Sacred - The British Library

One of the most extraordinary exhibitions that I ever went to was “The Writer in the Garden” at the British Library a couple of years ago. Although roughly chronological, it did not really have an overarching narrative or theme, but instead allowed ideas to ping around the room. It started with depictions of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, and managed to take in, amongst many other things, the Song of Songs, the Pearl and Chaucer, landscaping in Jane Austen (where a character’s opinion on gardening was used as a window into their soul), the Romantics (Keats’ garden obviously, and Wordsworth, but also an original manuscript of Kubla Khan), recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson and various Bloomsbury types, Philip Larkin’s lawnmower, automata, field recordings of gardens, midnight/secret gardens, Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness etc etc. It was so exciting and stimulating. I was there for hours, and in the end had to be forcibly ejaculated by the security guard.

Digging out my notes on that exhibition (which finished “that exhibition was FUCKING AWESOME – it felt like it was curated by my sub-conscious"), I see that afterwards I went to the BL’s semi-permanent exhibition of religious artefacts, and still in an excited state, noted that they had 10th century Torah scrolls, various Jewish artefacts from the 14th to 16th centuries, and a touchscreen display of the so-called Golden Hagadah of Barcelona circa 1320.

Those religious artefacts and others from Christianity and Islam have now been collated into a new exhibition at the BL, titled “Sacred.” And what a disappointing exhibition it is. It is everything that The Writer in the Garden was not: bland, flat, dull. The clue is in the tagline “discover what we share.” There’s that dreadful flat tone of voice again. This from the exhibition guide: “Religion is one of the main aspects of life by which we define ourselves, and from which we derive our sense of community. In the 2001 UK Census, 76.8% of people said that they had a religious faith”. I’ve commented on this voice before – patronizing, simplistic flat. Any excitement, any vibrancy, any passion, any violence, is brushed under the carpet and trodden down. Note that terrible word “community”. Note that meaningless statistic, and bear in mind that the 2001 census was the one where there was a huge underground campaign for people to declare their religion as “Jedi”.

There was much talk in the exhibition of “diversity” but, of course, none of difference or conflict. In the spirit of diversity, I largely focussed on the Jewish objects and took little interest in the Christian and Muslim objects. The highlight for any reader of this blog would have been a 13th Century copy of Moses Maimonides’ Guide For The Perplexed.

I would also have liked to learn more about micrography but the exhibition gave almost no consideration to the aesthetics or practice of calligraphy,

This was a stuffy, uncomfortable exhibition – the essence of three religions reduced to just a lot of book at low level behind glass, with explanatory notes even lower down.

God was barely mentioned.

Despite the BL’s best attempts to gloss over the nastier aspects of eg Christian anti-semitism, or violent factionism in Islam, little hints crept through – a Christian object depicted the Jew as blindfolded because of his refusal to accept Christ; a section on the Sunni/Shia split notes the almost immediate murder of Shia figures by Sunnis.

It is odd, because (for all that it ignores the class of civilisations) in some ways this exhibition perfectly captures life in Britain at the end of the Blair government – what Sukhdev Sandhu, in his review of the (hype surrounding the) Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer film calls a culture of “coercive banality”. The language of government speak. The closed-eyed attempt to ignore the reality of religious conflict. The flattening of all experiences, so that they are all equal and all bland and all meaningless – just stuff behind glass cases in a museum. He is so right about that notion of “coercive”. At the end of the exhibition is a screen on which you are asked to give your thoughts, which (once vetted of course!) flash up around you. Time after time, messages appear along the lines of “wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone realised how much they had in common”. This exhibition is an exercise in brainwashing. You come along, are battered into submission by banality, and then prove what good little boys and girls you are by parroting dull sentiments back into the system, where they will be used to brainwash other people.

This, for the record, was my entry, which I doubt you will be seeing up on the screen:

“Although people keep trying to persuade me of the powers of the British Library, nonetheless I have increasingly difficulty in believing that such a body actually exists.”