Jonathan Tokeley
RESCUING THE PAST
The cultural heritage crusade
374pp. Imprint Academic. £25.
84540 019 4
A few years ago, Jonathan Tokeley, a restorer of works of art, was charged with importing into England an impressive piece of Pharaonic art disguised as modern Egyptian tourist tat. Tokeley maintained, and still maintains, that he acted in innocence, that the piece was a fake, and that he has been traduced in the press by malicious colleagues. The British legal system decided that what he had done was questionable, and as a result he spent time in Wormwood Scrubs, an event about which he is commendably frank. There, no doubt, he had the opportunity to think about Egypt and the many questions raised by the antiquities trade, and it is presumably the results of his thinking which appear in Rescuing the Past.
There have been great works of literature written in prison. Boethius, John Bunyan and Oscar Wilde are proof of this, but it is fair to say that Tokeley’s self-justifying tirade is not a work in this league. He calls himself a student of philosophy, a subject which he did indeed study as part of his undergraduate career, but the result is nowhere near The Consolation of Philosophy. It is more the sort of thing which can happen when an attempt to write Newman’s Apologia meets the punk version of “I Did It My Way”.
Folklore has it that prisons are full of people who are convinced of their own innocence and compassion for society, and who know that the real crooks are all outside. It is not they who are at fault: it is something called The System. In some cases they may be right, but in others they are simply in a state of denial. In Rescuing the Past, almost all the people who appear are out of step and reduced to the status of puppets by their capitulation to self-interest. The only one in step turns out to be Tokeley himself.
In this account, the cultural heritage of Egypt is being destroyed, largely by the Egyptians who are its protectors. The officials who are charged with looking after the country’s many antiquities are corrupt, not through deliberate depravity but because it is the only way that they can survive on their salaries. As a result, great numbers of objects drift on to the art market illegally or leave the country, stolen more or less to order. Worse than this, the rickety education system means that Egyptians have no sense of the aesthetic or cultural value of works of art: they are not, as the celebrated Egyptologist Bernard Bothmer once remarked, “object-minded”. Much of the work of restoration or conservation which takes place in that country is mere play-acting, the efforts of people to stay employed and to keep their superiors from interfering in their tea-drinking routines. Islamic teaching, according to the author, encourages Egyptians to think of Pharaonic monuments as the products of an age of pagan ignorance, or jahiliyya.
Hence their destruction can sometimes be tolerated, as happened when the Taleban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Tokeley believes that similar events could start happening in Egypt as fundamentalism comes to the surface. As caricatures go, this is dashing stuff, but as a contribution to scientific relations with the owners of Egypt’s cultural heritage it is as ungenerous as it is damaging. It is a bit like inviting the College of Cardinals to a party in honour of The Da Vinci Code, as a way of furthering dialogue with the Vatican.
Tokeley also accuses professional Egyptologists of conniving in this disaster by concentrating on publication of convoluted articles on points of grammar, in obscure journals, with an eye only to the next research-assessment exercise and their own careers. They stay silent about the shortcomings of their Egyptian hosts because they wish to continue in those same careers. There is no doubt that the discipline has a generous share of unreadable monographs which disappear up their own footnotes, but this judgement ignores many of the joint projects of restoration and reconstruction which have been done successfully in collaboration with Egyptian colleagues, and with their keen cooperation. The archaeologists and restorers from Leiden and the Egypt Exploration Society who worked tirelessly with the Egyptians on restoring the reliefs from the tomb of Horemheb at Saqqara will not recognize the picture which is given in this book as a description of their work, and they will be right not to do so.
Tokeley’s real target is not Egyptologists or even the Egyptians. What he most wants to challenge is the prevailing orthodoxy among archaeologists, politicians, cultural ambassadors and museum curators which he terms the Cultural Heritage Crusade, or alternatively the Libertarian School. For Tokeley this orthodoxy is similar to a religious cult. It has a central dogma, the notion of cultural heritage which he feels obliged to capitalize in order to draw attention to the status given to it by its naive adherents. This is the idea that a nation’s past belongs to that nation and no other.
Objects from that past which have been illegally removed from a country should be returned without delay, and museums or private collections which have other artefacts that have been acquired legally still have a moral obligation to care for those objects, and to respect the sensitivities of the nation from which they originated. Museums and similar buildings are the temples of the Cultural Heritage devotion, and the cult has its own high priests, in the form of figures such as Professor Lord Renfrew, anyone in UNESCO, and the various heads of theEgyptian Antiquities Organization. This misguided worship, according to Tokeley, is the main cause of the crisis facing Egypt, and the same presumably applies to other countries whose heritage is beyond their capacity to maintain.
His proposal to free us from this belief system is to argue that objects from ancient Egypt are a commodity or resource like any other. Like such things, they can be bought and sold, and they can also be privatized. Western dealers and auction houses should be free to operate within Egypt. This would force prices up to international levels, and eliminate corruption and secretive dealing. (More money might well put an end to the improvised cutting of corners which the author detects everywhere in Egypt, but it would also introduce other forms of behaviour, some of them less than desirable, and probably less than legal.) Because the market would be freed, objects of art would find their way into the hands of the latter-day equivalent of Plato’s Guardians, people of sensibility and wisdom who are fit to be entrusted with the benefits of civilization.
Presumably there is a difference between stealing to order and buying to order, but one still wonders how brave this proposed new world would turn out to be in practice. In recent years the economy of Egypt has been liberalized to some degree, and the beginnings of a freer market in antiquities have made themselves felt. But if there is progress of a sort being made here, one can only conclude that it will come in spite of a book like this, and not because of it.
Whom is Tokeley hoping to convert to this radical doctrine of the free market? The academics, whom he urges to stop striking poses? This from an author who is happy to strike a pose on almost every page of his book. Or is he appealing to the Egyptians, who are described in one passage as people who “can barely change a car tyre”? In my experience, Egyptian mechanics have a talent for repairs and improvisations on old cars which is sometimes close to genius. Does Tokeley expect to make allies out of people he goes out of his way to alienate and belittle? Or is he simply reconciled to being a misunderstood prophet, the only sane man in a mad world?
The market is frequently maligned, and its capacity to benefit is regularly underestimated by purists. But there are dangers here. What Tokeley is really saying is that the Egyptians, collectively, have forfeited their right to their own heritage. If ownership is to be conferred on people who are above reproach, and who have the means to give an object a good home, who is to decide what or where a good home is? One of my favourite paintings, for example, is the view by Monet of Antibes which is now in the galleries of the Courtauld Institute in Somerset House. I would like the original, and would try my best to dust it regularly. It may be that if I hire some teams of private investigators, and then sex up a dossier or two, I can demonstrate publicly, or at any rate to myself, that there are academics in the world of London art-history whose ethical lives sometimes fall short of that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I think I can see the pine tree in the middle of the painting hanging its branches in dejection, waiting to be rescued from all the mediocrity and sleaze. Clearly Monet’s work of beauty would be better off in a purer environment, namely on the wall of somebody like me. In practice this will not happen, but what if I had the money and political influence to seriously challenge ownership of works of art on moral grounds which just happen to benefit me?
Suppose I find a toddler clutching a teddy bear. I recognize the bear as one of an extremely rare transitional design, which perfectly fills the remaining gap in my collection. Intellectually, I can make sense of that bear in the way that the toddler cannot. Obviously my claim to ownership of the toy is superior, because I am a philosopher of these things. Can we demand that he sell it to me, on the grounds that he does not know what he is carrying, and the bear does not deserve such a fate? The author of Rescuing the Past would seem to think that we can, and that we should.
Jonathan Tokeley has a considerable reputation as a restorer of works of art. He is not modest about this, but there is no reason to doubt his estimate of his own skills. He has clear ideas on how to solve major problems such as the decay of the Sphinx and the preservation of the murals in the tombs at Luxor. The range of his interests, as revealed in his book, is genuinely impressive. He has served his sentence, and the fact that he has should not be revisited on him, although there are times in his book when he seems to want to revisit it on himself. He should be free to return to his career. Perhaps now is the time for him to put his talents and expertise to the cause of serving the past, rather than trying to commandeer it.
