Learn more about Grayson Perry at The Saatchi Gallery Grayson Perry webpages.

On the one hand you encourage us to explore the creative possibilities of lies and decoys (’honest lies’, as you might say). ‘Just what is the problem with copies/fakes/counterfeits?’ you ask. ‘Only that they threaten the values accorded to notions of individual genius and intellectual/cultural property’, a threat which for you — since academic knowledge is like a vast open-source project — is a good thing. On the other hand, you appear to have gotten rather bent out of shape when Jennifer Wallace plagiarised relegated most of her references to Shanks et al. to her annotated reading notes at the back of her book in order, she tells us, to avoid alienating the broader readership that might fail to experience any Derridean (R.I.P.) jouissance when faced with a chain of scholarly references. You were evidently prompted by a colleague’s call ‘for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false [our emphasis] citation — saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from’.

Are we, the Trireme Veterans for Truth, the only ones who see any irony to this? So fakes are fascinating, as long as it’s not the fruit of your own labour that’s being copied? What’s the difference between a painter and his paintings and an academic and his ideas? We understand that you critiqued Wallace not for lying but for not playing ball along with the rest of the team, for not espousing ‘the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship’ that underpin independent research. But really, what’s more democratic: writing a book without footnotes and a bibliography that a broader public can read, or constructing a self-referential house of mirrors that only a relative few will appreciate? Such issues were, of course, touched upon in your follow-up. Our question is: isn’t a concern with citation really a concern with intellectual property, with one’s personal and unique contribution to a bigger enterprise, even if (or perhaps because?) that collective project is constantly growing and changing? Isn’t it, at some level, about you?

Disclaimers: (1) It is possible that the identity of this comment’s authors is a liberatingly counterfeit one. (2) Trireme Veterans for Truth have no affiliation whatsoever with Jennifer Wallace or her work. That is not a lie. (3) The Trireme Veterans for Truth have no affiliation whatsoever with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, whose lies (liberating and otherwise) we consider outrageous, appalling, and dangerous to the world. Trireme Veterans for Truth, in co-operation with the Sampan Veterans for Bliss, have successfully blocked the Swift Boat Veterans’ efforts to join the Weird Boat Veterans International Union.

One thing that has clearly not registered is that nobody yet knows where the pre-Roman houses were at Corinth were. The claim that burials at Corinth “come to bury their dead in distinctive areas rather than inter them among their houses” is clearly poorly informed despite articles such as Williams C. K. II, 1983 “The Early Urbanization of Corinth,” ASAtene 60 n.s. 44 1982 (1984) pp. 9-20. There are, however, extensive cemeteries and sporadic burials well within the ancient city walls down into the Hellenistic period, including at Anaploga and to the west of the theater. These perhaps suggest the urban organization of Corinth may be along the lines of Sparta with obes separated by areas dedicated to burials and other functions such as dining.

My personal research interests lie in the Late Antique to Early Modern range and I believe my students will attest that I encourage them to look at cultural landscapes of these periods and to deconstruct the scholarship based on the primary archaeological record. I have no doubt that when my preliminary publication is out those who know a great deal more about the Geometric period than I, for instance Professor Pfaff who has a daily growing manuscript on the new finds, will examine every aspect and may well not agree with each other about what is and is not interesting.

-J-

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
–Paul Gauguin

Just found your weblog entry about me, and read it with interest.

It raises a couple of points. Firstly, I’m not sure that scholasticism is entirely a bad thing! It certainly gets a bad press. You’re quite right about the need to embody our critique in our practice, but I think we need to work through that critique, even push it as far as it will go, if it’s to be effective. I’ve found that the way that I’ve worked over the years is to alternate between periods of reflecting on the practice of doing archaeology, and then returning to working on prehistory - hopefully with a fresh perspective. For the past three or four years I’ve been doing more of the reflection bit, because I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between archaeology and modernity, and thought that I needed to get it sorted out for myself before I could move on. Now that the book’s done, I’m starting to think about the Neolithic again - I hope in rather different ways.

I think that having addressed the question of materiality is central to this. You characterise my view very well in your piece, but I am actually very attracted to the notion of archaeology as a craft - and I think that your article with Randy McGuire on that theme is a really important piece of work. I’m also perfectly happy with the point that archaeologists engage in cultural production. It’s just the idea that what we work with is an inert raw material that bothers me. It seems to me that that such a view introduces the values of contemporary capitalism into our archaeology - reducing the stuff of past human lives to a set of resourc es. Isn’t this what the heritage industry actually does a lot of the time?

Now, you’re abolutely right to say that when a craftsperson works with wood or clay, their relationship with their material is one of ‘working with’ rather than one of imposition of form onto a dead substance. But is what archaeologists do more like what happens in a studio or a factory? Or is the metaphor or ‘making’ imperfect?

There are certainly ways in which what we do as archaeologists involves an almost intuitive engagement with materiality. When I dig a prehistoric pit, and find the edge with my trowel; when I enter a megalithic tomb, or walk across a landscape; when I handle a stone axe. But archaeology requires that we do more than this: we have to ask questions about how these places and things were for people in the past, who may have been quite unlike ourselves. And we then have to construct an account of what that past was like. In this respect, I think that our craft is different from that of a potter or a woodcarver.

So my question To Jonna and Fiona wasn’t intended as a put-down in any sense. I love the work that they do, but I wanted to provoke them by asking: how would it be if you thought about it this way? How might that potentially affect your practice? It seems to me that altough the remains of the past are fragmentary, they aren’t dead or intert. In important ways, we inhabit the past, because it’s all around us. We rework the traces, but they aren’t like specimens in a lab or raw materials stacked up in a factory.

All the best,

Julian