Crowning Folly

What is this obsession that certain foreign curators have with forever linking the work of British artists to assorted notions of imperial royalty? A couple of years ago, in 1997, a US-based curator put together a large-scale exhibition of British-based black artists’ work, split across several venues in New York and called it ‘Transforming the Crown’  (see AM214). The message was clear: the presence and activity of these artists (and the communities that produced them) were transforming the nature of the monarchic realm.

But the ‘Crown’ connection did not just afflict artists of duskier hues: also in 1997, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, hosted ‘Pictura Britannica’, an exhibition of work by bright young things from Britain (see AM211). I had assumed that the use of such imperialistic-sounding words – strongly reminiscent of such archaisms as His/Her Britannic Majesty – had by and large dies out. But here the word ‘Britannica’ was being used to categorise and introduce British-based artists whose work gravitated about as far away as it was possible to get from anything to do with an imperial, omnipresent monarchy…

…As if this was not bad enough, recently British artists had to endure what is perhaps the biggest insult of all – an exhibition of work by artists from a range of Asian backgrounds called ‘Crown Jewels’. The exhibition (NGBK, Berlin February 5 – March 12) featured the work of a group of (for the most part) widely-shown practitioners. Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Mohini Chandra, Sunil Gupta, Addela Khan, Shaheen Merali, Samena Rana and Shez 360. Were these artists white, the exhibition title would be no more than a minor irritation. But ‘Crown Jewels’ is delineated clearly and precisely along the lines of the artists’ supposed Indian or Pakistani identity, thus rendering the exhibition title a monumental slap in the face and an undisguised and nostalgic thowback to arguably one of the worst phases of British history – the days of empire…

The above extracts are from a text by Eddie Chambers, "Crowning Folly”, Art Monthly, London, Number 236, May 2000: 54-55