A History of the World in 100 Objects

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/

‘Most of us, if we come back to a museum that we visited as a child, have the sense that “we” have changed enormously, whilst the “things” have stayed serenely the same.’ This is one of the general assumptions about visiting a museum that Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, asks us to reconsider during the first instalment of A History of the World in 100 Objects. He suggests that, over time, museum artefacts provide communicative ‘signals from the past’ through what new technologies decipher and subsequently contribute to learning on the history of humanity. It’s this idea that’s at the centre of this unusual initiative, which attempts to synthesize the key developments in culture globally into a single project, through a concise selection of just 100 objects from the British Museum’s collection.

Hebrew astrolabe (1345–55)

This collaboration between the British Museum and the BBC is, as its guileless title sounds, an extremely fearless curatorial concept in several respects. It’s actually a difficult one to categorize, but could be described as a kind of semi-exhibition-based interactive human history survey. A History of the World in 100 Objects is a bit like foregrounding one of those museum audio-guides that most culturally savvy people are too embarrassed to be seen using.

A British one penny coin from 1903, which has been defaced by the Suffragettes (1903)

Sidelining the experience of the actual objects in question and foregrounding interpretation, it’s a technology- and language-centred project, narrated by MacGregor himself through three series of 15-minute daily radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. It is accompanied by a slick interactive website and unfolds gradually over the rest of the year. The ambitions here are multiple – not just in terms of unflinchingly portraying a concise, linear representation of all world order ever, but also navigating absolutely all the hegemonic and imperialistic antagonisms that a historical museum such as the British Museum embodies.

The Rossetta Stone (196BC)

From the first broadcast, MacGregor raises these antagonisms immediately. He begins not at the very birth of humanity, but with an artefact from his childhood memory of visiting a museum – an Egyptian casket. The Mummy of Hjornedjitef (c.3rd century BC) to be precise. Here, the commentary around this artefact also includes a soundbite from renowned Egyptian novelist Adhaf Soueif who suggests that housing the artefacts of the world’s civilizations in the British Museum is ‘no bad thing’. From this decisive conclusion, we work our way through all the selected objects of art, industry, weaponry and technology – from the earliest stonecutting tools, to statuettes and mathematical papyrus, through Chinese Zhou Dynasty ritual vessels, the Rosetta Stone, Spanish Hebrew Astrolabes and even a Hockney painting (In The Dull Village, 1966–7), eventually arriving at objects representing the present.

David Hockney painting, In The Dull Village (1966–7)

The narrative is always particularly careful, articulating the story of the connections between cultures. Seemingly aiming to transpose today’s context of globalization, MacGregor looks to dispel the normative ‘clash of the civilizations’ framing of history for one about co-dependency between cultures, and a more fluid notion of cultural geography.

Throughout our multimedia journey across the centuries, the selection of objects varies greatly towards the representation of their own time and culture. The penultimate object to have its story ‘revealed’ is an HSBC credit card accredited to one Tariq Adel. It’s somehow unimaginable as an actual collection item at the British Museum, but presumably intended to comment on today’s economy and culture of credit and consumerism. Whereas the hundredth object is to be kept a mystery until the final broadcast, though, going by MacGregor’s definition of humanity being based simply around ‘our dependency on objects’, the iPhone has to be a safe bet. The overall effect thus far from the first season of A History of the World in 100 Objects, in its dual verbal and virtual formats, is that of an ‘Internet of things’ to quote writer Bruce Sterling’s futuristic concept – a highly accessible network of apparently unrelated objects facilitated by technology, in this case a network across symbolic values, continents and millennia.

Byzantine Christian icon of the Festival of Orthodoxy, marked on first Sunday in Lent (1400)

Being only in part an exhibition-based project – which, in reality, feels wholly incidental – it’s clear that this is a highly contemporary example of curating segments of knowledge in place of artefacts. And a highly performative example it is too, with MacGregor stressing that it’s ‘a’ history and not ‘the’ history, that here privileges his own interpretation of said history. Whilst constantly running the risk of reducing human anthropology to something anecdotal and occasionally anonymous, the overall narrative of A History of the World in 100 Objects balances the fine line between profundity and absurdity. It’s certainly a thought-provoking, experimental and accessible way of disseminating knowledge. Yet what makes it an intriguing curatorial case study for the future is its breathtaking audaciousness in attempting to use a few select objects to extract and synthesize millennia of every facet of humanity, culture, politics, history, technology and society, into trim soundbites set to wistful incidental music. ‘Things’ will never be the same again.