Zeynep Aktüre (Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey)

At the archaeological museum in Selçuk, Turkey, the most popular displays are the two Ephesian Artemis statues that stand in niches at the longitudinal ends of a hall, in such a way as to invite Carol Duncan’s analysis of the modern museum as a ‘ritual space’ for aesthetic contemplation. However, Artemis Ephesia would not always seem to allow such a distanced encounter, at least not for those who are willing to perceive its simultaneous strangeness and familiarity.

As reported by museum’s former director Sabahattin Türkoğlu, the statue named as ‘Artemis the Beautiful’ on the basis of its excellent workmanship appeared rather strange to the workers who unearthed it in 1956: ‘Could a woman possibly have more than two breasts?’ It is hard to guess their reaction had they known that later those ‘breastlike swells on her chest were first thought to be breasts, then bodies of bees (the emblem of Ephesus is a bee), but then the thesis that these were the testicles of the bulls sacrificed to the goddess gained weight.’ Giving an idea about the range of interpretations inspired by the Ephesian Artemis figure, the latter two theories thus challenge Edward Falkaner’s apparently definitive mid-nineteenth century argument that the ‘swells’ are animal breasts, and that this ‘confirms the opinion of some learned men, that the Egyptian Isis and the Greek Diana were the same divinity with Rhœa, whose name they suppose to be derived from the Hebrew word, Rehah, to feed…’

What bridges across the century and a half that produced these interpretations is the belief that there should be a way of being sure about what the Ephesian Artemis figure and its various parts signify. Perhaps this was all the mysteries of the Ephesian Artemis were about—a cult of wonder which finds its material expression in a peculiar figure that shifts our attention to the problems of the very process of making sense by reminding us of the impossibility of being sure about the world, and of the fact that ‘in fact we can find pleasure in contemplating things that escape our understanding.’

This potential enables a conceptualization of the curiosities named Artemis Ephesia as ‘open works’ in the sense outlined by Umberto Eco. The concept finds its parallel in André Malraux’s idea of ‘a museum without walls’ wherein the museum is described principally as a spatial relation that has a trajectory towards openness in its involvement with the process of ordering that takes place in or around certain sites or buildings (such as the Stonehenge, according to Kevin Hetherington ), provoking a multiplicity of interpretations and meanings.

This paper will question whether, or not, the architecture and contents of the Artemis Ephesia Hall functions as ‘a museum without walls’ for the two sculptures to accomplish their intrinsic potential as curiosities by being open to a multiplicity of interpretations while, at the same time, staying closed for ‘overinterpretations’, in the sense coined by Eco.

Duncan, Carol 1991. ‘Chapter 6. Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, pp. 88-103 in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.) Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics of Museum Display. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, p. 90; Duncan, Carol 1998. ‘The Art Museum as Ritual’, pp. 473-485 in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press; Duncan, Carol and Alan Wallach 2004. ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, pp. 51-70 in Museum Studies – an Anthology of Contexts, edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Türkoğlu, Sabahattin 1991. Efes’in Öyküsü. Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayınları, p. 152.

Özeren, Öcal 1991. Ephesus. İstanbul: Keskin Color Kartpostalcılık Ltd. Şti., p.124.

Falkaner, Edward 1862. Ephesus, and the Temple of Diana. London: Day and Son, p. 290
Minor, Vernon Hyde 1994. Art History’s History. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, p. 172.

Eco, Umberto 1989 (1962). The Open Work, translated by A. Cancogni with an Introduction by D. Robey. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; 1984 (1979). The Role of the Reader – Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana University Press, Bloomington; 1994 (1990). The Limits of Interpretation. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.

Malraux, André 1967. Museum without Walls, translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price. London: Secker and Warburg.

Hetherington, Kevin 1996. ‘The utopics of social ordering – Stonehenge as a museum without walls’, pp. 153-76 in Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds.) Theorizing Museums. Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers / The Sociological Review, p. 28.

Cf. Colini, Stefan (ed.) 1992. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Eco, Umberto 1994 (©1990). The Limits of Interpretation. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis.