BlogBack: Bernard Tschumi on New Acropolis Museum’s Parthenon Marbles Display

Bernard Tschumi, architect of the New Acropolis Museum just opened in Athens, responds to my criticism of new installation of the Greek-owned Parthenon marbles, chock-a-bloc with replicas of the British-owned slabs from the same frieze:

One of the special aspects of the new Acropolis Museum is that it reconstitutes the original narrative continuity of the Parthenon frieze. For nearly a century and a half, no one has seen it "whole," until now. Divided between Athens and London, no one could follow the extraordinary story-telling achievement that was important to Phidias and to the people of Athens. The frieze is not a series of discrete "tableaux," but rather a kind of cinematic continuum.

So when the architects of the Acropolis Museum and its curators were confronted with dealing with the fact that it was unlikely that the British Museum would return the Marbles in time for the opening, we studied a number of alternatives. One included taking the very white, exact plaster molds given to Greece by the British Museum and putting a scrim in front of them, so as to give the absent segments a ghost-like presence.

While this worked somewhat when the viewer was standing, motionless, exactly perpendicular to the frieze, it created a dense and opaque mask as soon as the viewer saw these same segments at an angle. (The original frieze was conceived to be seen in motion, as viewers walked alongside the temple, inevitably looking at it at an angle.)

Additionally and not unimportantly, the scrim made these segments hard to read, occluding the narrative, and interposed an extra layer of material that violated the planar limit of the marble, which Phidias and his crew had worked hard and skillfully to respect.

Rather than having the long opaque patches resulting from the scrim, we felt that out of respect for the artist as well as the viewer, it was preferable to show the copy next to the original. The two cannot be mistaken. The original has the density of heavy, two-foot-deep stone, with 2500 years of yellowish and orange patina and darkened areas where fires raged over the temple. The reproduction of the Marbles currently in London is plaster-white, unmistakably a copy, but a highly respectful copy that gives the visitor a sense of the continuity of the extraordinary narrative that can be read only combined with the motion of the viewer's body in space. We think it was the correct decision.

I hope this clarifies our thinking, but most importantly, that you'll have a chance to go and see the completed installation in person.

My reaction to Tschumi's thoughtful explanation is this: To the extent that the current real-and-fake installation does succeed in giving the viewer a satisfying "sense of continuity," it fails in its attempt to underscore the imperative that all the authentic marbles be reunited. The Greeks are, in a sense, subverting their own argument. It's also worth noting that Tschumi himself previously advocated the idea of veiling the replica marbles behind a scrim, the installation strategy that I also favored.

That said, I'm violating my own rule of not reviewing something that I haven't set eyes on. I've seen the authentic marbles in both London and Athens, and I've seen the new Parthenon gallery in Athens (a year ago, before the marbles were installed), but I haven't seen the New Acropolis Museum since it opened this month.

Maybe one day. In the meantime, here's an article from today's Wall Street Journal by Athens-based Christine Pirovolakis, who DID recently visit the newly opened museum.