Museums and Prisons

Tate Britain stands on the site of Millbank penitentiary incorporating part of the prison within it's own structure. The bodies of may of the inmates remain concreted into the foundations of the building. The drains that run from the building to the Thames, a stones through away, bleed this decay into the silt of the Thames.

By 1776 transportation to the New World had been interrupted by the American War of Independence and old sailing ships known as hulks were dragged up the Thames and stuffed with up to 70,000 prisoners. This though was to be an 'expedient' that lasted till 1859. In 1779 the government introduced an Act which created a new form of hard labour for prisoners in the hulks. It commenced with dredging the river Thames - a profitable precursor to expanding trade with the colonies - and made provision for building Millbank penitentiary amongst others.

The penitentiary was the largest in Europe. It became the 19th Century cesspit for containing the rowdiest of the political mob. Henry James, who visited the prison in 1884, made use of his visit. In the novel 'The Princess Casamassina' (1886) he has Miss Pynsent describe the "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." As with today, there was considerable delay in government building programmes.

Transportation to Australia, made possible in 1787, began to relieve the pressure on the stinking hulks. It was not until 1817 that Millbank penitentiary finally opened. A convict at this time was stripped, shaven and sentenced to penal servitude, not imprisonment, and spent the first nine months of their sentence in solitary confinement. Before the birth of the prisons, punishment was an open display of power: public executions, floggings, disembowelling etc. The worry of the time was that such overt displays had become a source of contention to the mob and public order was threatened in various ways. Parliament, therefore, detached punishment from the public gaze and into prisons. 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 comments of the time condemned the poor as a vast heap of social refuse, the "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, criminalised sub-race. These views were structured into science by, amongst others, Beddoe, a future president of the Anthropological Institute.

A racial or quasi-racial view of the poor was not the only one. 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 the museums amongst other things such as schools and public parks. The birth of museums became a complement to 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, surgically removed the decadence and tyranny before offering the morsels of taste generated under previous forms of social control. The museum provides 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 to show and tell so that you might look and learn. Here, 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. Further reading: 'The Political Rationality of the Museum', Tony Bennett

scrapbook

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, colonisation 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 of ours. While Tate can never be fully inclusive of peoples' histories that may have run counter to its own, it can at least be a site of critical participation in the present history of cultural cosmetics of these islands.

From adolescence I had visited the Tate, read the Art books and generally 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 was how it was supposed to be. The historical literature on 'rational recreations' states that, in reforming opinion, museums were envisaged as a means of exposing the working classes to the improving mental influence of middle class culture. I was being innoculated for the cultural health of the nation.

I have tried in the images accompanying this text 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.

Tate BricABrac

When asked to create this site 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 the creation of much of its Art and of the collection itself. I felt nervous of having to produce an on-line work in a month from scratch and how to deal in amongst the bric-a-brac of the colonial masters in the UK. It's easy to wave a bit of shit on a stick, carry up the stairs until someone sniffs it. But there is little or no point to this strategy other then self gain and notoriety which are of little interest. I hoped the Tate would embrace this work as a legitimate counter point to some of it's own agendas and maintain the momentum for the glasnost of the Collection.

This work forced me into an uncomfortable proximity with the economic and social elite's use of aesthetics in their ascendancy to power and what this means in my own work on the internet. I was delighted of course in the creative power and imagination of the artists in the collection, enjoying the information contained in the works, whether that be the 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 out of the temple and smelt the filth of the Thames, over-shadowed by the Tate I was reminded that, down their - in the silt - under the stones - under 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 recognise themselves in terms of that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly.

----

* TransportationOld Museums and Prisons
* TaTeBritain
* TaTeModern
* TaTeLiverpool
* TaTeStIves
* TateBricABrac

Tate Britain

== Tate Britain

http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/slut.jpg
====== Giovanna Baccelli and Genine's Hair, Syphilis. after Thomas Gainsborough 1700-2000

The home of 500 years of tasty babes, luxury goods, own goals and psychological props of the British social elite.

Tate Britain is the national gallery of British art from 1500 to the present day, the Tudors to the Harwood De Mongrel Collection. Tate holds the greatest collection of British art in the world.
"Nationalistic sentiment has been a vital force in the making of the Tate Gallery, many of the donors giving generously in the belief that they were contributing to an aspect of the nation's cultural life that was available to all, and thus the nation's health, owing to the vital connection between art and society"

The Tate A History, Frances Spalding, London, 1998

The construction of the British National collection at the Tate is much more than a simple pointer to the biological or cultural sameness of the nation. It is a construction of the British social imagination, mapped onto geographical regions and increasingly technological sites. It is an example of economic power organising itself around the politics of the aesthetic.

Tate Britain shows British art in a dynamic series of thematic special displays and exhibitions. Historic and modern works hang together in challenging juxtaposition, drawing out new meanings from famous and familiar images.

http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/nipbabe.jpg

====== My Nipple and The Du Cane Boehm Family Group: After Gawen Hamilton 1734-2000

* TaTe
* TransportationOld Museums and Prisons
* TaTeBritain
* TaTeModern
* TaTeLiverpool
* TaTeStIves
* TateCorporate

Tate Liverpool

==== Liverpool Tate
The largest modern art gallery in the UK set up with the help of the Toxteth riots.

Tate Liverpool is the home of the National Collection of Modern Art in the North of England and the largest gallery of modern and contemporary art outside London. Tate Liverpool is housed in a beautiful converted warehouse which is part of the historic Albert Dock.
The art shown is by twentieth century artists and is always interesting and thought provoking. This construction of the British National taste is much more than a simple pointer to the biological or cultural sameness of the nation. It is a construction of the British social imagination, mapped onto geographical regions and increasingly technological sites. It is an example of economic power organising itself around the politics of the aesthetic.

http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/slaveskin.jpg
===== My Skin and The Du Cane and Boehm Faimily Group. After Gawen Hamilton 1734-2000

Tate Liverpool opened in 1988 in a converted warehouse in the Albert Dock. It is the home of the National Collection of Modern Art in the north of England. In the summer of 1981 Toxteth riots played a part in making a Liverpool outstation feasible, for they shook the government and secured the Merseyside Development Corporations sense of purpose. These riots had not been the result of unemployment in Liverpool, though this was clearly a factor, but of an ultimate collapse in relations between the police and mainly black residents of Toxteth, who were sick of what seemed to be officially tolerated harassment. A chain of events was set in motion which began with the appointment of Michael Helestine, secretary of state for the Environment, as Minister for Merseyside, with the instruction to offer a 'package' to help the city. Bowness then Director of the Tate seized the opportunity to approach Heseltine with Lord Hutchinson� They spoke for ten minuets and Hesltine pronounced it a wonderful idea.

The Tate A History, Frances Spalding

----

* TransportationOld Museums and Prisons
* TaTeBritain
* TaTeModern
* TaTeLiverpool
* TaTeStIves
* TateBricABrac

Tate Modern

== Tate Modern: A sweetner for the City

http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/charle.jpg

====== John Singleton Copely 1783-1815 The Death of Major Peirson and RPD's Ears 1800-2000

A major new gallery showing tasty babes, luxury goods, own goals and psychological props collected by the British social elite, housed in the former Bankside Power Station on the south bank of the Thames.

Tate Modern is Britain's new national museum of modern art. As class compositions change, each new economic force takes over the mantle of British taste. Each succeeding social elite must have its art, its 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.

From Henry Tate's convincing the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harcourt, to help out with funds, to Charles Saatchi's position as a patron and the Saatchi brothers' hand in the 1979 Thatcherite assent; to the hacking out of an industrial age monument reinvented with new money, displaying to all the City of London how good it has been, how rich it has become, how powerful it is... To inhabit the carcass of dead industries is a powerful metaphor: not to sweep it away but to borrow into it, occupy it, show power over the generation of power itself.
There will also be a full range of special exhibitions and a broad public corporate programme of events throughout the year.

Bankside Power Station has been transformed into Tate Modern by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. The former Turbine Hall, running the whole length of the vast building, now marks a breathtaking entrance to the gallery. From here visitors will be swept up by escalator through two floors featuring a caf�, shop and auditorium to three levels of galleries. At the top of the building is a new two storey glass structure which not only provides natural light into the galleries on the top floors, but will also house a stunning caf� offering outstanding views across London.

The Tate receives support from the British Government and relies on the patronage of plcs, of foundations, and of rich and poor individuals to fund the full range of its activities. Support may be given towards scholarship, conservation, education or exhibitions. In its early years, the elite's bull-baiting pit was occupied by Tate, the ascendant 'sugar boiler', and by the static old boys of the Royal Academy of Arts. Whilst the determined bulldog grip of the Academy was strong, it eventually proved too slow to bite for the modern economic bull terrier's ascendancy to acceptance. Eventually distancing itself from The National Gallery, this rebellion by the new economic elite was content initially to appropriate the culture of the established social hierarchy, buying its art, its culture and its history. Subsequent generations took it upon themselves to invent their own.
Emerging social elites seem 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. Henry Tate himself directly convinced Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to help with funds to build the Tate in order to circumvent the established aesthetic orthodoxy of the time. From its beginning, the Tate has supported the taste values of whichever social elite was contemporarily emerging.

http://www.mongrelx.org/tate/collections/images/scab.jpg

====== Turner, Scab and Thames Mould : 1840-2000

----

* TaTe
* TransportationOld Museums and Prisons
* TaTeBritain
* TaTeModern
* TaTeLiverpool
* TaTeStIves
* TateCorporate

Tate St Ives

==== Tate St Ives
Modern British art in a spectacular coastal setting located in one of the lowest waged areas of Britain.

Tate St Ives opened in June 1993 and offers a unique introduction to the new order of reality. This is one birthplace of modern municipal art, where many works can be viewed in the surroundings and atmosphere which inspired them: essential form abstracted from concrete.
The Gallery also manages the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, which gives a remarkable insight into the work of this great twentieth-century sculptor.

(IMAGE) = no4.tiff
Caption = Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying-Typhoon coming on and Mervins. 1840 -2000

----

* TransportationOld Museums and Prisons
* TaTeBritain
* TaTeModern
* TaTeLiverpool
* TaTeStIves
* TateBricABrac