british museum – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

Vikings Live

Last Thursday we went out to the cinema to see a live broadcast from the current British Museum exhibition about the Vikings (which I’ve already written about here). Cineworld Ipswich sadly managed not to switch the screen on in time for the start of the broadcast, but we only missed the first few minutes. The format of the live part of the show was Bettany Hughes and Michael Wood looking at various of the items on display in the exhibition and talking to experts about them (including Gareth Williams, the curator of the exhibition). There were also a couple of segments of chat with the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, about the exhibition and the objects. These live sections were interspersed with pre-recorded stuff – presumably partly to allow presenters and camera crews time to reorganise themselves for the next bit!

It was an interesting counterpoint to the exhibition itself. I felt the exhibition emphasised the non-raiding, non-marauding parts of the Viking story, and was trying to position them more as traders and colonisers. Whereas the broadcast wholeheartedly embraced the raiding and warlike side of the Vikings, while also pointing out their softer, more civilised side (sometimes). It also had more of a sense of fun to it than the exhibition itself – perhaps just because it’s easier to convey that enthusiasm in person than in a museum label.

Each segment of the broadcast was introduced with a dramatic declamation of (translated) Viking poetry, by a man dressed up as a Viking, followed by a burst of fire revealing the title (like “War” or “Raiding” or “Women”). Obviously these were part of the pre-recorded stuff, I thought they were rather well done. We also got to see the exhibition curator dressed up as a Viking warrior – apparently he does re-enactment as well as museum curation! He was particularly enthusiastic at showing Michael Wood how you could use a long knife from below a shield wall to gut your enemies … And the show piece at the end of the broadcast was some footage of a (re-enacted) Viking ship burial, which I think for me suffered from the amount they’d been hyping that in advance – sadly not quite as spectacular a I was expecting.

As well as all that sort of thing we also got treated to a much closer look at some of the artifacts than was possible in the exhibition itself. In the case of many of the smaller pieces (like the little ship brooch that opens the exhibition) this meant we got to see them at many many times life size and so could really see the detail. One thing that struck me in all the explanations of the objects was that a lot of them have been relatively recently discovered. The ship burial that they had from Scotland, for instance, hadn’t been completely conserved yet (making it incredibly fragile and difficult to display). And there was a tiny silver figurine of a female warrior(? valkyrie?) with a sword that had only been dug up last year!

It’s cool that the British Museum are doing this sort of thing. I think as a broadcast it would work whether or not you had a chance to see the exhibition in person. I’m glad we went to see it, and I think it’s a shame we somehow didn’t go to the Pompeii Live one last year – I’ll definitely keep an eye out for these sorts of tie-in broadcasts in future.

Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (British Museum Exihibition)

The British Museum’s current large exhibition is about Ice Age Art, and we went to see it earlier this month (just before we went away on holiday in fact, which is why the delay in writing about it 🙂 ).

Context

Modern humans (ie Homo sapiens) migrated out of Africa from around 70,000 years ago, and have inhabited Europe since at least 40,000 years ago. At that time the world was in a warmer phase of the Ice Age (tho still colder than today), and the ice sheets left lots of space in Europe for people to live. By around 20,000 years ago the world had cooled down more, and the ice sheets advanced down into Europe before retreating again (and the Ice Age “ended” about 10,000 years ago). The exhibition is about the art that has been found in Europe from that time period, which is the oldest art known from Europe.

The Exhibition

The exhibition is arranged chronologically – so you start with some of the oldest pieces dating from nearly 40,000 years ago, and move to things that are a mere 10-15,000 years old and date back to only a short time before agriculture & civilisation start. It is also grouped by type in many cases, so you see several small statues of abstract women together or several small animal sculptures together. There’s a strong emphasis on how these things are made by people, just like us – I thought they did a good job of conveying that particularly by putting in some pieces of modern art in the same room. Like a sculpture by Henry Moore that’s got a similar feel & aesthetic to the curves of the 30,000 year old small female nudes.

One thing that’s very striking about the objects in the exhibition is that they are so well made – these are not “cave people banging rocks together”. These are for the most part the works of artists who are skilled at creating the carvings, and as good at representational or abstract art as any artist today. Human figures seem to’ve been mostly represented in an abstract or generalised fashion rather than being portraits, but the animal carvings tended to be representational and look very like the thing they were representing. Which is interesting because art seems to have arrived fully fledged – even the oldest pieces (like the 35,000 year old lion man statue for instance) are well made. Maybe this is sampling bias – obviously very little actually survives from such a long ago time, but do we also discard the “banging rocks together” level of experimentation because we don’t see it as art when we see it? The lion man, or the female figurines, or the horses etc etc are very obviously created and created as art so we know what we’re looking at when it’s found.

Most of the objects in the exhibition are small sculptures or tools – physical & three dimensional objects. Obviously we know of two dimensional art from the era, from cave paintings, but you can’t pick them up and move them to a museum. They did have a room with an audiovisual display of some of the cave art, which was a good addition – although I wasn’t keen on the way it was set up as you walked in from a door under the projection so you ended up facing the people watching it and it felt like to find a seat or place to stand you had to walk across people’s view. There was also some indication of other forms of art – like music. One of the objects on display was a small flute made from the rib of a bird (I think it was a vulture) – again it’s sophisticated, in that the holes have clearly been measured (there are faint orientation marks) and precisely placed. The exhibition suggested that the overall bias to small portable things is also probably a true reflection of the time. People during the Ice Age lived a nomadic lifestyle, so you needed to be able to pack up your belongings and move them with you. So even if some of your art is designed to stay in one place the more personal stuff needs to be small.

One striking thing through the whole exhibition was that the vast majority of the human representations were of women – I can only remember a couple that weren’t. In the earlier Ice Age these are nude figures of older women who’ve had children or who are pregnant, with breasts, stomachs & hips/bottom emphasised. Not in a sexualised way, but fertility is clearly part of it. The more recent ones (ie ~20,000 years ago) are also of younger more obviously “sexy” women. There’s an interesting video clip on the museum’s page about the exhibition where the curator & an artist discuss how these figurines seem to represent more the female gaze than the male gaze we’re more accustomed to think about female nudes via. Less “look at the tits & ass on that” and more about the physical experiences of being pregnant or whatever. Their conclusion is that possibly these figurines were made by women and were something to do with rites of passage (puberty, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood etc) of women. But obviously we’ll never know.

Which last sentence neatly segues into the next thing I wanted to mention – I really liked the way the labelling was so clear about “we think this may’ve been used for that purpose but we don’t know”. Because we don’t, and can’t. The best we can do is to remember that these people were people just like us, and to think about how we’d use such things or what we’d make such things for. Some things must’ve been significant – like the lion man statue which would take ~800 hours to make with the tools of the time. That’s a major investment of time, so maybe it had some religious or spiritual importance. Or maybe this is one person’s life’s work of art that they did an hour at a time because they were an artist and that was what they felt a need to create? Other items looked less well made, some tools had pictures of animals etched into the surface by a less practiced & less artistic hand – was this someone making their spear straightener look more elegant/prettier/more their own by decorating it themself? Or was this important in a magical sense – that you drew your own bison on your own spear straightener because then you‘d catch bison with the spears you made? We don’t know & we can’t know, we can just guess because these were people.

This was a fascinating exhibition which both managed to remind you how old these things were, and how like us these people were. These objects come from a long period – three or four times the length of civilisation itself (not just our civilisation, but everything from the agricultural revolution onwards). And that’s mind-boggling. We think of a couple of hundred years ago as “history”, recent maybe, but history even so – people were different then, the past is a different country etc. We think of the Greeks & Romans as a long time ago, the Ancient Egyptians as longer still. But that’s all the last little bit of humankind – these pieces of Ice Age art are the representatives of the majority of human art in terms of time. And yet for all their age these people and their art are still recognisable – they just grew up in a different time and place.

The exhibition’s on till 26th May, and I’d definitely recommend a visit.

Other Stuff

Retail: Bought the book already (and definitely on my list to read). They had some very cool looking stuff, in particular a mug with a painting of a deer on it that became 3D to make the handle out of its head. We didn’t buy anything though.

Other Exhibits: Only a brief trot through the Egyptian rooms, with Ellen & Ady after we’d met up with them.

Other Things: As mentioned above, met Ellen in the museum by design, Ady by accident (well, we didn’t know for sure he was coming to the gig let alone where he’d meet us) and then Paul after we came out. Then off to a gig (about which more another time) via dinner at a place called Pasta Brown, which was rather nice even if they did take rather a long time to bring the bill when we were done.

Ritual & Revelry (British Museum Exhibition)

The British Museum currently has an exhibition on the art of drinking in Asia called “Ritual and Revelry” which runs through till 6 January. We visited it on 23 November as we were in London for a concert that evening.

The Exhibition

The bulk of the objects in the exhibition were in a single room in the museum – with just a couple in the room immediately before it. They were laid out in three groups according to their use. On one side were pots, jugs and pictures of these things that were used in ritual & religious contexts. On the the other side were the same types of things but they were used in social contexts. And in the centre were four cases, 3 of which were to do with tea drinking and the last was about bhang drinking. Or you could see it as divided between vessels primarily used for water, vessels used primarily for alcohol and those for tea (listing them in the same order). Each section had objects from right across the sweep of Asia, so you could see the similarities between the areas, and the interconnectedness of the different cultures.

The ritual side of the exhibition was mostly concerned with water containing vessels, such as the Indian lota which were originally made from gourds. The various different pots could be used in a variety of ways, and it seemed most started out as everyday water containing pots made out of gourds. Later they were made out of metal (such as bronze) and also gained religious symbolism. They could be used for drinking water or for pouring water as an offering, or over oneself as a ritual cleansing procedure. There were also some more startling objects – including a cup made with part of a human skull, which is used in some Buddhist rituals. Sometimes filled with human blood! I think, tho the label wasn’t clear, that that would be as an offering not as a drink.

I didn’t know that when tea was first drunk it was made from dried & powdered tea leaves, which were whisked into hot water rather than steeped in a tea pot. Tibetan butter tea is still made like this (using yak butter as well as water and tea, frankly it sounds vile to me but it’s probably very nutritious). The tea is imported into Tibet in bricks, just as all tea used to be sold. Steeping tea didn’t really take off until the 15th Century, and then a change in apparatus was needed – the more familiar to us teapots and strainers, rather than whisks.

The middle section also included a case with some paintings of people drinking bhang which is a drink I’d never heard of before. It’s made from the flowers & leaves of the female cannabis plant, and is hallucinogenic. It can be drunk, or smoked in a hookah.

Elegant Gathering at the Orchard Paviliion

Sake Bottle in the Shape of A Young Man Holding a Bottle of Sake

The third section, on the social side of drinking was about alcohol. I was astonished to find out that “toddy” is an actual drink – it’s Indian, and mildly alcoholic and made from palm sap. The jugs used by the toddy tappers to collect the palm sap look very like the lotas displayed over in the ritual section – and are still made out of gourds.

A large part of this side of the exhibition concentrated on the Chinese – particularly the Tang era poets called the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, who were renowned for producing their greatest work whilst drunk. There were also vases that were used in Chinese tradition drinking games – you aimed arrows at the openings in the pot, and if you failed to hit then you had to have a drink of something alcoholic. Obviously this would be a bit of a vicious circle 😉 The Japanese objects here were all to do with sake – I particularly liked the slightly recursive sake bottle in the shape of a young man holding a sake bottle. Sadly you didn’t pour the sake out of the bottle opening, instead you took the chap’s head off to pour.

I’ve got more photos up on flickr, in this set.

Other Things

Retail: As it’s not a major exhibition there wasn’t a dedicated shop immediately after you left, so I’m not even sure if there was particular stuff relating to it. They do normally have tea sets and sake sets in the shop, so perhaps that was it. I should look and see if there’s a book next time I’m at the museum.

Stuff I should know more about: More of the history of the countries that make up Asia – I’m starting to rectify my lack of knowledge of Chinese history soon (I have a book to read, anyway), but I still have not much of a feel for Indian history let alone the rest of the continent.

Other exhibits: We also went and looked at the new information they have up about the 3500BC (naturally) mummified man in the Pre-dynastic Egypt gallery. They CT scanned him, and have (possibly temporarily?) got a touch screen display set up where you can look at the pictures this generated. It has a 3D image of the body, and you can move it around, look at various levels (ie skeletal, or with muscles etc). And look at cross sections. It’s pretty neat to play with (tho we did have to wait a while before we could look properly), and well labelled. They discovered from the CT scan that he was probably killed by a knife thrust through the back of the left shoulder – so quite probably a murder victim. And once you’ve seen it on the scan all labelled up it’s nice to be able to look at the actual mummy and see it there as well.

Other places: That evening we went to a performance by Niyaz, of which more another time.

“Venice in Shakespeare’s Time” Hilary Williams (British Museum Friends Open Evening 5/12/12)

As well as the lecture we also went to a gallery talk at the Open Evening – these are where a curator takes you around some objects of interest in a gallery for 45 minutes or so. The theme of this one tied in with the Shakespeare exhibition, and was in some ways an extension of the central room of the exhibition. Shakespeare set several of his plays in Venice and (as discussed in both the exhibition and this talk) this was for several reasons, including the fact that it allowed him to portray situations that might’ve got him in trouble if he’d set them in England. Venice was also widely known as an exotic, tolerant place where luxurious goods came from. During the gallery talk she showed us various pieces of ceramics & glassware that had come from Venice around the time of Shakespeare or just before. Shakespeare himself is thought never to’ve gone to Venice, but he would’ve known about the place both from reading published works about it, and through objects like the ones she showed us which he would’ve seen in the houses of the aristocracy.

One of the things it seems hard to remember is how exotic good quality glass was at the time. The glassware of Venice was famous throughout Europe, and to have a Venetian glass salt cellar or marriage cup really showed how high status & wealthy you were. The glassmakers of Venice were apparently forbidden to leave the city, so that the recipe for their glass remained a secret only known to Venice.

As well as showing us several objects & setting them in their cultural context she also read us a story from an old guidebook to Venice – which labelled a house as where a man had murdered his wife. I’ve unfortunately forgotten the names, but the name of the family was reminiscent of “Moor” although they were not Moorish, and the name of the wife was similar to Desdemona. So it’s possible that Shakespeare didn’t just get an exotic stage set from his reading about Venice, but perhaps also the start of one of his plot lines.

An interesting talk 🙂

And for a bonus picture – here are the Christmas decorations at the British Museum. They even say something sensible in the hieroglyphs – something like “Beautiful birthday of God’s child”.

“A Mind Which Could Think Otherwise” Neema Parvini

The lecture at this month’s British Museum Friends Open Evening (“A Mind Which Could Think Otherwise: Understanding Shakespeare’s Creative Intelligence”) was tied in with their current major exhibition about Shakespeare (which we went to see a couple of months ago). The lecturer, Neema Parvini, is an academic at the University of Surrey & has written a couple of books about Shakespeare. The subject of his talk was whether or not Shakespeare is some sort of “universal genius who speaks to all of us” or purely a product of his time & place. Or perhaps more accurately the subject of his talk was a survey of the opinions (both popularly and in academia) about that question.

He started with an overview of what Shakespeare means to “the man in the street”, which includes the idea of him as somehow timeless with something to say to anyone regardless of race, creed, social status, gender etc. He then took a fairly lengthy digression through the Marxist theories of Louis Althusser, with several lengthy quotes in quite technical language (perhaps technical in a Marxist specific sense, perhaps technical in a more general philosophy sense, I don’t know). Eventually he returned to the point, which was the impact of these ideas on literary criticism, and how this ideology of a person as the product solely of their culture and upbringing was brought to the academic discussion about Shakespeare. Essentially the pervailing view in academia became that Shakespeare cannot be understood outside of his specific historical & cultural context, and that he’s as sexist, racist etc as any other product of that background. And that the only reason he’s regarded as some sort of universal genius is because we’ve all been indoctrinated during our schooling to believe this.

He then moved on to his own opinion on the subject – which is that while this backlash against the idea of Shakespeare as universal was necessary it has gone too far. He very briefly discussed the scientific work that lead him to this opinion – mentioning Richard Dawkins & Stephen Pinker. The idea here being that while we’re products of our culture, there are also fundamentals that are common across all cultures. In Pinker’s work this is language in particular, but also other things like emotions like jealousy, fear, love etc. (As an aside, although he didn’t mention it in the lecture this is the Nature vs. Nurture debate – and the idea that it’s one or the other is generally regarded as a false duality nowadays.) So his opinion is that there are things about Shakespeare’s plays that speak across the generations and across cultures, but there are things that are the product of his time and place. He then said he didn’t have time for many examples, but gave a few brief instances that demonstrated that Shakespeare was set apart from others of his contemporaries in how he wrote his plays. Shakespeare doesn’t often take sides among the characters of his plays – people are rarely completely evil, even the villains are given redeeming features and given human motivations. There are also not the moralising introductions or epilogues that others of his contemporaries would insert where the “lesson” of the play was spelt out. So whilst Shakespeare might well’ve been just as sexist etc as the rest of his culture, the way he wrote his plays allows one to sympathise with the characters even when our modern perspectives are different to Shakespeare’s.

Whilst he was quite a good speaker (although not good at reading out long passages from other’s works without stumbling) the subject of his talk wasn’t quite what the title and description of it in the booklet for the evening had lead one to believe. And I think the overall structure could’ve done with some reorganisation or tweaking for the audience – in particular I would personally have cut the lengthy discussion of Althusser’s philosophy and presented it more briefly & in a manner that was more clearly related to his point, like he did with the biology later in the talk. And then have had more time to go into a few specific examples, perhaps contrasting different critiques of the same passage from the three perspectives so that we could see as non-academics what the practical outcome of this theorising is. I wouldn’t’ve gone so far as to walk out of the talk (bad manners, if nothing else), but I did have some sympathy with the point of view of the person who did get up and grumpily announce “I thought this was supposed to be about Shakespeare” and leave, slamming the door behind him.

Chinese Galleries at the British Museum

While J looked at Egyptian stuff in the British Museum on our most recent trip to London I took the camera & went and looked at the Chinese Galleries again. The right hand side of the room is laid out chronologically so I started here with the Neolithic period. Even that early jade was still an important and symbolic material for the Chinese.

The Shang Dynasty is the next period in Chinese history, moving into the Bronze Age – it was during this time that writing was invented in China, and the tradition of using bronze ritual vessels to offer food and drink to the ancestors was started. These vessels were based on the shapes of Neolithic pottery vessels.

Jade Spearhead with Turquoise Inlaid Bronze Fittings

The Zhou conquered the lands ruled by the Shang – they kept many of the same traditions, including the bronze vessels and the writing system. During this period it was fashionable to inscribe your bronze vessels with a historical note about when the vessel was made or entered the family, which is invaluable to later historians. It was intended at the time to be a historical document, these vessels weren’t buried with the dead they were kept by the living. The latter part of this period was known as the Warring States period, and is immediately before the unification of China under the First Emperor. Confucious lived during this time and his ideal of harmony and service to the state was developed with the backdrop of war between the various Chinese states.

Inscription Inside a Bronze Ritual Vessel

Chariot Fitting in the Shape of a Bulls Head

As well as items from China proper the museum has things from the area around China as well. These two plaques are from nomadic tribes from the region that’s now Mongolia, and show evidence of Middle Eastern influences in their designs:

The First Emperor’s Dynasty consisted solely of himself, and after his death there was a brief period of civil war before the Han Dynasty took over and ruled for about 400 years. These are the rulers who were featured in the exhibition we went to at the Fitzwilliam Museum earlier this month. Their court was very opulent and rich – lots of fine gilt objects.

Gilt Bronze Dragon Shaped Furniture Stands

And I think next time I go to the museum I need to start over again with this next section and make a bit more sense of it! I have photos of a couple of things from the sort of time when Buddhism spread into China, displacing Confucianism as the primary religion, but that’s all between the end of the Han & the start of the Tang Dynasty and I think that means I’ve missed some stuff as that’s quite a long period of time (4 centuries or so). I am rather fond of the Tang pottery, with its distinctive bright colours and stylish designs.

And after that we get into the time when the Chinese developed porcelain. And also some gorgeous purple and green dishes, called Jun Ware.

Pictures are, as always, on flickr – click through to see larger versions 🙂

He Roars with the Sound of the Law

This is the image I am currently using as my desktop background, it’s made from 3 pictures I took in the Japanese Galleries at the British Museum on Monday. In the middle is Monju Bosatsu (Boddhisatva Manjusri), whose lion roars with the sound of Buddhist law. To the left is the deity Fudõ Myõ-õ whose fierce appearance shows his intolerance of wickedness. To the right is Aizen Myõ-õ who has the power to crush desire.

I’ve put more pictures from the Japanese galleries up on flickr, here.

British Museum Members Open Evening (3/9/12)

Monday evening was the September British Museum Members Open Evening & this was really why we’d come into London that day. We’d booked on the gallery talk about Chinese horses, given by Carol Michaelson, a (partially?) retired curator at the museum. She gave us a 45 minute overview of a vast swathe of Chinese history from prehistoric times through to the Tang dynasty (~9th Century AD), focusing on horses. Apparently because the Chinese have very little pasture land they never actually managed to successfully maintain a breeding population of fast horses (the Arabian type of horse that the Horse exhibition had been about) despite needing them for cavalry soldiers to defend against the northern & western nomadic tribes that frequently attacked the Chinese Empire. So one of the reasons for the Silk Route being an important part of Chinese trade was that the Chinese were frequently needing to buy more horses from the area in the Middle East that was breeding them.

The museum doesn’t actually have many models of horses from China, so instead she mostly showed us pieces of chariots & horse tack, and pictures of things from other collections. And recommended the Han exhibition that we’d just been to on Friday.

This was an interesting talk – these gallery talks are always pretty fascinating, because it’s not formal at all it’s just an expert in some field talking about something they’re enthusiastic about (and generally only sticking fairly loosely to the advertised theme). And she was a good speaker too.

After the talk we decided to take a look at the new Members Room that was opening for the first time that evening, and to relax with a nice glass of wine (we’d got the train so J could have one too). And a small spot of retail therapy – J got a fluffy Ankh that he’s threatening to hang from the car rearview mirror, and we picked up books for the exhibitions we’d been to.

The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot (Exhibition at the British Museum)

On Monday afternoon we went to look at the free exhibition the British Museum have on till the end of September about horses. To be honest I was much less interested in this in advance than other exhibitions we’ve been to, but it turned out to be more interesting than I’d expected.

Context

This exhibition was part of commemorating the Diamond Jubilee, and as such I think part of the context was “The Queen likes & owns race horses”. And the Saudia Arabian royal family were involved in sponsoring it, so even the broader view than thoroughbred race horses was still fairly focused on Arabian horses.

The Exhibition

It felt very much like an exhibition of two halves, and of the two I much prefered the first which focused more generally on horses in the ancient Middle East. The three rooms devoted to this covered a time period from the earliest references to horses about 5000 years ago to the medieval Islamic Middle East. The ancient era section had a few iconic items – like the Royal Standard of Ur, and some of the Amarna letters – as well as several Assyrian wall fragments (decorated with horses, and lion hunts) and pieces of ancient horse tack. Particularly striking in this section was the model horse head with the pieces of bridle etc put in their proper places, as a non-horsey person I appreciated the chance to see what things actually were rather than relying on my understanding of the technical terms.

It was also interesting to see how some of Egyptian culture clearly permeated through other parts of the Middle East – there were some Phoenician horse cheek guards which had lotus flowers or eyes of Horus on them. And model chariots or horses seemed to frequently have Bes faces (an Egyptian protective deity) on them.

The last room of this half had a model horse & rider in Sassanian style, in metal armour. And also some textile armour for both people & horses in the Islamic medieval period – as J said this looked like a horse-cosy, very like a tea-cosy! There were also some Korans (I’m not entirely sure why), and several paintings of people on horses from Islamic Middle Eastern countries.

And then the next room went back to prehistoric times, but this time in the Arabian peninsula, with a display of rock carvings of horses & neolithic Arabian tools loosely connected with horses. I think it would’ve been more interesting if this part and the bit with the Korans had been replaced with a bit about the horse in British society in general – as the next parts were about racehorses and Arabian purebred horses in the UK.

I didn’t know before this exhibition but pretty much all racehorses these days are thoroughbreds descended from 3 Arabian sires brought to the UK in around the 17th century and bred with native mares. These crosses turned out to be faster than the other horses in the races and came to dominate the racing scene. This part of the exhibition contained several paintings of famous horses, some pedigrees of particular lines and several things loaned by Her Majesty the Queen – like a set of silks (the jockey’s racing gear). I was particularly amused to see the paintings of the horse Pot8os – so named because when the groom was asked to write the name “potatoes” on the horse’s stall he wrote “Pot oooo oooo” and the owner was sufficiently amused to keep it as the actual name. The first ever txtspk! (in Victorian times, iirc.)

I spent a while at the end sitting infront of the small film of “horses in action” that they had, while I was waiting for J to catch up … particularly amusing (second only to the dancing horses of dressage) was the Queen jumping up in delight as her horse won something in 1954 and the gentleman next to her looked like he stood up because you can’t sit while the Queen stands, not for any other reason.

Other Stuff

Retail: We dithered about whether or not to pick up the book of the exhibition, but in the end decided we would. We also got a mug with a picture of Sassanian horses on it, and I looked at (but didn’t buy) lots of other nice but expensive things.

Other exhibits: We had a quick look at the Olympic medals display in the museum – this has the medals for this year plus a short explanation of the design & manufacture of them. And some medals and memorabilia of previous London games. I’ve got a small selection of photos up on flickr, of which this is a taster:

Also while J went back to the Shakespeare exhibition and then looked at Egyptian stuff, I went to look at the Japanese galleries more for the purpose of taking photos than looking at the labels. Photos to come at some future date 🙂

Other things: Dinner at Pizza Express, then back to the museum for the Members Open Evening, of which more another time.

Shakespeare: Staging the World (Exhibition at the British Museum)

The exhibition we went to on Sunday was one of the two currently on at the British Museum – this one was the Shakespeare related one & it’s on till mid-November.

Context

Shakespeare was actually the context for this exhibition not the subject. So his life (1564-1616) and works were the background to a collection of objects that told us about the people who came to see the plays, and the things that were going on in the world around him that informed his choice of subject matter.

The Exhibition

The exhibition itself felt very information dense (in a good way) – a combination of history lesson, insight into the way the people of the time thought of the world around them, insight into the ideas the plays were trying to convey, excerpts from the plays to listen to (and watch) and lots of paintings to admire.

I wasn’t expecting the large number of paintings, and they were a highlight for me. In particular the iconic image of Richard II (in the room focusing on the history plays) which I’ve seen many times in books but I don’t think I’ve seen the real thing before. Another one which especially caught my eye was the diptych showing old St Paul’s Cathedral – on the back of the left painting was James VI & I processing to church, then the left panel showed the Bishop preaching to the crowd in front of the King & Cathedral, and the right hand panel showed the Bishop’s vision of a restored Cathedral with angels all around. The spire of the Cathedral had been damaged some time prior, but we know with the hindsight of history that it wasn’t ever replaced and in fact old St Paul’s itself was replaced after the Great Fire of London (1666) with the current cathedral designed by Wren. In the painting one detail that amused me was the words coming from the angels’ mouths were written forwards or backwards depending which way the angel was facing!

And many more paintings, I think part of why I took quite a while to go round the exhibition was because I kept stopping in front of paintings to admire them 🙂

The first couple of rooms concentrated on the audience & the city of London, and after that each room focussed on one of the themes running through the plays – for instance the natural world (Shakespeare was, after all, a country boy) or the history of the country (England in earlier plays, Britain in later). Each of the themed rooms had one or more excerpts from a relevant play read by a well known actor (most also with a large video screen of the actor doing the reading). And each of these was also worth standing and paying attention to (increasing the time we spent in the exhibition – J actually had to go back in on Monday to finish it off!).

This era of English history is part of the time period I’m most interested in (roughly Wars of the Roses through to the Civil Wars), so I was already familiar with the broad sweep of events. There were still lots of interesting bits & pieces I wasn’t aware of before (like how it was fashionable to be “melancholy” – goths existed even then 😉 ). And it was good to see the actual objects. Of the non-paintings some of the highlights for me were the very fine embroidered jacket, the model ship that James VI & I had made to give thanks for not being drowned by witches, an exotic cup set in the shape of a head (you lifted the top of the head off which made one cup and the bulk of the head was another – really quite odd). Also nice was to see the objects that had been featured on the radio series that was on Radio 4 before the exhibition opened (Shakespeare’s Restless World).

Other Stuff

Retail: We’d picked up the book of the exhibition earlier this year when there was an extra discount for BM Members at one of the Open Evenings. After seeing the exhibition we didn’t really have time to browse the souvenirs (and forgot to go back & look on Monday!), but we did buy ourselves a copy of the RSC edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare (which is annotated & has essays on the plays too).

Stuff I should know more about: Shakespeare’s plays! Hence the book purchase above – I do know the rough plots of most of them, but hearing the excerpts in the exhibition made it clear how I don’t know enough about the details, and I enjoyed listening to the words.

Other places: Dinner at Wagamamas then off to Islington for a No-man gig (of which more another time).