‘It’s as if Amazon had their own army today’
Photo: The cover of the accompanying book to the British Museum exhibition Hew Locke: what have we here?
Daniel Nelson
What Have We Here? does what museums all over the country should be doing: taking a fresh look at their exhibits and captions and suggesting new ways of showing and explaining them.
The British Museum has taken the plunge and invited Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke to roam through its vast collection and talk to the museum’s curators.
The result is a blast of fresh air.
Locke has created a fascinating show by assembling some 150 objects related to British colonialism in Africa, the Caribbean and India, on the themes of sovereigns and icons of nationhood, trade, conflict and treasure.
You get a taste of the flavour from the outset: a painting of a sailing ship. Locke says the ship looks like many others. But closer inspection shows ventilation ports on the side: it’s a slaver.
A few steps further on, Locke offers a summary dismissal of a slavery scene illustration of Brazil from the museum’s collection: “This print is absurd. It says it’s allegorical but it looks bleeding literal!”
Under a grandiose picture of a Delhi durbar he points out: “When you rule an empire you’ve got to remind people constantly of your power.”
On a cabinet of East India Company memorabilia he says the company “gutted the Indian economy … it is as if Amazon had their own army today.”
He pounces on the euphemistic language of war in the official phrase “a British military expedition to Ethiopia — “like you’re not going to go and kill people and perhaps take it over. No, we’re going for an expedition.”
Carnival in Trinidad and Rio “is still considered by many participants as an expression of resistance”. Whether that’s also true for Notting Hill Carnival is left unspoken.
But some points are made explicit: the Caribbean as “pigmentocracy”, the deliberate creation of the illusion of White British superiority, the way all countries —- Guyana as much as Britain — reinvent themselves over and over again; that “violence underpins any arrangement of any state. Even if you don’t use it, the threat of it is always there. There was never a Pax Britannica.”
And so the colonial cabinets continue, displaying interesting and sometimes beautiful objects in their own right, the interest heightened by viewing them from another perspective. There’s no strictly imposed time sequence: “It’s not a chronological story, it’s a collage.” Locke wants you to wander across the room if something catches your eye.
He has also added a fourth dimension, his own artworks that include carnivalesque Watchers, looking down on visitors from on high.
It’s a delightful and educational exhibition that will provoke conservative culture war combatants into expostulating about “rewriting history”.
Hew Locke: What Have We Here?, £16/£18, is at the British Museum, Great Russell Street, WC1 3DG until 9 February. Info: https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/hew-locke-what-have-we-here
1 November, Hew Locke in conversation, £12