Trying to digest the whole world
Attempting to hold on to my hat after three huge exhibitions in less than a month
Right now I’m sitting with a bad case of cultural and artistic indigestion. At the beginning of October I travelled down to London to see ‘Ancient India, Living Traditions’, an exhibition of sacred Indian art at the British Museum. While I was there, I also went to the National Gallery to see the Millet exhibition. And when I got home, I went to see the 50 years retrospective exhibition of Andrew Goldsworthy, at the National Gallery in Edinburgh.
I have a draft essay which puts Goldsworthy beside Millet; I was interested in the idea that both artists were ‘responding to the land’.
I have a draft essay on the stone carvings from Amaravati, which appeared in two different parts of the British Museum.
I have buckets of images from everywhere in the Museum, waiting for text.
I haven’t even started to think about the exhibition that I actually went to see.
‘Ancient India, Living Traditions’ was a major exhibition at the British Museum this year, running from May to October. It was based around images created from 200 BCE to 600 CE in India, focussing on Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism; systems of belief and practice which originated in the Indian subcontinent but which now span the entire world. There are more than 2 million people of Indian heritage in the UK, the majority of whom are likely to be in some way involved in cultural practices relating to the kinds of things which could be seen in the exhibition. It must have been a huge undertaking, which I know included consultation with members of the different communities represented there (which is why, for example, there are no postcards of images for sale in the Museum shop).
Like all museum exhibits, the images were de-contextualised. The statues are no longer in their temples or wayside shrines, the railings are no longer around the great stupa at Amaravati - a stupa which, in fact, collapsed long ago, and the British Museum houses much of what remains of it. These spoils of empire are not only stolen goods, but also the unwittingly preserved remants of lost things which were looted long ago and removed from their homelands by a variety of different agents.
I could read the exhibition book. I could watch all the YouTube videos: Sushmar Jansari, the curator of the exhibition, introducing various topics and artefacts; William Dalrymple talking about his new book, which overlaps with the subject matter of the exhibition. But that would be starting to try to be comprehensive; it would be trying to explain this vast area when there are already many existing sources that can do that far better than I ever could.
There’s also something in me that objects to the assumption that I can’t relate to a piece of art unless I know something about it. That I have to be told what the symbols mean, who they represent, when the thing was made, what influences it shows. My objection is linked in some way to my early reaction to the conceptual turn in contemporary art, sometime in the 60s/70s, when ideas started to become more important than aesthetic, spatial or material qualities. Much of my pilgrimage has been about seeking out and encountering images without bringing any historical or conceptual preconceptions to them; just wanting to look and receive and notice what seemed to produce effects, and what didn’t.
Perhaps this is because of how these things tend to be dealt with in art history books. In Indian art, for example, authors fill whole books with discussion of precisely where upon a chronological timeline a particular image is placed, or the endless details of different iconographies, or a precise re-telling of each mythological story that a piece of art may be connected to. Time and context variables are well covered, over and over again, but few seem to pause to simply take in the wonder of the forms.
In taking this position I know that I’m directly arguing against the experience I had in the themed room of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, where the different paintings collected together under the theme of ‘French Connections’, for example, seemed to risk being only superficially appreciated without a sense of where they were placed in the history of European art. Nonetheless, especially with very ancient things (where there is very little reliable information about the fine details of context), and with art from outside of my cultural context, I seem to want to just receive an image without too many ideas about it in my mind.
Having said that, I do have cultural and historical information, whether I like it or not, about these sacred images and their traditions, because I’ve been studying them for many decades. In order to orient myself, and you, I’m going to start my approach to this exhibition by re-publishing three essays from earlier this year, over the next three weeks, which explore why I’m so intruiged by the sacred images of India.
First one coming next week.
Send me any questions!
Great! Looking forward to it. I have a question: why do you think it’s important to experience an image without information? That feels extremely sad to me, weirdly. If I read a book by Mishima, there are lots of things I won’t get if I don’t try to know a bit more about the Japan of his time. After all artists create in a society, they’re interacting with the fibre that makes it. Why this purity of the object, and this hope that the image is all-encompassing rather than being in a dynamic relation with the world around it, which you may not know? Which is not to say that you can’t appreciate a painting or an image without information but certainly, engaging with its time is actually revering it and its power, don’t you think?
Just saw a fantastic museum exhibition myself in San Francisco.
You're absolutely right, the museum is a decontextualizing space. Have you ever read Inside the White Cube by Brian O'Doherty?