Word: cambodia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Very little of it has been seen in the West--mere fragments mostly, especially if one bears in mind that most Cambodian sculpture was made as decoration for temples, a small part of a larger whole, its meaning lessened when removed. Because Cambodia was annexed as a French colony in 1863 and remained one until 1953, most of the sculpture that Europeans took from it ended up in France--notably at the Musee Guimet in Paris--rather than in England, Germany or America. But to deduce the scale, continuity and sheer aesthetic majesty of Cambodian art from such fragments...
...Angkor Wat in a box and ship it to Washington, but the organizers of the National Gallery's show have done the next best thing. With the cooperation of the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh and the Musee Guimet, under the general curatorial direction of the art historians Helen Jessup and Thierry Zephir, they have assembled the first full-scale traveling exhibition of classic Cambodian sculpture in more than 50 years. (A smaller show, a dress rehearsal for this one, was seen in Australia...
...show is a dignified call for help as well as an assertion of past cultural achievement. After 30 years of civil war and the genocidal madness of the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot, Cambodia's very name reeks of slaughter. The West needs to be reminded of its immense cultural heritage, and of the struggle--against all odds--to preserve it. Only a handful of Western historians and curators, mainly in France and America, are experts in ancient Cambodian art, and its fate within Cambodia for the past few decades has skirted catastrophe. Much of it has been looted...
...civil war all but destroyed Cambodia's frail, poorly funded cultural infrastructure; French-trained Khmer curators were murdered; the National Museum was reduced to a bat-infested wreck, its roof caving in, and abandoned for four years after 1975. (It has since been partially repaired by the Australian government, but, as one of the contributors to the show's excellent catalog bluntly observes, "The museum staff lacks the expertise and resources to repair and conserve the sculpture, or to catalogue the collection. [This] can only be rectified with international help.") As if this weren't enough, a major problem around...
...extremely slow-moving tradition to which the idea of innovation, beloved in the West, means little or nothing. Compared with Indian sculpture, from which it ultimately derives, Cambodian art is quite restricted in its range of subject: there isn't the same bewildering pullulation of different gods. In Cambodia the same cast recurs again and again: the Buddha in his various forms; the main Hindu deities: Shiva, Vishnu, the elephant god Ganesha and so forth. And there is very little of the eroticism of Indian sculpture: bare breasts and torsos, but no full nudes, and no copulation...