A show that makes you cry
When was the last time you cried in an exhibition? I can tell you when I did. It was last Thursday afternoon, inside
Living with the Gods, a new exhibition of about 160 objects at the British Museum, which complements Neil Macgregor’s ongoing Radio 4 series about the history of religious belief.
In front of me were artworks and artefacts related to the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. One of them was Macgregor’s final acquisition as the British Museum’s director: the so-called Lampedusa Cross, a wonky timber construction, mottled with damaged paint, made by a carpenter on the island south of Sicily from the pieces of a boat wrecked off its coast in 2013, when more than 300 Somali and Eritrean lives were lost.
What got me, though, were two shirts, suspended in mid-air. Once worn by Syrian children who drowned at sea, they had been dipped in plaster by Issam Kourbaj, the Syrian artist.
The actual shirts. From the bodies of children washed up on beaches in Lesbos. Now ghostly, pitiful memorials to tiny souls whose names are lost, with matter-of-fact inscriptions, in
Arabic and Greek: “Unknown Girl, three months”; “Unknown Boy, six months”. Devastating.
Kourbaj’s Lost is among the most recent objects in the exhibition. The oldest, by contrast, is very, very old: 40,000 years old, to be exact. It is an Ice Age sculpture known as the Lion Man, whittled from an ivory mammoth tusk, and discovered, in fragments, in a cave in Germany on the eve of the Second World War.
Around 30cm tall, it depicts a curious creature – half-human, halflion – with such detailed anatomical description, especially around its alert pricked ears, that it cannot be a man wearing a mask. We don’t know exactly what ritual purpose it served, in the darkness of the remote past, but it speaks of something fundamental to humanity: the need we have to interrogate the natural world, to tell stories about it, and, ultimately, to find our place within the cosmos. It once brought people together, as all religions do. So, it reminds us that we are social animals. Spotlit at the end of a dark passageway, evoking the cave in which our ancestors encountered him, the Lion Man is an appropriate starting point for an exhibition which informs us that 4,000 religions still exist today. Isn’t that statistic extraordinary? A century ago, apparently, the tally was even higher: around 10,000. As a thought-provoking wall text puts it, maybe we should consider ourselves Homo religiosus, not Homo sapiens. This is a show with a point of view. Living with the Gods is one of those exhibitions at which the British Museum excels. Its subject is so vast, so amorphous, that you fear it could proceed only by imparting generalities. At times, it does lapse into this, with a few banal, gnomic texts on the walls that say everything and nothing.
Yet, because it borrows the formula of Macgregor’s successful series – foregrounding objects that, crucially, have individually fascinating stories – it holds our attention throughout. Some of these objects are spectacular, of high aesthetic value. Others are, literally, worthless tat – but, in this context, no less interesting. There is an ancient Sumerian limestone statue of a female worshipper. And a guardian spirit of the hunt from Siberia, made from wood, fur, and leather, accompanied by his own improbably cute dog. If the hunt wasn’t successful, both would be abandoned in the wilderness. A 19th-century porcelain “avatar fox”, from Japan, represents a spirit messenger. Elsewhere, we find a three-legged Chinese “wonder toad”. A 16th-century French pendant of a tiny skeleton inside an enamelled coffin decorated with tongues of fire, an exquisite memento mori. And so on.
All this material is arranged into broad themes, such as “Light”, “Fire”, “Sacred Spaces”, “The Wheel of Life”, and “Prayer”. The unusual design – which employs sheer fabric, like veils on to the afterlife, to divide it up – helps to keep things free-flowing. And a coup at the end – ensuring that a spectral shadow of Lion Man, cast on voile, elongated like a Giacometti sculpture, is the final thing we see – suggests that maybe, after all, we are not as “advanced” as we like to think. Bravo.