Breaking the Surface: An Art/Archaeology of Prehistoric Architecture

355 Pages·2018·66.42 MB·English

by  Doug Bailey

Breaking the Surface

BREAKING THE
SURFACE
An Art/Archaeology of
Prehistoric Architecture
DOUG BAILEY
1
1
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© Doug Bailey 2018
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For Alasdair and Michael

Contents
Preface ix
1. Cutting Pit-houses: Function, Deposition, Questions Not Asked 1
2. Cutting Skin: Ron Athey’s 4 Scenes (a.d. 1994) 41
3. Cutting Holes: Philosophy and Psychology 71
Inter-text 95
4. Cutting Deep: Bronze Age (1470–1290 cal. b.c.) 96
5. Cutting Buildings: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (a.d. 1975) 129
6. Cutting Words: Linguistic Anthropology 170
Inter-text 196
7. Cutting the Ground: Neolithic Etton (3800 cal. b.c.) 197
8. Cutting Space: Lucio Fontana’s Tagli and Buchi
(a.d. 1950s and 1960s) 234
9. Cutting Absolute Worlds: Grounded Frames of Reference 265
Inter-text 289
Appendix Recutting Wilsford (a.d. 1960–1962) 291
Endnotes 299
Bibliography 307
Index 331

Preface
this is a book about holes. I referred to it as The Holes Book when speaking
to apparently interested colleagues, clearly uneasy students, and politely un-
impressed friends and relatives. They wanted to hear more about the excava-
tions that we were part of in southern Romania, in a village called Măgura.
There, we were opening and studying a site that contained examples of
Europe’s earliest architectural form, the pit-house or pit-hut. When people
asked about that fieldwork, I tried to explain what we were doing, what we
were finding at these sites, and what the sites meant in terms of the grand
narrative of human history, particularly with reference to the transition to a
fully sedentary life that marked the Neolithic (6500–3500 cal. B.C.). In these
conversations, I started to hear myself talk about the pit-houses less as build-
ings and more as holes sliced into the ground. The more I tried to describe
what these sites were, the more I felt the first ticklings of the inescapable itch
of an idea: if we were going to get to the bottom of our Neolithic pit-hut site in
Romania, then maybe we would be better off thinking of them not as architec-
ture, but as holes cut into a surface (i.e., the ground). I had very little idea what
this might mean. It was still many months before I would discover that other
academics and scientists for some time had been building a robust body of
research and thinking about holes: about what they were, and about the con-
sequences that a hole had on its diggers, users, and fillers. At a similar level of
ignorance, I had little idea that a series of modern and contemporary artists
had been making work by making holes since well before I had been born.
I scratched that itch. In an earlier project (Bailey 2005b), I had let my at-
tentions be distracted in a similar way. In that work, I had wondered what
might happen if we stepped away from goddess and cultic interpretations of
Neolithic figurines, and I had sought value far from traditional archaeological
typologies and means of explanation. There I had found relief in research
about miniaturization, about three-dimensionality, about touch, about the
rhetorics of illusion and representational absence, and about the politics of