St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art

Transcription

The museum arose out of what I think of as a very Glaswegian mixture of pragmatism and principle. It was originally intended to be a visitor centre for the cathedral. The cathedral ran out of funds, so the city rescued the building and asked us to turn it into a museum. I suggested that it should be a museum of religion because I believe that museums are capable of addressing really important issues in society, and there's no more important subject than the meaning of life. The museum represents the six main world religions that are present in Glasgow, although the museum does look at the importance of religion across the world and across time. It was a problem in the museum making sure we didn't over-represent religions which were - how shall I say? – good at artefacts. It could have been a very good Catholic-Hindu museum with a fairly strong Buddhist representation. The difficulty of representing aniconic religions meant we had to be very creative in searching out objects. Representing Judaism with Dora Holzhandler And representing Islam with this amazing painting by Ahmed Moustafa, where the calligraphic tradition of Islam and its geometric tradition are unified in a really visually powerful piece where the 99 attributes of Allah are represented in the work. And we made a deliberate decision to include some of the very best art we had in the collection, and very ordinary mundane things that would, in art galleries, be considered kitsch or tacky, in one place, partly to confront people with the aesthetic decisions they make. But it's also about trying to represent belief. Taking objects into a museum usually reduces their original meaning, whether it's historical or spiritual or religious. We wanted to put them into a museum where it's not exactly a spiritual space but we wanted to make it possible for believers to have a spiritual experience here. So, it blurs the boundary between the spiritual and the secular, quite consciously, and it tries to restore some resonance of the original meaning back to the objects, which most art galleries don’t do. I find the Hindu – representation of Hinduism, Hindu gods, in St Mungo's, very appealing, because, as a Hindu, if I walk into St Mungo's, I find my deities, my gods, who sit in my house, and I pray them, I am finding them sitting there as something that establishes a link between me and the person. Well, having gods outside temple does not mean that they have lost their sanctity. Yes, when you go to a museum, you go with a different frame of mind, you go with a different focus, you don’t go to pray there. But, to find them sitting there – and evidently, if I go into St Mungo's and I find that Shiva's statues there, I take my shoes off. So, that action establishes that it hasn't lost its sanctity. So, it's not going to temple, but to see God there, I would do my salutation and have the same feeling perhaps. After we opened, all the faiths had something to say about what was on display. For example, in the case of Hinduism, we raised the image of Shiva onto a stone plinth, because the Hindus felt it was disrespectful to Shiva for visitors to walk on the same level, so, we did, indeed, include a plinth. As a curator of this museum, my role has been to a) represent the religions accurately, or in an academic, curatorial, detached way, but also to try to represent them in a way that people who believe – represent them from the inside in a way that believers would recognise them, as well. The museum, has provoked violent reactions, including one object being attacked, and mainly amongst fundamentalists. And the values of the museum are civic values, where everybody is entitled to live together with mutual respect, so, inevitably, people who believe that their religion is the only true religion, to the exclusion of all others, have reacted, either in disagreement or, in some rare cases, with violent anger against the museum. For me, the truth claims of Christianity are exclusive. That means that it presents us with a world view that is self-contained and objectively true, to the exclusion of other truth claims and other world views. That means that when it's placed alongside religions with equal weight, for me, as an evangelical Christian, my concern would be that that presents a picture of Christianity being one among many paths to God, a picture that I couldn't accept. For some people, the museum has posed a particular threat to their faith and they have carried out acts of vandalism within the museum. The most notable act of vandalism was the damage inflicted on the image of the Hindu god, Shiva, that was pushed over in front of members of the public. And this was particularly insulting to the Hindu community, who'd performed a ceremony of welcome. We thought there would be a conflict between monotheism and core paganism. We actually thought it would be the African screen, which is a very, quote, 'pagan,' unquote, object in a room next to amazing pieces of Islamic and Christian art. I would say I was saddened rather than surprised or shocked, because I do know that there would be people who would find other religions taking over their religion, sometimes, and they might find that here is another religion, from another part of the world, being represented so strongly in their museum, is not something that is acceptable to everybody. In both the Gallery of Religion Life and the Scottish Galleries, we have what are known as talkback boards. And these have been elements of these galleries right from the very beginning. One of the important things about the talkback boards is it allows visitors to interact with each other. And people who write the comments sometimes have another comment added on, by a visitor or agrees or disagrees, and sometimes real debates can rage through these boards. Our debates rage for a long time, about the photography showing female genital mutilation, and also one raged about sin, and one raged on about truth. So, they are fascinating things to – and a different element for our visitors to explore. We do continually add to the museum, and this, in fact, is based on the talkback boards. We do have talkback boards with comments that complain about the lack of material from the pagan traditions. And so, as a result, we added a tree, a cluted tree, just beside the Zen Garden, and the culted tree is a place where people can hang rags, tie rags onto the tree with their own intention, as a way of leaving something behind to commemorate their experience in the museum. That tree was given to us by a group of pagans, who performed a ceremony, in a shopping centre in Glasgow. And I had been thinking about having a tree and, just within two weeks, a tree arrived, so. And visitors have responded wholeheartedly to adding their own little pieces of cloth to this tree, so, it's very much a permanent fixture in the museum. I would say this museum is very much a living museum and cannot exist, really, without engaging in the reality of the society that we live in. I think that's very important. And this museum will never be correct, it will never be a finished museum, the museum will constantly evolve as the world of religion constantly evolves.