This week I had the pleasure of going to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. I say ‘the pleasure’ but visiting the Pitt Rivers was never precisely a pleasure. Twenty years ago, as an undergraduate, the collection was something of a rite of initiation. The place, filled with strange and wondrous objects, was famed above all for its gruesome pickled heads: artefacts reminiscent of the ‘coconut’ that the one-eyed Brigadier Ritchie-Hook collects in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour.
What did we think of them in those now distant days? That they were part of another age, naturally – a collection of artefacts from another time, representing another era, with its interests and curiosities.
Today the collection is still there, although the heads are not. But after a recent refurb the place has transformed into a shrine to a different time: our own. For the museum is now dominated by signs telling you that the collection is a terrible thing. Huge billboards tell the visitor that the museum is ‘a footprint of colonialism’, is ‘not a neutral space’ and yet ‘can be an instrument of resistance’. Throughout the collection we are repeatedly hectored about ‘imperialism and colonialism’, naturally, but also colonial attitudes towards ‘race, class, culture, gender and sexuality’. The signs by the exhibits repeatedly parrot the mantras of our day about ‘hierarchies’ and ‘Eurocentric ideas’.
You might imagine the Pitt Rivers is something of an anomaly. But it is not. In today’s Britain it is to be expected that our cultural institutions are run by people who hate the collection in their care as well as our culture and our history more broadly. Lest we forget, all this has happened under a Conservative government.
Today it is to be expected that our cultural institutions are run by people who hate the collection in their care
Take Tate Britain, perched gloriously on the banks of the Thames. It is the home of one of the great collections of these islands. Yet today the trustees of the Tate do not seem to think that they should simply conserve the collection. They do not even think that their job is to explain it. They appear to believe their task is to condemn it – to stand as judge, juror and executioner over it.
I have written before on the atrocious treatment of Rex Whistler’s vast Arcadian mural in the museum’s basement. In recent years the Tate closed the room, looked into removing the work from the plaster walls and now says the room is locked until the gallery can add ‘interpretative material’ on the mural’s ‘racist imagery’. A committee which looked into the mural was ‘unequivocal’ in finding ‘the imagery of the work offensive’. All because the mural includes two details so tiny that almost nobody ever notices them – a black child being pulled by a woman in a frilly frock and another being pulled from a chariot.
For any non-malevolent observer, the message is clear. As in all of Whistler’s mural, he leaves a signal that even in Arcadia there exists the worm of human evil. But the ‘experts’ at the Tate did not approach the work in that way. Instead they bowed to the chants of malevolent activists and effectively agreed that the mural was ‘pro-slavery’ and that Whistler held racist views. This libel is made even more appalling by the fact that the artist died in Normandy fighting the Nazis in July 1944, aged just 39.
It’s not just Whistler whom the Tate has taken against. One of the treasures of the collection in its care is ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’, by Stanley Spencer. Possibly the artist’s most famous painting, it depicts the dead all rising from their tombs in Spencer’s local churchyard on the Day of Judgement. When I worked nearby, I often used to go to the Tate at lunchtime just to sit in front of this painting.
Today the gallery’s description beside this masterpiece condemns the artist. It was Spencer’s somewhat progressive vision to put people of all races rising from their tombs on the day of resurrection. But the Tate’s signage says that while the white people in the painting are friends of Spencer’s, he painted the black figures in ‘a generalising way’ based on images he saw in National Geographic.
A reasonable curator might simply note that there weren’t many black people in Cookham in the 1920s. But the Tate says that Spencer ‘reinforced racist stereotypes and divisions accepted at the time by most white British people’, thus simultaneously smearing the British people and demeaning a visionary masterwork by grinding it through the remorseless mill of identity politics.
If any museum curator in the land wonders where all this might lead, we can now point them somewhere. Specifically to the Wellcome Collection on London’s Euston Road. In recent years the museum has been struggling with its collection, which was put together by Henry Wellcome in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The organisation has been commissioning ‘anti-colonialist’ writers to conjure up denunciations of its Medicine Man permanent exhibition. So a new sign meant to accompany the casket for Henry Wellcome’s ashes consisted of a denunciation of him for his ‘power’, ‘money’ and the British Empire. A collection put together by an open, energetic mind has been turned into a source of shame and provoked an urge for patricide.
This past weekend the collection had an online meltdown. ‘What’s the point of museums?’ asked the Wellcome’s official Twitter account. ‘Truthfully, we’re asking ourselves the same question.’ The museum went on to flagellate itself over its collection, saying that the whole idea of it was ‘problematic for a number of reasons’. One was that apparently the Medicine Man exhibition ‘told a global story of health and medicine in which disabled people, black people, indigenous peoples and people of colour were exoticised, marginalised and exploited – or even missed out altogether’. And whereas the remains of minorities cannot be displayed, the remains of white people can be displayed but only so long as they are insulted. At the Wellcome, a fragment of the skin of Jeremy Bentham has an accompanying note by a pseudo-scholar, Dan Hicks, that says that Bentham leaving his body to science simply demonstrates the centring by museums of ‘the white cis-male body’. Hicks goes on (at the invitation of Wellcome): ‘Time’s up. Dismantle Wellcome’s enduring colonialism, its white infrastructure.’ After that, I wouldn’t just avoid donating my skin to a museum in this country. I wouldn’t leave them the shirt on my back, and don’t see why anyone else should either.
Showing that the curators had at least learned something from the 20th century (notably China), their struggle session continued interminably. And so: ‘The display still perpetuates a version of medical history that is based on racist, sexist and ableist theories and language. This is why this Sunday on 27 November, we will be closing Medicine Man for good.’ They had tried to find a way around it, but in the end the fact that this display had been put together at all – by a man ‘with enormous wealth, power and privilege’ – made it impossible to continue.
Tate Britain, the Pitt Rivers and every other collection in the land should take note. Once you start playing this game, you cannot win. Once you begin to shut yourself down, there is only one logical end point: total self-destruction. The late Robert Conquest explained the phenomenon well. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing, he said, and the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. Conquest used the example of the Church of England, but he could these days have pointed to almost any museum or gallery in the West, or the whole discipline of curating as it is imagined now. The aim is no longer to collect and curate but actively to dismantle.
The Pitt Rivers, for instance, is especially keen to ‘interrogate’ the way in which the collection has been presented until now, and why that is wrong. The collection is attacked for ‘problematic past research practices’, while Europeans are described as ‘a race of scientific criminals’ and also responsible for paving the way for ‘modern legal and illegal drug networks’. If there is anything good to be said about the museum, then the museum itself certainly doesn’t say it.
Once you begin to shut yourself down, there is only one logical end point: total self-destruction
No cliché of the modern academic and curatorial left is left untouched. There are signs labelled ‘Beyond the binary’ which inexplicably acclaim ‘queer icons’. One cabinet celebrates a figurine from the 1990s with ‘a huge queer following’. The small bookshop does the same. Alongside the books on Ancient Rome and Egypt, the visitor can buy children’s books of ‘Queer heroes’, books on diversity and also The Little Book of LGBTQ+: An A-Z of gender and sexual identities.
The whole thing is curious, just not in the way it used to be. The curators would appear to despise the museum and the people who put it together. And while the negative aspects of all other cultures are ignored entirely (slavery in Benin, anyone?), the in-iquity of Europeans is stressed everywhere.
Some might imagine that the Pitt Rivers, the Wellcome and the Tate are rogue institutions run by a few extremists, but the self-destructive, iconoclastic mania is actually encouraged everywhere. The Museums Association – a professional members organisation which more than 1,800 museums in the country have joined – has issued guidance and resources to its members on how to ‘decolonise’ their collections. They warn that there may be problems with the ‘comms strategy’ of their decolonisation work thanks to ‘negative press or feedback’, but that ‘pushing through those hesitations is essential. Remember, we must be brave in this work’. And there was me thinking Rex Whistler was brave to join up the moment war was declared.
Worse even than the claim of bravery is the warning that ‘discomfort’ is inevitable, yet worth it. The guidance quotes Sathnam Sanghera, one of the sages of the decolonisation movement, as saying our nation has been ‘wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal’ and ‘our failure to understand how this informs modern-day racism’ is apparently ‘catastrophic’. As one academic on the Museum Association puts it, there is a problem with ‘the overwhelming whiteness’ of our cultural institutions.
Well, in my observation there is an overwhelming blackness in those museums that exist in Africa, an overwhelming Chineseness in museums in China and an overwhelming Egyptianness about museums in Egypt. Only in the West, and especially in this country, do we decide that our past is so appalling that it needs to be ‘decolonised’ – which we can now see means assaulted, insulted and eventually closed.
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