Civilizations

This is a review of the initial episodes of the PBS series Civilizations (2018). My review of the complete series is available at Hyperallergic.

PBS is certainly no stranger to airing British programming. The latest in its long line of British imports is the BBC art history series Civilisations. And this series certainly feelsEnglish: It was inspired by the 1969 BBC series Civilisation, with British presenter Kenneth Clark. The new series has broadened its horizons beyond Clark’s European focus to a global scope, as indicated by the pluralized title and its use of multiple presenters. But all of them — Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga — are British.

Still, as with other British imports, this one has not come over wholesale to the U.S. Before the first episode aired, there were reports that Mary Beard was cut from her episodes. The reports appear to have started with an offhand comment from Beard herself, suggesting that American audiences didn’t want to see a “creaky old lady.” But it appears that, this time, sexism may not be at fault. All of the presenters’ screen time is cut significantly, and over the first two episodes there did not seem to be any significant difference in the amount of time we hear from Schama versus Beard (in the third episode, Beard’s screen time may have been cut further). These cuts are part of larger differences in direction between the British and American versions, which the BBC and PBS had apparently planned from the beginning. This included giving the PBS version an American narrator, Liev Schreiber, who serves to provide a unity to the three different presenters’ episodes, and I think to Americanize them.

What about the substance of the episodes themselves? Let’s compare the first two.

The first episode (“The Second Moment of Creation”) suffers from the fact that its writer-presenter, Simon Schama, does not specialize in any of the periods or material covered. It focuses mainly on ancient and often prehistoric art, while Schama’s expertise is in modern European history. So it is no surprise that the episode presents a great deal of outdated information and ideas as well as simplistic views of the distant past, ideas and views that are sometimes merely comforting and pat, but sometimes offensive and disturbing. When discussing the impressive ancient site of Petra, now in Jordan, Schama uses a discussion of its abandonment to illustrate part of the rise and fall of civilizations: “By the time of the Muslim conquests in the seventh century, Petra had been reduced by a series of earthquakes to little more than a dry and empty ruin.” But research over the last 25 years has shown that Petra was inhabited and thriving throughout the Byzantine period (fourth to early seventh centuries) and even beyond. 

Schama repeats a metaphor of the torch of civilizations, being passed on from one group of people to another — a metaphor critiqued by anthropologist Eric Wolf in Europe and the People without Historyas misleading and stale . . . in 1982 (I owe this reference to archaeologist Dimitri Nakassis). “Civilization” becomes oddly restricted not merely to art but to subjectively defined high art, with the many other cultures not judged to have such art conveniently ignored. And this judgment repeatedly emphasizes the centrality of Europe or “the West.” After a discussion of Paleolithic cave art, we get a brief detour to South Africa: “The culture of the San bushmen has endured for tens of thousands of years, providing a living connection to a distant hunter-gatherer past. And their art offers clues to the birth of the creative impulse and modern human self-consciousness.” This is a kind of amateur anthropology favored by people like Jared Diamond but rejected by scholars: modern hunter-gatherers are not “living fossils” but have evolved in their own right. Even worse, we immediately hear: “But it’s back in Europe that we find an object that may embody our earliest understanding of perfection.” For Schama at least, this object is La Dame de Brassempouy, the head of an ivory figurine of a woman, carved more than 20,000 years ago. “We have, right in front of us, the dawn of the idea of beauty.” This is more than just exaggeration and improbability, the idea that we have captured this exact moment, given our highly fragmentary evidence for the nature of life in the Stone Age. The presentation suggests that current-day, backwards Africa has value only for shining light on our own European past, but Stone Age Europe is advanced, looking forward to our present.

Simon Schama with the Lady of Brassempouy: “the dawn of the idea of beauty”

Schama’s episode was followed by “How Do We Look?”, featuring classicist Mary Beard. Beard warned that the American versions of her episodes are more “anodyne” than the British ones. It’s easy to see why. We hear of the many modern echoes of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II’s use of gigantic statues of himself to project power: Sisi (one of “Egypt’s modern pharaohs”), Stalin, Mao. All of these are foreign dictators — the other. Even the odd inclusion of a statue of Jesus (as an example of “giant sculptures of Jesus who gaze down upon the faithful”) is of the Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro. We are never shown anything closer to home, although there are many examples at hand, from Mount Rushmore to Christ of the Ozarks. But it is as we are told of artists working to counter this dangerous use of the human form that we return to something more familiar: a British sculptor, Antony Gormley (his 66-foot Angel of the North is called “a monument to embody the people”). Not long after, Schreiber describes the “revolution” in ancient Greek art, praising the “world’s first democracy,” and describing it as the roots of “Western civilization.” Just as in Schama’s episode, the presentation here is thoroughly Eurocentric. The view is summed up perfectly by art critic Jonathan Jones in his brief appearance: “I think they [the Greeks] consciously created an art of something called civilization.”

Christ of the Ozarks, Eureka Springs, Arkansas; photo by Jeff Weese via Flickr 

But even the American version of Beard’s episode points to something more than this typically Eurocentric story. We see this already in the title, “How Do We Look?”. It is a pun, referring both to how we appear to others (indicating the episode’s focus on the human form), and to how we see, in particular how we see art (indicating the episode’s interest in the history of how artworks have been received). Much of the episode engages with recent work in reception history, feminist scholarship, and postcolonialism. Here at least, “Western civilization” is not a fixed entity extending back to ancient times, but a tradition invented fairly recently. We are told how high art in the modern West as an expression of power, one used in by the colonial European powers around the world. And we see a vivid example of this in the Olmec Wrestler. Once viewed as the pinnacle of achievement of Olmec art in ancient Mexico, it has since been determined to be a forgery – one whose features are less like other works of Olmec art than like classical sculpture. Western ways of seeing art have greatly influenced how we see the rest of the world, even how we try to invent it.

Mary Beard discusses the influence of the 18th-century art historian Johann Winckelmann on how we see the Apollo Belvedere and Western art in general.

In these ways, Beard’s episode strongly echoes another decades-old BBC program, 1972’s Ways of Seeing with John Berger (as suggested to me by art historian Shannon Steiner). This is particularly true in Beard’s emphasis of the ways that we see art in general, and the specific focus on the female nude and the way men have seen her, which Beard extends back from Berger’s Renaissance beginnings to Praxiteles. Berger’s series is often understood, though I’m not sure there’s direct evidence of this, as a response to and critique of Clark’s Civilisation, which had been broadcast just three years earlier. Beard’s presentation contrasts with Schama’s in a similar way, even if not as innovative or engaging as the 1970s series.

Unlike Schama, Beard focuses more on periods and places within her expertise: the classical world and its modern reception. So it is not surprising that Beard often provides the best moments in her episodes, while probably the best – and certainly the best informed – moments of Schama’s come when we hear from the experts, such as Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker on their recent excavations of the Bronze Age site of Pylos in Greece. Combining deep knowledge and theoretical engagement, Beard’s presence is somewhat subversive. But her presence is not just undermining our received ideas about Western civilization. It is undermining the image of civilization presented elsewhere in the series – including in the American version of “How Do We Look?” In other words, Beard’s appearances subvert her own episode.

The series has some strong assets. The imagery and camera work are often stunning. The presenters are engaging personalities, though Schama can be overdramatic. It’s a shame that, to date, the series has largely wasted these advantages, using them and some new discoveries to tell a tired, old, comfortable story about ourselves.