[Reader-list] uncomfortable proximity

[Monica Narula]

Below is Graham Harwood's extended piece on his work "Uncomfortable 
Proximity", available online at 
http://www.tate.org.uk/home/default.htm (his page comes up 
automatically in a while). "Uncomfortable Proximity" is the title of 
an on-line project which mirrors the Tate's own web-site, but offers 
new images and ideas, collaged from his own experiences, his readings 
of Tate works and publicity materials and his interest in the Tate 
Britain site. Related critical texts by Matthew Fuller are in the 
Connections section of the Tate web-site

Uncomfortable Proximity
by Graham Harwood


Tate Britain: the 500 year old home of tasty babes, luxury goods, own 
goals and the psychological prop of the British social elite


When asked to create a new website by Matthew Gansallo of the Tate, I 
found myself awkwardly situated by my admiration for parts of the 
collection and my equal disdain for the social values that framed it 
and much of its art. This work forced me into an uncomfortable 
proximity with the economic and social elite's use of aesthetics in 
their ascendancy to power. I was delighted with the creative power 
and imagination of the artists in the Tate collection - I enjoyed the 
information contained in the works, whether it was aesthetic 
formalism, mathematical structures of perception, raw emotion, 
opto-chemical reactions of light across time or the social history 
they contain. But when I stepped outside the temple and smelt the 
filth of the Thames, I was reminded that down there - in the silt - 
under the stones - beneath the floor - lay the true costs of such a 
delight.
The tragedy of any social elite's possession of public creativity and 
imagination has led me to try and trace at least two threads of this 
elite's ascendancy in present history. The first involves mapping the 
rituals of tastefulness, the distance it creates from the uninspired 
Victorian mob, the language and manners of the tasteful, and the 
inherent hypocrisy that this implies. The second centres on the 
histories of different peoples, my friends and family, either 
ascendant, static or uncounted, which recognize themselves in terms 
of that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly.
The Tate's scrapbook of British pictorial history has many missing 
pages, either torn out through revision, or self-censored before the 
first sketch. Those that did make it created the cultural cosmetics 
of peoples profiting from slavery, migrant labour, colonization and 
transportation. Clearly the images in the historic collection and the 
image of the Tate itself are pregnant with the past's cosmetic 
cultural surgery: made ready for the shopping lists of the future. 
The skin of these paintings was stretched over a psychological frame 
- a shield against which were thrown the filthy, diseased, rotting 
corpses of daily life, profit and excess. The scrapbook's scalpelled 
pages will never be found - but they articulate in their absence the 
political and economic relations of that society and ours. While the 
Tate cannot ever be fully inclusive of those histories that run 
counter to its own, it can at least be a site of critical 
participation in the present history of the cultural cosmetics of 
these islands. From adolescence I had visited the Tate, read the art 
books and pulled a forelock in the direction of the cult of genius - 
on cue relegating my own creativity to the Victorian image of the 
rabid dog. We know well enough that this is how it was supposed to 
be. The historical literature on 'rational recreations' states that 
museums were envisaged as a means of exposing the working classes to 
the improving mental influence of middle class culture. I was being 
inoculated for the cultural health of the nation.
Tate Britain stands on the site of Millbank penitentiary - and parts 
of the prison are incorporated within its own structure. The drains 
that run from the building to the Thames, a stone's through away, 
bleed this decay into the city's silt. By 1776, transportation to the 
New World had been interrupted by the American War of Independence 
and so instead, old sailing ships known as hulks were dragged up the 
Thames and stuffed with up to 70,000 prisoners. This 'expedient' 
lasted till 1859. In 1779 the government introduced an Act which 
created a new form of hard labour for prisoners. They began by 
dredging the river Thames - a profitable precursor to expanding trade 
with the colonies - and made provision for building Millbank 
penitentiary.
The penitentiary was the largest in Europe, and it became the 19th 
century's cesspit for the rowdiest of political mobs. Henry James 
visited the prison in 1884, and later wrote it into his novel The 
Princess Casamassina (1886): "brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, 
truncated pinnacles and a character unspeakably sad and stern. It 
looked very sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent's eyes, and she 
wondered why a prison should have such an evil air if it was erected 
in the interest of justice and order...it threw a blight on the face 
of the day, making the river seem foul and poisonous." In the 19th 
century, as today, there was considerable delay in government 
building programmes.
Before the birth of the prisons, punishment was a public display of 
civic power: executions, floggings, disembowelling in the street. 
Worried that these overt displays were a source of contention to the 
mob and that public order was threatened in various ways, parliament 
detached punishment from the public gaze and put it into prisons. 
Millbank penitentiary finally opened in 1817. A convict at this time 
was stripped, shaven and sentenced to penal servitude, not 
imprisonment, and spent the first nine months of the sentence in 
solitary confinement.
Middle class society increasingly condemned the poor as products of 
their own low and immoral natures, and in 1834 the Poor Law was 
introduced, in which Disraeli announced to the world "that in England 
poverty is a crime". Other opinion of the time wrote off the poor as 
"mere human street-sweepings" who "serve as manure to the future 
crime-crop of the country". The main view of the ascendant middle 
class was that the poor existed beyond the farthest reaches of 
civilized, art-loving society and were an indolent, ignorant, 
degraded, criminalized sub-race. These views were structured into 
science by, amongst others, Beddoe, a future president of the 
Anthropological Institute.
Liberals, believing in the 'levelling-up' theory (that the labourer 
would emulate the artisan) dwelt upon the possibility of teaching 
even the lowest the virtues and satisfactions of self-help. The 
liberal elite of the mid and late 19th century put their faith in the 
new persuasive power of museums, schools and public parks. Thus, the 
birth of museums became a complement to the birth of prisons. The 
museum, then as now, provided a mechanism for the transformation of 
the crowd into an ordered and, ideally, self-regulating public. The 
democratic education of the mob was an attempt to addict them to the 
aspirational tastefulness of Victorian society. For the new social 
elite, sharing what had previously been private, exposing what had 
been concealed, became a totem of progressiveness.
The Tate, with a more or less free admission policy, provided a 
solution to the social chaos of the street: a site where bodies, 
constantly under surveillance, could be rendered docile through 
exposure to Gainsborough, Turner and Hogarth (instead of the jailer's 
whip and bludgeon). If the prison changed you through discipline and 
punishment, then the museum was a way of showing you how to look and 
learn. The purpose was not to know about people's culture - but to 
address people as the subjects of that culture; not to make the 
population visible to power - but to render power visible to the 
people and, at
the same time, to represent to them that power as if it were their 
own. The museum became, and is still, a technical solution to the 
problem of displaying wealth and power without the attendant risks of 
social disorder.
Emerging social elites still appear to find it necessary to justify 
their 'natural' right to wealth and privilege. This is done in many 
ways. The one that interests us here is the use of aesthetics to 
negotiate the social positions of new economic forces. As class 
compositions change, new economic forces take over the mantle of 
British taste. Each succeeding social elite must have its own art, 
its own brand around which secret codes and systems of value can be 
exchanged. This is usually in the form of what is to be tolerated and 
what is not, what's in and what's out, who's in and who's out. New 
money needs to be part of history. With money you can buy your way 
into art history. With even more money you can shape the future of 
that history: as the Tate Modern, Britain's newest national museum of 
modern art, is attempting to do. From its beginning, the Tate has 
supported the taste values of whichever social elite is 
contemporarily emerging. In this work, I have tried to play with the 
broken links within the Tate's collection, grafting on the skins of 
people who are close to me, dragging parts of the collection through 
the mud of the Thames, and infecting some of it with a relevant 
disease.
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net