(subtitle: I don't know art, but I know what I like)

LoveCMAG

The Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery (CMAG) is currently hosting a touring exhibition from the National Gallery, entitled "Love". I spent the afternoon down there today, along with a quick look at the new "exciting" Egypt Gallery. In both cases, although individual works and pieces in the collection were wonderful, the overall presentation and concept left me a bit depressed, and rather disappointed with the quality of Bristol's archivists.

Both the city's own gallery and the touring show have three problems:

  • A rejection of the adult audience
  • A preference for emotion over scholarship
  • An indiferrence, if not outright hostility, to historical context

(The first of these is perhaps the most forgivable - the bulk of CMAG visitors are families.)

The "Love" exhibition contains some marvellous works. The concept - supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Northern Rock Foundation, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and in London by the Bernard Sunley Charitable Foundation - is as follows:

Arguably love has been the inspiration for more great art than any other human emotion. Nevertheless it presents a challenge to the visual artist. How do you depict love? How do you convey its complexity and intensity?

The exhibition purports to answer this question through a collection of installations and paintings. There is the obligatory Tracy Emin, along with a piece of Marc Quinn's faux sculpture, mercifully redeemed by some breath-taking canvases. But there's very little to connect them all together. It's all very well saying it's an exhibition about "Love", but where does that get you? The emotional hook doesn't help the viewer to understand the artist's vision, the work's historical context or even the subject matter. There's too much ground to cover; too much exposition needed; too much distance between the artist and the viewer.

The programme accompanying the works isn't much use, either. The CMAG team have chosen to present the works through the eyes of a "People's Panel" who have provide commentary on their favourite works, created a "Love trail" and written their own poetry. For example:

We don’t need anyone else,
We only need each other.
Sad when we are apart,
Optimistic when we are together.

by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings The People's Panel

At least in an Art Gallery, you can disregard the official themes and take advantage of the opportunity to see rare works, even if you have to do your own legwork to understand the artists and periods (having the Internet on your mobile phone helps). But what about Museum exhibits?

The CMAG has recently relaunched their Egypt gallery. As with the touring "Love" exhibition, the conceptual framework is not the stuffy, traditional, scholarly approach of placing exhibits in their historical context. Instead, perhaps drawing inspiration from the Crystal Maze, there are four themed zones:

‘Belief’ - the religious beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, including their views of creation, their gods and their rituals.

‘Life’ - the social structure in ancient Egypt, childhood and a variety of different jobs from Pharaoh to farm labourer.

‘Death’ - funerary belief, preparation of the body for mummification, coffin symbolism and tombs.

‘Afterlife’ - the ancient Egyptians' beliefs about what happened after death, and the need for grave goods, servants, food offerings, and possessions.

You have to poke about on the computer for a while before you find out anything about "The Old Kingdom", "The Middle Kingdom" and "The New Kingdom", let alone the Ptolemaic Dynasty.

Did I forget to mention the "satellite" areas discussing ‘Egyptian Identity’, ‘How do we see Ancient Egypt?’, and 'The Ethics of Displaying the Dead’?bSuffice to say, your knowledge of Ancient Egypt at the end of your tour will not be much greater than if you'd rented "The Mummy" from Blockbuster.

It's not clear whether there is any genuine archivism or scholarly work (from this generation) underlying the exhibits. It's all beatifully designed, though, and the computers are terribly modern: lots of touch screen technology, pictures of exhibits and the option for visitors to leave comments on specific exhibits via the "Explore and Respond" area. It would be a step in the right direction if all the content and pictures on the in-museum computer systems could be made available via the Internet.

This doesn't bode well for the Museum of Bristol. Setting aside for one minute the absurdity of spending £25 million on another Museum at a time of financial crisis, the recent appointment of Londoners Event Communications Ltd. suggests we'll be seeing the same design-heavy, knowledge-lite approach.

You've only got a couple of weeks left to visit the "Love" exhibition, and remember to take a pen so you can write something on Yoko Ono's Secret Pieces III collaborative, conceptual art tosh. Mrs Barlow confiscated my pen, so I wasn't able to contribute.