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.