August 16, 2003

If all the ideas implicit in the Museum of the Mind show at the British Musuem were physically manifest in the exhibition itself, it would be a brilliant, dizzying affair. Unfortunately, those ideas seem to have stayed in the curators’ heads. Between the idea and the reality falls the explanatory text. A veritable wall of words greets you. The British Museum has not lost its affection for presentation boards and photoshop collages.

The very title is a mouthful, with a subtitle: Art and Memory in World Cultures. Riffing on the Renaissance idea of an architecture of memory, the exhibition imagines the British Museum — celebrating its 250th anniversary — as a memory palace. But this seems unnecessarily cumbersome for a briefish show.

Once you have digested that, and overcome the irritating display style, you can start to enjoy an astounding collection of objects: a Gandhi shadow puppet, a Hockney print paying homage to the museum’s wonderful Michelangelo drawings, Cromwell’s death mask, Micronesian navigation charts, a Day of the Dead altarpiece.

Emotion and mystery saturate these heterogeneous evidences of humanity’s obsession with the past and the need to preserve it. Coins, busts, icons, cult objects, coffins — everything here is an attempt to shore us up against our ruin by refusing to forget. Memory is perhaps what makes us special.

And yet the exhibition does not quite get hold of its subject. Even forgiving the aesthetics, there are problems with the argument that arise from a bland multiculturalism. Celebrating the fact that every world culture makes monuments, preserves souvenirs, fights forgetting, is like saying: “The human race — a great bunch of lads.” It doesn’t raise any questions, and seems to deny the existence of contrasts or tensions.

Memory is unreliable, contested, manipulable. Differences of memory — was that my land or yours? — cause wars. History was invented to criticize memory; yet, although there are potent images of the historical in this show, there is little sense of the development of the idea of history — that is, of transformations and differences in attitudes to the past.

Our culture seems sometimes to have become utterly amnesiac, so this exhibition can be forgiven for getting all dewy-eyed about memory. But all cultures exist between memory and forgetting — and a false memory can be worse than amnesia, as victims of the world’s undying hatreds can attest. — Dawn/Guardian Service