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Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans @ the British Museum

I didn’t read the press and publicity stuff closely enough so I vaguely thought this would be a general exhibition about historical Hawaiian art and culture – but I was wrong. It’s far more structured, nuanced and focused than that.

Featherwork and ornaments that evoke a gathering of ali‘i (chiefs) on display in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

A meeting of kings

The centrepiece of the show is that 200 years ago, in 1824, King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamāmalu became the first Hawaiian monarchs to visit the UK. It took them and ten of their courtiers 5 months (November 1823 to May 1824) to sail here on a Royal Navy ship and when they arrived they were treated with the courtesy and respect according any visiting monarch.

They met with the recently crowned British monarch, King George IV (crowned July 1821), and exchanged gifts: they gave our king beautiful hand-made cloaks, and received in return a silver teapot and a watch, among other luxury objects. They were dressed in the latest fashions, had their portraits painted by the court painter John Hayter, went to the theatre, were even the subject of the usual scathing regency satirical cartoons.

Portraits, cartoons and sumptuous gifts are all included here, along with a map of their route (they stopped at Buenos Aires along the way, and handed out gifts there, too).

Portrait of King Kamehameha II (left) and Queen Kamāmalu (right). Hand-coloured lithographs by John Hayter © The Trustees of the British Museum

Tragically – disastrously – after a few weeks, the handsome young king and queen both caught measles and died from it. Their courtiers returned to Hawaiʻi with the gifts but without a king, who was promptly replaced by his younger brother Kauikeaouli, who became King Kamehameha III and went on to reign for 30 years (June 1825 to December 1854).

It is this extraordinary event which provides the centrepiece of this exhibition. The show can be divided into the following parts:

1. Background facts

It opens with a brief recap of the history of Hawaii, complete with maps. Here’s a summary:

Hawaiʻi consists of 137 volcanic islands spanning 1,500 miles that make up almost the entire Hawaiian archipelago (the exception is Midway Atoll).

The eight main islands, from northwest to southeast, are Niʻihau, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, Kahoʻolawe, Maui, and Hawaiʻi, after which the state is named. The last is often called the Big Island or Hawaiʻi Island to avoid confusion with the state or archipelago.

The archipelago was settled between 1000 and 1200 by Polynesian seafarers navigating by the stars and following the flight of migratory birds. Over the centuries, the islands became the seats of numerous independent chiefdoms.

In 1778, British explorer James Cook was the first known non-Polynesian to arrive at the archipelago (he was to go on to be killed here, after a tragic cultural misunderstanding). The early British influence is reflected in the Hawaiian state flag, which contains a Union Jack.

King Kamehameha I, also known as Kamehameha the Great, unified the Hawaiian Islands by force and diplomacy, establishing the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1795 and completing unification by 1810, creating a single, powerful monarchy from separate chiefdoms.

It was his son, Kamehameha II, who succeed Kamehameha in 1819, who undertook the journey to Britain. the backstory is that in April 1822, English missionary William Ellis arrived with a schooner, the Prince Regent, to add to the King’s growing collection of ships (!). It was a gift from George IV the King of Great Britain and Kamehameha II wrote to thank him, requesting closer diplomatic ties. It was from this gesture and this correspondence that the idea was born for the royal court to journey to the other side of the planet to meet the British king.

Display of Akua hulu manu (feathered gods) in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Language and pronunciation

The Hawaiian language is referred to as Ölelo Hawali and terms and phrases from it are used throughout the exhibition.

Apparently, the correct pronunciation of Hawaiʻi is to insert a glottal stop before the final ‘e’ sound. What is a glottal stop? Imagine saying in a broad Cockney accent, the following phrase: ‘Wotta lotta little bottles’ so that it sounds like ‘Wo’a lo’a ‘li’el bo’els’, where you don’t voice the t sound. Same with Hawa [glottal stop] ee.

2. Hawaiʻi culture, beliefs and crafts

Having painted in this background, the exhibition then devotes the first big space to giving an overview of the gods, traditional beliefs, arts and crafts of the Hawaiian people at around the time of the royal visit. (Here we discover, amid much else, that the British Museum holds one of the largest collections of Hawaiian objects in the world outside of Hawaiʻi.)

Wooden ki‘i (images) that embody kua (gods) in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing ocean’ at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Highlights include:

  • a nine-foot kiʻi (image) of the god Kū, the god of warfare and governance, dressed with a contemporary loincloth and standing atop a pole
  • a magnificent ʻahu ʻula (feathered cloak) sent in 1810 by the first king of unified Hawaiʻi, Kamehameha I, to King George III, the largest known example of its kind

There are striking statues of wooden gods (see above), wooden bowls, plumed hats, gorgeous cloaks made from bird feathers, and a wall of coloured barkcloths.

kapa (barkcloth) pieces on display in Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans at the British Museum © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Barkcloth: Kapa (barkcloth) is made from the inner bark (bast) of the paper mulberry and other plant fibres. As a medium, kapa is a connector between the land, the people and the gods. Different forms of kapa had many uses, from everyday life to ritual practice, including as chiefly garments, spacial dividers, blankets and wrappings for bones.

Helmets: Mahiole (helmets) were worn in battle and in ceremonial contexts, often together with ʻahu ʻula (feathered cloaks and capes). The head has particular significance in Hawaiʻi as one of three centres in the body where the aumākua (deified ancestors) hover. Each helmet is unique and identifies the bearer as a chief. The structure is woven from the aerial roots of a climbing plant called ʻieʻie and is often adorned with feathers.

Gods: Origin stories tell that the islands were birthed by the gods. High chiefs were manifestations of the gods on earth. Through rituals, chefs could protect the people and ensure the land’s abundance. In turn, the people revered their chiefs and cultivated the land, gathering materials and nurturing resources. Craftspeople created precious items that honoured their chief.

Kū and Lono: Kū is a Hawaiian god whose realm includes warfare and governance and that in the Hawaiian ritual calendar, the season of Kū begins in January-February and ends in October-November. At that point Ku is replaced by Lono, a deity associated with harvest, peace and recreation. (So we are currently in the season of Kū.)

Here’s one of the exhibition’s carved wooden artefacts, which experts thinks depicts a chief, as indicated by the loincloth round his waist and the feathered headdress.

ʻUmeke kiʻi (bowl with figure) © The Trustees of the British Museum

In addition, there are feathered cloaks worn by chiefs, powerful shark-toothed weapons, spears and clubs, and much more.

3. The meeting of kings

As described above, this is the centrepiece of the show and includes displays of ceremonial cloaks, lithographs of the king and queen, portraits and pictures of them at the theatre, the silver teapot, the silver watch and a couple of satirical cartoons depicting a lecherous King George groping a buxom native queen, in the comically gross style of Regency cartoons.

Installation view of ‘Hawaiʻi a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum showing the gallery devoted to the royal visit © The Trustees of the British Museum (photo by MKH)

Red

The exhibition displays a large Hawaa’ian feathered cloak near to George IV’s coronation surcoat and this triggers fascinating thoughts about a) the persistence of monarchy and king worship across the most diverse societies, b) the need these have for grand costumes and regalia, and c) the importance of the colour red. In fact red, as you can see from the images, is the really dominant colour of the exhibition: you can see for yourself that the cloaks in particular include yellow and black patterning, but it’s almost always against a core background colour of red.

King George IV’s coronation surcoat (left) and a cloak belonging to King Kamehameha II (right) displayed so you can make a direct comparison of size, shape, colour and impact, in Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans @ the British Museum (photos by the author)

4. Alliance with Britain

Having established the close connection between Great Britain and Hawaiʻi which existed from its discovery by the West, the exhibition then explains that for 70 or so years after the 1824 visit, the two countries maintained close relations. When a zealous Royal Navy officer, Captain Lord George Paulet of HMS Carysfort, in 1843 illegally occupied Hawaiʻi and tried to formally annex the kingdom for Britain, King Kamehameha III wrote to the British government who recalled Paulet and assured the King of ongoing Hawaiian independence.

Negotiations were already underway which led in November of the same year (1843) to Great Britain and France signing the Anglo-Franco Proclamation, a joint declaration that formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. This agreement committed both nations to never take possession of Hawaiian territory, either directly or as a protectorate.

There’s a copy of the Proclamation in the exhibition, on loan from The National Archives and the curators tell us that the precise date, 28 November 1843, is still celebrated in Hawai’i today as Lā Kū’oko’a (Independence Day).

5. Annexation by the US

However, as we progress through the exhibition, the next key moment in the nation’s history came when America annexed Hawaiʻi. Like all historical events, this was more complex and fraught than it is now presented, with a background of political problems within Hawaiʻi exacerbated by the commercial interests of European and American businesses which owned extensive sugar and pineapple plantations. In 1893 a group of Western businessmen persuaded the local American agent to allow US marines to take part in the (peaceful) overthrow of the native government and to establish the Republic of Hawaii; and then lobbied Congress and the Senate to formally annex the islands, which the United States did 5 years later, in 1898. (Just worth reminding ourselves that the nearest part of the Hawaiian archipelago is 2,000 miles from the American mainland.)

The Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, protested against the coup but, when weapons were found in the palace which might have been used by loyalist forces, was placed under house arrest. She appealed to the British government, invoking the Anglo-Franco Proclamation but, to our shame, and as so often, we did nothing to defend the monarchy we had so enthusiastically hosted in 1824. Instead, in 1895 Queen Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate, thus ending the Hawaiian monarchy.

Even at the time, there was a great deal of debate in America, among politicians and the press, about the rights and wrongs of the coup and President Grover Cleveland opposed annexation. However, he was replaced by President William McKinley who pushed for annexation, which formally took place in July 1898. There then followed the inevitable sequence of assimilation whereby, first of all, in February 1900, the Hawaiian Islands became a US ‘incorporated territory’; and then in August 1959, the territory was officially declared America’s 50th state.

(For comparison, the contemporaneous Spanish-American war of 1898 ended with the Treaty of Paris (1898) whereby Spain ceded 1) Puerto Rico, 2) Guam and 3) the Philippines to the United States. The Philippines were a US colony from 1898 until given independence in 1946 whereas Guam and Puerto Rico remain to this day parts of the US as self-governing, ‘unincorporated territories’, meaning people born there are US citizens, they use US currency and passports, but residents can’t vote in presidential elections and have limited representation in Congress.)

And then, just as inevitably, came the modern attack of imperial guilt and in 1993 the US Congress passed the Apology Resolution, apologising for America’s role in the illegal annexation of the Hawaiian nation, which was signed by President Bill Clinton.

Throughout the annexation process the majority of Hawaiians wished to remain independent and this is signalled here in the exhibition by a picture of ʻAuʻa Haunani-Kay Trask (1949 to 2021). Trask was ‘a prominent Native Hawaiian activist, scholar, author and poet who was a leading figure in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She was known for her fierce advocacy against US imperialism, the illegal occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and the commodification of Hawaiian culture by the tourism industry.’

Trask is quoted, on the centenary of the annexation in 1993, making the simple statement: ‘We are not American’ and this is the text you see running in lines across this striking portrait, part of a series of 108 photographic portraits of Kānaka Oiwi (Native Hawaiians) made by Hawaiian artist Kapulani Landgraf.

Photo of ʻAuʻa Haunani-Kay Trask in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum © Kapulani Landgraf 2025

All of which makes for a thought-provoking read in light of President Trump’s ongoing threats to annex Greenland against the wishes of its (57,000) population…

6. Contemporary Hawaii

After this striking photo of Trask, we enter the final part of the exhibition, which focuses on contemporary Hawaiʻi.

Contemporary arts

I haven’t yet found space to mention that throughout the show, right from the start, the older objects have been interspersed with contemporary works made in the traditional style but made by contemporary Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) artists. These include:

Statue: A statue of historical figure Kekuaokalani, Liholiho’s cousin, who rebelled against the King’s decision to overturn the ‘ai kapu religious system. He was defeated and killed by Liholiho’s forces at the battle of Kuamo’o. The statue was made by contemporary carver Rocky Ka’iouliokahihikolo’Ehu Jensen after the traditional manner of articulated figures depicted in early drawings of Ahu’ena, defender of Hawaiian gods and faith.

Drum: Right at the start of the exhibition there’s a pahu or drum. Drums were thought to have been brought to Hawaiʻi by one of the first ancestors, named Laamaikahiki. The ancestors travelled from a place they called Kahiki, possibly in the Society or Marquesas Islands. But the point is that the drum in question isn’t an antique but was hand-carved by contemporary Native Hawaiian artist Dennis Kanale Keawe.

Akeanaliʻi by Dennis Kanaʻe Keawe (b. 1944). Made of kamani wood, shark skin, ʻaha (coconut cordage), carbon black soot coating, 2020

Contemporary videos

In the same spirit, sprinkled throughout the show are four or five short videos which show contemporary living practitioners of traditional arts and crafts explaining their practice. Take the drum, above – there’s a 90-second clip of La’akna Perry performing a mele or chant using the drum. Elsewhere:

  • Barkcloth: Hina Kneubuhl, a contemporary maker of kapa (Hawaiian barkcloth), explains how barkcloth is created and decorated, and how contemporary artists draw inspiration from ancestral works.
  • Hula: La’akea Perry, a Hawaiian kumu hula (dance master teacher), explains the importance of hula as a living practice and how it is taught today. He is filmed dancing with a newly made version of a ‘ulī’ulī (dance rattle), next to an historic example.

There’s also a general soundscape which floats across the displays, featuring the sound of waves breaking over lava beds and the sound of wind blowing through a coconut grove. All very soothing given that outside the Museum, the rain was pouring down in the gritty streets of central London.

Contemporary problems

No doubt there are all kinds of issues and ideas and things which could be written about contemporary Hawaii. The exhibition has selected a handful of areas where the state faces severe challenges and highlights how locals are trying to address them. these are mostly deep environmental issues which made for depressing reading.

1. Birds: Many of the mea kupuna or ancestral treasures on display in the exhibition – the many cloaks and other objects like coronets – were made from feathers taken from native birds. They were gathered sustainably – meaning the feathers were plucked in moderation from live birds which were then released – from species like the ‘ō’o, which was prized for its bright yellow plumage.

Today, many of Hawai’i’s unique bird species are extinct, including the ‘o’o. Those that survive are critically endangered. Avian diseases introduced from overseas have had a devastating effect, while natural habitats have been impacted by intensifying human activity. The art of featherwork continues but makers mostly use feathers from other bird species, often dyed.

2. The sea: There are almost one hundred Hawaiian fish hooks in the British Museum’s collection, reflecting the longstanding importance of fishing in Hawai’i, and also indicating the close interaction between early British crews and local fishing communities. There’s a display showing hooks with different shapes and materials designed to snare particular species of fish; the largest hook on show here was used to catch sharks.

Again, the contemporary situation is dire. Commercial overfishing in Hawaiian waters has led to a significant decline in fish populations and contributed to food insecurity for local people.

Fishing hooks in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

3. Agriculture: Kalo (taro) is such an important crop in Hawai’i that it is described as an ancestor in origin stories. Its tuber is pounded to make a dish called poi. But over the century of American occupation much of Hawai’i’s agricultural land was turned into monoculture plantations of sugar cane and pineapples. Some communities are now reclaiming land, aiming to restore the environment by planting crops like kalo, but they’ve a mountain to climb.

7. Ownership

Quite often at these sorts of exhibitions the curators have to apologise for the fact that lots of the artefacts were looted or stolen from their original owners – so it’s nice to visit an exhibition where both sides were surprisingly polite and respectful. All the artefacts in the royal visit section are well attested as gifts from the royal delegation and many of the other arts and crafts objects are on loan from museums in Hawaii. The relatively small number of objects which were possibly stolen by naval officers or missionaries are all carefully marked and indicated.

Indeed the Museum goes out of its way to explain that the entire show was assembled in collaboration with Native Hawaiian stewards. Apparently this extended to an opening ceremony on the day it opened which started with a native Hawaiian ceremony to greet the sunrise, and then progressed to blessing this space which contains so many objects crafted by the ancestors.

And, as my summary indicates, wherever possible the curators have used terms and phrases from the ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) alongside the English captions. The entire thing radiates respect and sensitivity.

8. Hope

Is there any hope for the future? Well, obviously not, but in order to live we all have to pretend there is. And so the exhibition ends with the projection onto a wall of a video showing four young Hawaiian students reciting a poem of hope for the future written by Hawaiian poet Brandy Nälani McDougall. The pattern and rhythm echo a traditional chant we heard earlier in the exhibition, another example of the way the curators, and their Hawaiian advisers, have tried to tie ancient and modern together into a living fabric.

Wall-sized video of students from Kamehameha School reciting the poem by Brandy Nälani McDougall in ‘Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans’ at the British Museum (photo by the author)

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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/17/hawai%ca%bbi-a-kingdom-crossing-oceans-the-british-museum/

Cavalcade by Noel Coward (1930)

New Year’s Eve: our London family, sheltered through two generations of Victorian prosperity, awaits the headlong cavalcade of the Twentieth Century…’
(First caption of the 1933 movie version)

Introduction

Copied from the Wikipedia article (why reinvent the wheel?) with my own adaptations:

‘Cavalcade’ is a play by Noël Coward with songs by Coward and others. It covers three decades in the life of the Marryots, an upper-middle-class British family, and their servants, beginning in 1900 and ending in 1930, a year before the premiere.

Its 22 scenes each focus on a major historical event of the period, including the Relief of Mafeking (17 May 17 1900), the death of Queen Victoria (22 January 1901), the sinking of the RMS Titanic (12 April 1912), scenes from World War I and so on. Popular songs from each period are woven into the score.

The play was premiered in 1931 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, directed by Coward himself. It took advantage of the large stage of Drury Lane with its hydraulics and moving components to stage a spectacular pageant.

Presented by the impresario Charles B. Cochran, the spectacular production involved a huge cast and massive sets. The first night was met with a standing ovation and it proved a hugely popular play, running for almost a year.

Background and production

During the run of his successful comedy ‘Private Lives’ in London in 1930, Coward discussed with the impresario C. B. Cochran the idea of a big spectacular production to follow the intimate small scale of ‘Private Lives’.

Coward considered the idea of an epic set during the French Revolution, but when he saw a photograph of a troopship leaving for the Boer War in an old copy of the Illustrated London News the germ of the new play came to him.

He outlined his scenario to Cochran and asked him to secure the Coliseum, London’s largest theatre. Cochran was unable to do so but was able to book the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which was not much smaller, provided Coward could guarantee an approximate opening date.

Coward and his designer Gladys Calthrop inspected Drury Lane and found it adequate in terms of the size of its stage and its technical facilities, although two extra hydraulic lifts had to be installed for quick changes of scenery, and unlike the Coliseum it lacked the revolving stage Coward wanted. While Calthrop began designing hundreds of costumes and twenty-two sets, Coward worked on the script, which he completed in August 1931.

‘Cavalcade’ premiered on 13 October 1931, starring Mary Clare and Edward Sinclair as the Marryot parents and featuring John Mills, Binnie Barnes, Una O’Connor, Moya Nugent, Arthur Macrae, Irene Browne and Maidie Andrews in supporting roles. The performance was a big success and the play went on to become one of the year’s biggest West End hits, running for 405 performances. It closed in September 1932.

Photos

The printed text of the play contains 22 photos from the production. In the online version I read these are all of shockingly poor quality so I wasn’t tempted to include any here.

The working classes

The play is immediately different in feel from anything else by Coward I’ve read because it features working class characters, in fact it opens with working class people, instantly differentiating it from the posh people dressing for dinner ambience of all the other plays.

Somewhere I’ve read a quote from Coward saying he was born into the middle class and so felt close to, or detached from, all the others. How working class characters here strike me as every bit as stereotypical as his upper middle class characters.

Synopsis

Part 1

Scene 1: Sunday 31 December 1899. The drawing-room of a London House

It is nearly midnight on New Year’s Eve 1899. The whole vast production opens in the kitchen of the posh Marryot family where we find the married parlourmaid Ellen and the butler, Bridges, fretting about preparing supper for their lords and masters, but also about the fact that Bridges has been called up to go and fight in the Boer War.

Cut to ‘above stairs’ where the master class, Robert (35) and Jane (31) Marryot, are seeing in the New Year quietly together. Jane’s brother is besieged in Mafeking, and Robert himself will shortly be going off to serve.

Robert and Jane invite their Bridges and Ellen toast the new year. Bells, shouting, and sirens outside usher in the New Year, and Robert proposes a toast to 1900.

Hearing her two boys stirring upstairs, Jane runs up to see after them, and her husband calls to her to bring them down to join the adults. He has some droll lines:

ROBERT: How very impolite of the twentieth century to waken the children.

Scene 2: Saturday 27 January 1900. A dockside

A month later, a contingent of volunteers are leaving for the war. On the dockside Jane and Ellen have parallel parting scenes with their men, Robert and Bridges. the basic dichotomy between the master class and the rude mechanicals reminds me of Shakespeare, goes back at least 300 years…

As the men go aboard Jane comforts Ellen, who is crying and a band strikes up ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. The volunteers wave their farewells to the cheering crowd.

Scene 3: Friday 8 March 1900. The drawing-room of the Marryots’ house

The Marryot boys – Edward (aged 12) and Joe (8) – are playing soldiers with a young friend, Edith Harris. She objects to being made to play the Boers, and they begin to quarrel. The noise brings in their mothers. Joe throws a toy at Edith, and is sharply slapped by Jane, whose nerves are on edge with anxiety about her brother and her husband.

Her state of mind is not helped by a barrel-organ outside, playing ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ under the window. Ellen the maid brings tea and the women commiserate about their menfolk in danger. Margaret, friend of Jane’s and mother of young Edith, sends the organ-grinder away then suggests taking Jane out tonight, to dinner at the Cafe Royal then on to the theatre to take her mind off her worry.

But left alone, Jane is tormented by the sound of the wretched barrel organ and collapses into hysterical tears.

Scene 4: Friday 8 May 1900. A theatre

Jane and Margaret are in a stage-box watching chorus girls performing ‘The Girls of the C.I.V’. The performance of the then popular musical comedy ‘Mirabelle’ continues but the performance is interrupted when the theatre manager comes onstage to announce that Mafeking has been relieved, triggering joyous uproar breaks out, the audience clapping, cheering and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Scene 5: Monday 21 January 1901. The kitchen of the Marryots’ house

The cook, Annie the parlour maid, and Ellen’s mother Mrs Snapper are preparing a special tea to greet Bridges on his return from the war. He comes in with Ellen, looking well, and kisses his little baby, Fanny. He tells them that he has bought a public house off a chap he met in Africa and is staying out there. So he and Ellen can work for themselves in future.

The celebratory mood is dampened when Annie brings in a newspaper reporting that Queen Victoria is ‘sinking’.

Scene 6: Sunday 27 January 1901. Kensington Gardens

This scene is all in mime. Robert and Jane are walking in Kensington Gardens with their children when they meet Margaret and Edith Harris. Everyone is in black, solemn and silent, following the Queen’s death.

Made me think of the death of our Queen Elizabeth II, who had reigned as long as anyone could remember, and the deep sense of loss many many people felt.

Scene 7: Saturday 2 February 1901. The Marryots’ drawing-room

On the balcony, Jane, Margaret, their children and the servants are watching Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. Robert, who was awarded the Victoria Cross is walking in the procession. Jane tells her children to stand respectfully as the coffin passes, especially after one of the boys drops a piece of cake onto the hat of a woman in the crowd. As the lights fade, Joe comments, ‘She must have been a very little lady’.

Scene 8: Thursday 14 May 1903. The grand staircase of a London house

Jane and Robert are attending a grand ball given by the Duchess of Churt. The Major-domo announces, ‘Sir Robert and Lady Marryot’.

Part II

Scene I: Saturday 16 June 1906. The bar parlour of a London public house

Jane has brought her eldest son Edward, now 18, to see Ellen and her mother, Mrs Snapper, in the flat above the public house. They are just having tea, together with Flo who is over-dressed and embarrassingly pretentious and George, who is a greengrocer. Alf and Ellen’s daughter Fanny is now seven-years-old and has been dancing to entertain them.

Ellen and her mother make excuses for Alf’s absence, lying that he is upstairs in bed after hurting his leg in a bicycling accident.

Alf Bridges enters, clearly drunk. Jane, dismayed, makes a tactful departure. Bridges starts to bully Fanny. He sees that Fanny has a nice new doll, just given her by Jane. Furious, he snatches it from the child and throws it into the fire, shouting that he can buy his own child a doll if he wants, he doesn’t need no bloomin’ charity. Ellen goes for Alf who punches her and is grabbed and thrown out the room by George.

Scene 2: Saturday 16 June 1906. A London street (exterior of the public house)

Alf emerges from the pub into a wonderful street scene with scores of Cockneys dancing and drinking and partying to the sound of a penny-in-the-slot piano, with much singing and laughter, costermongers hawking their wares, and a Salvation Army band performing. Fanny is happily dancing with some adults. Alf sees her and makes a grab at her but the men push him away, over offstage. Moments later there’s a screaming. Flo and Ellen had emerged from the pub to look for Fanny and, hearing the shouting, Flo runs offstage to see the scene, the re-enters to tell Ellen her husband has been run over and killed.

Scene 3: Wednesday 10 March 1909. The private room of a London restaurant

The Marryots’ eldest son, Edward Marryot, is holding his twenty-first birthday party, with many smart young guests. Rose, an actress from the old Mirabelle production, proposes his health and sings the big waltz number from the show.

Scene 4: Monday 25 July 1910. The beach of a popular seaside resort

On the beach crowds of holidaymakers are listening to Uncle George’s Concert Party performing from a bandstand. Ellen and her family are there and Fanny wins a prize for a song and dance competition.

Promenading are the posh people – Jane and Margaret, and their children, Edward, Joe and Edith. Edward and Edith are now young adults and sweet for each other. They unexpectedly bump into the roles – Ellen, little Fanny, George the greengrocer and Flo.

Ellen tells them that she has kept on the pub since her husband’s death and that Fanny is now at a dancing-school and determined to go on the stage.

A couple of unknown women walk by talking about the Crippen murder and how he was spotted and caught trying to escape on a liner, July 1910.

There’s a roll of thunder and it starts to rain. The beach becomes a sea of umbrellas (must have been impressive to see) and everyone walks or runs offstage leaving ‘One fat old woman is left asleep in a deck chair.’

A tremendous roll of thunder wakes her abruptly and she struggles to get up, and falls back into the chair, which collapses.

We are in the era of the Keystone cops.

Scene 5: Sunday 14 April 1912. The deck of an Atlantic liner

Edward has married Edith Harris, and they are on their honeymoon. They speculate blithely how long the initial bliss of marriage will last.

EDWARD: How long do you give us?
EDITH: I don’t know—and Edward—(she turns to him) I don’t care. This is our moment—complete and heavenly. I’m not afraid of anything. This is our own, for ever.

As they walk off, she lifts her cloak from where it has been draped over the ship’s rail, revealing the name Titanic on a lifebelt. The lights fade into complete darkness and the orchestra plays ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ very quietly.

Scene 6: Tuesday 4 August 1914. The Marryots’ drawing-room

Joe asks his father if he will fight (probably) and then is frightfully keen to sign up himself. Father urges caution. A newspaper seller in the street outside shouts that war has been declared, and Robert, Joe and Margaret join a toast to victory, but Jane – who I’ve realised is the ‘moral core’ of the text – delivers an impassioned diatribe against the stupidity of war before running out.

JANE: Drink to die war, then, if you want to. I’m not going to. I can’d Rule Britannia! Send us victorious, happy and glorious! Drink, Joey, you’re only a baby, still, but you’re old enough for war. Drink like the Germans are drinking, to Victory and Defeat, and stupid, tragic sorrow. But leave me out of it, please!

Scene 7: 1914–1915–1916–1917–1918. Marching

Above the proscenium 1914 glows in lights. It changes to 1915-1916, 1917 and 1918. Meanwhile, soldiers march uphill endlessly. Out of darkness into darkness. Sometimes they sing gay songs, sometimes they whistle, sometimes they march silently, but the sound of their tramping feet is unceasing. Below, the vision of them brightly-dressed, energetic women appear in pools of light, singing stirring recruiting songs.

Scene 8: Tuesday 22 October 1918. A restaurant

Joe and Fanny – now a rising young singer and dancer – are dining in a West End restaurant. Jane is now nineteen and extremely attractive. Joe is in army officer’s uniform. He is on leave but is about to return to the Front. They discuss marriage but she imagines his family would object. She gives him a locket with her picture in.

Scene 9: Tuesday 22 October 1918. A railway station

Jane sees Joe off at the railway station. Like many of the women on the platform she is distressed. This is conveyed by a simple but effective piece of stage business: as stretchers bearing wounded men are carried past her, she lights a match to light her cigarette but is so distracted by the sight of the wounded that she lets the match burn out.

Scene 10: Monday 11 November 1918. The Marryots’ drawing-room

Ellen, now very swankily dressed, comes to visit Jane. She announces that Joe is emotionally involved with her daughter. The two mothers fall out: Ellen thinks Jane regards Fanny as beneath Joe socially.

As Ellen says a pointed goodbye they hear the guns going off outside to signal the Armistice. At that exact moment the maid brings in a telegram. Jane opens it and tells Ellen, ‘You needn’t worry about Fanny and Joe any more, Ellen. He won’t be able to come back at all, because he’s dead.’ And she faints.

Scene 11: Monday 11 November 1918. Trafalgar Square

Surrounded by the frantic revelry of Armistice Night, Jane is walking, dazed, through Trafalgar Square. With tears streaming down her face, she cheers wildly and waves a rattle, while the band plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

Part III

Scene 1: Tuesday 31 December 1929. The Marryot’s drawing room

Margaret and Jane, both now elderly, are sitting by the fire. Margaret leaves, after wishing a happy New Year to Jane and Robert, who has come in to drink a New Year toast with his wife. Jane drinks first to him and then to England: ‘The hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness, and peace again’.

Scene 2: Evening, 1930. A night club

Robert, Jane, Margaret, Ellen and the full company are in a night club. At the piano, Fanny sings Coward’s song ‘Twentieth Century Blues’.

Scene 3: Chaos

When the song is finished, people rise from table and dance without apparently any particular enjoyment; it is the dull dancing of habit. The lights fade away from everything but the dancers, who appear to be rising in the air. They disappear and down stage left six ‘incurables’ in blue hospital uniform are sitting making baskets. They disappear and Fanny is seen singing her song for a moment, then far away up stage a band is seen playing wildly. Then down stage Jane and Robert standing with glasses of champagne held aloft, then Ellen sitting in front of a Radio loud speaker; then Margaret dancing with a young man. The visions are repealed quicker and quicker, while across the darkness runs a Riley light sign spelling out news. Noise grows louder and louder. Steam rivets, loud speakers, jazz bands, aeroplane propellers etc until the general effect is complete chaos.

Then it all fades into darkness and silence and away at the back a Union Jack glows through the blackness. The lights come up on the massed company singing ‘God Save the King’.

Music

In addition to compositions by Coward, more than fifty popular songs, national anthems, hymns, ballads, and topical tunes relevant to the years portrayed were used in the film. Wikipedia lists just some of them. There have been numerous recordings, of all the songs, or just Coward’s songs, and a Cavalcade Suite developed from them. Here’s a record made of music from the show, with a spoken introduction by Coward himself.

The fantastical

The absurdist surreal fantasies, the mad spur-of-the-moment imaginings of Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’ has alerted me to the vein of fantasy, or flights of fancy, which pop up at unexpected moments in Coward’s plays.

Thus Edward and Edith’s moment on the Titanic is intensified by Edith’s strange flight of fantasy:

EDITH: Wouldn’t it be awful if a magician came to us and said: ‘Unless you count accurately every single fish in the Atlantic you die to-night?’

How strange but how strangely effective it is in accentuating that short scene, in giving it an extra dimension of tragedy: the idea that not just people were drowned but that the priceless gift of fantasy and imagination was drowned with them.

A few scenes later the family arrive back in the house which has been locked up for a while and has no food in. Jane asks where her husband is, and her son Joe says:

JOE: Groping about in the wine cellar like an angry old beetle. He says strong drink is essential in a crisis.
JANE: We must have something to eat, too. I wonder if there is anything.
JOE: There’s a strong bit of cold tongue in the larder. I just put my head in and it sang the Marseillaise.

!

Different histories

History in an absolute sense is the record of everything that’s ever happened i.e. is an incomprehensibly vast amount of material which is being continually added to.

History is also an academic subject with its own sub-divisions and specialities, all subject to the changes in academic and social fashion. When I was a student Marxist history was still a going concern with notables such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson at their peak in the post-1960s radical ’70s and ’80s. But even at the time friends who actually studied history told me they were old hat and the new fashion was for social history from the bottom up, along with a new interest in regional history. I saw all this for myself in the eclipse of Christopher Hill’s Marxist accounts of the English Revolution by the regionalist approach of John Morell and the constitutional analysis of Conrad Russell.

Since then the study of British history has been shaken by at least three newer schools of thought or interpretation. The most obvious one is feminist history, which simply wants to redress centuries of dominance by men and reclaim the history of women, showing that women had more agency and influence than previously admitted, plus simply telling the stories of women from the well-known queens to the humblest working girls.

Alongside this has gone an equal surge in interest in Black history. In a sense the core of this is a proliferation of histories of the slave trade accompanied by the contentious claim that most of Britain’s eminence and the origin of the industrial revolution ultimately stemmed from the profits from the slave trade (see Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day by Eric Hobsbawm for a classic statement). But around this central core are new works emphasising the role of Black people from across the Empire, from Africa and the Caribbean, in fighting in the two world wars, and providing manpower in less well-known places such as in the merchant navy.

Thirdly there is the rise and rise of postcolonial studies, an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry which includes history, literature, film etc to examines the cultural, political and economic effects of colonialism and imperialism with a special emphasis on the colonised, on the victims of imperialism.

Fourthly, over the same timescale, the rise and rise of Queer studies: an interdisciplinary academic field that examines gender and sexuality, challenging traditional notions and exploring the social construction of these identities.

By now you can see where I’m going with this. It is to state the obvious fact that the political, social and cultural world in which Coward wrote this work, and the historical narrative of unquestioned, unified, white, imperial British supremacy which it unashamedly promotes, has been smashed to pieces over the last 50 years or so. That the play, the script and the movie made from it are not just a little dated, but come from a different world, far closer to the values of Queen Victoria than to us (it was only 30 years  from Victoria’s reign but is 90 years distant from us).

I feel like I just about have a vestigial contact with that world and its values, through the books and TV and films I consumed as a boy just 40 years after the play was premiered. But to my kids, the entire thing comes from another planet.

The Woolf connection

I learn from Philip Hoare’s wonderful 1995 biography of Coward that in 1928 he met and became friends with Virginia Woolf who, for a period, was awed and impressed by him, while he did everything he could to butter up to this scion of England’s intellectual set, extravagantly praising her most recent production, Orlando.

The idea of following an upper-middle-class family across several generations and dotted with key historic incidents from the period is also the plot of Virginia Wool’s 1937 novel, The Years. I wonder what she made of Coward producing something so similar in subject matter and scale while she was struggling so hard to create her book.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Interesting to learn that the 1970s television series, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, was to some extent based on ‘Cavalcade’.

As Karl Marx famously remarked, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as ITV costume drama.

The 1933 movie

‘Cavalcade’ was quickly snapped up by Hollywood which released a movie version in 1933. Directed by Frank Lloyd, the film version is an epic two hours long and won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Coward was still only 34. The scale of his success is breathtaking.

Philip Hoare

‘Cavalcade unashamedly reaffirms stereotypes: the characters seem almost Dickensian as Coward mixes comedy and tragedy… The overwhelming impression of the production was of nostalgic national introspection and sentimentality, somewhat redeemed by Coward’s handling of his material, technical skill and sense of spectacle. The result was a triumph of style over content.’ (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Haore, page 234)

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by Simon on May 30, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 30, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/30/cavalcade-noel-coward/

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican

Big and beautiful

This is a great exhibition, a huge and dazzling collection of contemporary fabric art from around the world, works large and small, incorporating a wide variety of techniques, bringing together images and traditions and colour palettes, stories and ideas from around the world.

Blood in the Grass, 1966 by Hannah Ryggen © Hannah Ryggen / DACS 2023. Photo by Kode / Dag Fosse

It brings together just over 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners. These include well-known names such as Faith Ringgold, Tracey Emin, Cecilia Vicuña, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Yinka Shonibare, alongside many less well-known figures. And it covers a very wide range of media, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.

Textile as a medium

Textiles play an extraordinarily wide variety of roles in our everyday lives. They cover and protect us, engage our senses, trigger our memories, indicate our gender, display our beliefs. We are wrapped in cloth when we’re born and shrouded in it when we die and every day in between will be wearing some kind of fabric. I just towelled myself down after a shower, then slipped on some comfortable fleece trousers and a t-shirt, am sitting on a cotton-cushioned chair, later tonight will slip between a white cotton sheet and a patterned duvet cover. Fabrics are everywhere in our lives.

Exhibition aims

But Barbican exhibitions are never just about beautiful objects, they are always polemical and political, they’re always making a point. This one has two aims:

1) One is to challenge and question the way artistic work in fabrics has always played second fiddle to the fine arts i.e. painting and traditional sculpture, always been looked down on, often demeaningly referred to as ‘women’s work’, or slighted for having such close association with domestic and artisan production.

2) The second aim is very strongly political: every one of the artists has been chosen for the way they use textiles, fibre and thread with political goals – to challenge oppressive power structures, to commemorate the victims of state power and historical wrongs, to stand up for the weak and oppressed, to act as rallying cries or symbols of resistance to power.

The exhibition aims:

to shine a light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, harnessing the medium to ask charged questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?

to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival.

And:

From intimate hand-crafted pieces to monumental sculptural installations, the works [gathered here] offer narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion alongside stories of resilience, love and hope.

‘Hard-luck stories’

What this means in practise is that a lot of the works on display, no matter how beautiful or appealing at first glance, turn out to have harrowing and shocking inspirations or subject matter. For some reason I’ve been listening to the old Bob Dylan song, Black Diamond Bay. In the last verse the narrator cynically laments that:

Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear.

Well, that perfectly describes the exhibits here. All of them have darker sides, and you need quite a strong stomach to cope with some of the stories you read about.

For example, the very first room contains a big bold quilt by Tracey Emin. This recalls her famous quilted tent, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’, and I immediately liked it because of the punk associations of the Union Jack. It also made me think of my daughter, a classic ‘school refuser’ who might well have said, with the artist, ‘No you listen – I’m not late – you’re lucky!’ All of which made me smile.

NO CHANCE (What a Year) 1999 by Tracey Emin © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2022, courtesy White Cube Photo by Stephen White

But then I read the wall label and discovered that this hand-stitched appliqué blanket expresses Emin’s feelings as a 13-year-old girl in 1977, the year a man raped her. Ah. Oh. Not so funny or entertaining now, is it? Now you understand the way the work’s sweary, confrontational text, cut out in felt and hand-stitched onto fabric, really comes from a place of great hurt and anger and vulnerability. God. Upsetting.

In a similar vein, I turned a corner into one of the upper gallery’s 12 alcoves and was immediately struck and attracted by the rich deep scarlet colouring of this wonderful piece of fabric, made all the more vibrant by the way it’s set against the jet-black background.

Installation view of ‘Luingamla Kashan’ by Zamthingla Ruivah (1990 to the present). Photo by the author

Until I read the wall label:

In 1986 a young woman in Northern India named Luingamla, a friend of the artist, was murdered by army officers who attempted to rape her. The officers walked free due to a law, a remnant of British colonial rule, that meant that armed forces were immune from being tried in civil courts. Student groups and the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Association) rallied to bring a case before the courts. They won the case in 1990, four years after her murder. Ruivah wove this keshan — a woollen sarong worn by men and women in the Naga Hills of Manipur, northeast India — to commemorate Luingamla’s path to justice. Since then, the design has been passed down through Naga communities across the region, with more than 6,000 women having produced over 15,000 of them. They have become a symbol of solidarity with the Naga resistance movement and the fight against state violence towards women.

Probably ‘hard luck story’ isn’t the correct term, but see what I mean? Every single artifact here has an upsetting or problematic inspiration or purpose.

Take the image I opened this review with, ‘Blood in the Grass’ by Hannah Ryggen. This turns out, on investigation, to be a visual depiction of the US war in Vietnam. Once you read the wall label you learn that the face at the top right is a stylised portrait of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over the disastrous escalation of the war in the late 1960s. And that the green rectangles represent the lush fields of Vietnam while the grid of red lines represents the blood shed by the massacred Vietnamese. Ah.

Or take this massive, wall-sized piece by Tau Lewis, ‘‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ which, at first sight, looks like lots of sea creatures frolicking against a patchwork of blue fabrics representing the ocean, a fairly harmless work you might find hanging in a sixth-form art block.

‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ by Tau Lewis (2019) © Tau Lewis, courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

But in fact:

This patchwork quilt in part pays homage to the enslaved women and children who lost their lives during the Middle Passage (the enforced transport of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). Reimagining them as sea creatures, Lewis transforms the trauma that lies in underwater territories into spaces of regeneration and emancipation.

There’s a lot about the historical crime of the slave trade, which feeds through into more up-to-date crimes against Black people and invocations of the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth’ by Teresa Margolles (2015) Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich/ Paris

Apparently, artist Teresa Margolles often uses material residues from murder sites in her art. This patchwork tapestry was laid on the ground at the site in New York where Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, was placed in an illegal chokehold and killed by New York police.

It’s one of a pair of works by Margolles which are laid flat on lightboxes like the bodies of the murdered placed on autopsy tables. The works were made collaboratively with embroiderers who were close to the victims. Members of the Harlem Needle Arts cultural arts institute made the work commemorating Garner’s death, a patchwork which also honours other African American victims of police brutality.

So, to recap: this is very far indeed from being a collection of pretty textiles. Every work tells a story and many of the stories are harrowing and upsetting.

Favourites

Here are some of the works I liked most, based more on their actual appearance and the impact they made on me than the righteousness of the issues they address. I add the curators’ explanations in italics.

‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018)

Installation view of ‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018) Photo by the author

In TIKAR/MEJA, images of tables are woven into the mats through the weft and warp of colourful strips of pandan leaves, using the same techniques Yee’s ancestors used for centuries. The table serves as a symbol for the imposition of a patriarchal and colonial worldview onto a population, while the mat signifies a more democratic and mutual power, imbued with ancestral knowledge and traditions. This display shows twelve works from a series of sixty that can be displayed in different configurations.

‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019)

Installation view of ‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019) Photo by the author

‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’ This passage from the Bible inspired the title of Zapata’s first sprawling ‘shag’ sculpture. Its structure references the architecture of the Nazca ceremonial site Cahuachi, where a huge woven cloth was excavated in 1952. She transforms the ruin into a landscape of vibrant latch-hooked threads, refusing any risk that this ancestral site might be lost to time. The undulating form subverts the notion of the rug as floor-based: Indigenous communities in Peru only began using textiles on the floor after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

Incidentally, the Zapata work raised a basic question about the exhibition which is that I really, really wanted to reach out, touch, stroke and run my hands over lots and lots of the works here. The curators make it worse by repeatedly emphasising how warm and intimate and comforting so many different types of fabric are – only to place around every single one of them, loud alarms which are triggered if you step or even put your hand beyond the black bars on the floor. Frustrating.

As usual the show is spread over the Barbican’s two floors. The 12 or so upstairs rooms have some great pieces, but the most impressive space is the big room downstairs, which contains the Zapata piece, a typical Abakan by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose major retrospective at Tate Modern I reviewed not so long ago.

Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012)

It also contains maybe the single most striking work in the show, a forest of slender, brightly coloured fabrics suspended from the ceiling and billowing gently as people walked past them, created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña.

Installation view of ‘Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012) photo by the author

The idea of hanging fabrics is familiar to anyone who caught Vicuña’s recent installation at Tate Modern. According to the curators:

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom. This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues found in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings.

Igshaan Adams

Mind you, the upstairs has a very impressive room, probably the best single space, filled with works by Igshaan Adams. It’s an installation consisting of several works. From the ceiling hang ‘prayer clouds’ gassy feeling conglomerate structures made from gold and silver link chain, copper , gold and silver wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint. Quite a mix!

Installation view of the Igshaan Adams room. Photo by the author

Through the ‘foggy’ effect of these metal imbroglios you see a more conventional rectangular work hanging on the wall. This is ‘Heideveld’ (2021) made of wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine. It was worth going right up close to the surface of this to see the extraordinary range of material which have been used and the awesome amount of work it must have taken.

Close-up view of ‘Heideveld’ by Igshaan Adams (2021) Photo by the author

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so-called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually.’

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993)

Although the works the curators have chosen all too often commemorate murder, oppression, racism, sexism, misogyny and so on, there are occasional moments of happiness, like the sun breaking through the clouds on a gloomy winter’s day. One such piece is ‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks.

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993) © Sheila Hicks, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023, courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

In ‘Family Treasures’, Hicks draws upon the intimacy of textile: we all wear it, we invest it with feelings and it is literally the texture of our everyday lives. While in Amsterdam in 1993, she asked close friends and family members to surrender their most beloved items of clothing, which she wrapped in colourful yarn and thread. Each tightly-wound bundle is a reminder of what we hold dear.

Hicks is a leading member of the fibre arts movement in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 70s, in which mostly women artists experimented with fibre and thread as a legitimate medium for art. Hicks’ work is often sculptural, playful and harnesses a variety of scales — from the small and intimate to the monumental — challenging the idea that textiles are flat, decorative and wall-based. Her work has been motivated by the acknowledgement that fibre permeates peoples’ lives. She has commented: ‘you can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.’

Sweet idea, huh? And very valid point that fabric art needn’t be flat and wall-based, as many, many of the works here amply demonstrate.

Hammock by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003)

‘Hammock’ (part of ‘Four Hammocks’) by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003) Courtesy of Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington DC. Photo by Chi Lam

‘Hammock’ was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.

Conclusion

I’ve covered 11 of the 50 exhibitors. That leaves 39 more for you to discover in this big, colourful, wonderful but – be warned – sometimes upsetting and challenging show. If it sets out to prove that work in fabric can be every bit as interesting as more traditional ‘fine art’, then it triumphantly succeeds. And if it wishes to show that this kind of work also lends itself to collaborative, community-based responses to brutality, abuse of power and exploitation, then it also succeeds.

Lastly, I haven’t devoted enough time to considering the actual techniques of quilting, sewing, knitting, collaging and assembling which are on display throughout the show. That’s because I’m not really qualified to do so, but the friend I went with hardly read any of the labels (thus sparing herself quite a lot of distress) and instead was riveted by the variety and inventiveness of technical skills on display.

I haven’t really dwelt enough on the artistry, skill and inventiveness which has gone into so many of these pieces. It’s worth visiting for anyone interested in fabric, quilting, sewing, decorating and texture-based art for that reason alone. Quite apart from the loud blare of the political stories and issues, here is a collection of quietly fastidious and intricate artistry.

Detail from ‘Dylegued (Entierro)’ by Teresa Margolles (2013) Photo by the author

Participating artists

  • Pacita Abad (The Philippines/USA)
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland)
  • Igshaan Adams (South Africa)
  • Ghada Amer (Egypt/France)
  • Arpilleristas (Chile)
  • Mercedes Azpilicueta (Argentina)
  • Yto Barrada (Morocco)
  • Kevin Beasley (USA)
  • Sanford Biggers (USA)
  • Louise Bourgeois (France / USA)
  • Diedrick Brackens (USA)
  • Jagoda Buić (Croatia)
  • Margarita Cabrera (Mexico / USA)
  • Feliciano Centurión (Paraguay)
  • Judy Chicago (USA)
  • Myrlande Constant (Haiti)
  • Cian Dayrit (The Philippines)
  • Tracey Emin (UK)
  • Jeffrey Gibson (USA)
  • Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (The Netherlands / Panama and The Netherlands / Yugoslavia)
  • Harmony Hammond (USA)
  • Sheila Hicks (USA)
  • Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa)
  • Yee I-Lann (Malaysia)
  • Kimsooja (South Korea)
  • Acaye Kerunen (Uganda)
  • José Leonilson (Brazil)
  • Tau Lewis (Canada)
  • Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana)
  • Teresa Margolles (Mexico)
  • Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe)
  • Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Poland)
  • Mrinalini Mukherjee (India)
  • Violeta Parra (Chile)
  • Solange Pessoa (Brazil)
  • Loretta Pettway (Gee’s Bend) (USA)
  • Antonio Pichillá (Guatemala)
  • Faith Ringgold (USA)
  • LJ Roberts (USA)
  • Zamthingla Ruivah (India)
  • Hannah Ryggen (Norway)
  • Tschabalala Self (USA)
  • Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (UK)
  • Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon)
  • Angela Su (Hong Kong)
  • Lenore Tawney (USA)
  • T. Vinoja (Sri Lanka)
  • Cecilia Vicuña (Chile)
  • Billie Zangewa (Malawi / South Africa)
  • Sarah Zapata (Peru / USA)

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by Simon on February 18, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on February 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/unravel-the-power-and-politics-of-textiles-in-art-the-barbican/

Cornelia Parker @ Tate Britain

Cornelia Parker (CBE, RA) is a very well-known and successful figure in British art. Born in 1956, she’s become famous for her ‘immersive’ i.e. BIG works. Above all she is a conceptual artist. What is conceptual art? According to the Tate website:

Conceptual art is art for which the idea (or concept) behind the work is more important than the finished art object. It emerged as an art movement in the 1960s and the term usually refers to art made from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

In some exhibitions you react to the painting or sculpture immediately, as an object in space which fills your visual cortex with sensations and impressions. You don’t necessarily have to read the wall labels. With conceptual art it is almost always vital to read the wall label in order to understand what you’re looking at. Sure, you could still respond naively and sensuously to the work’s appearance but you would be missing out on 99% of its meaning and intention.

The wonderful wall labels

This major retrospective of Parker’s career brings together almost 100 works, spanning the last 35 years. So that’s quite a lot of reading you have to do in order to understand almost every one of these pieces.

But a major feature of the exhibition is that the wall labels are written by Parker herself. Most wall labels at exhibitions are written by curators who, in our day and age, are obsessed with the same handful of issues around gender and ethnicity and lose no opportunity to bash the visitor over the head with reminders of Britain’s shameful, imperial, racist, slave-trading past etc etc.

So it is a major appeal of this exhibition that, instead of every single piece explained solely in terms of race or gender – as it would be if Tate curators had written them – Parker’s own wall labels are fantastically interesting, insightful, thought-provoking insights into her way of thinking and seeing the world. Instead of the world of art being reduced to a handful of worn-out ideas, Parker’s wall labels are as entertainingly varied as her subject matter, full of stories, anecdotes, bright ideas, explanations of technique, aims, collaborations.

They give you a really privileged insight into her worldview and into her decades’-long ability to be interested, curious, take everyday objects and have funny and creative ideas about how to transform them. After spending an hour and a half working through her thought processes for the different pieces, some of her creative spirit begins to rub off on you, you begin to see the everyday world the way she does, full of opportunities for disruptive and fun interventions. In this respect, this exhibition is one of the most genuinely inspiring I’ve ever been to.

Types of work

The exhibition includes immersive installations, sculptures, photographs, embroidery and drawings, as well as four large-scale, room-sized installations, and two rooms showing her art films. At the simplest, physical level, the pieces can be divided into two categories: Small and Large. Examples of the small will serve as an introduction to the large.

Introductory

In the downstairs atrium of Tate Britain stands a single sculpture, preparing you for the exhibition ahead.

The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Tate Photography

It is, of course, a life-size cast of Rodin’s sculpture, The Kiss, wrapped up in a mile of string. A vague symbolic gesture towards ‘the ties that bind’ people in relationships, maybe. In the nearby wall label Parker describes this as a ‘punk gesture’, which I found very significant. It’s the only time she mentions punk but she was just 20 when it hit, maybe at art school by then, so its attitude of really offensive, in-your-face irreverence must have taken her art school by storm. The point is, various later wall labels repeatedly say that she is interested in destruction and violence – but not violence against persons, against things. Her art does violence to inanimate objects in all kinds of inventive, creative and often very funny ways.

But there is, as so often, a further twist to the tail. Wrapping The Kiss in string is a relatively tame thing to do compared with Dada, Surrealist, Duchamp provocations from 100 years ago. It becomes more interesting when you learn that some opponents of conceptual art within the art world, fellow young irreverent artists, vandalised the original version of The Distance by cutting up the string into short sections, thus ‘liberating’ the sculpture.

And best of all, that Parker was undaunted and promptly gathered up all the cut-up pieces of string and tied them back together around a mysterious object at the centre, ‘a secret weapon’, which is unnamed and unknown.

‘The Distance (with concealed weapon)’ by Cornelia Parker (2003) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Small

I’ll jump straight in and give examples.

‘The Negative of Words’ (1996)

Parker realised that when an engraver engraves words into silver, for example into a cup like the Wimbledon champion’s cups, tiny fragments or curls of silver are generated. This piece is a pile of the shavings thus created. Parker contacted a silversmith, who agreed to her proposal, and it took several months to accumulate enough shavings for her to create the little mound, with sprinkled outliers, which we see on display here. As she points out, each sliver represents a letter, is the trace of a letter, is the inverse of writing, of language. They are absences made solid. This idea really resonated with me as I admired this carefully created little mound and its sprinkled outliers.

‘The Negative of Words’ by Cornelia Parker (1996) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

‘Luck Runs out’ (1995)

In the case next to it is an old dictionary. Under careful supervision, Parker arranged for a shotgun loaded with dice to be fired into the back of the book. The die penetrated to different depths into the text and jammed most of the pages together. As it happens the post-shooting dictionary automatically fell open at a page about ‘luck’. Hence the title, The luck of the draw. The roll of the dice.

‘Luck Runs Out’ and ‘The Negative of Words’ by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Apparently it’s part of a series titled ‘Avoided Objects’, so-called ‘object poems’ which ‘explore the fractured, unmade and unclassified’. The series explores ‘the denied and repressed’, which sounds a bit hackneyed and stale until she goes on to specify what that means in practice – the backs, underbellies or tarnished surfaces of things, which is much more interesting. Hence shooting this dictionary ‘in the back’.

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995)

While in Hartford Connecticut, Parker asked to visit the factory where the famous Colt 45 handgun is made. She was surprised to discover the process began with blank featureless gun-shaped casts, before any working parts were added. She asked if she could have one and the Americans, obliging as ever, gave her two and gave them a nice smooth industrial polish. Adding the word ’embryo’ to firearm juxtaposes the birth of the gun with the general idea of the birth of a human being, alongside a tool which might potentially bring it to an end.

‘Embryo money’ (1996)

Fascinated by money, Parker asked permission to visit the Royal Mint in Pontyclun, Wales. She asked for some samples of coins before they were ‘struck’ i.e. had the monarch’s face, writing, value, corrugated edges and everything else added – just the blank dummy coins. Embryo money, before it has accrued any of the power which so dominates all our lives.

‘Embryo Firearms’ (1995) and ‘Embryo money’ (1996) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

See what I mean by ‘conceptual’. You could relate to these just as intriguing objects, but the stories behind them – the anecdotes of Parker’s expeditions to interesting and unusual places to see industrial processes in action – add immeasurably to the enjoyment.

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996)

Parker developed a relationship with His Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She visited and got to know them at their Cardiff headquarters over a period of several months. One of the many, many types of contraband objects they confiscate are drugs. Parker persuaded them to let her have a seizure of cocaine after it had been incinerated. A million pounds worth of cocaine turned to ash, which is on display here, as a sad little pile.

In her wall label, Parker adds the coda, which you’d never have got from a curator, that she really loves the way Customs and Exercise destroy things in such a theatrical way, steamrollering fake Rolex watches or alcohol. ‘Like me, they are often symbolically killing things off.’ This kind of casual, candid opinion is a lovely insight into her way of thinking.

Inhaled cliffs’ (1996)

A personal favourite was ‘Inhaled cliffs’. She asked Customs about methods people use to smuggle stuff into the country, especially drugs, and discovered that some drugs can be used to ‘starch’ sheets, so a set of innocuous looking sheets turn out to be drenched in heroin, cocaine or other illicit substances which can be extracted once they’re safely in the country. This notion inspired ‘Inhaled cliffs’ in which Parker starched sheets with chalk from the white cliffs of Dover, ‘smuggling’ those great symbols of England into bed with her. She is tickled by the notion of ‘sleeping between cliffs’.

‘Exhaled cocaine’ (1996) and Inhaled cliffs’ (1996) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

I’m focusing a bit much on these objects in cases. There were conventional things attached to the wall, prints, flat objects treated in various ways. Photographs, for example. On her way to her studio past Pentonville Prison she noticed workmen plastering cracks in the perimeter wall, creating vivid white abstract shapes. They then started to whitewash the wall as a whole so, before these irregular, crack-shaped gestures disappeared, she quickly took photos with her phone and developed a set of 12 prints which are hung here, titled ‘Prison Wall Abstract’.

Or the ‘Pornographic drawings’ (1996). As part of her ongoing conversations with HM Customs she asked for examples of contraband and they gave her (along with the bag of cocaine ashes) chopped up lengths of pornographic film. Parker dissolved the fragments in solvent to create her own ink. She used this ink to create Rorschach blots i.e. poured them on one side of a piece of folded paper, pressed the other side down on the inked side and reopened it to have a symmetrical image. For some reason, all the ones she made (or chose to display) came out ‘to be particularly explicit’.

It dawns on me that these works are beyond ‘conceptual’ in the sense that they might better be described as anecdotal. Often there isn’t a grand concept, project or goal behind them – there is happenstance and accident. Seeing an opportunity to do something interesting and seizing it.

The other obvious thing is that she’s about transforming objects from one state to another. She starts with ‘found objects’ – gun moulds, unstamped coins, porn movies, cocaine and so on – and, in the examples I’ve given, doesn’t even transform them herself, but recognises their artistic potential.

Medium

Using this technique of remodelling the existing and everyday, is a middle-sized work titled ‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ from 2013. Parker describes playing hopscotch on pavements with her daughter. This led her to pay attention to pavements and to notice the antiquity of the old stone paving in Bunhill Fields near Old Street. She got permission to pour liquid rubber into the cracks in a path through Bunhill Fields. When the rubber dried she used the mould to make a metal cast, memorialising the captured cracks in bronze. She then suspended the mould on pins so that the cracks in the pavement hover a few inches above the floor, making it seem more spectral and ghostly. (It’s an accidental quirk that my photo of it features so many people’s feet.)

‘Black Path (Bunhill Fields)’ (2013) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Large

The interest in destruction I’ve mentioned earlier really comes to the fore in the three most famous room-sized installations in the exhibition. These are by way of being her greatest hits. They are:

  • Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 89)
  • Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)
  • Perpetual canon (2004)

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)

I’ll quote her wall label in its entirety:

We watch explosions daily, in action films, documentaries and on the news in never-ending reports of conflict. I wanted to create a real explosion, not a representation. I chose the garden shed because it’s the place where you store things you can’t quite throw away. The shed was blown up at the Army School of Ammunition. We used Semtex, a plastic explosive popular with terrorists. I pressed the plunger that blew the shed skywards. The soldiers helped me comb the field afterwards, picking up the blackened, mangled objects. In the gallery, as I suspended the objects one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated. The light inside created huge shadows on the wall. The shed looked as if it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again. The first part of the title is a scientific term for all the matter in the universe that can’t be seen or measured. The second part describes a diagram in which a machine’s parts are laid out and labelled to show how it works.

I’ve seen photos of this many times. Seeing it in the flesh I realised several things:

  1. it is a mobile – a very complex mobile, but in principle the same kind of thing my son makes to hang his origami figures from his ceiling
  2. it has a cubic, rectangular shape i.e. it is the opposite of chaotically exploding outwards; it is very contained
  3. this is achieved by hanging multiple objects from the same string, not just one
  4. as people walk slowly respectfully round it the eddies of air they stir
  5. and placing a single light bulb at the centre of it means not only that is casts shadows on the wall, but as the string move gently, so a) your perspective through the multiple layers of debris shifts and changes b) the shadows they cast on the wall subtly change

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Perpetual canon (2004)

Again, I’ll give Parker’s words verbatim:

I was invited to make a work for a circular space with a beautiful domed ceiling. I first thought of filling it with sound. This evolved into the idea of a mute marching band, frozen breathlessly in limbo. Perpetual Canon is a musical term that means repeating a phrase over and over again. The old instruments had experienced thousands of breaths circulating through them in their lifetime. They had their last breath squeezed out of them when they were squashed flat. Suspended pointing upwards around a central light bulb, their shadows march around the walls. This shadow performance replaces the cacophonous sound of their flattened hosts. Viewers and their shadows stand in for the absent players.

Perpetual canon (2004) by Cornelia Parker © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

The ghosts of music past. I was really taken by the idea that the shadows of us, the visitors, stand in for the long-dead players of these instruments.

Thirty Pieces of Silver (1988 to 1989)

Tate own this piece. In Tate’s words:

‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ comprises over a thousand flattened silver objects, including plates, spoons, candlesticks, trophies, cigarette cases, teapots and trombones. All the objects were ceremoniously crushed by a steamroller at Cornelia Parker’s request. She then arranged the transformed silver artefacts into thirty disc-shaped groups, which are suspended about a foot from the floor by hundreds of fine wires. Each ‘disc’ is approximately ninety centimetres in diameter and they are always hung in orderly rows, although their overall configuration is adapted each time to the space in which the work is displayed. The title refers to the biblical story of how the apostle Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in return for thirty pieces of silver.

And in Parker’s own words:

Drawn to broken things, I decided it was time to give in to my destructive urges on an epic scale. I collected as much silver plate as I could from car-boot sales, markets and auctions. Friends even donated their wedding presents. All these objects, with their various histories, shared the same fate: they were all robbed of their third dimension on the same day, on the same dusty road, by a steamroller. I took the fragments and assembled them into thirty separate pools. Every piece was suspended to hover a few inches above the ground, resurrecting the objects and replacing their lost volume. Inspired by my childhood love of the cartoon ‘deaths’ of Roadrunner or Tom and Jerry, I thought I was abandoning the traditional seriousness of sculptural technique. But perhaps there was another unconscious reason for my need to squash things. My home in east London was due to be demolished to make way for the M11 link road. The sense of anxiety lingers even now.

‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ by Cornelia Parker (1988 to1989) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

Newer works

‘War Room’ (2015)

The biggest thing in the show is a big long room entirely lined with red paper with holes in, titled ‘War Room’, from 2015. As usual, you need to read the wall label to understand what this is about.

‘War Room’ by Cornelia Parker (2015) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

In Parker’s own words:

I was invited to make a piece of work about the First World War. I had always wanted to go to the poppy factory in Richmond, London. Artificial poppies have been made there since 1922. They are sold to raise for money for ex-military personnel and their families. When I visited the factory, I saw this machine that had rolls of red paper with perforations where the poppies had been punched out. The fact that the poppies are absent is poignant, because obviously a lot of people didn’t come back from the First World War, and other wars since. In this room there’s something like 300,000 holes, and there’s many more lives lost than that. I decided to make War Room like a tent, suspending the material like fabric. It’s based on the magnificent tent which Henry VIII had made for a peace summit with the French king in 1520, known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. About a year later they were at war again.

The story, the anecdote, is, as usual, interesting but the resulting work less so.. You walk in, you walk round, you walk out. Meh. A slightly shimmery effect is created by having two layers of hole-y red paper hanging everywhere but…this is a minimal effect.

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ (2015)

One work dominates the penultimate room. It is an enormous, thirteen-metre long, hand-sewn embroidery of the Wikipedia page about Magna Carta.

‘Magna Carta (An Embroidery)’ by Cornelia Parker (2015) © Cornelia Parker (Photo by the author)

It is a collaborative work which involved over 200 volunteers including public figures, human rights lawyers, politicians and prisoners. On the wall is a list of the worthies who signed up to be involved, an entertaining list of the usual suspects: media-friendly left-of-centre politicians (Tom Watson, 55), actors, psychotherapists (Susie Orbach, 75), academics (Germaine Greer, 83), other high profile artists (Antony Gormley, 72), writers (Jeanette Winterson, 63, Philip Pullman, 75) and so on.

What struck me was how old all these people are. Our generation is declining, now, Cornelia. We’ve trashed the planet, wrecked the economy and degraded the political system for our children: best to withdraw tactfully and not keep on shouting and marching and trying to dominate everything. We’ve had our time. Over to a younger generation and hope they can do better.

The videos

There are two rooms featuring 7 or 8 art videos running consecutively. The best thing in the first room is a new six-minute video titled ‘FLAG 2022’ and made specially for this exhibition. Very entertainingly this shows the creation of a Union Jack by seamstresses in a factory only run backwards – so we see the British flag being systematically unsown and unstitched. It’s accompanied by a straight orchestral rendition of the hymn Jerusalem. Shame. It would have been funnier if Jerusalem had been played backwards, too – but maybe that would be a bit too 1960s, too much like the old avant-garde.

The second film room is about America. Oh dear. That far away country of which we hear so little, which is so rarely in the news, whose cultural products we so rarely get to see. This room contains:

  • One film which Parker shot at the annual Halloween Parade in New York, that city we so rarely hear about. Personally, I’d have though New York has enough artists of its own to do this kind of thing.
  • Another film showing supporters of Donald Trump milling about in New York outside Trump Tower sometime during his election campaign. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Donald Trump? He was quite big in America, apparently.

Frankly, these films are a let-down. It’s disappointing to see Parker genuflecting to God’s Own Country – as if New York or America need the slightest bit more coverage or publicity than the saturation exposure they already enjoy in the British media, TV, radio, films, academia, all across the internet and the toxic marshes of social media. There are other countries in the world, you know.

I’d like to have shared FLAG or any of the others in t his review, but I can’t find any of them on the internet.

Politics

From here onwards – in the second half of the exhibition – politics emerges as an increasingly dominant theme.

As well as the flag movie, the British film room includes a film made in the empty chamber of the House of Commons in 2018 using a camera attached to a drone, titled ‘Left Right and Centre’. Not only did they make this film, but they made a film about the making of the film, in which I caught Parker telling us how damn difficult it was to make because of health and safety, fire risk assessment etc. When artists start to think they are heroes…

I thought the result was very underwhelming. The drone hovered over the table you see in front of the Speaker of the House’s chair, set between the two front benches, which usually has the Mace on it – except in this film it had been covered with copies of England’s daily papers, which fluttered in the downdraft of the drone’s little rotors.

As with Donald Trump, I am sick to death of Parliament, the succession of incompetent politicians we have had leading our nation for the past 12 years, and the corrupt newspapers which lie and distort in order to keep the ruling party in power. Watching a 10-minute film on the wretched subject of contemporary British politics went a long way to destroying the happy, creative, open impression inspired by the first half of the exhibition.

In 2017 Parker was the first woman to be appointed official artist for the General Election. In this role, she observed the election campaign leading up to the 8 June vote, meeting with politicians, campaigners and voters and producing artworks in response. She made several films during this period including the aforementioned drone movie, and one titled ‘Election Abstract 2018’, a documentation of Parker’s observations during the campaign, posted on her Instagram account.

None of this, to my mind, is as funny or inventive as flattening a load of silverware with a steamroller, or displaying a little pile of incinerated cocaine, or soaking sheets in white cliff chalk, or taking a mould of Bunhill pavement. It just looks and sounds like the news, with little or no inventiveness and no particular insight. British politicians are idiots. Our newspapers are studies in bias and lies. So what’s new?

My heart sank even further when I read that another of her films is titled ‘Chomskian Abstract 2007’ and is an interview with the American social critic and philosopher Noam Chomsky, apparently about ‘the entwined relationship between ecological disaster and capitalism’.

Oh dear God. It’s not that Chomsky’s wrong or that hyper-capitalism driven on by American corporations and banks is not destroying the planet; it’s just that he is such a bleeding obvious choice for Great Man of the Left to interview. And so very, very, very old (born in 1928, Noam Chomsky turns 93 this year).

Is this the best Parker can do in the field of ‘radical’ or oppositional politics – interview a 93-year-old? It’s like waking up one morning and deciding you need to make a film about the environment and, after careful consideration, deciding you’d like to interview David Attenborough (aged 96) on the subject. Topics, and interviewees, don’t come more crashingly obvious than this.

Each year thousands and thousands of students in Britain graduate from international studies, politics or environmental courses. It would have been so much more interesting to interview the young, the future generation, and get their point of view rather than the done-to-death, decrepit old.

And he’s another Yank for God’s sake. What is it with the British cultural establishment and their cringing obeisance to American culture, artists, film-makers, politicians and intellectuals. Of the 200 contributors to the Magna Carta embroidery, in their summary of the show the curators single out just two – Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (who stitched ‘user’s manual’ into the embroidery) and Edward Snowden (who stitched the word ‘Liberty’).

Notice anything about them? Yes, they’re both American. Americans just seem carry more weight with Britain’s art establishment. They have a little more human value than mere Brits like you and me. More pizzazz, more glamour.

Lastly, what has Chomsky actually changed in his 50-odd years of railing against the American government and global capitalism? Nothing. Come to that, what good does getting 200 media-friendly worthies to contribute bits to a 13-metre-long embroidery achieve? Nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise for everyone involved and maybe it makes some of the gallery visitors feel warm and fuzzy and virtuous, too. Which is nice, but…

But meanwhile, out in the real world, Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are destroying the economy, ruining Britain’s standing in the financial world, and declaring war on the poor, the unwell, the vulnerable, even trashing support among their own middle-class, mortgage-paying supporters, in a zombie march of ideologues divorced from reality.

Flying a drone round the House of Commons or stitching a room-length embroidery are not only feeble responses to the world we live in but, worse, I found them imaginatively limiting and cramped. If you’re going to tackle the terrible world of contemporary politics, at least do it with some style and imagination. Old newspaper photos of Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn didn’t take me anywhere new – unlike the pile of silver shavings or a cast of Bunhill pavement or most of the pieces in the first half of the show, which opened magic doors in my mind.

Maybe Parker should stick to what she does best – blowing things up. Guy Fawkes Night is coming. Just a thought…

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Posted by Simon on October 10, 2022

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