Digital Poetics 3.19 The Monstrous and the Other: Hew Locke’s Installation at Tate Britain by M. Elijah Sueuga
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I had heard that faceless figures, human-esque creatures draped in fabrics, flamboyant colours, all shapes and sizes littered the Duveen Galleries of the Tate Britain. I had read that it was quite the spectacle, and also that it called attention to the chequered past of the Tate–particularly Henry Tate’s connection to the colonial sugar cane industry. I was not surprised, then, when on a Wednesday afternoon I entered the Tate to find ghastly figures littering the floor of the neoclassical Duveen Galleries.
These galleries were originally opened in 1937, funded by the affluent and controversial art dealer Joseph Duveen. They became the first public galleries in England created specifically for the display of sculpture. Over the past twenty years, the Tate has annually commissioned a British artist to make a new work in response to the large open space of the gallery: Anthea Hamilton (2018), Cerith Wyn Evans (2017), and Phyllida Barlow (2014) among them.
Upon arrival, I walked amongst these figures, appreciating the details of the piece for over an hour. Many of the figures were partially constructed of cardboard and masking tape, adorned with found objects that might have otherwise appeared in an eldritch antique shop. Figures were draped in multicoloured fabrics, and textiles with various paraphernalia of the British colonial era; commercial agreements regarding holding in Africa, and certificates of sale related to sugar plantations and African slave trade were both displayed ceremoniously by the groups of figures who raised the enlarged documents like banners or flags, and more subtly, patterned in the clothing of the ghoulish figures. Of course, much of this iconography was in direct reference to Henry Tate’s massive fortune, indebted to his profit on importation and refining of sugar, a commodity inextricably linked to slave labour in the Carribean, and upon which the Tate museums were founded. Amongst the statues of the exhibition were reproductions of coins from the colonial era with intricate seals, large chests, and packages carried amongst the colourful mannequins.
I found the facelessness of Hew’s figures most striking–at times terrifying. In place of faces, many of these humanoids possessed enlarged colonial emblems, carnivalesque masks resembling skulls or animals, cartoonish contorted expressions of anguish and distress seemed to envelop the majority of the figures. Their presence was not benign. Jack Halberstam tells us that, “[Monsters are] a technology of subjectivity, one which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy, and the pure can be known” (Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, p. 2). Indeed Halberstam’s comment felt alive in Hew’s work–a nod towards the Global Northern fear of the other, the foreign, the migrant. I could not help but see the connection to the ongoing refugee crisis, the plight of those seeking asylum, and racist attitudes of patriots. This work seemed to speak to the global rise of the far rightists and its connection with refugeeism, as well as the age-long tactic of demonising the displaced ‘other’ for the purpose of furthering nationalist interest and fastening political ascendancy. Indeed, the Black/Brown migrant in particular has always been an easy target, a cheap scapegoat for the purist-conservative. Hew’s bestial anthropoids seemed to hyperbolise these views.
The longer I perused Hew’s creatures, the more I saw a mass gathering of displaced persons. Pregnant figures with enlarged bellies, groups of figures clutching or dragging large bags, children carrying toy cargo ships, each individual uniquely dressed and decorated. Besides the unspoken tragedy afflicting these characters, there was an element of joy among them. In one sense, there seemed to be a celebration of the political ‘otherness’ ascribed to such persons– through vibrant colours, banners, flags waving, drummers drumming, arms outstretched in glory. Revelry in difference. Yet the immobility of these figures–frozen in their respective movements–haunted me. I thought of the ways in which many unregistered asylum seekers are often forced to live beneath legal detection, the great risks of movement for the illegal immigrant, the constant threat of discovery and deportation, the fear of notice from the wrong person that impels families to remain beneath the radar of government officials.
Hew’s work must also be brought into conversation with the Notting Hill Carnival and its history in anti-racist resistance. Amidst racial tensions, in May of 1959, Kelso Cochrane–a 32 year old, Antiguan born carpenter, and aspiring lawyer living in Notting Hill–was murdered in a racially motivated attack. Following the event, thousands of community members took to the streets of Notting Hill to attend Cochrane’s funeral and simultaneously to protest local racism towards the Black migrant community. Political activism and protests heightened when news of a police cover began to circulate, and eventually a street fair was organised by local community activist Rhaune Laslett. This fayre later evolved into Notting Hill Carnival, known as the largest festival gatherings of the Caribbean and Black migrant community in the United Kingdom, and the second largest Carnival in the world. The vibrant colours of the figures were all too evocative of the yearly processions deluging the streets of Notting Hill.
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Hew himself carries with him some of this weight and ethos through his own lineage. The artist’s father, the late sculptor Donald Locke, was born and raised in Guyana, and was eventually given a British Council art scholarship in 1954, with which he was able to study ceramics at the Bath School of Art and Design in England. Donald’s artwork often dealt with themes of the Black Atlantic, history and identity both through his life in the former British colony and as a Black migrant. Donald would often speak of his complicated relationship with his Guyanese heritage in his artwork–the ways in which he had to mask it in order to be seen as an artist within the dominant cultural discourse. “I don’t see the ‘form’ of Guyana reflected in sculpture,” Donald reflects in a 1989 interview with Rasheed Araeen. “Even if this were so, I would want to hide this connection…” (The Other Story 93).
As I continued to walk amongst Hew’s effigies approximately twenty minutes into my visit, I began to feel a wave of discomfort. Perhaps there was something insidious about the nature of the exhibition itself, an aura of hypocrisy. I tried to trace this feeling. The prints on these sculptures–those notably highlighting colonial violence that Tate founded on–seemed to send a message to the public that the Tate was aware of its historical wrongdoings. But was this merely an effort, on behalf of the Tate, to artwash, to distract the public from its continued questionable financial enterprises? I remembered the Liberate Tate collective, the group that protested the Tate’s corporate sponsorship with the notorious BP oil. Though the group was eventually successful in its campaign in 2016, it was not without massive media attention and years of organised effort. Not long after, I remembered reading of the strikes at the Tate in 2020, in response to the institution’s announcement of a cut in 313 jobs, predominantly in catering, retail, and event services, areas which would devastate the lowest paid, most precarious and most disadvantaged workers, disproportionately affecting BAME staff. Not least, there was the Tate’s continued relationship with the Zabludowicz Collection, an organisation having made most of it’s wealth from arms manufacturing for the Israeli military, and real estate business on illegally occupied Palestinian land, and continuing to donate millions of dollars to the State of Israel.
As I recalled these facts, I became more troubled. The exhibition began to feel like a facade in a game of distraction–an effort to turn attention towards an acknowledged chequered past and quietly away from the ongoing misdoings of the institution at present.
On my way out, I noticed a bust of Henry Tate, the museum's founder. Beneath it were two small plaques, one listing Tate’s accomplishments and contributions to British society, the other mentioning Tate’s involvement in the sugar business, which was bound with slavery. The final paragraph began: “As a museum, we believe in facing these problematic histories honestly and openly. We are working to address the legacies of slavery, colonialism, racial injustice…” Such a statement was rudely insincere, coming from the same institution that had recently attempted to boot off hundreds of mostly POC employees, while doing business with an organisation grounded in financially supporting the apartheid state of Israel.
I thought of Hew’s faceless characters, beautiful and anguished. It was possible that Hew was aware of these latent contradictions. Perhaps there was a bit of cheekiness to be found amidst these deranged apparitions, the colourful banners and cardboard frippery. I couldn’t be sure.
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M. Elijah Sueuga is a writer, poet and art historian focusing on late modern and contemporary sonic arts. They are a current graduate student in the History of Art at Williams College, and Curatorial Fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. They are currently interning at the87press as Resident Art and Sound Writer. They work additionally as a composer and dj.
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The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
