How does Tate promote cultural and systemic/institutional exclusion?
Museums have always been a highly-respected place of leisure and education that supposedly promotes neutrality in regards to its content, practice, and audience. To begin with, the concept of ‘museum’ itself centered from Europe during the late Renaissance, with a main aim of being an ‘eccentric space’ which serves as a repository of the past, created through the mirror of the present.[1] In other words, the museum is a meeting point where the past meets the present. The word ‘museum’ originates from the Greek mythological setting that consecrated the ‘Muses,’ which inhabits the nine goddesses of poetry, music, and liberal arts, whom taught men mysterious and important knowledge.[2] With this, it is important to note that the etymology and origins of the concept of the museum is very much Western. Highlighting on the ‘Muses,’ it is no surprise that the female goddesses are educating the men, the same way how artworks with the nude female body are subjected under the male gazes, as well as how the museum favors the Western, heterosexual, affluent male audience.
In more contemporary times, museums function as spaces that document social relationships represented in language, music, art, and other practices. Appropriately, this also means that there is a tendency for the inclusion of some practices along with the exclusion of others. Accordingly, Western modernist paintings are hung up on the walls of prestigious, international art museums, whereas, historical Asian and African sculptures are more than often encountered in ethnographic museums ‘celebrating’ the culture of the Others.[3] Often overlooked, this separation between the so-called European High Art and the Oriental craft calls attention to the cultural hegemony that envelopes educational institutions, especially the museum.
Apart from the segregation of its content, museums are also shaped by the social relationships of the visitors and users. Therefore, museums are inherently defined by whom it includes and excludes. According to the statistics in 2004, the museum visitors in America at the time describes the minority of the country’s population: one who has Euro-American ancestry, a higher than average income, and has graduated college.[4] Additionally, museums are structured to function as a site that provides aesthetic pleasure and contemplation,[5] that acts as a place of leisure, as well as to reinforce social strata and class separation.[6] The concept of museum as ‘leisure’ emphasizes the nature of socio-economic constraints, as it means that one has “the ability to ‘spend’ time not already committed to one’s employer, economic role, or for physical maintenance.” In fact, studies have shown that women and African-Americans in North America face leisure-decision constraints due to but not limited to their lack of economic power, family obligations, geographic and institutional segregation. Consequently, ‘leisure’ is an exclusionary concept, which favors those who are privileged to be given the ‘spare time’ that can be spent.[7]
Furthermore, in his book The Exhibitionary Complex, Tony Bennett theorizes that museums are constantly regulating disciplinary and power relations into society,[8] which often comes from the authoritative figure that has the power to show what can and cannot be shown to the public. Carol Duncan writes that “to control a museum means precisely to control the representation of a community and its highest values and truths.”[9] To ensure class distinctions, she also writes that museum visitors are expected to behave in decorum, which is a given amongst the upper class.[10] This museum etiquette is reinforced by the security guards and cameras all around the museums. The authoritative museum figure alongside the very concept of museum etiquette strengthens the claim that museums are not neutral, but instead, subjective.
This essay will focus on British institution Tate Gallery, a national emblem that houses collections of British artworks in four major sites across the United Kingdom. Tate was originally founded by Henry Tate, who was a Liverpool grocer turned sugar merchant, which provided him the fortune to build his legacy both in Tate Gallery and the multinational agriculture sugar company Tate and Lyle. The history of the Tate Gallery is often associated with slavery, due to Henry Tate’s direct association with sugar, one of the main commodities which define the brutal reality of slave trading during the exhaustingly extensive period of the British Empire. First and foremost, one must note that Liverpool — Tate’s hometown — was once Britain’s biggest slave port,[11] and it certainly does not help that his name continues to live on in the 160-year-old sugar company, considering that the gallery was in fact funded by the historically exploitive company.[12] On the Tate website, the gallery acknowledges this ongoing criticism and provides a statement discussing the legacies of historical slave ownership at Tate.
The statement begins by giving the readers context on sugar trading and the ever-growing wealth produced by slavery in the British economy and society, which permeated even beyond the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1833–34. The statement then moves on to Henry Tate himself, immediately defending his ‘clean’ legacy by writing that he was only fourteen years old when the abolition of slavery was passed in 1833, and that no evidence was found to prove that he had any direct link to owning any slaves.[13] The statement ultimately suggests that although there are fundamental ways in which obvious links can be made between the two, Tate Gallery was not directly associated with slavery. Moreover, what is now known to be Tate Britain is located in Millbank, London, on the site which used to be the Millbank Prison, the largest prison of the time and also a place of dread and suffering. It was also a place where convicts would be cargo shipped to Australia for penal transportation.[14]
Over the past decades, Tate have exhibited events and exhibitions concerning notions of imperialism and postcolonialism. In 2008, Tate Britain hosted The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Paintings, an exhibition which brings together a total of 120 paintings, prints, and drawings by Western artists. On the Tate’s website, it is written that the exhibition aimed to explore “the responses of British artists to the cultures and landscapes of the Near and Middle East between 1780 to 1930.” But for an exhibition that tried to “offer vital historical and cultural perspectives on the challenging questions of the ‘Orient’ and its representation in British Art,”[15] it sure is ironic that it included not a single artwork by a Middle Eastern painter. Instead, the exhibition provided the audience an entirely imaginary situation where only one side of the Oriental story is told, neglecting the possibility that the British representation of the ‘Orient’ could very much so be of misrepresentation.
However, in 2015, Tate Britain hosted an upscale exhibition titled Artist and Empire, with the tagline “Facing Britain’s Imperial Past”, which gathered much vexed criticism for being predictable and extremely late to the conversation of postcolonialism. The exhibition presented a major selection of artworks associated with the British Empire from the 16th century to the present, essentially examining “how the histories of the British Empire have shaped art past and present”.[16] The exhibition’s primary aim was for the audience to ‘face’ imperial Britain. Although the idea of facing the centuries old colonial past seem to be difficult and sometimes painful, Artist and Empire created only slight discomfort. Failing to recognize the complexity and traumatic reality which surpasses continents and centuries, the exhibition belittled and reduced the labyrinthine Empire.[17]
First and foremost, Artist and Empire is quite an odd name for an exhibition with such an ambitious goal. The title itself does not explain what constitutes as “art” and what it means to be an “artist”.[18] It is disregarding the contestation that artworks of the colonized are regarded to be crafts and folk art as opposed to fine art, and instead universalizes the “artist”, reducing the intricacy of it to a more generic understanding of what the word could mean for the exhibition directors. As an exhibition that tried to include art in the conversation of Empire and colonialism, it ends up stringing along the idea of ‘Ornamentalism’, due to the artworks of the colonized presented in a way that suggests them to be supplementary towards the Western artworks.[19] Artist and Empire also decided to leave out one other important aspect of Empire, which is looting, and in explanation of the immense looting of the Benin Bronzes, it was written that the looting was an act of retaliation.[20]
The exhibition is comprised of six rooms, which content is as follows consecutively; “Mapping and marking”, “Trophies of Empire”, “Imperial Heroics”, “Power Dressing”, “Face to Face”, and “Out of Empire” and “Legacies of Empire”. All in which intended to cover the whole of the British Empire, starting from the trading voyages, to the artefacts both produced and looted, to the grand clothing and rituals.[21] Inside the six supposedly enlightening rooms, the exhibition also failed to address globalization, labor exploitation, violence, and especially slavery in regards to Empire. Mentioned very briefly, the exhibition only seemed to acknowledge the acts of violence of the British Empire in passing and not from the voices of the victims. Contrarily, it appears that instead of admitting to the violent functioning of the British Empire, everything is justified and rationalized to portray mere reactive tendencies to the savage colonized ‘other’.[22] Inside, the atmosphere of the exhibition remains to be calm and collected, opposing the actual chaos and rupture of the history of the British Empire.
Instead of confronting the dark and vicious side of the British Empire, Artist and Empire have given an underwhelming and surface-level peek onto the tangled web of the imperialistic actuality of British history. At the same time, Tate have made sure that albeit the exhibition was a supposedly eye-opening one, it was curated to maintain its aesthetic allure. The exhibition ends up looking like it is romanticizing the lasting eternal effects of the Empire onto the ‘other’ nations and cultures, raging in pride over shame. Alongside this, the museum gift shop comes into play with the conflict. Inside the individual shop dedicated for the exhibition, typical souvenirs related to Artist and Empire were sold as well as books with politically basic content in the subject of Empire. Yet iconic and revolutionary texts by postcolonial figures like Frantz Fanon, C.L.R James, and Edward Said were very rarely to be found on the shelves of the shop.[23] Again, one must question, how does an institution solely devoted to British art, present the longstanding outcome of the British Empire when the very origin of the institution was built on and still funded by the nation’s imperial history? With this, the exhibition did the opposite of what it claimed to do, by creating a passive and interested attitude within the audience instead of igniting painful inconvenience. This conscious decision by the curators legitimizes the orientalist and imperialist lens that guides the institution’s core.
Apart from the programs and content of the museum, Tate have been culturally excluding non-White and less substantial visitors through their shops and restaurants. The museum shop is an undeniably inseparable part of what makes Tate as acclaimed as it is today. The galleries always provide relatable shops accompanying every current show that they are having, alongside a larger main shop which sells mostly souvenirs, books, artwork prints, and even jewelry. These items that are sold are especially more expensive than other items of the same quality being sold elsewhere. With T-shirts and cushions costing around £25, mugs for £18, and a Grayson Perry silk scarf for £95, it is obvious that not everyone can afford them. Although the museum entry is free, the contradicting high-priced commodities create a space which allows everyone to view the art, but not wear them as tokens, as not everyone is willing to pay for overpriced objects laced in pride. On top of this, it is also important to realize that the exhibitions held at the galleries are rarely free, again, creating a distance between who is allowed into the museum, and who is allowed into the up to date and relevant exhibitions.
Inside the Tate Britain is the infamous Rex Whistler restaurant, which features a mural entitled The Expedition of in Pursuit of Rare Meats, painted by Rex Whistler himself in 1927. The mural is meant to overwhelm the visitors, generating an atmosphere which unintentionally favors a certain hierarchy. With the mural’s title and placement in the restaurant of the historical Tate Britain, its irony and paradox is profound. The mural depicts a “hunting party setting out from a Palladian villa into a landscape of crenellated fortresses, stacked pagodas and preposterously lumpy hills,”[24] with images of white people towing black children with ropes around their necks, along with Chinese figures that are considered to be caricatures.[25] The title of the painting itself is already problematic, almost indicating that the child slaves are acknowledged to be of rare meats. In Figure 1, we can see that even the white dog has more freedom than a black child.
In the Tate Britain website, the Rex Whistler Restaurant was described as ‘The Most Amusing Room in Europe’ due to the political and social intrigue over the mural, as well as the reputation that it upholds for having “one of the capital’s finest wine cellars”,[26] completely disregarding the political and social exclusion that it attends to. It was after the museum have received massive amounts of critics over the summer of 2020 that they acknowledge the damage that it imposes, and changed the content of the website. In fact, in 2013, the Tate Britain have restored the mural as part of the gallery’s £45m revamp,[27] indicating that in contemporary times, the museum still refuses to neglect the racist and problematic artwork. With its expensive food and beverage prices, it is ironic that oppressed black children are mistreated within the walls of the room in which white, conservative visitors with deep pockets enjoy their lavish meal and sip their fine wine.
The Rex Whistler restaurant is currently under review by the ethics committee of the museum, and it is ludicrous that its future is still being discussed even though the entirety of the restaurant screams of cultural exclusion. The organisation has reported that the restaurant is “unequivocally…offensive”,[28] a minimizing description of the actual harm and trauma that it could potentially cause the visitors. The Rex Whistler restaurant exemplifies how the Tate favours one specific group over the other, and that is the Western, affluent visitor, who is able to enjoy a fine dining experience with a glass of rare wine while ignoring what is right in front of them, the cultural hegemony that is present within the institution they are supporting. With the restaurant still operational before the summer of 2020, it is as if Tate have forgotten that non-White cultures exist and that the institution would have simply not exist without the endless pain and tragic violence that they had to endure. In addition to this particular restaurant, both Tate Britain and Tate Modern have also been known to have exquisite cafes which exclusivities go hand in hand with the restaurant and shop. The cafes sell standard foods and beverages, with sugar that is of course, sponsored by Tate and Lyle, clearly linking the two companies together.
It is no surprise that some of the exhibitions held by Tate have very specific target audiences which are in no way representative of the whole of present day Britain, the same way the restaurants invite only a certain part of British society. It is safe to say that Tate have now become more than just galleries showcasing British art. It is now an institution that directly reflects Britain’s pride and glory, through ways that often turn a blind eye towards other cultures. There are much more instances regarding Tate which identify the cultural hegemony that stems in the heart of the institution, both systemic and in the form of modern day scandal. Although most contemporary art institutions claim to be a neutral space that is relevant and inclusive towards people of difference, in truth, the political and economic aspect of the business simply does not allow this utopia to come true. In some ways, a museum is always in favour of one identity over the other, whether it be the upper class over the lower, the white over the black, the heterosexual over the queer, or the male over the female. Tate is just one of the examples which correspond to the cultural exclusion which is overlooked and forgiven most of the time. But as art institutions aim to educate and enlighten visitors, further inspections and changes have to be made in order to produce unbiased content, otherwise endless circulations of prejudice will continue to run through.
NOTES:
[1] Paula Findlen, “The Museum: its classical etymology and renaissance genealogy,” Journal of the History of Collections 1 no. 1 (1989): 59–60. doi:10.1093/jhc/1.1.59
[2] Ibid., 60
[3] Kevin Coffee, “Cultural inclusion, exclusion and the formative roles of museums,” Museum Management and Curatorship 23 no. 3 (2008): 262. DOI: 10.1080/09647770802234078
[4] Ibid.
[5] Mark O’Neill, “The good enough visitor,” In Museum, Society, Inequality, edited by Richard Sandell, 24–40. London, New York: Routledge, 2002.
[6] Pierre Bourdieu, “Les fractions de la classe dominante et les modes d’appropriation de l’oeuvre d’art,” Social Science Information 13, no. 3 (1974): 7–31.
[7] Coffee, “Cultural inclusion, exclusion and the formative roles of museums,” 270.
[8] Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations no. 4 (Spring 1988): 73.
[9] Carol Duncan, “Civilizing Ritual: Inside Public Art Museums,” (London: Routledge, 1995), 8–9.
[10] Ibid., 13.
[11] Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 2.
[12] Nicola Gray, “Echoes of Empire: ‘Artist and Empire’ at Tate Britain,” Third Text forum.
http://thirdtext.org/echoes-of-empire.
[13] “The Galleries and Slavery,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/history-tate/tate-galleries-and-slavery.
[14] “History of Tate Britain,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/about-us/history-tate/history-tate-britain.
[15] “Tate Britain Exhibition: The Lure of the East: British Oriental Painting,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/lure-east-british-orientalist-painting.
[16] “Tate Britain Exhibition: Artist and Empire,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/artist-and-empire.
[17] Jessica Hutchens, “Ambiguous Narratives: ‘Art and Empire’ at Tate Britain,” Third Text forum. http://thirdtext.org/hutchens-artist-empire.
[18] Nicola Gray, “Echoes of Empire: ‘Artist and Empire’ at Tate Britain,” Third Text forum.
http://thirdtext.org/echoes-of-empire.
[19] Natasha Eaton, “Tired Ornamentalism,” Third Text forum. http://thirdtext.org/tired-ornamentalism.
[20] Louis Allday, “On (Not) Facing Britain’s Imperial Past at Tate Britain,” Third Text forum.
http://thirdtext.org/allday-artist-empire.
[21] “Artist and Empire: Room Guide,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/artist-and-empire/artist-and-empire-room-guide
[22] Louis Allday, “On (Not) Facing Britain’s Imperial Past at Tate Britain,” Third Text forum.
http://thirdtext.org/allday-artist-empire.
[23] Natasha Eaton, “Tired Ornamentalism,” Third Text forum. http://thirdtext.org/tired-ornamentalism.
[24] Digby Warde-Aldam, “Lunch With Rex Whistler: Art in the Tate Britain Restaurant,” Apollo Magazine, 10 Jan, 2014, www.apollo-magazine.com/rex-whistler-restaurant/.
[25] Kate Brown, “Tate Britain Has Responded to Backlash Over a Mural of Enslaved Children at Its Restaurant With a Statement on Its History,” Artnet News, 4 Aug, 2020, news.artnet.com/art-world/rex-whistler-at-the-tate-1898872.
[26] The White Pube, “Trigger warning: paintings of black children in slaver,” Instagram, 30 July, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CDQ6cMkFKvU/.
[27] “Restoring the Tate’s Whistler Mural.” BBC News, BBC, 19 Nov. 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-24959200.
[28] Lanre Bakare, “Future of Tate Britain’s ‘offensive’ Rex Whistler mural under review,” The Guardian, December 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/dec/07/future-of-tate-britains-offensive-rex-whistler-mural-under-review.