Museum Visit

After reading about the Assyrian reliefs, it was truly a pleasure to be able to view them in person. Upon entering the Assyrian exhibit, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the reliefs in the entrance room. Walking further inside, I was pleasantly pleased with the length of the entire exhibit and the incredible number of different artifacts that it held. The entire exhibit was more than I could have imagined was going to be there.

During the first walk through that Irene Winter sent us on, I had realized that there was too much there to really examine in great detail as Irene had said. I focused mainly on the large reliefs and took some time to look at the smaller artifacts like some of the pottery and wall adornments. With the second walk through I truly enjoyed listening to Irene talk about the specific pieces she had picked out for us to study. While her talk about the “propaganda,” or false labeling was interesting, the parts of her discussion which I found to be the most interesting were the ones in which she picked out the details in reliefs and explained their meaning in relationship to the Assyrians. In the entrance room, her talk on the detail in the musculature of the first relief was particularly intriguing when she later compared it to the free standing statue of the King also placed in the room. She compared the clearly defined musculature to fact that the King was almost fully clothed. While these two aspects of the carvings would seem unrelated, the idea that the distinctly displayed muscles of the relief helps the viewer to later associate the clothed statue of the King with the power of those muscles without having to explicitly show them.

Another detail in the exhibit that particularly excited me was the small piece of painted ivory that came from a larger piece of furniture which I believe was called The Negro and the Lioness. With the first walk through it had caught my eye since it was solitarily displayed in case as opposed to the other small pieces being grouped together. The eroticism of the position of the lioness and man were very evident to me; this and the way in which it was brightly colored captured my attention through the several walk-through’s that our class did. Irene eventually talked about the piece in the end. I was amazed to find out that the placement of the piece was very deliberate and that I was in fact being highly influenced by the layout of the exhibit. The piece being placed in the center of a room as well as having a spotlight on it indeed did reel me into looking at it. The whole intimate atmosphere that the museum created helped to invoke the seductive nature of the piece. While Irene had discussed the way in which the Museum had set up the exhibit as a way of manipulating the audience, I had not truly understood what she meant until the realization that I too had be completely influenced. This to me was the most interesting personal aspect of the trip.