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| Manchester City Galleries |
I once
worked with a colleague from the same post-war generation as myself who said
that his school (I think as late as the early 1960s) continued to mark ‘Empire
Day' – an event of which I had barely heard and was astonished it might still be
celebrated. Because the dissolution of
the self-styled ‘British Empire’ with the independence of India and Pakistan,
followed by the swift transformation of other colonies into supposed equal
members of the rebranded ‘Commonwealth’ was always presented as a jolly good idea
rather than with any sense of lost glory, failure or defeat. Subsequently, if not generally ignored and essentially
forgotten, Empire became a realm of embarrassment and shame, as the once-renowned
military adventures were rediscovered as aggressive adjuncts to conquest,
exploitation, oppression. So one would
not have expected, in the last part of the 20th century, to see any
exhibition unequivocally devoted to the subject, and not least because most of
the directly associated art – fanciful battle paintings, tear-jerking scenes of
suffering (European) women and children,
heroic equestrian statuary – is poor in quality as well as ideologically.
Stubbs’ painting of a cheetah being an exception.
Artist and Empire: facing
Britain’s Imperial Past at Tate Britain is thus an interesting post-imperial project,
ranging far and wide geographically and stretching from the 16th to
21st century. Its aim, to
quote the brief guide, is to ‘illustrate the complicated histories embodied by
objects, inviting us to consider how their status and meaning change over time.
In reflecting imperial narratives and post-colonial re-evaluation, it
foregrounds the peoples, dramas and tragedies of Empire and their resonance in
art today’. Note the careful absence of
any celebration in that final sentence – Empire is not (yet?) the source of any
joy or commendation.
The
display is too heterogenous to summarize,
and I am personally less interested, visually or conceptually, in
imagined scenes of bloodthirsty events masquerading as heroic defeats (Rorkes’
Drift, General Gordon etc) for which artists
usually had to seek out Zulu performers to portray savage ‘fuzzywuzzies’. The most interesting aspect of Artists and Empire is the endeavour to
create a dialogue between domestic British representations of Empire and
responses to it from India, Africa and the Americas, representing the coloniser
in their own art forms, including sculpture and textiles. One would like to see this exchange expanded,
for the present exhibition is largely drawn from British collections, limiting
the range of depictions, many objects being trophies or curios that
imperialists obtained overseas. A selection
with a Southeast Asian focus is however scheduled for Singapore in late 2016.
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| Singh Twins / Museum of London |
Notable
too is the extent to which, if most (white) Britons have airbrushed Empire from
their historical sense, so that it has become as fantastic as the world of
Arthur and Merlin, artists of Indian, African and Caribbean heritage remain
highly conscious of the colonial legacy.
Here, the Singh Twins' intricate painting EnTWINed answers Eastward Ho
and Home Again, mid-Victorian
portrayals of troops sent from Liverpool to quell the Indian insurrection
(though sadly the pictures are widely separated in this show, so their
dialogue, including that with the triumphal picture of Britannia spearing the
Bengal tiger, also on display, is not immediately visible).
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| Hew Locke /Hales Gallery |
Donald
Locke’s unsettling Trophies of Empire
stands near his son Hew’s image of the statue of Bristol slaver Edward Colston
draped with glittering yet tawdry ornaments, from the Restoration series.
PS this message just received from BBC Arts Desk. If the senders [anonymous to me] mean what they say in the 'personal note', they should be kept to their promise....
ARTSNIGHT: Kwasi Kwarteng
Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng is
the guest curator of this episode of Artsnight. The author of the book
'Ghosts of Empire', Kwasi looks at how the British Empire impacted on art,
architecture and literature. He meets one of Australia's greatest
living novelists - Peter Carey - to discuss the writer's obsession with early
colonial life, as well as exploring Tate Britain's Artist and Empire
exhibition. Comedian Shazia Mirza discusses why fabric and clothing is so vital
to the story of the Indian sub-continent. And we meet the sculptor Fowokan, who
found a way of reconnecting with his ancestral African past through his work.
On a personal note I'd also like to add that
our team in BBC Arts is a small group of people who are really trying to change
the nature of Arts programming at the BBC and with this episode of ARTSNIGHT we
wanted to produce and provoke a broader and more diverse discussion about the
cultural legacy of the British Empire (at least broader and more diverse than
you usually find on TV...). I hope we've made at least a small change to
the way this subject is discussed.
I would also highly recommend another episode
of ARTSNIGHT to the people on your mailing list, which is the one we made with
George The Poet for 30 October. He is a young British-African spoken word
poet who used his episode to explore the nature of "black culture",
including an interview with Paul Gilroy - that seems like
it could be pertinent to the themes explored in 'No Colour Bar'. By the
time you send the email out tomorrow, I'm afraid that there will only be
one more day left to watch it on BBC iPlayer (!).
ARTSNIGHT: George The Poet
In this episode of Artsnight, George the Poet explores the meaning
of black culture in four spoken word chapters. Racheal Ofori opens up some
black female stereotypes, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Dennis Bovell look back
at the beginnings of dub poetry, Professor Paul Gilroy explains some of the
history of black diasporas, and Akala likens rap to the works of Shakespeare.
George the Poet asks - what is black culture?
