An artist’s response to a racist mural walks a fine line

For almost 100 years, a 17.5 meter long mural provided the backdrop to a high-end restaurant at Tate Britain. While the guests drank good wine and ate expensive dishes, they could glance at Rex Whistler’s painting, which depicted a hunting party through a fantastic landscape.

Few visitors to London’s art museum seemed to notice two small parts of Whistler’s scene, each spanning just a few inches: one shows a white woman, dressed in a flowing dress and hat, dragging a black boy by a rope, while the boy is unclothed. , terrified mother watches from a tree; the other shows the same boy chained to a collar, running behind a cart.

It wasn’t until 2020, following the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, that anti-racism activists highlighted these sections on social media and demanded the mural’s removal. Soon, Tate closed the restaurant and administrators began to worry about what to do with the painting, titled “The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats.”

Their solution went on display on Tuesday when Tate Britain reopened the ornate room containing the work. Instead of dinners, the mural now surrounds a large video work by the black British artist Keith Piper which aims to highlight and explain Whistler’s racist images. Chloe Hodge, the exhibition’s curator, said Piper’s work would be on display for about a year.

With this new presentation, Tate Britain seeks to balance the demands of activists, who want offensive works of art to be removed from view, and conservative politicians and art lovers, many of whom want museums to avoid any hint of ‘woke’ attitudes. But by taking a middle ground between these positions, Piper said, he knew he and the museum could irritate both sides.

“A lot of people said this is a poisoned chalice,” Piper said.

Piper’s 22-minute dual-screen film, called “Vice Voce” after the Latin name used for oral exams at universities in Britain, dramatizes an imaginary conversation between Whistler (played by Ian Pink) and a university lecturer (Ellen O’Grady). In the first half of the film, the academic Whistler asks questions about the history of the mural, which the artist completed in 1927. The mood suddenly changes when she points out Whistler’s image of the black mother hiding in a tree.

“Who is this?” the teacher asks. “Oh, just a little humor,” Whistler replies.

The teacher has more questions for Whistler: about the racist depictions of black people in other works of art he made, and about the treatment of ethnic minorities in 1920s Britain.

In the video, Whistler is confused by the question. “This is all getting rather distasteful,” he says: “I thought you wanted to talk about my work.”

In Britain, discussions surrounding problematic works of art have focused less on an artist’s motivations and social influences, and more on whether a sculpture or painting should be exhibited at all. But the Whistler mural, which is painted directly onto the museum walls, is protected by British heritage laws, meaning Tate Britain cannot easily remove or change it even if administrators wanted to. And last year the British Conservative government published guidelines said museums should ‘preserve and explain’ problematic images or works of art that are part of a building.

Still, some art critics and members of Tate’s own young and diverse staff urged the museum to hide the mural behind a screen.

Hodge, the curator, said she chose Piper to respond to Whistler’s mural because she felt he would be “deeply involved” with the original painting and not produce “something reactionary.” She added that she expected the work to divide opinion. “We can’t commission work that will do everything for everyone,” said Hodge: “This is ultimately Keith’s own artistic response.”

Piper – founder of the Blk Art Group, a collective of black artists founded in England in the 1980s – has been exploring issues of racism and slavery in his art for decades. In his 1996 video work “Go west, young man”, a father and son discuss racist stereotypes; “The Codex of the Colored,” a faux-historical artifact Piper created in 2017, contains pots of black, brown, and cream paint to represent the ways plantation owners classified and controlled enslaved people.

Zehra Jumabhoy, a lecturer in art history at the University of Bristol, said she was surprised when Tate Britain chose Piper for the commission because “his early work was so angry”. If the museum had wanted to avoid the tensions surrounding the mural, there were safer options, she added.

Still, Piper was the obvious choice for some artists. Hew Locke, the prominent Guyanese British artist, said Piper’s art had the courage, historical accuracy and occasional wit required for the high-profile commission. Piper was “his own man,” Locke said, and wasn’t out to please anyone but himself.

In an interview in the cafe at Tate Britain, Piper said he had never eaten in the restaurant space where his work is now on display: “It was too expensive!” he said – and so had not seen the mural before the commotion.

But he wasn’t shocked to hear that racist images were hanging on the walls of Tate Britain, he said – such stereotypical figures were once commonplace in British art. What had surprised him, however, was how long it took for the museum to do something about the mural. While delving into the institute’s archives, Piper said, he found letters from visitors from the 1970s complaining about the painting.

While the way Whistler had portrayed black people was unacceptable, Piper said, he disagreed with those who had urged Tate Britain to remove the mural or hide it behind a screen. “My argument is that by going against it, it becomes an important witness to history, and by going against it, we learn things and hear things that we may not have heard before,” he said. “That is the important role of the arts and museums.”

After the interview, Piper walked into Tate Britain’s newest gallery to do a final check on ‘Vice Voce’. He chatted briefly with Hodge, who said some other Tate Britain staff had come by to view the piece. While they liked it, they said, some expected the film to “condemn Rex Whistler more.”

Piper looked surprised. “Isn’t it judgmental?” he asked.

Hodge paused. “Well,” she said, “there are always two sides.”