cobwebs and curiosities, serpents and skulls

Mythologies (ed.), exh cat., Haunch of Venison, London, 2009

Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar (1983) is a meditation on how we observe and understand the world around us.[i] Calvino’s eponymous protagonist (who is named after the Palomar observatory in California), ‘a nervous man who lives in a frenzied and congested world’, observes the breaking of waves on the beach, watches tortoises mating in his garden, shops for cheese, and ponders on the codes and taboos which govern social behaviour.[ii] In each instance he attempts to analyse and question, to form conclusions, but ultimately finds himself ‘even more unsure about everything.’[iii] In an episode entitled ‘Serpents and Skulls’ Mr Palomar visits the Toltec ruins in Tula, Mexico. He is accompanied by an ‘impassioned and eloquent expert on Pre-Columbian civilisations’, who explains about the legends of Quetzalcoatl, the uses of the temple of the Morning Star and the meanings of sculptures of the Plumed Serpent. Mr Palomar hesitates: ‘All this has to be taken on faith; for that matter, it would be hard to demonstrate the opposite. In Mexican archaeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something else that stands, in turn, for yet another something… every picture seems a rebus to be deciphered.’ As they tour the site Mr Palomar’s friend ‘pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.’[iv]

Yet as Palomar and his friend make their way through the ruins they keep on coming across a group of schoolchildren. The teacher leading them tells the children which civilization each structure was made by, from which stone etc., but then concludes, “We don’t know what it means.” For our hero, his friend and the teacher present diametrically opposed approaches which constitute a dilemma:

‘Though Mr Palomar continues to follow the explanation of his friend acting a guide, he always ends up crossing the path of the schoolboys and overhearing the teacher’s words. He is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation, allegorical readings, have always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind. But he feels attracted also by the opposite attitude of the schoolteacher: what had a first seemed only a brisk lack of interest is being revealed to him as a scholarly and pedagogical position, a methodological choice by this serious and conscientious young man, a rule from which he will not swerve. A stone, a figure, a sign, a word that reach us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, it is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.’[v]

Palomar/Calvino identifies a paradox. The world – its natural wonders, historic sites, ancient civilizations, alien religions and perverse beliefs – is inherently mysterious. We want to explain, to interpret, to classify, but we also want to allow the world to retain this mystery. That there are some things we cannot understand is exciting and inspiring. This paradox offers a fascinating creative tension which runs through much of the work in Mythologies. We see it in the way in which Guy Tillim’s portraits of young Mai-Mai soldiers in the Congo seem like exercises in objective documentation yet remain essentially strange. In the ways in which trash is reconfigured as objects of power by the Haitian artists Jean Herard Celeur and Guyodo. In the uncanny animism of Ricky Swallow’s carved backpack, of Jochem Hendricks’ taxidermied dogs and Christian Boltanski’s Théâtre d'ombres. In the alchemical transformations of matter undertaken by Keith Tyson and the otherwordly thresholds of Bill Viola and Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. All is strange. And as the most famous scientist of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, said: ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’

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 Mythologies is about the stories we tell about the world in order to understand it. The exhibition takes as its starting point the previous role of 6 Burlington Gardens as the Museum of Mankind. Between 1970 and 1998 the building housed the British Museum’s vast ethnographic collections and staged a series of important exhibitions on subjects ranging from the Mexican Day of the Dead to Japanese Kites, from Sir Stanford Raffles to Indonesian Shadow plays. It was home to extraordinary exhibits ranging from the infamous Crystal Skull - long thought to be an Aztec death symbol, but now widely considered a nineteenth century fake – to controversial Colonial trophies such as the Benin Bronzes. The British Museum’s collections were based on the Miscellania of Sir Hans Sloane, a cornucopia of antiquities, natural history specimens and other curiosities, which was bequeathed to the nation on his death in 1793. The collections of Sloane and the British Museum are recalled throughout the exhibition in a series of strange echoes, as are the exhibitions held at the Museum of Mankind; in Hew Locke’s tapestry, Ivan and Heather Morison’s kites, in Carlos Amorales’ animation and collages, in Damien Hirst’s diamond skull, and in new works by Kiki Smith, John Isaacs and Wim Delvoye. For many artists, as James Putnam suggests in his essay, the Museum of Mankind was a rich source of inspiration, and the idea that it represented continues to exert a magnetic pull on the imagination of the curious and the creative. The scale of its endeavour (and that of its parent institution, the British Museum), to bring together under one roof all the cultures of the world - represented by objects of everyday life, of unbelievable spiritual resonance, of historic and artistic importance - and to somehow explain all this, has something intrinsically mythic about it. Its breadth is absurd. It smacks of hubris, of folly, of a project one might find in the metaphysical fictions of Calvino or Borges.

Mythologies responds to this heady mix of circumstances. It is celebratory, critical, speculative, contradictory, imaginative, rooted in history yet looking into the future. It takes account of recent developments in ethnographic research but also reaches back to the world of Sir Thomas Browne, who mused that ‘all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world. We study the order of things’, says Browne, ‘but we cannot grasp their innermost essence.’[vi]

For Mythologies, Burlington Gardens is transformed into a haunted house, a place of darkness and light, a giant Cabinet of Curiosities. It self-consciously evokes the mysterious and transformative atmospheres of the historic displays at the Pitt Rivers, Hunterian, Horniman and Sir John Soane’s Museums. Exploring museological strategies such as archiving, display and taxonomy, whilst blurring the boundaries between the parallel universes of art, biology, ethnography and anthropology – which in the distant past constituted a continuum - the exhibition aims to invoke a sense of wonder and mystery. Ethnography has struggled in the last 50 years to rid itself of the subjective – of its focus on exoticism and mystery – but these are exactly the qualities that contemporary art finds exciting and which the exhibition seeks to invoke. Of course, this does not mean a return to the kind of cultural Colonialism that characterized many Western museums until the late twentieth century. Here the ‘Other’ is evoked deliberately, as a creative strategy. In today’s globalized cultural arena artists from India, China, Latin America and the Middle East are as likely to show alongside colleagues from France, America or Scandinavia, as they are with each other.

The exhibition title suggests not only the classical process of story-telling and mythologizing but also references two key texts of modern anthropology, Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, first published in 1957, and Claude Levi-Strauss’s Mythologiques, published in four volumes between 1964 and 1971. Mythologiques is a seminal and founding text of Structural Anthropology, in which Levi-Strauss proposes that culture is a system of symbolic communication. Barthes’ innovation (which is perhaps even more crucial for the exhibition) was to take classic anthropological techniques of analysis and apply them to contemporary phenomena such as popular pastimes, advertising, photographs and movie stars. We don’t take these innovations to be definitive (and indeed, they have been the subject of vigorous debate in the intervening years), but by invoking these texts the exhibition suggests that contemporary art can offer a similar opportunity to reinterpret and re-read the world. It is perhaps a system of symbolic communication in itself. However, a paradox applies (a different one to that faced by Mr Palomar). Such academically rigorous strategies may analyze and explain the world, but they can conversely reinforce our sense of the wonderful strangeness of contemporary life. So we turn about once more.

 Mythologies addresses a set of thematics that emerge from consideration of anthropological, ethnographic and museological discourse, and which might have been the subject of exhibitions of displays at the Museum of Mankind; beginnings and endings, rites and ritual, magic and material culture. There are works which explore the imagery of crucifixes and masks and address ideas of belief. Key to this exhibition is the concept of the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities, which can be understood as the founding stone of museology. From John Tradescant’s seventeenth century collection in Lambeth, known as ‘The Ark’ we have the distinction between Naturalia and Artificalia, which leads us to the more recent divisions between museums of natural history and those of material culture. The classic Victorian museum – perhaps exemplified by the Horniman in South London, and still evident in provincial municipal museums – housed a wide variety of collections under one roof in order to provide educational opportunities. Mythologies takes a similar pluralistic approach. There is a suite of rooms that engage with ideas of Natural Histories, and there are spaces that explore contemporary art’s engagement with notions of Other Worlds, of The Afterlife and memory, of Religious Belief, as well as Magic and Classical mythology and symbolism, Memento Mori and Vanitas.

Alongside Barthes and Levi-Strauss the exhibition invokes a series of emblematic figures: Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, John Tradescant, Sir John Soane and Charles Darwin, The Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Sir Hans Sloane is perhaps the skeleton at the feast.

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 What then, we should ask ourselves, is myth? Traditionally myths are ‘imaginative traditions about the nature, history and destiny of the world, the gods, man and society.’[vii] Richard Cavendish suggests that they exist in ‘all societies, of the present as well as the past. They are part of the fabric of human life, expressing beliefs, moulding behaviour and justifying institutions, customs and values’ and goes on to assert that ‘It is consequently impossible to understand human beings without an understanding of their myths.’[viii] Key to the idea of myth is the notion of truthfulness:

‘A myth is a story or tradition which claims to enshrine a fundamental truth about the world and human life, which is regarded in its own milieu as authoritative, but whose truth is not literal, historic or scientific.’ [ix]

However, in the last 50 years Barthes, Levi-Strauss and others have contributed to a new understanding of what myth might be, positing it above all else as a system of communication. Barthes states, unequivocally: ‘What is a myth today? I shall give you at the outset a first, very simple answer, which is perfectly consistent with etymology: myth is a type of speech.’[x] Elsewhere he writes: ‘What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form.’[xi]

Mythologies reflects this range of approaches. It encompasses traditional, structural and linguistic approaches to myth but is above all non-prescriptive. It embraces the notion of disparate perspectives, of what Michel Foucault called ‘subjugated knowledges.’[xii] Some old ideas keep on coming back. Here we find references to Narcissus and Bacchus, we see Mexican death symbols and an ancient Chinese Monkey King, alongside images of present-day America, India, South Africa and the Congo. It also suggests that contemporary art, and the institutions within which it is shown, written about, discussed, bought and sold, themselves constitute a mythic system. Looked at in this way contemporary art can be understood as a machine for generating stories and images that help us to understand our world, but which might also renew its strangeness and power. The museum is in this formulation thus as a mechanism for re-presenting, decoding (and, crucially, also encoding) contemporary myth.

As Cavendish states: ‘When old myths are lost, new ones are needed. Myths flourish and fade and die, but new myths are born, old ones are resurrected, and hybrid forms combining new and old emerge when times change or cultures mingle.’[xiii]

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 Since the Museum of Mankind closed its doors in 1998, contemporary ethnography has made efforts to overcome traditional models in which a Western subject investigated a non-Western ‘Other’. A growing trend in anthropological research and analysis, multi-sited ethnography looks at culture as embedded in the macro-constructions of a global social order. By tracking a subject across spatial and temporal boundaries, it can look at ethnic groups in diaspora, a particular commodity as it travels through the networks of global capitalism, or stories or rumours that appear in multiple locations and time periods. One might argue that contemporary art does something similar.

While today’s anthropologists continue to concern themselves with the distinct ways in which people in different locales experience and understand their lives, they aim to combine a focus on the local with an effort to grasp larger political, economic and cultural frameworks. This exhibition shows that many contemporary artists are subscribing to just such a multi-sited approach. The exhibition thereby turns its investigative eye to social phenomena specific to contemporary cultures – such as horror movies (Shovlin) or commuters (Kallat) – whilst also offering echoes of older tropes – such as shadow plays (Boltanski, Noble & Webster), masks (Pardo) and sacrificial altars (Dixon, Isaacs) - in an effort to present a world in which, regardless of where and how we live, we are all trying to make sense of each other.

 Notes

 [i] Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, trans. William Weaver, Vintage, London, 1994

[ii] Calvino, p.4

[iii] Calvino, p.7

[iv] Calvino, p.86-87

[v] Calvino, p.87-88

[vi] Source? Quoted in Sebald, The Rings of Saturn – unfinished footnote?

[vii] Richard Cavendish ed., Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, London, 1980, p.8

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid., p.9

[x] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957, p.xx

[xi] Ibid., p.xx

[xii] ‘..For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges.’ Foucault, Michel, Society Must be Defended. (Trans. David Macey). Bertani, Mauro & Fontana, Alessandro (eds.). Picador, NY 2003

[xiii] Cavendish, op cit. p.xx