March 28, 2003
ART REVIEW | ASIA WEEK
Millenniums of Asia, Packed Into a Week
By HOLLAND COTTER
One Tuesday earlier this month, some of the Metropolitan Museum's Asian art galleries had an unusual number of visitors. That day more than 300 people went to the Ancient Near Eastern galleries, and most of them did the same thing when they got there. They took out a sketchbook and pencil and silently began to make drawings of the objects around them.
An art class field trip? No, this was a draw-in organized by a New York-based group called Artists Against the War. The galleries they chose were those with work from ancient Mesopotamia, the land that is now Iraq.
Their purpose, they said, was to call attention to the civilizations that had flourished there under various names — Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, the Arab-Muslim Abbasid empire — during 5,000 years, and into the present.
The objects the visitors drew included exquisite luxury items and fierce religious emblems, the latter often designed not to embody evil but to frighten it away. In certain pieces, influences from Arabia, Persia, China, India and the Mediterranean world mingled.
Whatever the specific political message of the event, by copying these Asian images over and over again, the artists seemed intent on emblazoning them on the collective consciousness of another culture, our own.
