This autumn Tate Britain in London presents a major exhibition of art associated with the British Empire from the 16th century to the present day.
In 21st century Britain, ‘empire’ is highly provocative. Its histories of war, conquest and slavery are difficult and painful to address but its legacy is everywhere and affects us all. Artist and Empire will bring together extraordinary and unexpected works to explore how artists from Britain and around the world have responded to the dramas, tragedies and experiences of the Empire.
Featuring a vast array of objects from collections across Britain, including maps, flags, paintings, photographs, sculptures and artefacts, the exhibition examines how the histories of the British Empire have shaped art past and present. Contemporary works within the exhibition suggest that the ramifications of the Empire are far from over.
The show raises questions about ownership, authorship and how the value and meanings of these diverse objects have changed through history, it also asks what they still mean to us today.
Included in the exhibition are two etchings from a series of 12 which narrate the story of the famous bronze sculptures taken from Benin in West Africa as part of British colonial booty by the Filecchio artist, Tony Philipps.
The first etching represents the brutal intervention of a punitive raid (1898) when ceremonial bronze heads were captured. The second shows one of the heads on show in a glass case museum display.
The sequence as a whole is commentary on the ironies behind colonial acquisitions from ‘primitive’ peoples, their subsequent exposure as revered works of art, and the fate of all artworks in general upon leaving the context within which they were created.
It was the first time that he has used the sequential reworking of the same etching plate to show the transformation through time of a single image. The image above is of a painting with the same name ‘Face to Face’ based on the same subject.
The series Anatomy of London comes to an end next year with a show at the Guildhall Library in July (see above image – St.James’s – pen-and-wash)
The project England – Heritage & Contemporary Life continues with a show in Manchester in September (above image -Haywain IV pen-and-wash )
Tony Phillips’ print series The History of the Benin Bronzes pictures how these culturally specific and internationally important sculptures were looted by the British army and then venerated by the bourgeoisie of Western imperialist countries as objects of great beauty and highly advanced craftsmanship. During the same period the European states and their agents considered the subjugated African peoples as ‘primitive’, uncivilized, and worthy only of the enforced imposition of Western standards and ways of life. This is a sad reflection on the nature of imperialism and on human interaction: that the reality of brutal repression and suffering can be discounted, while artefacts acquired as a result of this brutality can be aesthetically admired.
Tony Phillips eloquently states that the journey of the Benin bronzes parodies the artistic process itself, in which the artwork, once it leaves the hands of the artist must make its own way in the world, become subject to the misinterpretations, prejudices and changing contexts of human circumstances, and hope to still have a message to convey wherever it ends up. In his skilful refiguring of this narrative, Phillips has been able to extend the story further, to show how the damage caused by the removal of enslaved Africans to foreign lands, has led to misinterpretation, prejudice and confusion. The History of the Benin Bronzes print series provides a contemporary context that helps to visualise the detrimental effects of the colonial legacy and the African Holocaust that was the slave trade. – Kevin Dalton-Johnson
Tony Phillips is a black artist born in Liverpool in 1952. He studied mural painting at Lancaster Art College, graduating in 1972. He remained in Lancaster until 1977, working as an artist involved in street theatre, community work and social activism.
In 1977 Phillips made the decision to move closer to London, and relocated to Shrewsbury, where he remained until 2001, before moving to Italy. Tony Phillips was involved in the seminal exhibitions Black Art: Plotting the Course, (1988) and History of Identity (1991) both curated by Eddie Chambers, who worked tirelessly to widen the spectrum of black artistic practice. Phillips contributed his most ambitious works to these exhibitions and this work resonated with Eddie Chambers’ Pan-Africanist sensibility and wit.
Tony Phillips’ work has explored themes of consumerism, capitalism, the dislocation of the human from nature, the nude, history, the passage of time and the visual, the role of the individual in society, and painted and printed images of Liverpool. He has worked to develop and define his own visual language in printmaking. His print series have often had a strong narrative theme. Usually he creates the first image and then prints the whole edition of impressions from this plate before moving on to the next image. The same plate is then used to form another image from either later or earlier in the narrative sequence, with some area of the first image on the plate left unchanged, some altered, and some obliterated entirely. Tony Phillips has made many series of prints in this way, including Jazz, Guide to the 20th Century and The History of the Benin Bronzes. This device works perfectly to illustrate the theme of diasporic displacement and the difficult and fragmentary process of recovering black cultural history.
The thematic richness of this approach to making a series of prints, combined with the powerful subject matter, was what attracted me to The History of the Benin Bronzes. When I first saw the series the narrative pulled me in immediately and demanded my attention, as it was so closely related to my own interests and research. I also felt that these prints constituted a crucial repository of images representing the Benin past, and an argument for returning the bronzes to Benin. On closer inspection, it became apparent to me that the artist had used the same plate to create more than one image in the story, which led me to believe that there was more to the print series than was apparent from simply understanding the narrated sequence of events.
The second half of The History of the Benin Bronzes presents a narrative of violence, hypocrisy and the ironies of cultural identity, through picturing events surrounding the British Punitive Expedition into Benin in 1897, which resulted in the sacking and burning of the city, the looting of thousands of bronze and wooden artefacts, and the sending into exile of the Oba (the spiritual and political leader) of the city. The series of prints then ends by showing the dispersal of the Benin sculptures around the Western world, ending up in various auction houses, galleries and museums, the academic lecture theatre and the private lounge, where they are discussed and admired.
When the Benin sculptures were brought to the West, they were widely seen as some of the greatest examples of bronze casting in existence, and as important works of art that helped to define the Western taste for what were seen as a ‘primitive’ black aesthetic. However, their original function was far more important than just providing a visual confirmation of entrenched British and Continental European colonial ideologies. These sculptures were integral to the beliefs and customs of Benin civilization.
The first five prints of the sequence were created late in the production process of the series, from plates used previously to make the images showing the bronzes in Western contexts. These images show the bronzes intact in their original contexts in Benin society, where they performed a complex variety of functions: – as religious objects involved in ritual sacrifice, ancestral worship, and dance; as magnificent symbols of the power and the strength of the Oba and the people of Benin, warding off evil spirits and the challenges of neighbouring communities; and as decorative objects enhancing the beauty of the Oba’s Palace. The details of these lost functions and lost social contexts, were imaginatively redrawn and reconstructed by Tony Phillips in the process of reusing the plates and making the prints; a process that was at the same time an attempt to recover important contexts in black history, disrupted by the expansion of the British empire into Benin in 1897.
