The Ashmolean: Greece

I had stumbled into the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University’s museum of art and archeology, several times in the weeks before to escape the hustle and bustle of Oxford city’s streets. As an undergraduate student at Stanford University studying abroad in Oxford, I had few expectations about how an European museum would compare to American museums. I just hoped it would feel new, exciting, and different. The museum’s collections are displayed much like they are in America and contain the usual array of artifacts. Much to my satisfaction, I did find a difference between European and American museums. The difference was that European viewers explore museums at a slower and more natural pace. My experiences in American museums, especially if I am alone and without a thunderous group of other students to stampede normal museum-goers out of the way, is that viewers skip from art piece to art piece impatiently, like they are in stop-and-go traffic on the way to work or forcefully, like they are busting through massive, 300 pound line-backers to the touchdown endzone, pushing to see every single item the museum has on its walls. Inside, an European museum feels like strolling along a meandering dirt path, each breath of air so cold and old and refreshing. People amble around to pocket cornucopias of culture, ideas, and stories. Sometimes they stir up chatter, other times, the silence of a church choir’s pause. Purposefully, now, I paved my path to my favorite place in the museum, the Greece Exhibit.

The Greece Exhibit

The exhibit features statues, vessels, trinkets, and weapons. In the center of the room is an imposing bronze statue of Zeus throwing a lightning bolt. Being a sun-deprived, non-muscular, and mortal woman who often cannot remember where she puts her room key and who dresses funny, I was dumbfounded by the statue’s rippled muscles and expression of severe justice. Its stance is so commanding, I felt like a scurrying mouse in comparison. The audience response to the statue was generally the same as mine. Children, especially, were googley-eyed and open mouthed when they peered up at the long and god-like figure of the ruler of Mt. Olympus.

The purpose of the Ashmolean museum is to show the public artifacts owned by Oxford University (and purloined from their origin countries). As such, they shelve ample items in simple glass displays. The Greece exhibit has numerous trinkets, vessels, statues, figurines, weapons, armor, seals, and writing tablets. Some of the items harken to mythology: Hercules slaying the Nemean lion on a clay pot or a gorgon, a creature who can turn a person into a stone statue with its stare, in the center of a bowl. Such a bowl must’ve been used only for the dinner party guest you did not like.

Perhaps the real value of the Greece exhibit and of the Ashmolean museum on the whole is: it invites the viewer with its simple layout and furnishings to unconditionally engross themselves in imaginative play with the artifacts. On the other side of the coin, the Ashmolean does not really direct the audience towards feeling a certain way about its items. They have all the details about artifacts, but leave the viewer to guess at the importance of each object. It does fulfill its purpose in housing collections that people can freely musey around in. The Greece exhibit, especially, has tons of clay vessels. The clay vessels are the most characteristic and frequent artifact that their civilization left us. Scholars know most of what they know about Greece from studying these clay pots and jars. It does make sense to show the clay vessels in the Greece exhibit. That said, they do become tedious. It would be better if the museum had some structure to show why they have the clay vessels in the exhibit. The same commentary can be made about other displays featuring high quantities of some kind of artifact, not just clay vessels. The Ashmolean museum and the Greece exhibit quenches the overbrimmingly curious with plenty of art and archeology to inspect. The mildly curious will be left wishing for some overarching meaning to tie together the pieces on display.