The Museum as Tomb?

The British Museum has recently been hosting increasingly interesting shows that mix contemporary art with their collections. In 2008, Statuephilia featured the work of five contemporary sculptors in and around the museum, from Marc Quinn to Anthony Gormley, with Damien Hirst’s intervention in the Enlightenment Gallery being the most effective to my mind. Now the museum has gone a step further, inviting the artist Grayson Perry to curate his own show.

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, despite my first impressions, is charming, effective and very thought provoking. The premise, which could be better introduced at the start of the exhibition, is that it is Perry’s highly personal engagement with the collections, related to his teddy bear, Alan Measles, and a pilgrimage to Germany on which he took him. Thus, the displays are themed to ideas like pilgrimage, sexuality, relics, cultural conversation, and each include a mixture of Perry’s own works with and in response to British Museum objects. His ceramics in this show are particularly exquisite. They make visually very successfully his argument about the importance of the craftsmanship that went into these objects, as well as the culturally constructed meanings that surround them, and how these are changed in the museum. The centerpiece of the show is ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’ constructed like an ancient burial with a large sculpture by Perry at the centre. This is a ship of objects copied from the collections, with a hand-axe at its centre, sailing into the unknown of life and meaning.

Appropriately, questions inherent to Perry’s exhibition were also raised by Sir Mark Jones in his Francis Haskell Memorial Lecture at the National Gallery on Friday. Sir Mark gave a provocative talk about ‘Museums, Collecting and Competitive Display,’ in which he argued that the large, expensive modern museum has replaced the cathedral as the centre of national competitive display. As such, they act to sanctify wealth and beauty, and as a sort of ritual deposition for private collections. Collectors therefore remain the key personalities behind public collections. Objects are not ‘dead’ in museums because they are fulfilling their ultimate role as objects of display for both these collectors and for the institution. This is a self-acknowledged ‘useless’ role performed by museums as conspicuous consumption for a wealthy, successful society.

Yet, if we think about these arguments in conjunction with Perry’s show, we see that museums are also repositories of meaning. In Sir Mark’s picture I am left unsure what the role of the curator is, but in Perry’s the curator is central to keeping the multi-layered meanings alive. It is this which gives collections personality, not just the artists or collectors behind them.