Erin Thompson at the LRB:
I met Gordon in Phnom Penh a year ago. He had agreed to take me and Ashish Dhakal, a journalist and repatriation activist from Nepal, to Koh Ker and Angkor. First, though, I spent nearly a week at the National Museum of Cambodia. It opened in 1920, designed by George Groslier, to hold the artefacts that archaeologists in French Indochina weren’t shipping back to Paris. He enlarged the architectural forms of Cambodian Buddhist temples to create a building that hadn’t previously been needed in a region where sacred artworks generally remained in place.
One morning I saw a member of staff bow towards a sculpture of a reclining Buddha before dusting it in long, gentle strokes. Another climbed a stepladder and ran a feather duster with rainbow-coloured bristles over the shoulders of a Krishna, long after all the dust had to have gone. One afternoon I watched an ant lay a clutch of eggs in a shallow cavity in a sculpture’s broken arm. The eggs fell to the floor and a woman swept them up, singing so quietly I could hear her voice only between strokes of her broom.
more here.