Two exhibitions at the British Museum emphasise in different ways the
changing public perception of culture. One of them deliberately makes
intriguing comparisons between past and present.
TWO new exhibitions at the British Museum this winter demonstrate the
museum's commitment to scholarship and to a wider general audience. Both
exhibitions succeed in raising fundamental questions about the
relationship between the museum and its public.
The lively exhibition in the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery attempts to
forge links between the past and present, displaying specially
commissioned works by a dozen contemporary artists alongside the
permanent exhibition. Focusing on contemporary debates about how to
display the past and make it meaningful to a present-day audience, the
museum has succeeded in creating a series of intriguing comparisons.
The exhibition was launched at the end of October with a temporary
display by the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy which lasted for three days
made from 30 tons of compacted yellow sand snaking around the permanent
collection.
Now the links between the old and new are suggested by the huge Red
Granite Head from a Colossal Figure of a King from Thebes, from the
eighteenth dynasty (circa 1390 BC), shown alongside Iron Shadows, a
seven-foot-high sculpture by Igor Mitoraj which is based on the same
regular facial features as the original but produced in fragmented and
rusted cast iron.
At the back of the exhibition Alexander Mihaylovich's 20-ft-high oil
painting Colossus of Menes dominates the show. Perhaps the work which
best summarises the museum's aims, however, is Frog by Marc Quinn. A
live North American woodfrog, able to survive freezing during winter
hibernation, has been suspended inside a perspex head above a gleaming
refrigeration unit. As a centrepiece to the exhibition it works well,
suggesting the kind of rebirth that lies at its heart.
If this is the public face of the British Museum, the exhibition
across the corridor could not be more different. Clustered together in a
few rooms is a small silent collection of beautiful relics from
Byzantium. The achievements of the Byzantine empire which flourished for
over a millennium as successor to the Roman Empire in the eastern
Mediterannean -- which also established the Orthodox Church -- are
represented by a peerless selection of artefacts from British
collections.
Icons, jewellery, illuminated manuscripts, fragments of architecture,
and textiles chart the progress of a recognisably Christian art from its
establishment in the fifth century through to late sixteenth-century
items from Mount Athos.
The exhibition concentrates on the creation of Constantinople as the
capital and administrative centre of Byzantium from its inauguration in
330 and gradual emergence as the New Rome.
The final room is devoted to exquisite examples of Byzantine art
produced after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, largely from Crete
which was a Venetian colony until 1665. The fifteenth-century Icon of
the Nativity or the Icon of St John the Baptist are both beautiful and
painstakingly crafted works.
One of the main messages from the works on display and from the
photographs of Byzantine architecture is the way in which existing art
forms from Jewish, pagan, and secular cultures were all pressed into
Christian service.
The relief panel representing Leda and Swan produced in Egypt in the
fourth or fifth centuries has all the uninhibited expression of the best
pagan art and makes a telling comparison with the solemnity of the
religious works.
The painted image of Saint Kollouthos, for example (also from Egypt
from a century or so later), depicts a favourite Egyptian martyr and is
painted on a thick canvas rather than the usual wood used for the other
icons.
Interestingly, the mosaic from the apse of San Michele in Africisco
Ravenna dedicated in 545 shows a smiling beardless youth which has only
recently been recognised as a depiction of Christ.
A series of stunning photographs of the architectural achievements of
Byzantium demonstrates how the Christian Church developed out of the
Roman secular tradition. The monumental sixth-century Church of
Hagiasophia, built by the Emperor Justinian, is shown in present-day
Istanbul complete with the minarets and other Islamic fittings which
were added during the building's use as a mosque from the fifteenth
century to the early twentieth century.
If the British Museum's aim is to underline the way in which we
constantly modify culture, then these two exhibitions demonstrate its
relevance in quite different but none the less effective ways.
* Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art is at the British
Museum, London until February 26, 1995. Byzantium runs to April 23,
1995.
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