Calling to mind
Andrew Lambirth
The Museum of the Mind British Museum until 7 September
Subtitled 'Art and Memory in World Cultures', this small but fascinating show has bitten off rather more than it can chew. The theme of art and memory must, by its very nature — which is to touch on nearly everything — be a vast subject which only the most intrepid anthropologist would venture to engage with in the limited confines of the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery. I am not in general an admirer of blockbuster exhibitions, but why isn't the BM mounting something like the phenomenally successful Aztecs show which has just closed at the RA? Aztecs is just the sort of show you'd expect the BM to mount, building on the strength of its collections and exploring an area in which human history outweighs fine art. But, no, instead we get the trendily named Museum of the Mind to launch the British Museum's
250th anniversary programme. Even though Hockney and one or two other contemporary artists are included in the show, we could have done with something that made a bigger splash.
That said, the exhibition is an enjoyable collection of diverse objects, and if it manages to remind the public of the range of the Museum's treasures then it will have served some purpose. But does there have to be so much inane signage? Here's a sample of such wall writing: 'With its public galleries and worldwide collection, the British Museum has become a theatre of memory.' Really? I think it demeans itself by such marketing ploys. That and the almost obligatory (these days) 'sound sculpture' at the entrance and exit to the gallery might be enough to deter sensitive souls. For visitors are invited to pick up an old-fashioned black telephone and record their memories of the dear old BM. This 'interactive sound work', entitled The Memory Machine', is the brainchild of Cathy Lane and Nye Parry, and plays back a mixed and garbled soundtrack of people talking. As if we weren't already bombarded by enough noise pollution.
Much better to focus attention on the staggeringly super-kitsch 'Day of the Dead' altar monument created by the Mexican shrine-maker Eugenio Reyes Eustaquio. This massive tiered white satin weddingcake of statuettes and photos, artificial fruit and flowers and bread is intended to celebrate the return of the souls of departed ancestors, and is thus built around an image of the Museum's founder, Sir Hans Sloane. It has been specially commissioned to echo the Museum's architecture, and is by far the most gaudy item in the exhibition. Elisabeth Frink's lifesize bronze head of Sir John Pope-Hennessy, the Museum's director from 1974 to 1976, looks on in apparent disapproval.
The objects range from an elegantly displayed Inca string tally (information is coded in the knots), to a modern 'monoprint' by Osi Audu made from graphite, safety pins and plaited wool. This looks like a tower block or a skull, and we are told the safety pins symbolise the ubiquitous eyes of consciousness'. Two rather beautiful navigation charts of cane and tiny cowrie shells from the Marshall Islands look considerably better than a lot of postwar abstract sculpture, while other objects to hold my attention were variously a marble bust of Euripides (a Roman version of a Greek original), a 1947 Scottish £5 note, and a 17th-century French diptych sundial.
One of the more remarkable exhibits is a Roman mosaic portrait of Christ, dating from the 4th century AD, and hailing from Hinton St Mary in Dorset. This roundel, with its rather melancholy-looking Christ flanked by pomegranates to symbolise eternity, is believed to be the earliest representation of the Saviour in Britain. Amid the medals and coins there's a rather fine cameo of Augustus, while nearby there's a double self-portrait by Jock McFadyen, of the artist going bald overnight in 1983. A pen-and-ink study of an armour-plated rhino by Direr is particularly noteworthy because it was done entirely from verbal descriptions, and not from visual experience. Other objects to wonder at include a cut-and-painted animal-hide shadow puppet of Gandhi from the 1960s or 1970s, gold death-masks from Nineveh cheek-byjowl with Cromwell's death-mask, all bent nose but no wart, a Ghanaian fantasy coffin in the shape of a stubby Winchester rifle and a fabulous Piranesi drawing of Rome. A nicely mixed bag.
An accompanying book by John Mack, keeper of the Museum's Department of Ethnography and curator of the show, is published by the British Museum Press at f19.99 (special exhibition price of £14.99). A Museum Trail extends the themes of the exhibition through the BM's other galleries, from the famous relief of the Assyrian coming down like the wolf on the fold, or in this case a lion, to the colossal bust of Rameses II that inspired Shelley to write of Ozymandias.
In the end, the exhibition is perhaps too geared to commemorative objects. (And for some reason there is rather too much Mexican Day of the Dead memorabilia papier mache skeleton figures and a Posada broadsheet, besides the wonderful shrine at the beginning of the show.) Death is billed as the chief threat to memory, whereas in fact it is Time which is the real enemy. I would like to have seen more celebration of the gentler side of things, the binding vows and the apparently ephemeral declarations. After all, memory is about first love as well as last rites.
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