PAINTING BACKWARDS or how my fool encountered the melancholic

‘Uncompanionable’ is the word Leo Steinberg used to describe the female figures in Pablo Picasso’s paintings of the early forties. This project demonstrates a series of attempts to imagine acts of companionship in an area of tension between art history and fine art, which it constructs anew. The object I’ve most tried to companion is the reproduction of a small portrait picture, Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), which developed from work surrounding his celebrated political mural, Guernica. The effort of companionship makes a fool of me and I take my fool as methodology, understood as a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done. A key principle of my fool is a logic of encounter in which what’s conscientiously sought gives way to something else that emerges, repeats, insists; it is to this level of experience that my project addresses itself. For my fool’s procedures, I turn to a number of others, including Picasso’s lover in 1937, the photographer and painter Dora Maar (of whom Weeping Woman is a portrait) who made her own enigmatic companion to Weeping Woman, a half-painted copy known as Woman in a Red Hat; and psychoanalysis, whose own development might be seen as a sustained effort to companion the seemingly uncompanionable in the human subject. I’ve engaged with the PhD as an educational site through which to expose and reconstitute previous moments in my education as an artist and art historian. Reaching back to my childhood bedroom, the project opens to a reproduction of Weeping Woman in one of two art books I owned in my pre- to early teens, around 1986 to 1992. The other book is a monograph on Dürer, open at plate 38, Melencolia I (1514). Rather than becoming involved in this image’s details, my fool turns from it towards the field of melancholy, ultimately coming to the art historical literature of the eighties and early nineties that derogated melancholy as a pathological attitude to the end of painting, and which informed the discourse of art history to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student. My fool speculates as to whether painting’s sickness might have been misdiagnosed and the search for a cure misguided; following psychoanalytic insights, a slightly different problem for painting is proposed, one that Dora Maar’s copy of Picasso’s Weeping Woman is seen as a response to. The bedroom setting, two images, and several historical moments, cross the painting Weeping Woman with what is experienced as uncompanionable in me. This is a kind of pleasure, felt as both strange and intimate, which I take in this and other modernist paintings, and which my work continues to circle. Given this pleasure troubles as much as supports the working ‘I’, the project adopts the first person as the preferred pronoun of my fool and bearer of its principal problems. Here, by way of the lacunary autobiographical subject, art history and fine art find their interaction, not in fusional plenitude but in restive exchanges that precipitate a series of blind fields

Documenting the initial appearance of domestic cattle in the Eastern Fertile Crescent (northern Iraq and western Iran)

In this paper we address the timing of and mechanisms for the appearance of domestic cattle in the Eastern Fertile Crescent (EFC) region of SW Asia through the analysis of new and previously published species abundance and biometric data from 86 archaeofaunal assemblages. We find that Bos exploitation was a minor component of animal economies in the EFC in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene but increased dramatically in the sixth millennium BC. Moreover, biometric data indicate that small-sized Bos, likely representing domesticates, appear suddenly in the region without any transitional forms in the early to mid sixth millennium BC. This suggests that domestic cattle were imported into the EFC, possibly associated with the spread of the Halaf archaeological culture, several millennia after they first appear in the neighboring northern Levant

The round house horizon along the Taurus-Zagros arc: A synthesis of recent excavations of late Epipaleolithic and early aceramic sites in southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq

The origin of food production is an important issue for archaeologists working in southwest Asia. For various reasons, most of the models used to explain the economic shift from foraging to food production have relied heavily on data from the Levant. The result of this has been to give primacy to the Levant as the region where this shift first took place and the perception of southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq as cultural backwaters. Thus, the development of agriculture and subsequent changes in technology, social organization and demographics along the flanks of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains was thought to be the result of diffusion from the Levant. However, a survey of recent archaeological work in southeastern Anatolia and northern Iraq provides new data that adds significantly to our understanding of these changes. It is now clear that the eastern part of southwest Asia was an independent center of development. This region constitutes a unique cultural entity rooted in local late Upper Paleolithic/Epipaleolithic cultures, the most notable of which is the Zarzian. These data also challenge several long held assumptions concerning the nature of this economic shift and the development of sedentary society. It is now evident that the exploitation of dense stands of wild cereal grasses was not a necessary precondition for the development of sedentism. Additionally, although food production had a tremendous impact on later social and cultural developments, the shift to food production was not at all dramatic. For more than two millennia, food production constituted only a minor component of the larger subsistence system. It appears to have been one of several strategies used to mitigate risks incurred by decreased mobility. Thus, these recent excavations force us to rethink the questions we have been asking as well as our explanations for the changes which took place at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene

Societal Evolution of Small, Pre-state Centers and Polities : the example of Tepe Gawra in Northern Mesopotamia

Theories such as those offered to explain the supposed Uruk Expansion or Southern Uruk colonial system in the North and East of Greater Mesopotamia have emphasized the roles of state development and urbanism in the supposed core area of the South, and the role of trade between that resource-poor, highly developed zone and its less developed, resource-rich periphery as the raison d'être for the expansion. Although even the proponents of the World Systems construct now acknowledge the complexity of Northern societies before the period of most intense contact, our understanding of the interaction is still based on a number of questionable assumptions concerning the impetus for regional exchange, the preeminence of states and centers of large size in initiating and directing exchange, and the functioning of centers and polities of various size in the exchange network. In this paper we will present some new perspectives on the analysis of social development and network interaction coming from Mesoamericanists, some of which we accept, some of which we question. Those perspectives challenge us to look at variability in motives and means used by leaders within each polity, and the probability of non-elite roles in structuring society. We will use, in our opinion, the most useful of those perspectives to analyze the evolution of a small center in Northern Mesopotamia, and to show how that evolution reflected its behavior in relation to the larger region. In doing so, we will emphasize four aspects of the sile : 1 - its particular geographical, geological, and ecological situation, 2 - strategies of various actors at the site and in its immediate area to affect the political and economic structure of the polity, 3 - measures of the construction of social identities by some of the players, and 4 - the probable role of Gawra in larger exchange networks.Des théories telles que celles qui sont offertes pour expliquer l'expansion supposée urukéenne ou le système colonial mis en place par les Urukéens du sud dans le nord et l'est de la Grande Mésopotamie ont mis l'accent à la fois sur le rôle du développement de l'état et de l'urbanisme dans la zone nucléaire méridionale et sur celui qu'aurait pu jouer le commerce entre les régions pauvres en ressources mais hautement développées du sud et celles de la périphérie riches en ressources mais encore peu développées ; elles en ont fait la raison d'être de cette expansion. Bien que les tenants d'une explication par le système mondial reconnaissent maintenant que les sociétés septentrionales étaient fort complexes avant même que les contacts avec le sud ne se soient intensifiés, notre compréhension des interactions des deux zones reste fondée sur un certain nombre de suppositions ; celles-ci concernent les raisons liées à l'impulsion donnée aux échanges régionaux, à la prééminence d'états et de centres de grande taille qui auraient été à l'origine de ces échanges et qui les auraient dirigés et à la place prise par le fonctionnement de ces centres et des systèmes mis en place pour le fonctionnement de ces réseaux. Dans cet article sont présentées de nouvelles perspectives liées à l'analyse du développement social et des réseaux d'interaction empruntées à des spécialistes de l'Amérique centrale. Si nous en retenons certaines, d'autres posent question. Ces perspectives nous conduisent d'une part à mesurer la variabilité qui existe aussi bien dans les raisons qui ont conduit les responsables, à l'intérieur de chaque système, à utiliser certains moyens et, d'autre part, à considérer les rôles qu'ont pu tenir, dans la structuration de la société, des personnes n'appartenant pas aux élites. Nous avons retenu celles qui, à notre avis, sont les plus adaptées à l'analyse de l'évolution d'un petit site de la Mésopotamie septentrionale et qui permettent de montrer comment cette évolution reflétait le rôle de ce site au sein de la région au sens large. Nous insisterons ainsi sur quatre aspects de Gawra : 1) sa situation géographique, géologique, écologique ; 2) les stratégies des divers acteurs, tant sur le site que dans son voisinage immédiat; et à quel degré celles-ci ont pu modifier la structure politique et sociale du système; 3) les mesures prises pour permettre à certains acteurs la construction d'identités sociales; 4) le rôle probable de Gawra dans un grand réseau d'échanges.Rothman Mitchell S., Peasnall B. Societal Evolution of Small, Pre-state Centers and Polities : the example of Tepe Gawra in Northern Mesopotamia. In: Paléorient, 1999, vol. 25, n°1. L'expansion urukéenne : perspectives septentrionales vues à partir de hacinebi, hassek höyük et gawra. pp. 101-114

Hallan Çemi, pig husbandry, and post-Pleistocene adaptations along the Taurus-Zagros Arc (Turkey)

Recent work at Hallan Çemi and other round house horizon sites in eastern Anatolia indicates that the Taurus-Zagros flanks were a second autochthonous center of neolithization in southwestern Asia. Fully settled complex hunter-gatherer societies are in existence in this area by the late Younger Dryas. These settled village societies were based on adaptations that did not involve cereal exploitation, presumably because cereals were absent in this area during the late Younger Dryas. Instead, these adaptations revolved around the exploitation of nuts and pulses, plus the hunting of ovicaprids and deer supplemented by early experiments with animal husbandry involving pigs. They are thus distinct from those that served as the foundation for the earliest sedentary societies in the Levant. Most current attempts to explain the beginnings of settled village life in southwestern Asia are based solely on Levantine data, which until recently were virtually all that were available. The Anatolian data do not conform to the Levantine pattern and thus raise serious questions about the general validity of these models.Les travaux récents conduits à Hallan Çemi et sur d'autres sites qui se placent en Anatolie orientale sur l'horizon à maisons circulaires indiquent que les flancs du Taurus-Zagros furent un deuxième centre autochtone de néolithisation en Asie du sud-ouest. Des sociétés tout à fait sédentarisées de chasseurs-cueilleurs étaient présentes dans cette région au Dryas récent. Ces groupes établis en village avaient une subsistance qui ne reposait pas sur l'exploitation des céréales absentes dans cette région au Dryas récent, mais ils s'adaptèrent à l'exploitation de noix et de légumineuses à laquelle s'ajoutaient la chasse d'ovicapridés et de cerfs, ainsi que les premiers essais d'élevage, y compris celui de cochons. Ainsi, ces sociétés se distinguent-elles de celles qui constituaient les premières sociétés sédentaires au Levant. Jusqu'à présent, les tentatives d'explication du début de la vie villageoise reposaient uniquement sur des données provenant du Levant, seules disponibles. Les données en provenance ď Anatolie ne se conforment pas à celles du Levant et soulèvent ainsi des questions sérieuses sur la validité de la généralisation de ces modèles.Rosenberg Michael, Nesbitt R. Mark, Redding Richard W., Peasnall Brian L. Hallan Çemi, pig husbandry, and post-Pleistocene adaptations along the Taurus-Zagros Arc (Turkey). In: Paléorient, 1998, vol. 24, n°1. pp. 25-41