All posts tagged BP

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent @ the Whitechapel Gallery

‘Visual attempts to dissect the newspeak that bombards us’
(Peter Kennard in an article about his photomontages)

Chances are you’ve seen one or more of Peter Kennard’s iconic photomontages, particularly during his heyday in the 1980s when the reign of Mrs Thatcher provided the perfect background for his brand of aggressively radical, satirical photomontages, published in a wide variety of left-leaning magazines and newspapers.

‘Protest and Survive’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist

Throughout Thatcher’s premiership, and fired by her close partnership with Rocking Ronnie Reagan, there was widespread paranoia on the Left that the world stood on the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war and Kennard’s witty, bleak, mashed-up montages provided a perfect accompaniment to the mood of anxiety among concerned activists everywhere.

‘Haywain with Cruise Missiles’ by Peter Kennard (1980) Tate: Purchased from the artist 2007 © Peter Kennard

Photomontage

Photomontage is the technique of cutting, arranging and gluing together photos (or parts of photos) to make a new image, sometimes with text similarly cut and pasted from newspapers or other sources. As a technique it’s always been associated with politics and satire, from its origins in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 30s and the great pioneer of political montages, John Heartfield.

The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts.

‘The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts’ by John Heartfield, October 1932

As a student activist in the 196os, Kennard found theoretical underpinnings for photomontage in the critical writings of Marxist thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht who promoted photomontage and collage (among other strategies) as ways of puncturing, subverting and questioning the smooth lies of capitalist discourse and bourgeois culture. Indeed, one of newspapers on show here is a Guardian Arts supplement from the 1990s featuring a long essay about Benjamin by James Wood and illustrated by a photomontage of him (Benjamin) by Kennard.

‘Walter Benjamin’ by Peter Kennard (1990) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

Kennard at the Whitechapel

This new exhibition of Kennard’s work includes lots of golden oldies from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, witty, savage, sometimes very bleak visual protests against a world run by rich Western corporations who, in what is probably his central theme, make obscene amounts of money by selling arms, weapons, bombs, guns to disgusting regimes which then use them to repress, murder, massacre their own and neighbouring populations. Champagne-swilling capitalists win – unarmed civilians, women and children lose.

‘Stop’ by Peter Kennard as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

However, this exhibition is not by any means a retrospective or dwelling on the past. Two of the three rooms contain very up-to-date works, completed in 2023 or this year, which show Kennard expanding his range in new and interesting ways. Having pondered all this a bit, I think the best way to 1) indicate what the show actually contains and 2) to indicate how the new stuff differs and expands on the old, is simply to describe it room by room.

Room 1

Room 1 is named the Archive Room and contains four elements. First there’s a plain table on which are ten books, publications from Kennard’s career from coffee table blockbusters to smaller, postcard-sized works. You could grab a coffee from the cafe downstairs, sit and browse through these for an interesting half hour or so.

On a shelf round two walls are 17 copies of one of these books – @earth – open to 17 different images.

On another wall is a hinged rack (the kind you see in art gallery shops) of 42 posters of Kennard images ranging from 1979 to 2019, made from photolithography and silkscreen on card.

Lastly, there are piles and piles of newspapers – or at least that’s what I thought they were till I looked closely and realised they are specially printed broadsheet-sized, newspaper-style folded versions of his images, accompanied by smatterings of text, which are FREE and we are encouraged to take away with us.

Installation view of ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, showing the reading table, copies of @earth open on the shelf and piles and piles of free papers (photo by the author)

Room 2

Barely a room, really just an extension of the same space, the second gallery contains three elements. There is a display case which bears the title ‘Worktop, 1966–2024’ and is, as the name suggests, a junk shop-style collection of the kinds of materials that Kennard collects – magazines, books, photos – plus all manner of equipment used to make the works, such as a tape measure, rulers, paints, knives and tools and so on.

The artist’s bric-a-brac at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Above the display case are four large framed works titled ‘Stocks’ from 1994. These are four copies of the Financial Times which have been subjected to a dramatic transformation, namely a gaunt, ravaged, black and white arm and hand tearing its way down through the neat columns of stock market prices, in a gesture which manages to convey terrible despair.

©Peter Kennard Newspaper 8 (1994) Carbon toner, oil, charcoal, pastel on newspaper, wood

‘Stock’ by Peter Kennard (1994) as featured in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery

Opposite these a sort of alcove has been filled with 25 poster-sized blow-ups pf his images to create a little forest of placards, each attached to a wooden post themselves secured in red vices. This is his newest work, created specially for this exhibition, is titled ‘People’s University of the East End’, and there’s a story behind it.

It turns out that the three ‘galleries’ in which the show is held were once part of the former Whitechapel Library (1892 to 2005). At the turn of the twentieth century this was a free resource to the poor inhabitants of the area who would have read books, magazines and newspapers here. Back then it was nicknamed the ‘People’s University of the East End’, hence the title of this installation which, as the curators put it, ‘reflects on the capacity for learning, community and activism in public spaces.’

The exhibition, we learn, was conceived to echo and reflect on this idea of a library, a place where ideas are made available, promoted and circulate. Hence the inclusion of the word Archive in the title of the show, for it brings together not just the images themselves, but includes actual copies of the original newspapers and magazines and posters, as well as the more recent books, in which his images were first published and continue to circulate.

Installation view of ‘People’s University of the East End’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

This little copse of placards is quite a neat idea, and contains up-to-date works such as the barbed-wire tree from the civil war in Syria (centre right) and the image of Julian Assange intercut with the American and British flags at the bottom right, but it didn’t pull my daisy, I’m not sure why. In the same way, the notion of the Archive certainly explains the bringing together of all these formats – posters, newspapers, and the vitrine showing his bric-a-brac – but doesn’t really come off, as an idea.

The best bit, I thought, were the shiny red vices supporting the posts, like a little army of red crabs. ‘Red vices’, hmm, that could have been a witty alternative title for the exhibition and the right-on causes Kennard has spent a lifetime supporting…

Anyway, themes from these first two spaces are picked up in the third, biggest and best room of the show.

Room 3: the installations

The first wall of the third and final room displays no fewer than 40 of his classic photomontages, ranging from a piece commenting on British Army brutality in Northern Ireland in 1973 to the Free Julian Assange piece I mentioned above, made in 2023, via one of my favourites, the very funny Maggie Regina from 1983.

Maggie Regina by Peter Kennard (1983) in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

It’s an impressive selection from fifty years of mostly stark and upsetting imagery designed to provoke the viewer into thinking again about the forces of violence and exploitation which underlie our shiny Western world.

But the big thing here is the installations which I think are brilliant. There are four of them and, remember the copies of the Financial Times with the gaunt arm tearing through it in the previous room? – they all rely on newspapers as their central material.

1. Reading Room

The simplest is ‘Reading Room’. Picking up on the Whitechapel Library motif, these are four old two-sided wooden lecterns, the kind that turn-of-the-century readers would have read their newspapers on. Each of them hosts an original edition of a newspaper or magazine where a Kennard work originally appeared. Most of the 8 newspapers in question were copies of the Guardian, the exceptions being two copies of The Workers Press and a vintage copy of the New Musical Express.

Installation view of ‘Reading Room, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

The classic black-and-white photomontages address these issues:

  • 1973 scientists involved in torture (The Workers Press)
  • 1974 British investment in apartheid South Africa (The Workers Press)
  • 1981 nuclear weapons, a skeleton morphing into an atom bomb (New Musical Express)
  • 1989 reunification of East and West Germany (Guardian)
  • 1990 the Whites Only policy of South African apartheid (Guardian)
  • 1990 profile of Walter Benjamin (Guardian)
  • 1991 Gulf War, the attempt to stop Saddam Hussein (Guardian)
  • 1991 a centrefold collection of photomontages (Guardian)

2. World Markets (1997 to 2024)

‘World Markets’ is a set of 16 broadsheet newspaper double-spreads, most if not all from Kennard’s favourite target, the Financial Times, on which he has projected faces intended, presumably, to represent The Poor and Exploited. The aim is to remind us that behind the wall of numbers which is the faster-then-ever, digitally automated stock market, are the lives of the poor and downtrodden who suffer from the ravages of global capitalism.

Installation view of ‘World Markets, 1997 to 2024,’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Both these are straightforward in manner and material. The last two installations represent something completely new because they use electric lights and projections.

3. Double Exposure, 2023

‘Double Exposure’ covers a whole wall. It consists of three rows of 12 Financial Times pages with lights projecting images of war and conflict and poverty onto them. It was made in collaboration with Nigel Brown and is large and imposing. Part of the overall visual impact comes from the complicated spaghetti of electric cabling hanging from each projection and spooling along the floor.

Installation view of ‘Double Exposure’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

The dynamic nature of this installation i.e. the lights continually changing, is appealing. And the notion of this magic lantern show revealing the ‘truth’ behind the blank walls of stocks and shares prices on the FT pages is also sort of interesting.

Kennard’s dualistic worldview

‘Double Exposure’ really just brings out the fundamental concept which underlies all Kennard’s work which is that there are two levels of reality – the smooth, plausible, ‘common sense’ world we inhabit, defined and described and promoted in the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberal consumer capitalism, the world of perfect people smiling down at us from advertising hoardings in the streets, on the sides of buses, on the Tube, on TV on our social media, the world of newspapers and TV assuring us that our values and our way of life, our pensions and investments in mega-corporations, are the only rational, practical ways to run the world – and the other world, the Dark Side, where the huge profits which keep the corporations afloat which our pensions and savings are invested in, the world of ‘shiny happy people’ is sustained by the ruthless exploitation of the poor and powerless, of indigenous peoples around the world, of peasants and workers forced to sweat in terrible conditions in Indonesian sweatshops or be psychologically destroyed in China’s suicide factories, and where, above all, the West maintains its hegemonic control of the world’s economic and financial systems through the ruthless elimination of anyone who stands in its way via wars of conquest dressed up as ‘liberation’ or ‘freedom’ – as in the deep need to control the world’s oil supplies which underlay the West’s adventures in the Gulf War and then the Iraq War.

Kennard’s works represent this Two World Hypothesis, this duality, via works which are themselves dualistic or dichotomous, in which (in his classic works) images from two different value systems are made to crash into each other, the startlingness of the disjunction intended to wake us from our complacent slumber.

‘Thatcher Unmasked’ by Peter Kennard (1986) A/POLITICAL

You can see how this duality underlies all his work, from duality of ‘The Haywain with Cruise missiles’ (where the self-deceiving bourgeois dream of some Old Englande is punctured by the modern reality of England being a lunch pad for American nukes) through to the dual image of copies of the Financial Times which have been ripped by the gaunt arm of the global poor (‘Stocks’) or have projected onto them the faces of the global poor (‘World Markets’ and ‘Double Exposure’).

There are, of course, a number of problems with this approach and with the whole radical worldview which underlies it, of which three spring straight to mind.

1. What’s the alternative?

One is, What else do you suggest? Forty years ago I read Class War and Socialist Worker and the kind of publications Kennard’s works appeared in and fondly imagined that the (Western) world could be subjected to a socialist transformation, but the collapse of the Soviet Union and of all the regimes around the world which it supported took all the steam out of those (wildly impractical) hopes and into the vacuum rushed the two flavours of neoliberalism which have ruled the West ever since, the Hard Neoliberalism of the Conservatives and Republicans, of Reagan and Thatcher, or the Soft Neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, which promised a fairer world and a middle way but still deregulated the financial sector leading to the 2008 crash and enthusiastically promoted the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, trashing Blair’s reputation forever.

Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps

Photo-Op by kennardphillipps (2005) © kennardphillipps

Right up to the present day, activists on the Left are still trying to devise a new economic and social theory on which to base their policies, an ideological vacuum you can clearly see in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, which is just the British wing of the general bemusement of left-of-centre parties across the West.

Which explains why the Left has so enthusiastically embraced identity politics – it’s an excuse, it’s a fig leaf, it covers for their lack of an economic theory. Certainly feminism and black rights and refugees and Palestine are worthy causes, but in all the Western nations the Left and progressives and activists have clustered round these causes because they don’t know what to do about the economy any more – should we nationalise all the utilities, should the government create an industrial strategy and support native industries?

The Right has won everywhere because it has a clear strategy – reduce the state, privatise everything, neuter trade unions, leave all economic decisions to the market, cut taxes on the rich – which it implements everywhere with total consistency, and has ideological allies in all the media owned by the rich who stand to directly benefit from these policies.

I take the pint that Kennard’s work is satirical commentary and like satire through the ages is under no obligation to propose its own alternative agenda, and yet at some point, during this review of 50 years of political engagement, surely every visitor is going to ask, ‘OK – you hate this universe of exploitation and warmongering – what’s your alternative?’

2. The post-Cold War multipolar world

The second objection to Kennard’s worldview is that it is too western and too parochial. If Reagan and Thatcher deserved mocking in the 1980s how much more so did the totalitarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Communist China?

In this century 9/11 crystallised the threat from radical Islam, a completely new force which entered the world with the 1979 Iranian revolution but none of us were really aware of in the 1980s and 90s (except for those plucky mujahideen Sandy Gall was always reporting on for ITN) and despite the mounting rhythm of Islamic terror attacks.

The point is that the radical or Marxist critique of the West which Kennard’s works seem to embody – his relentless criticism of the British state and army, from Ulster to Basra, and British arms and weapons suppliers making fortunes from murder – has been trumped or eclipsed by forces which are demonstrably more evil and wicked – ISIS in Syria, the Taliban in Afghanistan – and the great arc of instability across North Africa, through the Middle East, Iran-Iraq, up into Syria, countries which were destabilised by the uprisings of the Arab Spring and the chaos, civil wars (Libya, Yemen, Syria) or renewed repression (Egypt) they left in their wake. And of course the horrific Hamas raid on Israel followed by the brutal war on Gaza, with the constant threat of a second front opening against Hizbollah in the Lebanon.

And if you throw in the very real threat to Eastern Europe presented by Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and the ever-present anxiety about China’s threats to Taiwan, then get a world in which even the most radical Left are hard put to argue that it’s the West who are the biggest threat to peace or the most violent culture or the most repressive regimes.

It’s quite clear to everyone that, even if you want to excoriate Western arms companies and rapacious corporations who are, for example, continuing to supply arms for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza, the overall values of the West need supporting against the very real enemies threatening it from all sides (including, of course, from within – Trump, Reform and the maniac right of the Conservative Party). As in France, the Left needs to present a united front against the Right which, as I mentioned above, succeeds time and time again because it knows what it wants, in a way the fractured Left all-too-often doesn’t.

In summary, mocking the American and British state, big corporations and warmongering leaders made a lot of sense in the Reagan-Thatcher 1980s, and again in the light of the Bush-Blair Iraq War of 2003 – but now, in 2024, doesn’t feel like an adequate response to a far more complicated, and threatening, world. The iniquity of British arms manufacturers continuing to supply Israel or the Syrian government, profiting from conflict in Yemen or Sudan, remains deplorable.

Union Mask by Peter Kennard (2007) Courtesy the artist

3. How ‘radical’ can any contemporary artist be?

The third objection would be the familiar one levelled at all artists no matter how ‘radical’ or ‘subversive’, which is that their works, across all channels and media, fit smoothly inside the capitalist consumer culture they claim to critique, so smoothly as to have, in practice, zero effect.

The Whitechapel Gallery has a shop which, as always, devotes a section to merchandise from the exhibitions of the moment, in this case books and posters and postcards by Peter Kennard all available at very competitive prices. All artists are as tightly enmeshed in the system they wish to undermine as the richest stockbroker or wickedest arms dealer.

You know the old Leftie joke, ‘If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it’ – same here: Kennard, Banksy, any other political artist you care to mention, don’t change anything at all, so much as provide a kind of backdrop for certain kinds of lives, images certain kinds of student zealots and ageing activists identify with and enjoy looking at.

The richest man I know loves all kinds of art, including ‘radical’ stuff like Kennard, loved political photos in the Elton John photo exhibition, coos as Yoni Shinkobare CBE’s deconstruction of imperial statues and why shouldn’t he? None of them threaten him or his ample investments in the slightest. They’re lifestyle accessories, they’re one more set of consumer items to be flicked through while waiting for a plane or by the pool or in a pokey room in Whitechapel.

The man who made them, Kennard, has to believe in The Cause and is as fiercely committed to making works skewering the evil arms trade as he was 50 years ago, and his consistency and commitment is admirable. But strolling round this exhibition inevitably raises the question whether work like this changes anything at all, even in the minds of visitors who, half an hour later, are browsing in the shop or wedged onto a busy tube train.

4. Boardroom (2023)

The last of the installations in the third room is ‘Boardroom’ which dates from last year. I really liked these works because they use rough, industrial, derelict materials, the kind of thing which always lights my candle. On three big salvaged boards are suspended sheets of (as usual) newsprint. Onto these have been printed anonymous portraits of everyday people, The People, the masses. And onto these are projected the logos of oil and arms companies, of Shell and BP, BAE Systems and many others of the same ilk, the point being, of course, that it’s ordinary people, especially in developing countries, who pay the price for the rapacious exploitation of oil (in the Middle East or Nigeria) and the disgustingly indiscriminate use of weaponry (Syria, Ukraine, Gaza).

Installation view of ‘Boardroom’ in ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Arms and the artist

On reflection, maybe it’s his hatred of state violence which is Kennard’s most consistent subject, from the US bombing of Cambodia and North Vietnam, the British Army’s use of rubber bullets in Northern Ireland in the early 70s, the threat of nuclear apocalypse during the 1980s, the West’s use of devastating firepower against Iraq in 1991 and then again in 2003, and western arms companies continuing to profit from conflicts in Ukraine and Israel.

Maybe, rather than critiquing capitalism per se, it would be more accurate to say that Kennard has spent a lifetime excoriating the ruinous products of Western arms companies and the bellicose leaders who support and encourage the militaristic worldview.

‘Sub-Trump’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York

As an intellectual position, this hatred of companies who profit from selling instruments of death and destruction is more viable than thoughts about overthrowing the entire capitalist system. Who doesn’t agree that we should be feeding starving children rather than building nukes and subs and drones? Except that we live in a world with a Russia in it, where even if Vladimir Putin miraculously dies of a heart attack, chances are he would only be replaced by an even more aggressive Russian nationalist – and a world which also has an increasingly nationalist China in it – not to mention a belligerent Iran which was the main beneficiary of the foolish war in Iraq.

With the result that we live in a world where the defence ministers of every country in NATO are calling for more to be spent on defence budgets in readiness for a war with Russia. Is that wrong? Is Kennard saying European nations should be winding down their defence budgets and sending a signal of passivity to Putin?

You look at Kennard’s powerful images and installations, you are touched by the images of starving children and with one part of your mind you strongly sympathise with criticism of arms companies (and the entire ‘system’) which profits from making and selling weapons of death… and yet… another part of your mind wonders – ‘OK, I get it, arms companies are immoral and wicked… but what would your policy be towards Ukraine and Russia? What would you be advising NATO leaders? Do you think this is the moment to reduce our military capability even further?’

The moral outrage of the works excoriating the killing of the innocent and profiteering from death… clash with a realistic assessment of the warlike world we live in… and so left me, literally, in two minds about all of these works.

New media

Putting their subject matter to one side for a moment, Kennard was keen to emphasise that these latter works – the ones using lights and projections, ‘Double Exposure’ and ‘Boardroom’ – are an interesting new strategy of his, an attempt to deconstruct the whole process of photomontage, the artistic practice which made his name.

I think I understand what he thinks he’s getting at but I’m not sure it’s really true. If you use a narrow definition of photomontage i.e. juxtaposing photographs from different sources on a flat surface to make a new photo image, then yes. But if you use the broader definition I attempted above, of juxtaposing objects from two different value systems (faces of people from the developing world with the sleek markets pages of the Financial Times) then this is fundamentally the same approach, the same way to get an effect.

Putting the idea of ‘deconstruction’ to one side, I still liked these works the best: 1) because I like the industrial paraphernalia of salvaged wood, clips and metal brackets and cabling which they involve, and 2) because they are fresh and new, in technique and aim, when set beside the yellowing montages from the 1970s and ’80s. I found them the most interesting as overall objects or sculptures in the same way that I liked the red vices (novel) more than the protest placards (familiar).

Summary

As you can tell, I’m conflicted. I really liked the photomontages because, in their deliberately scrappy mashed-up appearance, they actually display great visual taste. They’re like classic punk visuals and are almost all impactful and effective images, cousins of the political cartoons from the period, distant relations, maybe, of the savage satire of Gerald Scarfe. Despite being made out of other people’s material, their harsh juxtapositions have an immediately recognisable visual identity, much as you can instantly recognise a Banksy work of graffiti.

And I liked the four installations, and the efforts he’s been making with wood and placards and lights etc to broaden out his practice.

And yet I couldn’t help feeling that, at some level, it all comes from a bygone age. Even his response to the most recent events like the terrible civil war in Syria or the jokey photomontages featuring Donald Trump… they’re good but they signify a style and approach which comes from another era and doesn’t (as I’ve tried to explain) really reflect the complexity of our time, the troubled 2020s.

‘Syria’ by Peter Kennard (2018) Courtesy of the artist and Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, Rome and New York

Or am I being too harsh? Is this a man who has been impressively true to his radical beliefs through half a century of political turmoil and social change, an unflinching critic of corporate greed and political mendacity? As he himself puts it:

‘My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society. Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on…’Archive of Dissent’ brings together fifty years of work that all attempt to express that anger by ripping through the mask by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask: the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying ‘no’ to corporate and state power. It rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies.’

Is it a good thing that he’s still making images which highlight the violent exploitation lying behind the sleek corporate reports, the environmental destruction which pays for BP bonuses, the murderous blowing up of innocent bodies which underlies the profits of the arms manufacturers named in ‘Boardroom’?

Or is it both at the same time? I was conflicted.

Recommendation

It’s not a big exhibition, it’s not a major exhibition. The first two rooms are small, the second one little more than an alcove. If you’re already a fan you should go in order to see the installations and new pieces, but if you’re not, I’d hesitate to recommend it. You don’t get a lot more of a visual hit than you do from surfing the images on his website.

On balance, I think the wall of images of poor people and babies’ faces projected onto copies of the FT which makes up ‘World Markets’ is worth seeing in the flesh, but as to the rest…well, I’ve given a detailed description of what you see, so you can make your own mind up.

The good old days: a copy of the New Musical Express from 1981 featuring a page-size photomontage by Kennard on the left and reviews of recent gigs by Echo and the Bunnymen and The Cure on the right, on show at ‘Archive of Dissent: Peter Kennard’ at the Whitechapel Gallery (photo by the author)

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on July 27, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Politics
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/07/27/peter-kennard-archive-of-dissent-the-whitechapel-gallery/

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)

I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it – but it is not at all what I expected. With the title ‘Dictatorland’ and a photo of an African dictator on the cover, I expected it to be an entertaining romp through the careers of Africa’s most notable dictators and kleptocrats, and it certainly contains that element, with chapters describing the rise to power of the following notable crooks and dictators:

  • Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo)
  • Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
  • Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)
  • Sani Abacha (Nigeria)
  • Francisco Macías and Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast)
  • Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)

Kenyon gives potted biographies consisting of short, punchy sections, scenes depicting the origins, education and early years of each baddie, their early involvement with their country’s independence movements or army (training ground for most dictators) or with a nationalist guerrilla movement.

Then he moves on to gruesome snapshots from their years in power, their madcap schemes (Mobutu’s Versailles-sized palace and Houphouët-Boigny’s basilica in the deep jungle vie for winner of the most expensive African folly) – descriptions of their secret police and torture chambers (Equatorial Guinea’s Macías Nguema is estimated to have had up to a quarter of the entire population of his country executed, making him ‘one of the most brutal dictators in history’) – and then on to the inevitable economic collapse, and their final overthrow, leaving a country in ruins.

In telling these stories Kenyon gives excellent backgrounders on the colonisation of the relevant country; the behaviour of its colonial government; the rise of nationalist agitation during the 1950s; the fraught political manoeuvres around independence, and so on.

All these profiles and pocket histories are clear and authoritative. They make for an immensely enjoyable read which conveys a lot of historical information with a sure, light touch.

The geological context

BUT there is one more crucial aspect of the book which I hadn’t expected at all; this is that Kenyon places the careers of all his dictators within a broader, what you could call, geological context. The entire book starts not with the this or that imperial conquest of this or that part of Africa, as you might expect, but with a description of the earliest ancestor of the genus Homo which has so far been found in Africa, the so-called specimen LD 350-1.

The point is that this introduces a deep historical perspective, far deeper than the past century or so of political history, a deep perspective from which Kenyon describes the geological history of Africa, and in particular the origin of the high value minerals and resources which were to play such an important part in modern Africa’s history, namely copper, diamonds, gold and then oil.

So, for example, he tells us about the discovery of the enormous stands of diamonds in southern Africa which caused the white invaders to seize the land from its black African inhabitants, and then to start fighting among themselves. He tells us the origin of the de Beers company and why the Kimberly region got its name, none of which I knew before.

This ‘geological perspective’ provides a deeper historical context for the actions of all the imperial conquerors, the colonial administrators, and then the newly independent black African leaders. It shows how they all tended to be dazzled by, fall victim to, act on the basis of, lust for Africa’s mineral wealth.

This perspective explains why the first few years of Congo’s independence era were characterised by civil war when the mineral-rich province of Katanga tried to secede from the nation (with the help of the Belgian government which wanted to hang on to its copper and diamond industries). It helps you understand how the Great War of Africa (1998 to 2002) developed into a struggle between numerous factions and foreign armies to seize parts of the country rich in minerals (diamonds, copper, gold, cobalt).

In the same vein, chapter three isn’t about a dictator at all but consists of an extended, and very readable, history of the rise of oil as the central fuel of the twentieth century. Kenyon gives the history of oil discoveries, first of all in Persia, then in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, in the 1920s and 30s, the controlling role played by Britain – which still owned or ran many of those places – alongside the growing power of America and how, by contrast, for decades, no oil companies thought Africa would yield oil deposits.

The oil chapter introduces us to a number of white, European oil prospectors, from back in the glory days of prospecting, the 1950s. We meet more of them than we do Africans, especially the ones Kenyon has tracked down and interviewed, old white men in their 80s (men like Dave Kingston, Rex Brown, David Orser) who still remember the excitement of the primitive conditions they worked under in the deserts of Libya or the malarial swamps of the Niger Delta.

The point is that a lot of those early prospectors and the oil companies they worked for (BP, Shell, Esso) were dead wrong about Africa: certain parts of it turned out to be sitting on top of vast oceans of oil, starting with Nigeria, where oil was struck in 1956, and then in Libya in 1959, then offshore Angola.

But the deep political-historical point is that, just as the so-called winds of political change were sweeping through Africa, many if not most places on the continent were about to undergo a sweeping economic change which would see their entire economies becoming orientated around a handful of commodities, commodities which the West would not only discover and develop, but do everything in their power to keep their sweaty hands on.

The dictators didn’t plan it, but they came to power just as a handful of commodities emerged as the dominant factor in their countries’ economies and the key importance of this is that an industry like gold or copper or oil is a) highly centralised and b) generates fantastic wealth.

The coincidence of mineral discoveries with independence gave the dictators immense personal control about which foreign companies were awarded contracts and licences to mine and extract the resources, and taught the dictators how to cream off for themselves and their families, hangers-on and clients, truly vast fortunes, billions and billions of dollars.

To put it another way: although nobody understood it at the time, the mineralisation of the economies of so many African nations was to create and entrench the rule of dictators and elites who acquired obscene wealth, while their nations’ infrastructures fell to pieces and their populations starved in the streets.

Many resource-rich African nations were to turn into rentier states (p.225), a rentier state being ‘a state which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments…With virtually no taxes citizens are less demanding and politically engaged and the income from rents negates the need for economic development… Instead, the government essentially ‘bribes’ the citizenry with extensive social welfare programs, becoming an allocation or distributive state…In the words of Noah Feldman in his book After Jihad, “no fiscal connection between the government and the people. The government has only to keep its people in line so that they do not overthrow it and start collecting the oil rents themselves.”‘ (Wikipedia).

Dictators like Mobutu or the successive rulers of Nigeria dealt solely and exclusively with multinational corporations dealing in oil, copper, diamond or gold, raking in fortunes from licensing fees and a cut of the profits.

With this guaranteed income the rulers of rentier states do not need to consult the population (no need for pesky elections) because their administrations aren’t reliant on taxation the way ‘normal’ western states are; with a guaranteed income not reliant on elections or representative assemblies of any kind, billionaire dictators become ever-more detached from conditions in their countries which they let go to rack and ruin. They can spend a fortune on building up a state-of-the-art military and still earn enough in corrupt rake-offs to build a palace in the jungle and hire Concorde to fly in ice cream from Paris (as Mobutu did) or build the biggest most expensive folly in Africa (as Félix Houphouët-Boigny did), while their populations see their standard of living collapse, prices hit by hyper-inflation, food become rarer, drinking water unavailable, and ultimately starve.

Back to Kenyon’s book, so it’s only after this long disquisition on the early history of oil exploration in chapter 3, that Kenyon returns to his ostensible subject, the dictators, in chapter 4. This gives an excellent summary of the 1969 Libyan coup staged by the Free Officers Movement which overthrew King Idris (friend to the West), and which installed what was supposedly a free socialist society, but which quite quickly came to be dominated by Colonel Gaddafi and became more and more authoritarian – spies and eavesdroppers in all public places, midnight arrest, torture and imprisonment without trial, the usual stuff. The point being, he was able to do pretty much what he wanted, set up a security state, claim to have invented a whole new political philosophy, and provide training bases for terrorist groups from around the world, because of the vast oil revenues his government acquired year after year without lifting a finger.

I expected a book titled ‘Dictators’ to consist of maybe a chapter each about Africa’s top ten dictators, amounting to an ‘Observer I Spy Book of African Dictators’ – but although that is, obviously, the ostensible subject, it’s not really the core of the text. It’s this geological or mineralogical context which is, arguably, the book’s most distinctive feature.

Contents

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

Clearly the topic of chocolate doesn’t quite fit into my initial suggestion that the book has a ‘geological’ or ‘mineralogical’ perspective. Chocolate is very much about geography, as I learned from Kenyon’s typically clear and interesting description, which explains that cocoa bean trees only grow in very restricted latitudes, in the right kind of tropical forest. The plant originated in South America but was experimentally introduced into Africa by Europeans, and nowadays Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are by far the two largest cocoa growing countries, accounting for over 60 % of global cocoa production.

Which is why, after chapter 7 introducing and explaining the history and development of cocoa in Africa, chapter 8 of the book focuses in on Côte d’Ivoire and the notorious figure of Félix Houphouët-Boigny who started out as a mild-mannered doctor, union leader, and cocoa planter himself, before winning election to the French Assembly and then becoming Ivory Coast’s first president, a position he held from 1960 to his death in 1993, making him the longest-serving leader in Africa’s history (a record subsequently beaten by Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017). So a chapter about a dictator, alright; but placed in the broader context of a history of the relevant basic resource.

Anyway, chocolate is obviously not a mineral, which left me a little stumped at how to give an overall summary of the book’s perspective. ‘A resource-based history of some dictatorial African rulers’? ‘A commodities-based explanation of African tyrants’? Not exactly catchy, are they? I can see why Kenyon’s publishers will have struggled to come up with a title capturing what it’s taken me three or four paragraphs to explain and how ‘Dictatorland’, although very catchy, doesn’t begin to convey this historical and resource-led backgrounding which I’ve been banging on about.

So: the book is not at all what I was expecting because its focus on precious resources makes it much more interesting, and much more penetrating, than just another purely political history would have done.

Lots of context, not so much analysis

A reviewer on Amazon points out that, entertaining and well told though the dictators’ stories are, the book lacks any kind of political or intellectual analysis.

Well, yes and no. Kenyon has no ideological axe to grind and amid his many anecdotes, his stories about oil, independence struggles, his very readable accounts of the early days and triumphant rises of his dictators, it’s true that there’s little or no effort to question or dig deeper.

If you compare him with Michael Ignatieff’s books about international affairs, the latter uses examples and interviews to make searching points about the nature of nationalism and society which I found immensely illuminating and useful. There’s nothing or not much like that here. Kenyon tells his stories, describes key scenes from each country’s history, interviews survivors from those times, very well and very readably, and that tends to be your lot.

The Amazon reviewer wanted answers to more theoretical questions like: Why has post-independence Africa been such a disaster? What is it in African culture which makes Africans incapable of ruling themselves? Is democracy impossible in Africa and if so, why? Kenyon never asks those kinds of questions. He’s a descriptive not an analytical writer.

Except that, arguably, the mineralogical and resource-focused context is his theory, his analysis, his explanation. His mineral and resource-based perspective in fact goes a long way to presenting an explanation which underpins many of Africa’s troubles, and which, although it may be familiar to experts, I hadn’t come across in the dozen or so other books about Africa which I’ve read or not, I think, considered in such detail.

His short reference to ‘rentier states’, so brief it doesn’t merit inclusion in the book’s index, is a mighty key which unlocks not just the behaviour, but the tendency to total corruption, and the longevity which characterised so many of the dictators.

That first generation of dictators, coming to power in the early 1960s, is now routinely vilified, but their longevity did ensure stability of sorts. Since their overthrows, whether in the 90s (Houphouët-Boigny), in the Arab Spring (Gaddafi) or later (Mugabe in 2017), their countries have often got even worse and the resource perspective explains why: it’s because the dictators weren’t followed by ‘democracy’ in any sense we in the West understand. The demise of the dictators resulted in the eruption of multiple groups, parties and leaders, including the ever-intrusive armies, who themselves set about squabbling for control of the narrow range of commodities which generate such obscene wealth.

The West and the aid organisations have been fighting a battle for over 50 years to persuade the ruling classes of African countries to give a damn about their populations, to invest in infrastructure, industry and agriculture, to make long-term plans to develop the country as a whole and thus remove their populations from poverty. Meanwhile the elites themselves have been engaged in often cut-throat competition to fight their way to the seat of absolute power which the first generation of post-independence rulers showed is the pathway to unimaginable wealth, power and prestige.

This deep economic and political conflict is still at work in many African countries to this day, it’s arguably the key to understanding African affairs, and Kenyon’s excellent, hugely readable, enjoyable and illuminating book really helps to explain why.

Let the facts speak for themselves

There’s one other really strong aspect to Kenyon’s narrative which I want to emphasise. This is his admirable ability to let the facts speak for themselves.

The last two books about Africa I’ve read – ‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong and ‘Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ by Tim Butcher – are both excellent in their ways, but irritated me because the authors banged on and on about the evils of imperialism and the racism of the colonial administrations, throwing these terms of abuse around on every page, repeating the same old accusations in the same old clichéd phrases, all the while generally downplaying the role of modern African rulers in Africa’s woes.

In my Wrong review I pointed out that simply venting the opinion that the colonial regimes were racist and exploitative, and insistently blaming ‘the West’ for everything that ever went wrong in Eritrea, soon becomes boring, irritating and, eventually, counter-productive.

By complete contrast Kenyon’s text is studded with facts, gives the facts, just the facts. For example, the opening chapter about diamonds states the facts about how the imperialists in the 1880s and 1890s stole the land from its native owners, in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in stark, straight, factual terms which really bring home the inexcusable iniquity of their behaviour.

Kenyon gives the facts about how local chieftains and rulers were swindled out of their land by crooked legal documents they didn’t understand, or simply driven off it at gunpoint; how Africans were corralled into small, unhealthy, infertile areas, while the whites stole all the best agricultural land (notably in Kenya and Rhodesia), or any land which showed signs of gold, copper or diamonds (South Africa in particular).

In the chapter about Mugabe Kenyon describes the surreal maze of passes and identity cards and papers which the British colonial authorities in what was Southern Rhodesia demanded that every African needed just to get around, just to walk down the street, how they had to step off the pavement if white people were walking towards them, how the slightest infringement of this world of rules triggered shouted abuse, beatings or arbitrary arrest.

In other words, Kenyon’s simple statements of the facts of imperial conquest, imperial land grabbing, imperial hypocrisy, imperial greed, the imposition of deliberately discriminatory, deliberately demeaning and humiliating regulations, at every level and every minute of an Africans’ life, is infinitely more powerful than Wrong or Butcher’s more generalised sloganeering about ‘racism’ or ‘the West’.

I don’t think Kenyon anywhere in the book uses the word ‘racist’ because he doesn’t have to. Kenyon’s plain, lucid stating of the facts of each of these issues does the same job but infinitely better; makes you quiver with anger, shrivel with embarrassment, and totally understand the rage and the impatience for freedom which drove agitators like Lumumba and Mugabe.

And this is another reason why I think this is an excellent book.

Eritrea

The very last chapter demonstrates Kenyon’s strengths and weaknesses. It gives a good account of the rise to tyranny of Isaias Afwerki, the man who rose steadily through the ranks of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to lead them to victory in the bitter 30-year-long war against Ethiopia, which finally came to an end in May 1991, with Ethiopia’s granting of Eritrea’s independence.

Kenyon tells the same story as Michela Wrong does in her long, digressive book ‘I Didn’t Do It For You’ in literally one-tenth of the space (one 44-page chapter versus Wrong’s 432 pages). Moreover, Kenyon’s account is more up to date, Wrong, published in 2005, hoping Afwerki’s regime might be overthrown or soften, Kenyon, published in 2018, giving the bad news that Afwerki’s regime not only didn’t soften but has become steadily more harsh and repressive.

Since independence Eritrea has had no elections, no constitution, no free press or media. It is almost impossible to gain entry to report on it. Eritrea commonly competes with North Korea as least free country in the world.

Also, Kenyon is balanced. Michela Wrong, as I’ve mentioned, comes over as very biased, repeating whenever she can the strongest criticisms of western nations like Italy, Britain and the West, very slow to blame anyone else (such as the brutal Derg regime in Ethiopia or its Soviet suppliers or the vile Afwerki), very slow to concede that the colonial period brought any benefits.

Kenyon, by contrast, feels fair and balanced. He clearly states that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imperialism at its most brutal, involving poison gassing of entire villages; but that the Fascist regime did then set about building roads and harbour facilities and wide boulevards and a modern infrastructure. Similarly, he mentions that the Brits asset stripped the country after they’d won it from Italy in 1940 but also introduced democracy, a free press and trade unions. In other words, he shows that the imperial legacy was mixed.

Something also emerges from Kenyon’s account which doesn’t so much from Wrong’s, which is the importance of the visit by Afwerki and a few other EFPL leaders to Maoist China in the mid-1960s. They arrived in the middle of the so-called Cultural Revolution and were very impressed by the zeal and sense of embattled virtue of the young Red Guards who rounded up the entire bourgeoisie and shunted intellectuals off to the country to work alongside peasants.

This more than anything explains how Afwerki went from being a hero of the independence struggle to one of the most repressive dictators in the world – because he knows no better. All he knows is The Struggle, and so he imagines himself surrounded by conspirators, a paranoia which is occasionally proven true because people have, understandably enough, conspired to overthrow him, and then was confirmed when was broke out anew with Ethiopia in 1998, and then 9/11 confirmed the rising threat from Islamists in the country, and then the civil war between Tigrayans from the north fighting against the Ethiopian government and so, you can see it from his point of view: there is constant struggle; the revolution is in continual jeopardy; only one man can save the revolution and save his country, and that’s why he can’t afford to hold elections. What if Islamists, if regional separatists, if rebels or traitors were elected? No, of course not. Only one man can save the nation, and he has to carry on his embattled lonely duty for as long as it takes.

And so another African dictator is born.

Wrong spends 400 pages trying to persuade us that it was Italy, Britain and the wicked West who are responsible for Eritrea’s current plight. In Kenyon’s account, both imperial nations were guilty of bad or atrocious acts, and the UN of foolish ones, but the real responsibility falls on Afwerki’s Maoist indoctrination, the man’s personal paranoia and delusions of destiny.

(The same goes, in spades, for the career of Paul Kagame who’s been at the heart of Rwandan Political Front (RPF) activity since the late 1980s and, like Afwerki, brought the paranoid style developed when the RPF was a small outfit hiding out in the mountains into office into general government when the RPF seized power in 1994, where this anxious guerrilla mindset has blossomed into intolerance of any dissent, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution worthy of Stalin or North Korea. See ‘Do Not Disturb’, the breath-taking indictment of the Rwanda regime, by Michela Wrong.)

Credit

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon was published in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd. References are to the 2018 Apollo paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

3 Comments
by Simon on December 1, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/dictatorland-the-men-who-stole-africa-paul-kenyon/

Nero: the man behind the myth @ the British Museum

Surprisingly, given his notoriety, this is the first major exhibition in the UK devoted to the Roman Emperor Nero or, to give him his full name, Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.

Marble bust of Nero. Italy (around AD 55) Photo by Francesco Piras © MiC Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cagliari

Nero’s predecessors

Nero was the fifth Roman emperor, his predecessors having been:

  • Augustus, who overthrew the Roman Republic, established the principate and reigned 27 BC to 14 AD
  • Tiberius (14 to 37 AD)
  • Caligula, star of the 1979 porn movie starring Malcolm McDowell (37 to 41)
  • Claudius, star of the famous TV series based on the novels by Robert Graves (41 to 54)

Last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty

Nero, born in 37 AD, reigned from 54 to 68, 14 years, from the ages of just 16 to 30, so he was very young. He was the last male descendant of Rome’s first emperor Augustus (his great-great grandson and so his death marked the end of what came to be called the Julio-Claudian dynasty. It was later claimed that during his reign he had his own mother killed, Agrippina, who had schemed to help her son to the succession, then did away with his first wife and allegedly his second wife.

The Great Fire of Rome

The Great Fire of Rome occurred during Nero’s reign, in AD 64. For 9 days the flames rampaged through Rome utterly destroying 3 of its 14 districts. Later accounts claim Nero watched it from the vantage point of his palace, singing to the accompaniment of his lyre. Some later sources claim that Nero deliberately started it in order to flatten Rome so he could rebuild it more magnificently, not least by constructing his enormous Golden Palace.

Wars and rebellions

During his reign Nero had to deal with:

  • a major uprising by British tribes led by Queen Boudica which seriously threatened Roman rule in this distant colony (60 to 61 AD)
  • ongoing war against the mighty Parthian Empire on Rome’s eastern border
  • then, in 66, a major insurrection of the Jewish population in Palestine which was to drag on for four years until the Romans finally suppressed it in 70 AD, razing much of the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, including the temple of Solomon, and dispersing its Jewish population, a key event in the rise of Christianity

The Pisonian conspiracy

There had been simmering discontent with various aspects of Nero’s rule among Rome’s traditionalist, aristocratic families, and a number of low-level conspiracies to overthrow him. The most serious came in 65, centred on Gaius Calpurnius Piso who aimed to have Nero assassinated and replace him. The conspiracy involved at least 40 individuals, all of whom were executed, forced to commit suicide or sent into exile.

The Galba revolt and suicide

In 68 Gaius Julius Vindex, the governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, rebelled against Nero’s tax policies. Lucius Verginius Rufus, the governor of Germania Superior, was ordered to put down Vindex’s rebellion. In an attempt to gain support from outside his own province, Vindex called upon Servius Sulpicius Galba, the governor of Hispania Tarraconensis, to join the rebellion and to declare himself emperor in opposition to Nero. This set in train a series of events which led to Galba leading his forces on Rome.

Abruptly the Senate, who had always been resentful of his populist and unorthodox policies, abandoned Nero, declaring him a public enemy, and the leader of his own bodyguard went over to Galba.

Nero fled to a villa outside the city and, when he was told soldiers from the Senate were coming to arrest him and drag him to the Forum where he would likely be beaten to death, he ordered a loyal servant to kill him. It was 9 June 68.

Civil war

Far from securing a peaceful transition of power, the removal of Nero led to a series of short-lived civil wars or military battles for supremacy among a succession of provincial generals in what came to be known as the ‘Year of Four Emperors’, being:

  • Galba, governor of western Spain, murdered in January 69
  • Otho, governor of northern Spain who supported Galba, but then overthrew him, before committing suicide in April 69
  • Vitellius, governor of Germania Inferior, who overthrew Otho and ruled for 9 months till he was executed December 69
  • Vespasian, general of the armies in the East, who marched on Rome, overthrew Vitellius and founded the Flavian dynasty, which ruled from 69 to 79 AD

Once order had been restored by Vespasian, the Roman Senate excised Nero’s memory from official records, his images were defaced or destroyed in a ritual process known as damnatio memoriae, and his name was vilified in order to to legitimise the new ruling dynasty which emerged from the chaos, the Flavian dynasty.

Bust of Agrippina the Younger, younger sister of the emperor Caligula, niece and fourth wife of the emperor Claudius, and the mother of emperor Nero who, it was said, had her murdered in 59 AD.

The fabrication of Nero’s negative reputation

Nero has been for nearly two thousand years vilified as a monster who murdered his own mother, had Christians set alight to illuminate the games, who fiddled while Rome burnt and possibly started the great conflagration himself, who indulged his absurd fantasy that he was a great artist, and wasted a fortune on his overblown Golden Palace.

Nowadays, we live in a great era of revisionism and Nero’s is one among many reputations which are coming in for a major reconsideration. And, in the spirit of the times, this major exhibition sets out to overturn the traditional image of Nero the monster.

The curators’ contention is that Nero’s bad reputation image was a political and literary fabrication, invented generations later, in order to legitimise the overthrow of the Augustan dynasty and validate the authority of its successors, the Flavian dynasty (69 to 96 AD) and the Nerva–Antonine dynasty which followed (96 to 192).

In the words of the exhibition curator, Thorsten Opper: ‘The Nero of our common imagination is an entirely artificial figure, carefully crafted 2,000 years ago.’

Certainly the Roman historians who are our main sources for the lives of the emperors were writing a long time afterwards. Tacitus (56 to 120) wrote his histories between about 100 and 110 AD, 40 to 50 years after the events he depicts.

The other main authority is the Lives of the Emperors written by the historian Suetonius (lived 70 to 122), a gripping read, even after all these years, because of the juicy and scandalous gossip it contains about the first twelve emperors of Rome but, like Tacitus, several generations removed from the events he describes.

A century later Cassius Dio (155 to 235) wrote a vast 80-volume history of Rome from its legendary origins to his own time, which includes a summary of the reign of Nero. It is one of only three sources we have for the rebellion of the British warrior-queen Boudicca against Roman occupation in 60 to 61 AD.

The exhibition implies that all three of these main sources are not what we would nowadays think of as attempts at historical veracity, but narratives created much later in order to bolster the authority of the later dynasties by discrediting their predecessors. Seen in this way, Tacitus and Suetonius tell us as much about the conflicts among the elite of their own times as of Nero’s.

The curators make a series of claims to back up this theory, but they can all be subsumed under what is maybe the basic premise of the exhibition which is that: A whole host of new (and newish) archaeological discoveries shed more light than ever before on the attitudes and lives and opinions of people living in 50s and 60s Rome and, taken together, these undercut the idea that Nero was perceived in his own time as a vicious tyrant. If anything, these new discoveries tend to prove the reverse: that Nero was extremely popular during his life and long afterwards, among the common people of Rome and, particularly in the East of the Empire.

Evidence for a positive interpretation of Nero

So the curators set up a dichotomy which runs through the exhibition, between the written texts of later ‘historians’ which (they claim) are seriously compromised and biased, written to please sponsors in the tiny Senatorial elite – and the archaeological evidence which, in numerous ways, suggests the opposite: that demonstrates that many Romans liked and even worshipped Nero, during his lifetime and even after his death.

The evidence they bring is highly varied in style and weight:

  • They show how melodramatic speeches put into the mouth of Agrippina by the ‘historians’ Tacitus and Dio Cassius, as Nero supposedly stabbed her to death, are in fact copies of speeches from a play written soon after Nero’s death, Octavia, which itself adapted the entire scene from Seneca’s Oedipus, itself, of course, dependent on ancient Greek originals. In other words, Tacitus and Suetonius’s accounts are less to do with what we think of as ‘objective history’ and much more to do with tapping into well-established literary stereotypes and tropes, not least for producing high drama with its requirement for tearful victims and callous, cold-hearted villains.
  • Nero had nothing to do with starting the Great Fire of Rome nor singing during it, as he was absent in Antium at the time. On the contrary there is evidence that he made great efforts to shelter refugees from the flames and then organised the rebuilding of the city afterwards.
  • Talking of building, Nero inaugurated building schemes throughout Rome including the building of a new larger central market and also the rebuilding and expansion of the port of Ostia, popular with the people and merchants.
  • Nero certainly performed onstage but there is evidence that this was a popular move. He created a claque of followers, the Augustiani, who clapped and cheered his performances. Spinning his association with the theatre as a populist tactic reminded me of King Charles II, who was also criticised by the elite for his debauched lifestyle but was wildly popular with the general public. Was Nero the Charles II of his day?
  • Nero expanded the chariot races and other games held in the Circus, also very popular.
  • There are several exhibits focusing on Nero’s haircut. He initiated a new style of having his hair brushed forward and a little curled at the front. We know this from statues and know that other nobles followed him. He set a fashion. ‘I’ll have a Nero, please, Mario.’
  • Down at the more plebeian end of the scale, the exhibition displays some pro-Nero graffiti found on a wall and which the curators have blown up large and displayed on an exhibition wall. There’s also a caricature of Nero from the wall of a shop on the Palatine Hill, which the curators have entertainingly animated, so we can watch it slowly being drawn on a screen.
  • On a more elevated geopolitical plane, Nero continued to be popular in the East after his death. We know this because a succession of impersonators arose who used his name and reputation to gather followings and lead forces before, inevitably, being crushed by the army but still, why would anyone set themselves up as followers, devotees or reincarnations of the man unless he retained a high degree of popularity?

The Senate

The Roman Senate consisted of some 600 men from Rome’s oldest and most prestigious families. They saw themselves as guardians of traditions and values. The first room or space in the exhibition is devoted to an impressive raised platform maybe 50 feet long on which stand a series of lifesize statues or busts of the first Emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius) and some of the key female figures (Livia, Agrippina), behind them on the wall an enormous family tree of the Julian Dynasty.

Gallery of statues of emperors from the Julio-Claudian Dynasty (photo by the author)

As usual I found it challenging to follow the precise details of who married who, adopted who, murdered who and so on. But I was struck by a thread that ran through the labels for all of the figures and this was mention of the Senate and how each of the emperors sooner or later incurred the criticism of the oligarchy, the small number of hugely rich and influential senators who regarded themselves as keepers of Rome’s traditional values, many of whom thought they had as much right to the principate (as Augustus called his position) as the madman Caligula or the stammering wretch Claudius.

As you carry on reading the wall labels this undercurrent of Senatorial resentment keeps recurring. Nero’s appearances on the stage may have been popular with the plebs, but the aristocrats severely disapproved. Lowered the tone. Conduct unbecoming.

Agrippina, Nero’s mother, certainly seems to have been the powerful schemer historians depict and so – she brought down on herself the vituperative criticism of the Senate, which strongly disapproved of powerful women. The legend that Nero had his own mother murdered reflects badly on both of them, and so was a perfect propaganda slur.

The people may have approved of the new building works in Rome, but the Senate disliked the higher taxes required to fund them, and so on.

Slowly but consistently, the curators are making the point that there was always opposition to the very idea of a prince, a princeps, a supposed ‘first among equals’, to the very idea of what people eventually came to call the ’emperor’, right from the time of Augustus.

Augustus’s homicidal rule (he had some 5,000 men from Rome’s leading parties executed in order to enforce his power) was only grudgingly accepted because the ruling class was exhausted after two generations of fratricidal civil war.

But the upper class sniping and criticism never stopped and highly educated, highly ambitious men never stopped gossiping and scheming against the First Family, and paying lawyers, orators and ‘historians’ to undermine and defame them at every opportunity. This then, should be understood as the background to the parti pris accounts of Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio Cassius.

The point being that it wasn’t just Nero. The exhibition slowly, subtly builds up a picture of a political system which was seething with resentments and power struggles at every level. The reputation Nero acquired for being a monster was just the latest in a succession of insults and abuse which had been hurled at Tiberius and the supposedly perverted goings-on at his villa on Capri, at the outright insanity of Caligula, at the doddery ineffectiveness of Claudius, and so on. The very idea of an ’emperor’ was deeply resented.

The more you look into it, the more you realise that all opinions in such a society were party pris, biased, sponsored by and supporting particular factions in the never-ending struggle for supreme power.

It prompts the thought that maybe being Roman Emperor was simply an impossible job. Maybe it was impossible to try and balance all the forces and please everyone in such a strife-ridden society, trying to suppress the slaves on the estates as much as the rebellions which kept breaking out throughout the occupied territories, all the time watching your back for the unceasing threat of a coup or assassination closer to home. Maybe it’s this simple fact which explains why so many of them started out welcomed and hailed by writers and people, yet ended their reigns in paranoia and violence.

Wider context

And this brings me to the most important thing I want to say about this exhibition, which is this: the pre-publicity and the posters and the website and the title of the exhibition itself all promote this idea that the exhibition addresses this one big question: was Nero the monster posterity has made him out to be? (And answers, pretty solidly, No, he wasn’t).

But in fact, the exhibition is much bigger and more ambitious and more wide-ranging than that. It feels like it sheds light on an enormous range of subjects going far beyond the personality or role of one man. By the end you feel like you’ve been given a panoramic overview of an entire society, analysed at multiple levels, from high politics and military strategy, through colonial rule, the role of women, of slaves, theatre and the arts, architecture and town planning, right down to day to day implements such as lamps and mirrors and coins and jewellery.

It feels like a wonderfully informative and dazzling total immersion in every aspect of first century Roman culture.

Exhibits

The exhibition fills the Museum’s largest gallery, the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery. I’ve been to some shows, such as the Rodin one, where the gallery is fully lit and sparkles with Scandinavian clarity. For this exhibition the overhead lights are turned off and the different spaces are separated by dark wood panelling and gauze hangings to create a dark and brooding atmosphere. In this setting are displayed over 200 objects, large and small, which appear out of the gloom, beautifully mounted and lit.

The very first exhibit has been carefully chosen to set the tone. It is a bust of Nero which, we are told, started life as the likeness of a different emperor but was extensively remodelled in the 1660s. In what way? To make the image blunter, heavier, more sensual and crude. Why? Because the sculptor was following the by-then established myth of the sensual, murderous tyrant. It is symbolic of the way the curators think Nero’s image was systematically besmirched after his death.

Bust of Nero, marble with later alterations (AD 59 to 98) Roma, Musei Capitolini. Photo by the author

The exhibition includes numerous objects from the Museum’s own collection, alongside rare loans from Europe, and ranges from humble graffiti to grand sculpture, precious manuscripts, objects destroyed in the fire of Rome, priceless jewellery and slave chains from Wales.

The new archaeological finds include:

  • treasures hidden during the destruction of Colchester in AD 60 to 61 during Boudica’s Iceni rebellion
  • burned artifacts from the Fire of Rome in AD 64
  • evidence from the destruction of Pompeii which suggest a new understanding of Nero’s reign

Statues

Statues of Nero were erected throughout the empire, yet very few survive due to the official suppression of his image. A star piece in the exhibition is a bronze head of Nero, long-mistaken as Claudius, which was found in the River Alde in Suffolk in 1907. The head was part of a statue that probably stood in Camulodunum (Colchester) before being torn down during the Boudica-led rebellion.

Head from a copper statue of the emperor Nero. Found in England © The Trustees of the British Museum

Roman Britain

The so-called Fenwick Hoard was discovered in 2014 beneath the floor of a shop on Colchester High Street. The treasure was buried for safekeeping by settlers fleeing for their lives during Boudica’s attack. Among the items are Roman republican and imperial coins, military armlets and fashionable jewelry similar to finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The Fenwick Hoard, England (AD 60 to 61) © Colchester Museums

It’s impressive but it is dwarfed by two other exhibits in the same section. First there’s a map of Roman Britain which shows where the important mines were. Just like the conquistadors who conquered Central America in the 16th century, the conquering Romans came looking for resources of all kinds to exploit and these included mines which were worked with slave labour. The exhibition includes some massive lead ingots shaped and marked with stamps indicating they date from Nero’s reign, and invites us to consider the back-breaking slave labour which went into their production.

But the most striking exhibit is a big slave chain of the type used to shackle native Britons, as they were bought, sold, transported around the country to work the land and the mines. People forget that Roman society was first and foremost a slave economy. People really forget that Britain was famous in the first century for the quality of its slaves who were widely exported throughout the empire.

Iron slave chain from Llyn Cerrig Bach, Anglesey, Wales (100 BC to AD 78)

Later on we are told a spine-chilling story concerning slaves. In 61 a distinguished senator was murdered by one of his household staff. Despite protests from the populace, Nero backed the senate’s decision to uphold an existing law which stipulated that, if one slave committed a capital crime, all the enslaved members of the owner’s household must be executed, to act as a deterrent.

Brutality was all around, at every moment, in a strictly controlled, rigidly hierarchical society subjected to multiple types of power and enforcement.

Nero the performer

Famously, Nero was the first Roman emperor to act on stage and compete in public games as a charioteer. The exhibition includes some vivid depictions of these chariot races including oil lamps show a racing quadriga (four-horse chariot), a victorious racehorse and a triumphant charioteer, as well as mass-produced architectural panels showing details of the races, like this one in which a quadriga is approaching the turning posts at the end of the course. (Next to it the exhibition actually includes three life-sized replicas of these turning tall conical posts.)

Terracotta relief showing a chariot-race, Italy (AD 40–70) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Obviously, ancient Rome was also famous for its gladiator contests and the exhibition includes a selection of scary-looking gladiatorial weapons from Pompeii on loan from the Louvre. Nero set up his own gladiatorial school, the Iudus Neronianus. A famous gladiator of the day, Spiculus, later became the loyal commander of his bodyguards.

Bronze gladiator’s helmet, Pompeii (1st century AD) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Sometimes rivalries connected to the games got out of hand. In AD 59, a violent riot erupted during a gladiatorial contest in Pompeii’s amphitheatre between opposing supporters from Pompeii and nearby Nuceria. The show includes a photo of a wall painting giving an aerial view of the event, showing the amphitheatre and people fighting in the arena and in the stands, as well as in the streets outside. Nero handed the investigation to the Senate, which issued Pompeii with a 10-year ban on holding gladiatorial games. Football hooliganism is nothing new.

Compare and contrast those bloody scenes with the rather less blood-thirsty spectacle of the ancient theatre. The show includes some large frescoes from Pompeii depicting actors and theatrical masks lend by Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Mind you, Roman tragedy could be a bloodthirsty affair, as the tragedies written by Nero’s tutor, the philosopher Seneca, amply demonstrate.

Fresco of a seated actor dressed as a king and female figure with a small painting of a mask, Italy (AD 30 to 40) With permission of the Ministero della Cultura ̶ Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

Aged 21, Nero first took to the stage as part of private games, but a few years later he performed publicly in Naples and then in Rome itself. This event was described in elite sources as unprecedented and scandalous, but contemporary evidence shows that Nero was hardly the first young man of good family to take part in public performances.

No doubt Nero thought of himself as a great artist – and the curators emphasise that he put a lot of time and energy into learning the play the cithara, or lyre, to professional standard – but his performances may also a political motivation, reaching out to the crowd, the plebs, the common people, showing he was one of them and enjoyed popular entertainment; part of his ongoing attempts to create and maintain a popular power base to balance the ever-present threat from the disapproving aristocracy. Again I think of Charles II, never really confident of his throne…

Nero created a group of supporters, the Augustiani which comprised knights and commoners alike, young men who accompanied Nero’s performances with rhythmic clapping and chants, steering the reactions of the audience. Not content to leave it at that, the curators have actually created a one-minute long aural recreation of these roisterers cheering and chanting in Latin, which plays from speakers directly above the theatre frescos.

In one of the show’s smaller pleasures, there’s a six-inch-high ivory carving of a Roman actor in the middle of a tragic performance. His pose and gestures are theatrical, you can see his face behind the stylised mask they all wore, but what was news to me was that the actors wore raised platform shoes called cothurni. He looks like a member of a Glam Rock band (admittedly, wearing a toga).

Relics of the Great Fire of Rome

One of the defining moments of Nero’s reign was the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which burned for nine days and laid waste to large parts of the city. Excavations in recent years have revealed the true extent of the ferocity and impact of the fire. As you might expect the exhibition includes a bit of peppy son-et-lumiere, with flickering red flames licking around a map of the city blocks affected with sound affects of a Big Fire. The prime exhibit is a big iron window grating, discovered near the Circus Maximus, which was twisted and warped by the fire’s intense heat.

As mentioned, Nero was for centuries blamed for the fire and not doing enough to quench it. Nowadays, opinion is that Nero a) was not even in Rome when it occurred b) took prompt steps to both rehouse those made homeless, but to rebuild Rome bigger and better.

The Domus Aurea

The exhibition devotes an entire section to the centrepiece of Nero’s building a new palace called Domus Aurea or Golden House. It shows us photographs of the surviving rooms, corridors and halls and displays fragments of the luxury frescoes and wall decorations which adorned it.

Fresco fragments from the Domus Aurea, Italy (AD 64 to 68) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The elaborate designs and the use of precious materials such as exotic marbles, cinnabar and gold speak to the height of imperial luxury. Another display case shows a selection of silver cutlery, plates and mirrors, all top luxury items. It’s all housed in a distinct setting which is, unlike the rest of the exhibition, bright and well lit, to subliminally give us the impression that we have entered the villa itself. Clever.

Conclusion

The curators argue that the conclusion to be drawn from this wide survey of the archaeological evidence is that Nero was not the merciless, matricidal maniac of legend; that the physical evidence gathered here suggests, on the contrary, that Nero was widely admired among ordinary Romans due to his popular policies, his funding of and participation in extravagant games, his grand building projects, even his popular haircut, and that he remained popular, notably in the East of the Empire, long after his death.

In this version, the Domus Aurea was vast but large parts of it were open to the public. The great fire certainly happened but far from fiddling, Nero organised the rescue and rehousing of much of the population.

So the infamous legend which went down to posterity is the product of authors representing the view of the later Roman ruling classes and Senatorial factions who triumphed in the civil war which immediately followed his death.

Do I buy this new revisionist version? Difficult to say, maybe impossible for anyone who isn’t a real scholar of the times, and even the historians themselves (as so often) seem to disagree.

What I think is clear is that by the end of this huge and sumptuous exhibition, the narrow question ‘Nero: Man or Monster’ has been superseded by the awesomely wide-ranging and thought-provoking variety of artefacts on show, which inform you about all aspects of a society which was so completely, almost incomprehensibly, unlike our own. This is a really great exhibition.

Marble portrait of Nero, Italy (AD 64–68). Photo by Renate Kühling. Courtesy of State Collections of Antiquities and Glyptothek, Munich

This portrait dates to the last years of Nero’s reign. It was probably created to mark his 10-year anniversary as emperor. Nero’s forehead is framed by a row of curls and his hair is worn long, intended to convey a sense of vigour, refinement and god-like beauty. Contemporary poetry likened Nero to Apollo and Mars. His elaborate hairstyle set a new trend that remained fashionable for decades.

BC and AD

I thought that some time ago we all adopted the terms BCE and CE denoting ‘Before the Common Era’ and the ‘Common Era’ to replaced BC and AD, which were seen as too Christian, Eurocentric and uninclusive. So I was surprised to see BC and AD used universally throughout the exhibition.

BP and the BM

Odd that the British Museum which hurries, like all other museums and galleries, to keep up to date with woke imperatives about diversity and inclusion, which in its wall labels and official pronouncements is hyper-sensitive to issues of race and gender, is tone deaf to the greatest single issue of our times, climate change, and so continues to allow exhibitions to be sponsored by the multinational, fossil fuel-promoting corporation BP.

Ironic that an exhibition about the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned is supported by a corporation which is helping the planet to burn.

Related links

More British Museum exhibition reviews

Roman reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on June 12, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Ancient history, Exhibition, Slavery
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/12/nero-the-man-behind-the-myth-the-british-museum/

Troy: Myth and Reality @ the British Museum

What Troy means to me

For me the Iliad will always be the greatest story ever told. The Christian story is hugely more rich and complicated and influential and subtle, but the tale of Troy is, for me, more true.

It is, for me, a description and investigation and celebration and commiseration of masculinity. It starts with two men fighting over a woman (Agamemnon and Achilles fall out over who should possess the slave girl Briseis, captured in a small Greek raid on an outlying Trojan temple), it climaxes in two tragic, avoidable deaths (Patroclus of the Greeks, Hector of the Trojans), and leads up to the most moving scene in all literature, when King Priam of Troy sneaks by night into the Greek camp and confronts Achilles in his tent, falling to his knees and weepingly imploring the mightiest warrior of the age to give him back the battered body of his dead son (Hector). And instead of slaughtering him on the spot and bringing the war to a swift end, Achilles also falls to his knees and both men weep unappeasable anguish at the loss of their beloved ones.

From a thousand years BC right up to the present day, how many parents and lovers have wept unassuageable tears of grief and anguish over the pointless deaths of their loved ones in pointless wars. That agony has been repeated over and over again hundreds of millions of times.

For me Achilles’ great scream of anguish when he learns that his lover Patroclus is dead and that it was he, Achilles, who sent him to his death, his huge superhuman cry of pain which rings out over the battlefield and brings the fighting to a terrified halt, is the cry of all men against a cruel, uncaring universe, the agony of realising we are our own worst enemies, the tormented howl of someone who has understood human nature to its bitterest depths.

The Iliad is truer than the Christian story because there is no redemption and no comfort anywhere. The human condition is endless conflict and the relentless death of the people we love most. Men are compelled to fight, they don’t know why, and then bewail the devastation they have caused and the lives they have pointlessly destroyed. Nothing changes and no-one can be saved. Syria. Yemen. Libya. Myanmar. Congo.

Achilles kills the Amazon queen Penthesilea, Athenian amphora (530 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The exhibition

1. Long gallery of ancient artifacts

This epic blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum brings together over 300 objects to give a comprehensive overview of the myths and legends and long legacy surrounding the siege of Troy. It is, like most recent BM exhibitions, beautifully staged, with the wall of the long gallery painted black and evocatively decorated with archaic Greek patterns, while half way along the gallery the wooden ribs of enormous horse arch up over the visitor, obviously referencing the famous wooden horse.

Although it’s divided into lots of sections, Troy is essentially in two halves. The first, long narrow gallery displays umpteen red-figure vases, statues, sarcophagi, carved reliefs and so on from the era of the Athenian empire (5th century BC) onwards including and later Roman efforts, depicting numerous episodes from the long series of myths and legends connected with the epic story.

Roman sarcophagus lid including detail of the Trojan horse (late 2nd century AD) Photograph © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The curators increase the size of their subject matter by including the legends surrounding Odysseus and his ten-year-long journey back from the war to be reunited with his brave long-suffering wife Penelope. Homer’s Odyssey is very different in tone and subject matter from the Iliad. It is more full of fairy stories and legends about the Sirens or Calypso or the one-eyed Cyclops or Scylla and Charybdis.

And they also devote some sections to Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, which follows the adventures of Aeneas, a minor character in the Iliad, who is promoted by Virgil to become a semi-Odysseus in his own right, fleeing burning Troy to wander the Mediterranean, have a long love affair with Dido Queen of Carthage, before being compelled to fulfil his duty which is to sail to Italy and found the precursor of Rome.

Including Odysseus, Virgil and all their related stories in the exhibition gives the curators more subject matter but, in my purist eyes, weakens the impact of the Iliad material, the material solely about the war, which focuses on battle, conflict, male anger and destruction only.

There are informative sections about the Greek gods, the geography of the Homeric world, how the Romans co-opted the Greek legends for their own purposes, if you didn’t already know.

And then the first gallery comes to an end and you turn the corner and come back on yourself along a narrow gallery running parallel to the first one.

2. Archaeology and Schliemann

At this turning point is a section devoted to the excavations carried out on the coast of modern-day Turkey by a series of Victorian archaeologists, which climaxed in the German excavator Heinrich Schliemann who loudly claimed to have uncovered the true site of Troy in 1873.

Display of objects found by Schliemann at Troy along with books describing his excavations. Photo by the author

3. Troy in European art

And when you progress beyond Schliemann and turn the corner you discover that the second long corridor is – rather surprisingly – an art gallery.

If the first half of the exhibition shows how the legends of Troy were depicted in ancient Greek art and sculpture, this second gallery shows how the same legends were depicted by European artists from the Middle Ages onwards.

I enjoyed this second half more, partly because it was so unexpected. So, for example, there’s a section devoted to European literature on Troy which contains some marvellous medieval illuminated books. We see a copy of John Lydgate’s Troy Book (1420), learn that the first book printed in England by William Caxton was a translation of a French account of Troy. There are first editions of Chapman’s complete translation of Homer (1616), Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid (1697) and Pope’s translation of The Iliad (1715 to 1720).

A page of a 1485 manuscript of Virgil’s works showing the wooden horse being taken into Troy, and Aeneas carrying his father on his back

But most of the space in the gallery is devoted to paintings, drawings and a handful of sculptures, of which the standout example is this masterpiece of sensuality by Filippo Albacini, a portrait of the wounded Achilles (apparently, the gilded arrow in the heel of this sculpture has been restored especially for this exhibition).

The Wounded Achilles (1825) by Filippo Albacini. Photograph © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth

But the main impression is of a long, narrow gallery space hung with lots of paintings and drawings and prints.

As well as surprise, another reason for enjoying this part of the exhibition more was that it was far less crowded: I arrived fifteen minutes after opening time but already the first, more archaeological half of the exhibition was packed with crowds of people shuffling very slowly past each red-figure vase and fragment of stone relief – and because the exhibit labels were at knee height almost all of them were completely unreadable, concealed by people packed as tight as commuters on a tube train.

By contrast, for the hour or more that I was there, the second half, the long gallery of paintings, stayed almost empty, with only a dozen or so people drifting through it – which meant that you could enjoy the paintings (or prints or drawings) and read the wall labels, at your leisure. Works on display include:

Clytemnestra, 1882, oil on canvas by John Collier (1850-1934) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Clytemnestra, 1882, oil on canvas by John Collier (1850 to 1934) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

It’s amazing to learn that this is the first full-scale exhibition about Troy ever held in the UK. Among other treasures it features, at the very end, the gold jewelry Schliemann found buried deep in the ruins of the city he excavated on the Turkish coast and which he declared to the world must be the jewelry of Helen herself, a preposterous claim he sought to back up by getting his wife to pose for photos wearing them.

Sophia Schliemann wearing the ‘Jewels of Helen’ excavated by her husband, Heinrich Schliemann, in Hisarlik (photograph taken around 1874)

Modern art interpretations

Right at the start of the show visitors are surprised by two big artifacts which are not at all historic – a vast painting, Vengeance of Achilles (1962) by American artist Cy Twombly, and an assemblage of forty or so objects by British sculptor Anthony Caro which he titled The Trojan War.

Dominating the section about medieval manuscripts of Troy, rather jarringly some might feel, is a video screen showing an adaptation of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women acted by Syrian refugee women, whose wailing voices can be heard echoing  from loudspeakers all through the second half of the exhibition.

And the show ends with a spectacular wall-sized creation of fluorescent tubes radiating out from a central point and named The Shield of Achilles by British artist Spencer Finch.

The Shield of Achilles by Spencer Finch (2019)

My point being that this is a very wide-ranging idea of what an exhibition about Troy should look and feel like, spilling out from the narrow fields of archaeology and ancient artifacts to encompass scores of works of European art, and even – as indicated here – up-to-the-minute contemporary art.

Feminist interpretations

The people who wrote the press release are excited to announce the discovery that there are women (yes, women!) in this 3,000-year-old story:

The cause of the Trojan War was a woman, Helen who was taken to Troy by Paris, This exhibition presents a chance to re-examine Helen, not just as a beautiful victim or a feared seductress, but as her own woman.

Artist Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) explores history and its characters as a way to examine issues in the present. In 2007 Antin created the photographic series Helen’s Odyssey. Here, Helen of Troy is allowed to speak for herself in a series of imagined scenes from her life. This exhibition will feature Judgment of Paris (after Rubens) – Dark Helen from this series, where Helen is pictured looking unhappy to be used as a bribe, prompting visitors to re-examine the representations of Helen that have gone before.

‘Judgement of Paris (after Rubens) – Dark/Light Helen’ by Eleanor Antin (2007)

And the wall label introducing the section on ‘Women of the Trojan War’ shares their discovery that:

Helen and other women play central roles in the story of Troy.

Helen is a pawn in a divine quarrel. Iphigeneia is sacrificed for a fair wind to Troy. Cassandra and the other surviving Trojan women are enslaved when Troy falls. Queen Clytemnestra acts fearlessly in taking revenge on Agamemnon, but pays for it with her life.

Unusual in having a happier ending, Helen has fascinated artists through the ages. Many have attempted to capture her irresistible beauty, while questioning whether she is an innocent victim or knowing seductress.

It’s no surprise that the curators disapprove of the whole idea of the Judgement of Paris, the first ever beauty parade. As the introduction to the feminist section laconically points out, even goddesses couldn’t escape the oppression of the male gaze:

Even the powerful goddesses are subject to male judgement.

Yes but the goddesses also murder and doom men for their sport – lots of men, condemned to violent deaths by angry goddesses. But that aspect of the story doesn’t fit the women-are-always-victims paradigm and so is lightly glossed over in preference for yet another condemnation of the male gaze.

In a way this section isn’t feminist enough. What does it tell us that the founding text of all Western literature is a celebration of male rage and toxic masculinity? Just adding a feminist section and a few works by modern women artists and claim to be giving Helen or whoever their voice isn’t really adequate. A deep critique would examine the way that every single aspect of the story glamorises the worst possible excesses of male behaviour, and lay down a kind of imaginative framework and rhetorical techniques for justifying and preserving patriarchal values. The feminist section should have ripped it to pieces.

BP

Meanwhile, there is the usual hypocrisy about the exhibition sponsor at work here – for while the feminist curators write their captions about the male gaze, they are (necessarily) silent about the glaring fact that the exhibition is sponsored by BP.

BP is one of the world’s biggest producers and refiners of fossil fuels, the burning of which is propelling the earth and all its life forms towards a global warming disaster. This fact which has not gone unnoticed by some protestors.

To me it is symptomatic of the refined hypocrisy of the art and exhibition world that a handful of paintings depicting an ancient Greek myth can get feminist curators and artists bothered enough to criticise and parody them – but destroying the planet and exterminating all the life forms on it… they’re happy to go along with that. After all, the profits from poisoning the planet pay their wages and sponsor their exhibitions.

Obviously the curators can’t speak out against the multibillion dollar corporation which is paying them to castigate the male gaze, but that’s the nature of selling out. If you sign up to a morally compromised institution then you, too, will be morally compromised. No amount of tut-tutting over long-dead painters can get you off the hook.

Related links

More British Museum exhibition reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on February 12, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, Exhibition, Feminism, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 12, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/02/12/troy-myth-and-reality-british-museum/