Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it.
It opens with depictions of Black figures by Gainsborough and Reynolds, portraits of former slaves, abolitionists, attendants and illegitimate children. There weren’t a lot of Black people in Britain at the time, and most of those who were here struggled to escape lives of subservience. In among those paintings; a gorgeous, quiet, contemporary portrait of the Black painter Scipio Moorhead by Kerry James Marshall, a fleet of model ships by Hew Locke. Already, at the start of the show, the balance favours old, tricky, problematic art over brilliant new work. It’s uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the point.
Elsewhere there are paintings of the pale-skinned children of plantation owners, portraits of the families of colonial governors. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) was the only academician to own slaves, but the other artists here are implicated because they would have had patrons who owned plantations or profited off the slave trade.
Again, there are contemporary works by the likes of Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce here and there, but they’re left as background material to a foreground of historical wrongdoings.
There are works which depict Black figures but which only serve to exoticise them or ‘speak to racist stereotypes’. An awful 1892 Frank Dicksee painting of gambolling nude white youths ‘demonstrates an “Aryanising” of academic art’, a 1939 painting of the RA selection committee is included to show how all the members were white. An all-male, all-white institution in 1930s Britain? Shocking.
It’s an act of public self-flagellation
You’re left thinking ‘if this work is so bad, so racist, why are you showing it?’ What’s gained by giving such a huge platform to these crap, dodgy old paintings? Obviously, all these works are racist at worst, problematic at best. The issue is that there’s so much of it, and it’s given so much attention, that it almost eclipses the real draw. This show has some amazing, beautiful, moving work in it. John Akomfrah’s video about the turbulent history of the sea, from whaling to slavery, is lush, gorgeous and heart wrenching. Betye Saar’s freshly pressed KKK sheet and slave ship ironing board is brutal, shocking and brilliant. There’s an amazingly tumultuous Ellen Gallagher sea painting, a room of ultra-colourful Lubaina Humid cutouts, each with their own painful narratives. All of these works tell the show’s story perfectly without giving a platform to all these old paintings the RA is so clearly ashamed of.
The basic point of the show is a good one - but by tipping the balance so heavily in favour of the past, by giving so much space and prominence to questionable old paintings, they’ve let the bad work dominate the good work, leaving contemporary art as an afterthought. As a result, this feels like a show of racist paintings. It’s an act of public self-flagellation, exhibition as mea culpa, an institution holding its hands up and admitting guilt and complicity in colonial, racist, imperialist histories.
This massive show was an opportunity to celebrate and raise up incredible new art by incredible living Black and South Asian artists, but it just got too caught up in apologising for the past to make a change in the present.