Warning: this review contains racist imagery of Black people bound and humiliated.
It contains them not to promote or publicise or validate them in any way, but because they’re the crux of the problem Tate Britain is having to address and which this blog post discusses.
The problem
In 1926 the director of the National Gallery of British Art (now Tate Britain) commissioned the young artist Rex Whistler to produce a mural ‘as decoration for the new refreshment room’. Whistler was just 21 at the time and spent 18 months painting a mural on all four rooms of the new restaurant before it opened in 1927. The mural is based on an allegorical story written by Whistler’s close friend Edith Olivier (1872 to 1948) and titled ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’.
The mural depicts an expedition in search of rare food and drink led by the fictional Duke of Epicurania. A hunting party sets off from the steps of the gallery, travels across rivers and seas, through pastoral landscapes and wild forests. The group shoots at leopards and deer and meets unicorns and mermaids. They pass islands topped with Italian cities, encounter shipwrecks and ruins, and visit the Great Wall of China. They return home laden with spoils, greeted by a cheering crowd.
So far, so quirky, BUT – as part of this journey, in among the various scenes, are two episodes in particular which have come to seem unacceptably racist. In one of them the group kidnaps a Black child and leads him tied by the hands while his naked mother watches from a tree overhead.
A bound Black boy being dragged along by a lady: detail of ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ by Rex Whistler at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
And in another another Black boy (is it the same one?) is being dragged by a leash round his neck behind a pony and trap like a wild animal.
Boy bound by the neck being dragged behind a chariot: detail of ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ by Rex Whistler at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
To be honest, although I wandered round the (now closed) restaurant after a visit to see a different exhibition, I had no idea that it was based on a narrative at all, no sense of this Duke of Epicuriania or the quest aspect of the mural, until I read about it online.
Just facing the painted walls, uninformed, I thought they depicted vague scenes in an idealised countryside dotted with buildings in which people in fancy costume are taking walks or rides. The work covers the four walls of this low, windowless, dingy room, making it even darker. Overall, I thought it was a pretty bad work of art.
And I didn’t notice either of the notorious scenes involving Black people. I had to ask the visitor attendant to point them out to me and even she had a little difficulty finding them.
But over the years, there’s been a mounting chorus of concern about the racist images and the directors of Tate have been presented with the tricky problem of what to do about them. As Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson explains online, they’ve been caught on the horns of a dilemma because the mural represents two key aspects of Tate’s mission in direct conflict with each other, namely: 1) its organisational goal of being inclusive and diverse i.e. trying to be more welcoming to and respectful of non-white visitors and communities; but at the same time 2) acting as custodian of an immovable, site-specific artwork.
Tate’s tried various strategies. In 2013 the work was restored and a booklet accompanying the mural was updated to acknowledge the problematic content. The restaurant was still open back then i.e. you could enjoy a jolly lunch in the shadow of these troubling images. In 2018 the gallery installed an additional explanatory text at the entrance of the restaurant. But in the light of Black Lives Matter and the ever-growing awareness of Black rights, even these steps came to seem inadequate.
Mother of the captured Black boy taking refuge up a tree: detail of ‘The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats’ by Rex Whistler at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Enter Keith Piper
The restaurant closed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic which allowed the Tate Board to have another big think about whether to even re-open it. Tate consulted with artists, art historians, cultural advisors, civic representatives and young creatives to ‘discuss next steps’ (as we say in the Civil Service).
They came up with a new solution, namely commissioning a contemporary Black artist to make a work which would act in dialogue with the mural, reframing it for contemporary audiences. The artist chosen was Keith Piper, a leading figure in the British Black Arts Movement.
Regarding historic racist works like this, Piper echoes the stance taken by Shoni Yinkobare CBE regarding the imperial statues which litter central London, which is that they should not be taken down, taken away or hidden; they should remain in place but be given a modern historical context i.e. explanatory text or even countervailing works. As Piper puts it:
‘We can only fully understand history and all its complexity if we are able to go back and encounter the objects themselves.’
What does this mean in practice? It means that the room is now closed forever, as a restaurant, and has become the site of a new artwork. This is a film made by Piper, Viva Voce, projected onto two large screens in the middle of the now empty room, installed earlier this year (2024).
Installation view of ‘Viva Voce’ in the Whistler room at Tate Britain (photo by the author)
Viva Voce
Viva voce is Latin for ‘by word of mouth’ and is the phrase used to describe the oral examination which some students have to undergo in order to get their degree. In the film Piper stages an imagined conversation between artist Rex Whistler and a fictional woman academic, Professor Shepherd. ‘Professor Shepherd’ starts by asking the actor playing Whistler about the origins and thinking behind his mural before zeroing in on the racist imagery and giving him a very hard time about it. The encounter turns into a fierce interrogation and ‘take-down’ (as the kids say) of the increasingly harassed and stressed-out artist.
The film also shows scenes of research in the Tate archives as the Professor digs out Olivier’s original story, examines the early drafts for the mural and so on. It includes footage of Black soldiers during the First World War and Black American cabaret singer Florence Mills who performed in London in 1926. Shepherd asks Whistler if he had attended the ‘Races in Residence’ displays at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition or joined the 1926 General Strike.
In short, the film musters a range of background information and context to bolster the stern, humourless Professor in giving actor Rex Whistler a very hard time, reducing him to increasingly feeble defences of all his art crimes. The expression on her face and the accusatory finger in this still from the film capture the merciless tone of the thing.
Still from ‘Viva Voce’ by Keith Piper (2024) © Keith Piper
Bullying and harassment
Of course we are now all officially on the side of the angels and deplore any hint of racist stereotyping, words, actions or images. We’ve all attended our employers’ Unconscious Bias workshops and discovered that we’re all racist, whether we think so or not, and that we all work for organisations which are institutionally racist, whether its bosses or employees think so or not. (I certainly have.) The detecting and calling out and punishing of racism is already a big business (employment law and lawyers, HR departments, consultants and advisers, training courses, big organisations making abject apologies, raising money for reparations) and will only get bigger as the years go by.
1) But despite the ever-growing weight of institutional pressure brought to bear on this issue, I wasn’t as ‘upset’ and ‘distressed’ by the two offending scenes in the mural as the wall labels, the warning outside the room, and Tate’s online article evidently wanted me to be. For a start, as I mentioned, I couldn’t find the offensive images on my own and had to ask the visitor attendant to point them out to me, and she took a while to find them, despite being asked to do so every day. In other words, I had to make quite an effort to go out of my way to be offended. Finding three images about 4 or 5 inches high amid the four long walls of this busy mural painting was like doing a ‘Where’s Wally’ challenge.
When I did have them pointed out to me, the images felt as small and distant, as crudely and stereotypically painted as all the other figures in the mural – they were a lot less impactful than much bigger representations of Black or native figures I’ve seen in thousands of other paintings from the colonial period, in numerous galleries and exhibitions i.e. offensive and demeaning but not fatal to the adult mind.
Personally, I find things like a Russian missile landing on Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital ‘distressing’ or Israel’s endless slaughter of helpless civilians in Gaza ‘upsetting’. Those are the kind of real-world crimes which upset me. I found a couple of stereotypical and demeaning figures lost in the sea of a third-rate mural buried in the bowels of a London gallery quite a lot less upsetting. Here they are. They’re quite unpleasant. What shall we do about them?
2) My main reaction was the purely intellectual one of reflecting on how their existence presents Tate – with its commitment to being as inclusive and diverse as possible, and its superwoke lecturing of visitors to all its exhibitions – with a huge and embarrassing problem. The Piper film is, I suppose, for the time being, a pretty good solution. It ticks most of the boxes: issue addressed head-on, tick. Contemporary art work commissioned, tick. From a leading Black artist, tick. But it doesn’t feel permanent, it feels like a stop-gap solution. What will be here in five years, ten years time? What do you think Tate should do about the mural?
3) In fact, contrary to Tate’s intentions, I’m afraid I found the massive dominating Keith Piper film much more offensive than the (hard-to-find) images. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the whole film because I found the unrelentingly accusatory tone of the interrogating Professor so deeply disturbing. Her aim from the get-go is to indict Whistler as a war criminal and reduce him to miserable grovelling apology. It reminded me of all the descriptions I’ve read of scenes in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or its East European satellites or in Latin American dictatorships, where artists or writers were arrested and interrogated by humourless commissars for failing to toe the Party line or being involved in some imaginary conspiracy. Everything Whistler had done, everything he’d said, all his friends and acquaintances, every book he’d read, every expo he’d visited, no stone is left unturned to create the web of guilt and atrocity which the accusing Professor meshes him in.
Imagine if someone came knocking on your door and arrested you for something you said or did or wrote or drew when you were a naive 21-year-old, and angrily interrogated you for hours about the context and build-up to your offence, cross-questioning you about your friends and ‘associates’ (as the professor does here), implying that all of them are guilty of grotesque crimes against correct thinking, before consigning you to 10 years in the Gulag.
As to the mural I don’t give a monkeys – it was a hundred years ago and, guess what, lots of social attitudes have changed out of all recognition since then. Tate can preserve it and struggle on with evermore contorted justifications – or paint it over with pictures of unicorns and turn the room into a crèche for all I care. The sooner these offensive images are obliterated the better.
What upset me wasn’t that people from 100 years ago included in their artworks images we now find unacceptable; a moment’s reflection suggests it would be weird if they hadn’t, otherwise what is social progress all about?
What upset me was the implacable, unremitting anger behind the Professor figure in the film, because that is contemporary, that is now, that is 2024. It very powerfully suggests a deep well of Black anger at a potentially limitless number of offences against the most up-to-date definitions of diversity and inclusion, committed at any time in the past, by anyone. It suggests a terrifying future in which absolutely everything in British history and culture is going to be subjected to the same intense level of scrutiny, the same unrelenting interrogation, and the same unforgiving anger. In which case, who shall escape a whipping?
Related links
- Keith Piper and Rex Whistler at Tate Britain
- Curator Chloe Hodge speaks to artist Keith Piper about his new work, Viva Voce
- Keith Piper website
- Rex Whistler Wikipedia article
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