ART
Once a year at Tate Britain
the most imposing galleries
in the building, the Duveen
Galleries, are turned over to
a contemporary artist to fill.
Called the Tate Britain
Commission, it’s a mighty
annual challenge.
The Duveen Galleries are
named after the crooked art
dealer who defaced the Elgin
Marbles to make them appear
whiter (now there’s a name
I would like to see removed
from a wall). They are
seriously difficult spaces to
use. Built in the 1930s, they
stretch down the length of
Tate Britain for 300ft, with
neoclassical walls looming
over you like cliffs,
punctuated by Ionic columns
determined to impose order.
Many a contemporary artist
has foundered in the effort to
take on these fascistic canyons.
Last time out, Heather
Look again, this ‘perfect artwork’ at Tate Britain is simply not what you think
Carnival — or a protest?
Phillipson filled them with an
orgy of flashing, bleeping light
shows and video screens,
which she called a “pre-post-
historic environment”. More
biohazard than art event, the
electricity-guzzling monster
was a grotesque piece of
technological self-indulgence,
using up several forests’
worth of power every day.
What a relief, therefore,
to witness Hew Locke’s
installation called The
Procession, which fills every
problematic inch of the
Duveen Galleries, and does so
dazzlingly. On all artistic levels
— imagination, effort, scale,
invention, colour, excitement
— The Procession is a triumph.
Locke, born in 1959 of
Guyanese descent, has long
been one of the pioneering
Caribbean artists whose work
brings precious emotion
and passion to British
art. His encrusted
sculptures, with
their homemade
textures and folky
moods, go against
the grain of British
modernism with itsappetite for coolness and its
self-conscious conceptual
bent. For most of his career
Locke did not fit in. Now,
suddenly, he does.
He is one of the key
exhibitors in Life Between
Islands, the beautiful and
rousing Tate Britain show that
brings together artists of
Caribbean descent working
in Britain since the 1950s. In
that display he’s a smaller
presence in a boisterous crowd
of creatives. In the Duveen
Galleries he commands a
gigantic space that most artists
find ungovernable.
Essentially he has turned
Tate Britain into Notting Hill,
and arranged for a sweeping,
swaying, silent-but-noisy
carnival procession to parade
down the centre of the gallery
and fill it with issues relating
to the Caribbean presence
in Britain. I’m not
certain how many
lifesized figurettes
are involved in this
tidal wave of
dancing and
marching. I gave up
counting after 40.We’re talking somewhere over- And then there are the
horses. The people in
wheelchairs. The children.
The overall impression is of
a huge crowd parading down
the fascistic Duveen and
reclaiming it for the streets
in a colourful display of
Caribbean trespassing. With a
practised eye for carnival and
its dynamics, Locke divides
The Procession into sections:
the posh bit with men in suits;
the red bit, which feels like a
band. So the entire surge
forward feels like a sculptural
progression.
Yet it isn’t only carnivals
that feature boisterous crowds
sashaying though the streets.
So, too, do protest marches.
And as you start leaning in
closer to inspect the individual
figures, the truer, deeper
meaning of The Procession
becomes evident. This isn’t just
some madcap voodoo carnival
that has been misdirected to
Tate Britain. Every figure here
is intent on making a point
about Europe’s colonial past.
Every processionist protests,
accuses, confronts.
It’s all in the detail. One of
the joys of the piece is the
endlessly inventive way in
which the parading figures
have been assembled from
cardboard, mannequins,
animal masks, bits of cloth
and rag. Each member of the
ragtag army moves and
dances in an individual way.
It’s impossible to imagine the
amount of work involved in
creating them.
And as you begin to pay
attention to the rags, flags
and banners out of which the
column of pretend humanity
has been assembled, you start
to notice the accusations
being sartorially smuggled in.
Printed on the cloths and rags
are sales tokens and share
certificates relating to historic
Caribbean businesses — the
digging of the Panama Canal,
the establishment of the
banana plantations.
Companies from Belgium,
Britain, Russia are issuing
stocks in cruel Caribbean pipe
dreams. Enterprises that
require slaves to work them
are being bought and sold.
As all this is recognised, the
carnival parade grows darker
and darker. See that woman on
a plinth printed on the faded
shirt? That’s Victoria, empress
of here, there and everywhere
in a world painted red by the
exigencies of colonialism. See
those Jamaican mansions
barely visible on that banner
held by the kid at the back?
That’s a house in which the
colonists lived.
I could go on and on. And
to prove that the gods of art
are overwhelmingly on
Locke’s side in this argument,
what should have taken place
in the week The Procession was
installed but that awkward
Caribbean tour by the Duke
and Duchess of Cambridge,
riding in white through the
streets of Jamaica on the back
of the royal Land Rover, like a
pair of Roman charioteers, or
touching the fingers of excited
black children thrust through
the bars of a fence.
Locke’s sweeping, busy,
hugely ambitious, minutely
detailed installation is many
things. One of them is the
perfect artwork to illuminate
a pivotal royal moment. cHew Locke: The Procession,
Tate Britain, London SW1,
until Jan 22WALDEMAR
JANUSZCZAK
A carnival of human life
Hew Locke’s The ProcessionTHE
CRITICSPAUL QUEZADA-NEIMAN/ALAMY16 3 April 2022