Symposium

After the second world war, there was a growing interest in the material of clay among European artists. Pablo Picasso, Asger Jorn and many others appreciated the way in which they could easily and quickly form the material, brightness and steadiness of glazes and inevitable role of a coincidence in the process. Besides, in the time of increasing production of artificial materials such as plastics, clay bore connotations of a tradition reaching to the prehistoric times and of “un-spoiled” folk culture. On the other hand, a growing number of students in studios of ceramics at schools of applied art shifted their focus from mugs and vases to sculpture. In 1959 a new format of artistic work was established by sculptor Karl Prantl in Sankt Margarethen, Austria: a symposium. A group of artists spend ca. 5 weeks in one place ─ far from artistic centres ─ and experiment with different approaches to one material, sharing their experience. This idea resonated a lot in the Central Europe, where symposia in different materials came to existence in the 1960s and artists from both sides of the Iron Curtain started to meet there and work together after a roughly 15 years long break. For clay, the first symposium was founded in Austria as well, in 1963, by ceramicist Kurt Ohnsorg in Gmunden, a small city with a ceramic factory.
The second “International Symposium of Ceramics” was founded three years later in the small spa city of Bechyně in Czechoslovakia ─ on the other side of the Iron Curtain. How did this idea transfer across this political barrier and why did it resonate in both systems, which offered very different conditions for artists, who were dealing with a different set of problems? What did the ideals of collectiveness, folk art and experiment mean in those different contexts?
Ohnsorg met his Czechoslovak colleagues supposedly at the International Exhibition of Ceramics in Prague in 1962. It was one of the first events in Czechoslovakia, where artists from the Western countries could present their work after the second world war. The exhibition was eagerly supported by the Czechoslovak authorities, who could demonstrate the cultural advancement of the country two years after they had officially announced, that Socialism had been successfully built in Czechoslovakia. They planned to support creation of business connections and export Czechoslovak ceramic products. But it was equally important for the ceramicists, who made their independent international contacts there and many of them focused on something else: they wanted to further explore possibilities of clay in context of fine art.
Political relaxation in Czechoslovakia during the 1960s enabled ceramicists and other young artists to get elected to a management of the Union of Czechoslovak artists in 1964 and they transformed this centralized institution into a progressive force, which got rebellious after the Soviet occupation in 1968 and so it had to be disbanded completely and founded again with a completely new set of members. Before that it gave the ceramists a chance to enforce their goals including the establishment of a symposium focused on collective work, experiment, exploration of both art and design and above all on crossing the borders between East and West using the network of peripheral cities, separated from the traditional art centres.

Chapter "Ceramic Contacts: Foundation of the International Symposium of Ceramics Bechyně" explores different strategies used by Czechoslovak ceramicists to re-establish their international contacts during the 1960s, which culminated with the establishment of the Bechyně Symposium.

Other chapters and interviews deal with topics such as creation of European network of art symposia (Marcel Fišer),  context of workf of Austrian ceramicist Kurt Ohnsorg and Czech sculptor Zbyněk Sekal (Marie Klimešová), complicated relationship between "fine art" and ceramics in the 1970s (Kristýna Péčová).

The book includes interviews (by Veronika Rollová, Eva Pelechová and Kristýna Péčová) focused on historical context of symposia (with Gabi Dewalt, Jindra Viková, and Helena Samohelová) and with contemporary artists Yael Atzmony, Ellen Kleckner, Katie Sleyman, Giorgio di Palma, Sofie Norsteng and Adam Železný.

Poems by Ondřej Buddeus.
Photography by Tomáš Brabec and Pavel Baňka.

The book consists of several papers in Turkish and English that treat Muslih al-Din Mustafa Khojazada (838-893/1434-1488) who is one of the most prominent thinkers of Ottoman period and the author of Tahafut al-falasifa, a comparison and trial of al-Ghazali's claims and arguments about the Muslim philosophers, in many aspects.

For two years, Faculty of Theology (Ilahiyat)-Uludağ University and Bursa Metropolitan Municipality have been organizing several symposiums to discover the Ottoman tradition of philosophy, thought and culture. The last two symposiums were held with the contribution of researches from several countries on Mulla Fanari (4-6 December 2010, Bursa) and Khojazada, scholars who were originally born or educated in the Bursa of the Ottoman State. The proceedings of Mulla Fanari Symposium was published last year.

Focusing on the interpretation of a shared, widespread and particularly perplexing iconographic theme, this book compares explanatory frameworks in different schools of archaeology including Classical, Egyptian and Chinese, and importantly challenges a prevailing material skepticism that eschews and even invalidates religious and afterlife beliefs as a part of ancient social identities.

The papers largely concentrate on pictorial depictions of banqueting and/or food offerings and how they might be understood in such settings, although some papers consider tomb deposits and furnishings. Traditionally, three main interpretative paradigms have been employed in 'deciphering' such images: 1) they represent worldly activities, either quotidien or idealised, 2) they represent an imagined pleasant afterlife (and therefore evidence this belief) and 3) they represent funerary or mortuary rites. Such interpretations have been challenged by scholarship that refutes the validity of these strict, divisive categories, but in concentrating on social structures embedded in the images, has tended to eschew potential eschatological aspects of meaning. Collectively, the papers here reconsider this matter, making significant contributions to discussions of ambiguity, agency, interaction, performance, the role of the viewer, the issue of 'meaning', and the various ways in which images can be approached and used.

Contents

Preface
Introduction: what lies beyond? (Draycott)

1. J. Fabricius, ‘Hellenistic Funerary Banquet Reliefs – Thoughts on Problems Old and New’.
2. P. Amann, ‘“Banquet and grave”. The material basis, aims and first results of a recent research project’.
3. G. Robins, ‘Meals for the dead: the image of the deceased seated before a table of offerings in ancient Egyptian art’.
4. N. Harrington, ‘The Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian banquet: ideals and realities’.
5. D. Bonatz, ‘Syro-Hittite funerary monuments revisited’.
6. E. Baughan, ‘Burial klinai and “Totenmahl”?’
7. C.M. Draycott, ‘Drinking to Death. The ‘Totenmahl’, drinking culture and funerary representation in late Archaic/early Achaemenid Western Anatolia’.
8. S. Lockwood, ‘Family matters: the interpretation of Lycian “funerary banquet” reliefs’.
9. A.M. Carstens, ‘Bridging the boundary: the sacrificial deposit of the Maussolleion of Halikarnassos and its symbolic language’.
10. M. Tsouli, ‘Testimonia on funerary banquets in ancient Sparta’.
11. C. Lawton, ‘The “Totenmahl” motif in votive reliefs of Classical Athens’.
12. M. Stamatopoulou, ‘Banquets in the painted stelai of Demetrias’.
13. M. Kalaitzi, ‘The theme of the banqueter on Hellenistic Macedonian tombstones’.
14. T. Mitterlechner, ‘The banquet in Etruscan funerary art and its underlying meaning’.
15. L. Audley-Miller, ‘The banquet in Palmyrene funerary contexts’.
16. A. Slawisch, ‘Reading the image? Ambiguities in the interpretation of banquet scenes on grave stelai from Roman Thrace’.
17. M. Nylan, ‘At table: reading and misreading funerary images of banquets in early China’.

Envoy (O. Murray)

Review
F. Hobden, JHS 138 (2018), 290-291 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-hellenic-studies/article/abs/cm-draycott-and-m-stamatopoulou-eds-dining-and-death-interdisciplinary-perspectives-on-the-funerary-banquet-in-ancient-art-burial-and-ritual-colloquia-antiqua-16-leuven-peeters-2016-pp-xxxviii-690-110-9789042932417/15C83FDE7C1A0CC3814ACDBD69BF057F