Athens may be in chaos, but the Olympic buildings, with their beautiful spirals and curves, are worthy of the ancients, writes Jonathan Jones
'It does not exist." The man at the gate of the site where Athens' authorities had proposed building a new Acropolis Museum in time for this month's Olympics could not be clearer. When I ask when it is likely to open he shrugs. "Who knows?" I would guess never. It was admitted some time ago that the new museum would not be ready for the Olympics. But what stunned me, looking down from the rocky promontory that dominates central Athens where the Parthenon was built in the fifth century BC, is that work has scarcely begun.
The new Acropolis Museum was going to be a modern masterpiece, its glory a glass-walled room looking up at the Parthenon, the great temple to Athena. This room was designed to display the Elgin Marbles, the temple's frieze and sculptures, removed to London by Lord Elgin at the beginning of the 19th century. Greece hoped the return of the Olympics to Hellenic soil, combined with the swanky new museum, would oblige the British Museum to at least loan the frieze. Yet I can't see any evidence of belief in this project, just a grey patch of sunburned earth pockmarked by concrete foundations.
Protesters objected that it would obliterate early Christian remains. Red paint has been spattered like blood on the site fence. "SOS they destroy antiquities," someone has written.
Whatever the reasons, the will to build the new Acropolis Museum by 2004 has evaporated. The most important cultural consequence, therefore, of the Athens Olympiad 2004 is that the Elgin Marbles will never return to Athens. If it didn't happen this year it's not going to happen at all. There will never be a better opportunity. By failing to carry through its grand project at the foot of the Acropolis, Greece wasted it. Philhellenes need to find another cause, because this one is lost.
The Olympics is not, you might think, a cultural event. No one worries about the influence of Euro 2004 on the Portuguese art scene. But the return of the ancient games to Athens is a moment so rich in historical, artistic, architectural and even mythological associations that it becomes by definition a cultural as well as an athletic festival. Athens is staging a "cultural olympiad", a collection of exhibitions and concerts under the aegis of the organising committee of the Olympic Games.
Meanwhile, even the new stadium and its surrounding complex aspire to be works of art. If the story of the new Acropolis Museum is pathetic, that of Santiago Calatrava's Olympic stadium may soon be acknowledged as glorious. Rumours of catastrophic failure have dogged this ambitious project. Construction has continued to the last minute. In the scramble to complete the project death rates have been noticeably high. "Eighteen workers dead for the f***ing Olympics," says graffiti in the city centre.
The best way to get to the stadium is by metro: the Greek government is urging people to use it rather than bring the city's traffic to a final standstill.
The new Athens metro is itself a spectacle; because the very soil of Athens is composed of antiquities, the digging of an underground railway network in time for the Olympics brought to light millions of remains, from water pipes to amphorae.
Some are beguilingly displayed in the metro stops, to the extent that stations such as Syntagma and Akropoli serve as underground museums, with entire sections of archaeological strata exposed in the walls, glimpses of the everyday life of ancient Athens. Getting out at Irini, on the north-eastern outskirts of the city, you encounter something else.
Bowed and torqued white metal radiates across the main Olympic site. Curving, spiralling forms span fountain-splashed pools. Calatrava's architecture is the opposite of classical, yet his Olympic public space is a modern Acropolis. Like the ancient sacred mount, it is a constellation of charismatic architectural forms that orchestrate communal life, and it is beautiful. The practicality of it all has yet to be proven.
Athens broke with recent Olympic tradition in commissioning a major permanent work of architecture rather than the temporary, functional structures with which other cities have been satisfied. Even now, barely more than a week before the games open, the Olympic complex is still a building site. As a crocodile of schoolchildren make their way inside, carrying colourful hoops for a rehearsal, an orange JCB drives out.
I care far more about architecture than I do about athletics, and as architecture this is lovely. Calatrava is a poetic designer of warped and vibrating baroque forms; he made his name with a bridge, the Campo Volantin footbridge in Bilbao, that uses bent arcs of metal to suggest motion and tension and life. His Olympic designs work in exactly the same way. Apparently ignoring function, they insist on expression. Graceful and agitated, they are sculptures; they do not so much fulfil tasks as generate emotion. This is a daring achievement, the one thing I saw in Athens that lives up to the spirit of ancient Greece, where sport and culture, body and intellect, were unified.
You can see how athletics inhabited the ancient Greek soul in Magna Graecia, a superb exhibition at the Museum of Cycladic Art, near the Greek parliament. This is by far the best of the exhibitions staged for the Olympics. It examines the cult of athletics not just in the Greek islands but also far beyond, in the world the Greeks colonised; it is full of outstanding finds from Sicily, southern Italy, Rome, Tuscany.
The most stunning exhibit is a marble statue of a charioteer, discovered on Mozia, an island off Sicily. At least, this exhibition argues that the Youth of Mozia is a charioteer; other theories have it that he was a priest or a Carthaginian. In fact he is incredibly muscular and gracefully athletic. His shoulders seethe with strength, and he has a hand confidently on his hip while the other, the curators argue, held the reins of the winning chariot at one of the ancient games. He wears a long robe designed to heighten rather than conceal his anatomy; it clings to his round buttocks and his emphatic genitalia. It's a fifth-century sculpture from the height of the classical Greek world, and it reminds you that ancient sport didn't just inspire art, it inspired great art.
This ancient obsession with competitive sports, and other kinds of competition, is explored in Agon, an exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The idea of agon - contest - dominated Greek culture; this show includes not only images of torch races, discus throwers and long jumpers but also the Athenian competition for best tragic drama that gave us Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. This exhibition is less intense, more abstract, in other words not as good as the one at the Museum of Cycladic Art. But that's as nothing compared with the chaos that surrounds it, and here we return to Athens' shame.
The National Archaeological Museum of Athens, a huge neoclassical building north-west of the centre, was one of many museums that closed for radical renovation before the Olympics. It has now reopened - sort of. The grounds are a mess, with workers half-heartedly tidying up. The cafe does not yet exist; unopened crates contain fridges. There's no bookshop. The upstairs is closed. The atmosphere is subdued. I go to the Museum of the Ancient Agora; it is closed for renovation. Even part of the old Acropolis Museum is closed. Two weeks before the Olympics there is less ancient art on view than normal. Looking at contemporary art isn't easy, either. I am almost physically ejected from the Cultural Institute of Athens; all I wanted to do was see an installation, but this seems to count as espionage.
Luckily, the curator of the Bernier- Eliades Gallery, in an old house near the Acropolis, is happy to show me her Gilbert and George exhibition. I don't know how the British rib ticklers would fit into ancient Greece. Their new works, in which their faces are grossly distorted gurning masks with stuck-out tongues, resemble satyrs, the goat-legged demonic creatures of ancient Greek myth. Gilbert and George offer a gross, lumpen, distorted reflection of the Apollonion bodies about to grace Athens.
The ancient Greeks would be unimpressed by the Cultural Olympiad. In the Magna Graecia exhibition is a stone architectural model of a stadium, made for the Philhellene Roman emperor Hadrian and discovered at his villa in Tivoli. It is remarkable, exemplifying the same reverence for ancient Greece that made Baron Coubertin revive the Olympics in Athens in 1896. I visit the Panathenaic Stadium, the site of the ancient Athenian stadium, reconstructed for those first modern games. It looks exactly like Hadrian's model. We are all the slaves of ancient Athens; every modern stadium imitates ancient stadiums, just as every neoclassical building, or indeed every human effort to impose beautiful order on space, apes the Parthenon. Athens hasn't made much of its cultural opportunity, but then it doesn't have to: it is Athens.
... - Guardian Service
