bones, and of course he crunched them up, took the crunched pieces, put them in little cups, put them in 800 degree centigrade oven for two hours, ground up the bone results, so all fitting with the art archeology thing. And then his creative work, I think I'm gonna have to come out of this again, but let's see what happens. We come out of the, so this is his work in which he titles The Hum. And while this is running, let me read what he says. Well, I won't let you listen actually. So obviously that dust is the ground up burnt bone, and he's fascinated by this concept there, that there is some noise that exists at all time in the world, in the past and the present, in the prehistoric past and in the modern present. And he's making work with that noise and with these objects. And I wanna finish with one example because I wanna leave a few minutes for a conversation. I'm gonna go to the final one, which was our title slide. So these are the bones we sent out to, or the objects we sent out to Laurent Olivier in Paris. I think many of you may know Laurent's work. And this is what he wrote upon receiving these objects. And his work is called Remember Wounded Knee. When I saw those brown bones all alike and industrially butchered, I was stroked by their strange blind faces deprived of mouth. I put them back on their feet. They are standing, asking silently for something into a savage language that we can't hear. They are the invisible victims of this unbearable violence that turns the earth into a desert and people into nobodies. They are the ghosts of the American past, the evidence of its present. This is the terrifying face of this country, which is so full of rage and defiance, the immense sadness of its landscape, which is inhabited by sorrows and distress. This is Wounded Knee, the huge red stain on the stars and stripes that no one sees. All right, I'm gonna leave, that's my last example, but I will say that there are links to a website called Art Archaeologies, where much of this work is and where more work is uploaded every week. There's a Facebook page, which provides highlights and notifications of new work being posted on Art Archaeologies. That's just the Facebook page, Art Archaeology. You can find me at DW Bailey, it's SFSU.edu, or you can get me through my department. So I've left three and a half minutes for discussion. I hope that's not too little. We can pop the lights up, thank you very much. Yes. In its place, because many of the moves that you illustrated in your examples to me were as much about the articulation of things which do not belong together as they were the breaking up part for decontextualizing of things. And I think that decontextualizing things has a particular political place, especially in conversations about history and identity, et cetera. And articulation is being used, for example, by indigenous scholars as a way to reclaim some things that have been erased. So I wonder what you think about. I think you're absolutely right. So I think once the disarticulation happens or the decontextualization or the breaking off, then anything is fair game. And yes, this is a lot of juxtapositioning and articulation. And to be honest with you, it's a little bit of a cheat because there is an undercurrent which still drives the power of some of this, that this material came from something which is old. But I completely agree with you, yeah, absolutely. Yes. Okay, in turn. As someone who has cherished and worked with antiquities for 50 years, I think it's audacious to destroy anything you find without any respect for the fact that it's lasted that long. Gali took fragments and put them into beautiful works. You're destroying things. Why? How dare you? I respect that opinion. Ruth. I have two responses, actually. One to yours. But one of them is about that these materials, what would have happened to these materials, these ineligible materials if they hadn't come to San Francisco State. And it's about what do we do with all these materials that are excavated. Well, and it's something that we're very sensitive to having just got rid of a lot or we're involved. No, no, sorry, that's a secret. That's a question of that question. Anyway, it seems to me when I saw those boxes at San Francisco State, my main thought was, come on, what are we going to do with all this stuff? Right. What should be done with it? And now I'm thinking about my own thing, which is too big for the discipline and anyway, it's not a very hygienic thing that being based in wood, living, almost living wood. So, you know, do I, what do I do with that? Where do I put that? I can't just put it in the garbage bin. I mean, I like it, I've recorded it, I've documented it and so on. What do I do with it now? So that's one of my things so that, you know, you can't keep all the old and so old antiquities. Right, so could we deal with that one first? Yes, yes. So yeah, anyone who's run any excavation, millions and millions of objects. Many of them we decide are go into a box and go into a storage and maybe a PhD student will come along, but the reality of that I think is that I have thousands, tens of thousands of objects in a museum in Romania. I convinced them to keep all the coursewares. They're sitting there and they will sit there probably until that museum falls down. It's a fundamental problem and I think it actually asks an existential question about archeology. What is it that we're doing? Why are we doing it? Are we justified in doing it? Are we justified in doing all that we're doing? Because those are more responsibility when you excavate a site to curate that collection. And funny, when I've given this talk in earlier iterations of it, some people feel relieved that oh, here's something which these objects can be used for which has some value, an artistic value that they're finding a place for whatever, whether that, and it is disturbing and I'm sorry that the former questioner left because it's a really important debate. And I think it's a debate I'm engaging and I'm excited about engaging and I am, it's me. Okay, you go, but this is an issue. I didn't know that there is a good answer to this but I think we need to be talking about this. There isn't a single answer. Right, there isn't. So Paleo West was excited to get rid of this stuff. Whew, someone's gonna take it off our hands and they signed the paperwork legally to give us the right to use it as teaching research. I said what I was gonna do with it and they said wow, that sounds interesting. Send us a link, put us in the credits. Yes. On somebody's property or the city of San Francisco's property. Well, I think there are a whole bunch of different properties that Transbay exists on, right? Right. San Francisco, perpetuity, you dig it up, you take it away because normally things belong to the place they came from, meaning they go to a museum, a local museum, or they go back in the ground in that site. I mean, so why did these things not go back in the ground? Have you been to the Transbay Transit Center? There's no ground to put them in. Well, there is some ground somewhere there. It's still a place. Christina, that's absolutely a good idea to reap. I don't understand why Paleo West. Paleo West. But own the stuff, I mean, that's the part that's... Well, I would have to look at the legal documents that they negotiated with the city. When you dig something. Yeah. So the reason, the fascination about type... Sorry? They don't... No, no, they didn't say that. They said, you will decide as a professional archeologist what is eligible to be retained and studied and presented and curated. By making that decision, you're gonna make create a category called ineligible, and no one cares about that material. And what I'm saying in calling the project ineligible is that, wow, there's a potential ineligibility to make new things, to create new things, which doesn't fit in the archeological logic or an archeological ontology of what we should do. I completely get it. It doesn't, I don't want it to fit in that. I'm looking for some new space, which turns its back and violates some of the norms, which I respect those norms. Yeah, and that's part of the date. That's part of the argument, the danger and the reaction. Yeah, I wanna get outside of that ontology. So there's been a hand up in the back for ages. Yeah, that helps. Interesting, yeah. You select based on your interest or your interest. When I started talking to artists about this, they said, this is how artists work. We're gonna tell you what we wanna do. We're gonna tell you the theme we're gonna work on and we're then gonna select the materials we wanna use to make that work. And I said, okay, I'm not doing that. I'm doing something which is outside of the artistic ontology of how you plan to do work. And some people said, we don't wanna do that. And I said, okay, I'm with, no worries. So we made a selection based on material, based on physical material. So all the rusty metal bits are in one big container. All the plates are in one big, all the bones are in the big container. That's what the students were doing. They were disarticulating it out. But that was, it was, it was the same ontological clash which I had with my archeological colleague and myself and thinking about how I was raised as an archeologist. But I wanted to have, for me that clash was a sign of we're going somewhere else, some third space outside of both of these disciplines. And therefore the rules we have used in both these disciplines, we have to set aside for a moment to participate in this project. Good question. I have something that jumps off of that. So part of the premise of business is taking things out of context. Yes. Okay. And then you call these groups that you create assemblages. Okay. Which of course there are other big low-end archeological terms. Where in fact they're not actually assemblages in the sense that none of these things were necessarily found together. And like you were explaining how you divided the material, what was that to mean? What, why, rather than giving someone something random that probably was, even if it was a false assemblage or a random one, why would you necessarily choose to put things by material rather than a different selection? Great question. And when we started doing this we weren't sure quite how we were gonna deal with this. We thought about keeping them within their closed context assemblages. In fact, when we sent them out we called them kits. Kit one to kit 85. But your point is taken. And I think that there came a point when we had to decide how are we gonna send things out? And if I went back and thought about this idea if we're gonna treat it as raw materials as in an artistic studio, before you do your articulation you juxtapositioning, well you squeeze your acrylic out of a tube. It's in your box of paint. So that's a material, it's a medium which shares some coherence. So I said, okay that's what we're gonna do. And we made the decision over a couple of days talking about it and saying, okay let's group them by raw materials and send them out. Cause that seems like if you went to an art store and said how do they sell things? Here's the balsa wood section. Here's the paint section. Here's the oil section. And I said, okay I'm gonna go with that. But I mean it could have gone other ways. Well it might be an argument for do or more mix medium type of thing. Some kits could not be. To be completely. Because the artists who normally want a single material would have to deal with the fact that in fact. Well to be honest with you, Ruth came and selected hers. I was gonna say. Annie came, you came and selected yours? So some people who are local, people who are local to the Bay Area came and selected. And they just, I just said go into the room and take what you want. And everything that the people who came was a mixture of different materials. But I didn't want that to happen. Actually I didn't want that to happen. Well it was a random selection too. So they chose and because of that it was chosen to de-perfect my self. And I wanted to force people, yeah. From what I know, several of the things I chose were shoots because as an archaeologist I'm never being allowed to actually do anything. It's a blind thing you gotta never supply. But I specifically didn't want that. I didn't want people to get a box of stuff which they could relate to. I wanted them to go in and blind. Thank you. Thank you. That makes me feel better. I'll say this is having the actualized repurposed things do political work, I guess. And as I watched the film clip of the calcined bone dancing and making these beautiful patterns respond, I mean that was an aesthetic experience. Not for me a political one. I mean, is it just your choice that it should do political work? I suppose the artist just wants it to do aesthetic work. Really important question. So we sent out 85 kits. There are 28 pieces in the show in Portugal. Some of those pieces have some clearly political edge where they speak to something. Many of them do not. And we had a great, we were discussing with the museum what information we wanna give to the spectator, the visitor. And some of the team wants it just to be titled or untitled, no other information, and people have to react to things from their own personal experiences. I'm very sympathetic to that perspective. Another part of the team, which I'm also sympathetic to, is to use QR codes, which people scan with their phones and they get either a text or a video or an acoustic thing, which fills in some of the background of what the maker, for example, Marco who did the vibrating bone thing, talks a lot about the role of the hum in our society and electronics and digital era and it's just a problem we need to, so that's his political show on it. Everyone sort of can work their stuff into something. The woman who wove the nails into tapestry, she writes in her text, two paragraphs, about her personal feeling rejected as an unattractive woman in Portugal and how making this beautiful piece of work with something which is seemed to be unattractive, arrested nail speaks to that. Now looking at that piece of work, I can never, I will always be an archeologist trained as one. I don't get that, but what's to say that you have to get something from the piece of art? I think everything has to speak to people in a different way. I think that's part of what I like about the art archeology, it gets away from saying result, interpretation, explanation, data point analysis. Oh, there's lots of interesting experimental archeology that goes on. I don't mean experimental archeology like making Flint. I mean, what do I mean? I mean archeologists doing weird stuff, yes. But yeah, that's a really, it's a hard one. And some, we got back 48 works, 50 works, and we had to make a set of decisions about what do we include in the show or not. And one of the criteria that we used was, is there some political, social issue which in some way it engages? And the pipe fruit one I showed you first off, the artist said, no, we just, we wanted to make this, it looks cool. I'm like, absolutely, that looks really cool. But it doesn't really fit into, if you want to be really strict about it. Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah, so these are the huge issues we've been wrestling with. Meg. We're already involved as a foundation and what do we think we've got things in context? We decide what context is. We're creating. We decide what objects to take out of the ground and what to leave. And I think in my excavations in Romania, I gave up on interpreting that site and wrote that book with the holes in it because I said, I'm fooling, I am, this is a bit of a scam to tell people that I know what happened. I mean, I can make a story which has scientific facts that support it, but that's my, I use trowels and I use shovels and I use micromerphology. Why? So looking at this in a bigger picture, that it really is, I mean, certainly that's what's happened with art as a concept in anthropology. Is that, for example, in my own work with so-called catalytic art or the Catholic, and whereas we call what Native Americans did rock art or pedagogic, I don't know why in one thing, part of the catalytic, I mean, we've already created value judgments right there. When the building first opened, I do believe there was a little museum up on the top floors and there was a, I think the last basis, porcelain in very blue shape, pipe to blue shape, all of the blue shape was a small exhibit and I wondered if it was still there. I don't know and what I've, I have not engaged with the trans Bay people. I want to get Portugal done. I'm a little concerned for some of the issues which were raised by some people here. I want to like to get Portugal done and into the galleries there before someone says, well, what are you doing with this? You can't take these materials out of the country, you can't do this. So I'm very aware of the sensitivity, but I'm also trying to avoid a project being stopped. But the plan is to go back to the Trans Bay Transit Center and to have another exhibition with this material and others. And I've, everyone I've spoken to is very excited about that, especially because this is not only archeology, but it's something else and it people are, whether they hate it or they love it, people react to this. And I think sort of I was excited by doing that. Yeah. Well, I'm there. I mean, the Trans Bay Transit Center did excavate a native burial. Yes. How we're making value difference and then there's a whole set of ethical principles. Yeah. And you're right. So through all the leather shoes, we had a lot of leather, a lot of organics. I mean, people who got part of their kit, they're like, whoa, yay. And then Colleen Morgan with putting the shoe on I don't know if it's her child or someone else. Well, I have no expectation of that's really, I don't know why that's very powerful to me, but it says something about these objects which were deemed to be unimportant and discardable for our reasons of historical valuation are actually full of energy and value. How do we release that? Probably not in the traditional way of doing archeology. And that's what I'm trying. That's what this is about. Yes, sure. Downsizing. I've been going through downsizing for the last year and there's some other people in this room today so I'll mention that because it's exactly what you go through. You cannot say everything and you have different reasons in the clash that has to be done. And in the, there's an article coming out next year in a book about the slide dissolving project where I talk a lot about archives and as an anthropologist called Liam Buckley wrote a very important article about the National Photographic Archives in the Gambia where he was doing his PhD research and how they were all decaying. Ants and Mildew. And the whole article argues about maybe we need to value decay in a way in which we haven't. And he talks about local people where he was living. The man died and the widow burned all his things. Didn't want to give them to the museum. Didn't want to retain them. And her way of dealing with loss and life was to release them and to value that moment of release and destruction as something positive. It is part of the cycle. Completely. And we're sort of, we're fooling with life when we're preserving stuff which should decay. Sorry. We do all these burnt houses in the Neolithic. It all comes back to Ruth always. Yes. Sorry. Yes. I've been staying back a long time ago on people. These were not our envelopes. We go down to the store and buy lots of envelopes. These were made from advertisements maybe out of magazines or newspapers. And we carefully fold it up. And then some of the names on these envelopes were like notable. You know, they were creeping with the media. Famous life analogists that had collected in the Philippines and had sent in their collections. All the symbols that's gone into the trash. They are not valued at all. It was just all about the life ends. And I just, I kept a few because like, oh, I just can't, you know, the beautiful handwriting on them. So it just, you know, something about what you're talking about. Well, the issue of discard is a huge anthropological debate. Go back to Danny Miller's work. Karen Dahl, some of you know her work who's one of our students did this amazing coat made out of clothes that had been thrown away. We had been sent to recycling center. The Goodwill deemed them not to be good enough to put in their shop. So they're put in big bales and they're shipped to Africa where people wear these shirts. And there's this weird valuation which we don't often question. And I think that's an interesting way of thinking about this. We have all kinds of strange reasons to value what we should preserve or keep. And then there were disarticially dots here. Right. Triggers here. So all these parts and they could take whatever they wanted and then repashion them to an art piece. And our pieces were very political and like DNA spiral, you know, that I think of as done pieces or flowers made out of done pieces. And all these ideas are floating in my mind from your shop. Excellent. Yeah. Yay. Which may be a good way to wrap up unless there are other questions. Oh, okay. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.