Tate Britain’s new exhibition highlights artistic collusion with colonial ideas, but avoids facing up to the worst of imperialism.
Elizabeth Butler, 'The Remnants of an Army, Jellabad, January 13th, 1842', 1879.Today, the prospect of an artist acting as a willing agent of pro-colonial ideas is highly unlikely. When contemporary artists engage with empire, their remit is to subvert, as with Scottish artist Andrew Gilbert whose installation British Infantry Advance on Jerusalem, 4th of July, 1879 is presented incongruously in the third room of Tate Britain’s new exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past. Gilbert’s work is an inverted version of those ethnographic displays found in museums across Europe in which models of colonial subjects are represented as exotic curios, the infamous Leopard Man at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Brussels being one example. In Gilbert’s installation it’s British soldiers who are on display with their cultural (and anachronistic) trappings exaggerated to ridiculous effect; cigarette holders, teabags, Union Jack and leather boots presumably purchased from an Adult store.
The placement of Gilbert’s installation in a room of paintings that, in comparison, are decidedly unmodern and very unfashionable is deliberate. ‘Is it time to face Britain’s Imperial past?’, asks the promotional material for Artist and Empire. It’s a bold question, but what aspect of empire is Tate Britain setting out to confront? Last year, public reaction forced the Barbican Art Centre to cancel an exhibition bySouth African artist Brett Bailey which critiqued human zoos and slavery by placing black actors in chains, suggesting that we might not have the stomach for a face-to-face with the worst of Empire. Tate’s Artist and Empire won’t require any trigger warnings regarding upsetting content – there are no signs of concentration camps or mutilation. The impact of post-colonial indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson’s abstract series Our Bones/Hair/Skin in Your Collections resides mostly in the work’s title. Where violence against indigenous people does appear it takes metaphorical form, as in Edward Armitage’s 1858 response to the Indian Mutiny,Retribution, where Britannia – personified as a sword-wielding woman – justly slays an insurgent tiger over the corpse a child. What Artist and Empire confronts is artistic collusion with colonialism. For many, it was an aesthetic opportunity.
The exhibition succeeds in showing that artists were a necessary tool of empire, rather than the critical thorn in its side we might expect when viewing colonialism from a retrospective standpoint. Taken as whole, it makes a case for the art of empire to be considered a genre in its own right. Artists mapped empire, and did so with extended artistic licence. They celebrated imperial heroics with large paintings of stoic men carrying the white man’s burden that visitors will expect. One such is John Everett Millais’ 1874 painting The North-West Passage, subtitled: ‘It might be done, and England should do it’. Artists capture empire’s rich stories; George Stubbs’ painting A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants depicts a Cheetah that was presented to George III in 1764 which took part in a stag hunt in Windsor Great Park, fled, and had to be recaptured by its handlers. Artists had an ethnographic role in documenting empire; paintings of Europeans proudly painted in indigenous attire from 1594 and 1842 show that such portraits were a genre which endured, little changed, for much of empire’s lifespan. And, ultimately, artists were to prove important in chronicling demise. As is often the case, the first signs of historical change appear in art and literature; curator Alison Smith points out how towards the turn of the 20th century paintings begin to turn towards the defeat.
George Stubbs, A Cheetah and a Stag with Two Indian Attendants, c.1794
It has been remarked that the British Empire has become ‘invisible’. More accurately, it hides in plain sight, something addressed by the contemporary artist Hew Locke, whose Restoration series features photographs of statues in Bristol. Locke has embellished the images loudly and crudely with gold coins, chains, shells and trade beads so as to render them violently unmissable. His subjects are carefully chosen: one of the statues is of Edward Colston, slave trader and Deputy of the Royal African Company whose trading monopoly made Bristol a thriving slave port. When considering empire as an invisible presence in Europe’s cities, it should be remembered that the Tate galleries were founded with money made by their 19th century sugar merchant patron. Artist and Empire considers what artists did for empire, and what empire did for art, and very the rooms that house it are not insignificant examples of the latter.
Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past is at Tate Britain, London until April 10th 2016.
Rhys Griffiths is editorial assistant at History Today
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