Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire

ABSTRACT

Taking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain’s high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition’s content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the ‘building blocks’ for more diverse practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Museums
• Tate Britain
• empire
• racism
• diversity
• art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Ruskin’s equation of empire with racial destiny had a direct influence on Cecil Rhodes who emulates him in his ‘Confession of Faith’ where he contends that the English ‘are the finest race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race’ (Cecil Rhodes 2nd June 1877, quoted in Wheatcroft 1985, 140).

2. Thornhill, T. ‘The Art of Empire: New exhibition breathes life back into era when the sun never set on Britain’s conquests’, Mail Online 24th November 2015. Accessed 30th February 2016 <dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3331890/The-art-Empire-New-exhibition-breathes-life-era-sun-never-set-Britain-s-conquests.html>

3. Coomer, M. ‘Artist and Empire’. Time Out. Accessed 30th February 2016 <timeout.com/London/art/artist-and-empire>

4. Jones, J. ‘Artist and Empire Review – a captivating look at the colonial times we still live in’. The Guardian Monday 23rd November 2015. Accessed 30th February 2016 <theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/23/artist-and-empire-review-was tate-britain>

5. The only review that I came across that discussed the exhibition’s multiple absences, including slavery, from a critical perspective was on an online platform, Media Diversified, set up to promote ‘skilled writers of colour’: Zarina Muhammad, ‘Art and Empire@Tate Britain’. Media Diversified 13th February 2016. Accessed 28th March 2016 <mediadiversified.org/2016/02/13/art-and-empire-tate-britain>

6. J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), Boston Art Museum, is a rare example of a romantic image of slavery, in which slaves are shown shackled arms raised, as if to heaven, in a tempestuous sea.

7. A copy of the print is available to view in the Michael Graham-Stewart Slavery Collection, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

8. Wedderburn reportedly smuggled copies of his Radical journal to the slave plantations in Jamaica. In one example ‘The Axe Laid to the Root, or a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, being an address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica’ he warned the planters ‘prepare for flight … the fate of St. Domingo awaits you’ (no.1, col. 12 [1817], referenced in Hochschild 2005, 320–321, 404).

9. This description of the artists and display was used in the exhibition text, room six.

10. Judy Watson talking in her exhibition opening for ‘In Our Skin’, at the QAGOMA Queensland Art Gallery (2012). ‘Judy Watson Artist Talk Contemporary Australian Women Goma’. YouTube. Accessed 10th February 2016 <www.youtube.com/watch?v=frEGesqpuCQ>

11. Ibid.

12. Dewdney, Dibosa and Walsh (2013) describe how Blake, Slavery and the Radical Mind (2007) attempted to ‘retrieve a British cultural history of radical artistic production that engaged, but was not defined by slavery’, but paradoxically reproduced marginalization through its conflation of slavery with the wider contemporary black and minority experience (2013, 67). In their opinion, Tate Britain continued to rely on the ‘colonialist logic’ of centre and periphery: ‘with tribute flowing from the (colonial) margin to the (imperial) metropolis’ (2013, 233).