For the Lives column, Sylvie Robinson retraces the recent and ancient travels of a bull’s head looted from a temple in present-day Lebanon, recently repatriated from the United States—a saga represented in The Return, an exhibition by Rayyane Tabet on view at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, May 4–August 16, 2023.
Photo: Sylvie Robinson.
Anyone who has recently passed through customs at the Beirut airport might recognize a sign in which an outstretched, gloved hand emerges from the dark to protect a terracotta amphora. The sign is part of the National Campaign Against Illicit Trafficking of Cultural Property by UNESCO and the Lebanese Ministry of Culture. It reads, OUR HERITAGE IS NOT FOR SALE. The irony is that such a statement would not be relevant if the exact opposite weren’t common knowledge—heritage is always for sale and being sold, illicitly or not—something of which Rayyane Tabet’s The Return is hyperaware.
The exhibition fixates on a single object of antiquity—a marble bull’s head from c. 360 BCE that the French archeologist Maurice Dunand excavated from the Eshmun Temple in Saida, Lebanon in July 1967. Upon its state-sponsored excavation, Dunand’s team made four photographs of the bull’s head. In July 2017, fifty years later to the day, four photographs were taken again. However, this time, the photographer was a US federal agent. The Department of Homeland Security had requisitioned the bull’s head from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it was on loan. The Return seeks to reconstitute the fifty years between these photographs, charting the bull’s head’s epic journey through the shadows of the global antiquities market.
Upon entering the gallery, my eyes had to adjust to the dim, pervasive blue that obscured the interior. The windows were covered in tinted film, and sculptures made of car headlights hung from the ceiling, emitting a blue glow. A small wall text referred to the June 1967 six-day war that required those living in the Arab world to shelter in place and turn off all light sources at night to avoid being targeted in air raids. To circumvent the mandate for darkness, people painted their windows and car lights blue, rendering the light less visible from planes. The bull’s head was excavated the following month. It is in the blue, affective shadow of war that Tabet chose to tell the head’s story.
Out of the blue loomed eight free-standing walls with enormous reproductions of the head’s eight photographs. On the walls’ versos, Tabet pinned an exhaustive collection of documents—excavation inventories, police reports, custom declarations, sales invoices, shipping documents, loan agreements, emails, and court papers—that were presented to the Supreme Court of New York by the lawyer Matthew Bogdanos. In the dim light, I squinted at the fine print. Needless to say, it is a complicated story.
Rayyane Tabet, The Return, 2023. Installation view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, May 4–August 16, 2023.
The paper trail starts with the bull’s head’s excavation, storage, and eventual looting by paramilitary forces during the Lebanese Civil War. For the next fifteen years, the head disappears from the record, before reappearing in a sale between a New York antiquities dealer and a Colorado couple in 1996. Two years later, it is mentioned in a House & Garden magazine spread lionizing the couple’s “truly grand” antiquities collection. After many appraisals and transfers from Colorado to Geneva to Paris, a New York collector buys and loans the head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2010. In 2016, a curator recognized it as a stolen Lebanese artifact. The Colorado couple then repurchased the bull’s head and preemptively sued the Manhattan DA and the Lebanese antiquities directorate to prevent its seizure, claiming insufficient proof of its theft. The couple eventually conceded. The bull’s head was repatriated to Lebanon in 2017 and later linked to 180 other looted artifacts in the New York collector’s possession.
Even though the exhibition contains documents that name the sordid cast of characters implicated, the eight chapters of wall texts that Tabet wrote to accompany the primary documents avoided casting blame, referring to them instead as “antiquities dealer (A),” “antiquities collectors (A) and (B),” and “antiquities collector (C).” The enormous sums for which the bull’s head was sold ($1.2 million) or appraised ($1.5 million) were not mentioned. Tabet also did not refer to Israel as the perpetrator of the six-day war in the exhibition, nor did he specify that the Israeli-backed Phalangists were the militia responsible for initially looting the bull’s head.
Through his wall texts’ restraint, Tabet produced a formula by which a material object can be reduced to a collection of points and exchanges. The Return not only addresses the bull’s head’s odyssey across continents and through decades but also its journey’s banality. The truth is that looting and disappearances like this one happen all the time and everywhere. What’s remarkable here is that it has been returned. The blue light thus creates an atmosphere of complicity, a throbbing darkness in which covert crimes and desires can occur and be pardoned. The bull’s head, saturated in blue and rendered so large, both reveals and fetishizes the technical virtuosity of the ancient, unknown artist and produced in me a guilty desire to also lay claim to the object and access the “heritage” it might contain.
The Return also contains an implicit invitation to visit the National Museum in Beirut where the bull’s head is now on display. I found it there in a cramped corner with other repatriated objects. Because of the General Amnesty Law issued after the Lebanese Civil War that exempts war protagonists—the country’s current political elite—from legal liability for crimes committed before 1991, the museum curators cannot state that the bull’s head was looted by Phalangists. Instead, a sign explaining its return only said that the object was “missing since 1981.”
After seeing Tabet’s show, it was bizarre to look at the actual bull’s head and have the eight photographs and chapters of its history coalesce into a single object. The bull’s horns have been broken off from its head, rendering it blunt and docile. It was smaller than I expected. I spent a long time staring at it. For me, this was the most effective part of Tabet’s show, its ability to make a single object so slippery. The bull cannot be grabbed by the horns.
Rayyane Tabet, The Return, 2023. Installation view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, May 4–August 16, 2023.
In his fascinating and brilliantly written 66-page court filing for the bull’s head’s seizure, the lawyer Matthew Bogdanos admits that:
Even this investigation—with access to so much more material and with so much more legal authority in this country [the US] than the Lebanese Republic—has been unable to illuminate those well-appointed shadows where money changes hands and legitimate, but all-too-inconvenient, questions of the provenance and ownership history of the object are frequently considered outré and ever so gauche.
I could accuse Tabet of doing nothing more than exploiting and displaying Bogdanos’s investigation for his own artistic aims. Tabet himself says in an interview that he is “usually against showing documents as art” but justifies doing exactly that because “it marks the return of the story.” Yet I think the success of The Return is its ability to nod at and provide a space to dwell in “those well-appointed shadows” to which Bogdanos refers and which the general amnesty helps to uphold in Lebanon. Although the material object can be returned to Lebanon, the story that attaches itself to the bull’s head is far more unwieldy.
To close the story for myself, I convinced an archeologist friend to take me to the Eshmun Temple, the best-preserved Phoenician site in Lebanon and the place from which the bull’s head (and much of the National Museum’s contents) were excavated. Our taxi driver had no idea there was a temple just outside the city, so my friend directed him from the center of Saida. Once there, we climbed through the overgrowth to reach the top of the temple. There was no literature or signage, but my friend pointed out what he knew of the site: the Roman colonnade, the Byzantine church, the ablution basins. Although a project had been announced to restore the mosaics on site, we stood and watched a tattered tarp flap in the breeze as the crumbling mosaics bleached in the sun.
It was too hot to linger. Before leaving, my friend quickly photographed me sitting in the goddess Astarte’s throne, who, the story goes, fell deeply in love with a young hunter from Beirut named Eshmun. Astarte pursued the youth with such amorous intensity that, to escape her advances, he castrated himself and died. Astarte, dismayed, resurrected Eshmun, and transformed him into a god of healing. The temple was built to worship him.
While walking away, I mentally returned the bull’s head to the place where it rested for millennia before its 50-year odyssey. It is no surprise that millions of dollars passed through a single object when the temple it was once a part of is so neglected, but it is sad. Just as Eshmun’s castration made him even more desirable, even godly, to Astarte, the head’s value on the market—its very desirability—was also contingent on a castration from its context. Tabet’s title, The Return, most obviously refers to the bull’s head’s repatriation to Lebanon and its restoration as a cultural heritage item after years of exchange on antiquity markets. Yet I can’t help but think how The Return also returns the idea of the bull’s head and whatever heritage it possesses or signifies to the art market, albeit the contemporary one. With this work, Tabet opens a chapter to the bull’s head’s future sale—in the form of The Return—to a museum or collector.
The Return stands the bull’s head on its head. The project reveals the grotesque ideas, appraisals, and receipts that started to evolve out of it as soon as it emerged from the earth in Saida as a potential commodity. I suspect Tabet is conscious of the inability to locate heritage in the bull’s head alone. The more we try to locate heritage through investigation (artistic, archeological, legal, or otherwise), the more it becomes dispersed, unbound, and atmospheric—a blue light. Perhaps heritage, as conceived within capitalistic relations, is so confused and contested an idea that it can only be consolidated as such by its sale. x
Sylvie Robinson is an artist and writer, now based in Bern, and sometimes other places that begin with B.