If you have the uncanny feeling of being watched as you go around Hew Locke’s exhibition at the British Museum, it’s because you are. Standing sentinel above the display cabinets are figures in hats and headdresses, masks and elaborate costume, keeping lookout from eyeless skulls.
I was there before the official opening, on my own except for a couple of handymen and a press officer, and the “watchers” gave me the heebie-jeebies. They are supposed to. This is an exhibition that doesn’t so much prick the conscience as pummel it.
The British Museum, along with other “world museums”, has taken a battering in recent years. All that loot, those spoils, those ill-gotten gains. The artist Locke, born in Scotland and brought up in Guyana in the years after it gained independence, has raided the British Museum stores to assemble a dossier of imperial misdemeanours. In the circular exhibition space above the Reading Room, he has made a wound-baring Wunderkammer of artefacts that illuminate the darkest parts of our past.
I don’t know whether to call it strictly an exhibition. Like Pio Abad’s Ashmolean show last year, now shortlisted for the Turner Prize, Locke’s what have we here? is a sort of illustrated academic symposium. I usually rail against the gallery caption habit — all reading, no looking — but the captions here are the point. Each object, print and painting comes with a curatorial label and an expository Post-It from Locke.
In a video at the entrance Locke sets out his stall. He wants us to think about “issues of empire, issues of messy histories’’. The show “is about debate, it’s about in-depth dialogue. Let’s have a conversation, but let’s have a conversation where we’re facing up to stuff properly.”
But it’s not a debate or a dialogue, really. It’s a closing statement from the prosecution. We see the British Empire at its worst, at its most murderous, rapacious, cruel and inhuman. I do not defend any of the actions or campaigns spotlighted by this show. The mass slaughter of Tibetans, the trade and transport of slaves, the plunder and appropriation of treasures all appall.
Presenting the odd positive, however, wouldn’t diminish the case but strengthen it. You would not feel so lent on. Surely the British Empire brought something, anything good to at least one of its colonies?
Locke has described his interventions in the past as “mindful vandalism” and his updates and takeovers are among the best things in the show. I wanted more of Locke’s art, his eye for embellishment, his gift for ghostly beauty and historical bling, and less of his lessons.
His three busts of Queen Victoria, Prince Albert Edward and Princess Alexandra, weighed down with coins, medals, trinkets and other gilded idiocies send up the pomp and propaganda of the empire more effectively than the captions. His crewless, skeletal galleons are more haunting than potted histories of the slave trade and its abolition.
The good ship British Museum, captained by Locke, has faced up to its past with creativity and flair, but it’s hard to recommend with pleasure a show that leaves you feeling so royally scolded.