Art News

Tate Britain is expected to permanently close its restaurant because of a controversy over an historic artwork created nearly a century ago.

Rex Whistler's mural The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats , which was painted specifically for the restaurant in 1927, has recently been criticised because of its politically incorrect portrayal of non-Europeans.

Moya Greene, until last month a Tate trustee and chair of its 'Ethics' Committee, reported back to the gallery's board. She told fellow trustees that committee members were unequivocal in their view that the imagery of the work is offensive. In addition, they claim the offence is compounded by the use of the room as a restaurant.

Tate trustees were also advised that the Rex Whistler mural is an important work of art in the care of trustees and that it should not be altered or removed. Although not a formally accessioned work, it forms part of a Grade I-listed interior.

Following the committee's advice, it seems almost certain that the restaurant will never reopen. It was closed in March because of Covid-19, but did not reopen with the gallery displays last week.

The mural includes two small figures of bound black children who are probably enslaved and also depicts caricatured Chinese people.

A Tate spokesman said:

We are taking this time to consult internally and externally on the future of the room and the mural, and we will keep the public informed of future plans. The external consultation is expected to be launched early in the new year.

One of the most hotly anticipated blockbuster exhibitions on the art world's horizon has been pushed back after organizers raised concerns over images evoking racist violence in certain works. After its original planned summer opening was delayed until 2021 because of the pandemic, a high-profile Philip Guston retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston has now been put on hold for four years.

A joint statement signed by directors of all four museums said the exhibition was being pushed until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted:

We recognize that the world we live in is very different from the one in which we first began to collaborate on this project five years ago. The racial justice movement that started in the U.S. and radiated to countries around the world, in addition to challenges of a global health crisis, have led us to pause.

Organizers raised concerns over painful imagery including the recurring Ku Klux Klan characters that appear in Guston's late-period works. Twenty-five such drawings and paintings featuring KKK imagery were to be included in one or more iterations of the show.

 

Update: Opposition

28th September 2020. See article from news.artnet.com

The postponement has been met with opposition from Musa Mayer, the artist's daughter and head of the Guston Foundation. Mayer said in a statement:

Half a century ago, my father made a body of work that shocked the art world. Not only had he violated the canon of what a noted abstract artist should be painting at a time of particularly doctrinaire art criticism, but he dared to hold up a mirror to white America, exposing the banality of evil and the systemic racism we are still struggling to confront today.

They plan, they plot, they ride around in cars smoking cigars. We never see their acts of hatred. We never know what is in their minds. But it is clear that they are us. Our denial, our concealment. My father dared to unveil white culpability, our shared role in allowing the racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood, when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles.

The art historian and curator Darby English told the New York Times that the decision to postpone the show was cowardly and patronizing, an insult to art and the public alike:

Guston's paintings were thoughtfully created in identification with history's victims, English said, adding that it should be part of one's attitude to see them as opportunities to think, to improve thinking, to sharpen perception, to talk to one another, and not to grimly proceed with one's head in the sand, avoiding difficult conversations because you think the timing is bad.

A group of Thai academics and experts told a Parliament committee that crackdowns on arts deemed inappropriate to Buddhism is a danger to Thailand's creativity.

In a meeting with the House Committee of Religions, Arts and Culture, Chulalongkorn University political scientist Bundit Chanrochanakit and fellow panelists advised the government to back off from regulating artistic expression. The meeting was held in the wake of a recent order to erase a temple mural denounced by local officials as blasphemy.

Bundit  pointed to the pressure to remove mural figures at a temple in Uthai Thani that appears to show Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha and his deputy, Prawit Wongsuwan, drowning with demons who attempted to stop Lord Buddha from attaining enlightenment.

The figures were eventually painted over after local officials paid a visit and demanded the censorship.

Bundit cited another case of controversy over artists' interpretation of religious topics: the Ultraman Buddha painting by an art student in September. The artist was forced to apologize after hardline Buddhist officials accused her of disrespect to their religion by depicting Buddha as a Japanese superhero, Ultraman.

Copenhagen's iconic The Little Mermaid statue in was vandalised on Friday but police and commentators were mystified about the slogan daubed on the rock. An unknown person has scrawled the words 'Racist Fish' on it.

According to police other statues around Copenhagen have also been vandalised with various phrases. Police also said that on June 16, someone had written racist on a statue of Danish King Christian IV, who ruled between 1588 and 1648.

BLM protests have prompted Edinburgh Council to reconsider censoring an Alice Wonderland school mural that features a golliwog.

The council says it will review a 2013 decision to leave depiction at Wardie primary school intact The mural painted in 1936 depicts Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which makes no mention of a golliwog . The council refused to remove the image at Wardie primary school in the north of the city in 2013 after a parent complained to the police that it was racist and offensive. lt said the depiction was a historical artefact within a mural of significant artistic importance.

The city's education convener, Ian Perry, and the vice-convener, Alison Dickie, said the council accepted its original position that keeping it would prompt critical discussion of racism and past attitudes should be revisited.

Rowena Arshad, the co-director of the centre for education for racial equality in Scotland at Edinburgh University, claimed the Wardie mural was an anachronism and should be removed.

If we want to talk about the golliwog in history, it belongs in the Museum of Childhood [in central Edinburgh], anti-racist teaching packs and television programmes, not a primary school, she said.

The city is considering censoring sites that honour people linked to slavery, particularly Henry Dundas, Lord Melville, who delayed the abolition of the UK's slave trade. A plaque setting out his role is to be placed under his monument in central Edinburgh.

A Chinese Consulate put pressure on Belfast Council to remove an image of Tiananmen Square from a public art exhibition.

A photo from the Double Take exhibition, by Zurich-based artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger, displayed images of Airfix like model kits recreating globally significant events. In this case depicting an iconic image of a lone protester in front of a convoy of military tanks in Beijing.

The photograph was not removed, although it is understood the exhibition was scheduled to end a short time after the matter was raised. A council spokesman said:

We received a complaint in June 2019 in relation to a photograph in the Double Take exhibition, part of the Belfast Photographic Festival, on the front lawns of Belfast City Hall. The photograph was not removed.

Amnesty International's Northern Ireland programme director Patrick Corrigan said:

It is outrageous that the Chinese Consulate apparently sought to have the photograph, commemorating the brave students of 1989, removed from the grounds of Belfast City Hall. The state censorship of Beijing cannot be extended to Belfast.

It came as little surprise to Kuwaiti artist Shurooq Amin that her latest exhibition was shut down by the authorities just a week after it opened. Her work has always sparked controversy.

Amin's most recent defiant display, Like Russian Dolls We Nest in Previous Selves , opened on 8 January. It was planned to run for a month at the Contemporary Art Platform (CAP). But a week after opening, the exhibition was dramatically shut down and her work ordered to be removed.

Though authorities released no official statement , the gallery said they were told they hadn't obtained a prior licence from the concerned authorities and that there were claims that the exhibition contained elements in violation of the publishing law of the Ministry of Information.

In Like Russian Dolls We Nest in Previous Selves , a set of portraits show women sitting on thrones, some in revealing clothing and languid poses with bottles of what appears to be alcohol.

In the main gallery space, mannequins were positioned to look like visitors viewing the artwork. In a country where alcohol is illegal, the bottles might be controversial enough. But the conservatively veiled mannequins looking at the portraits of the scantily clad women may also have provoked debate.