October 2, 2019 – April 5, 2020
Bankside, London SE1 9TG
tate.org.uk

American exceptionalism is a very real phenomenon, but it far too often obscures a British exceptionalism and a very British obliviousness to history. Whereas America is notorious around the world for its geography skills, that antagonism of history – crystallised through the struggles for civil rights – has long been in the public consciousness, however unwelcome it might be. Few people in Britain are so keenly aware of their own country’s actions, of Oliver Cromwell’s massacres in Ireland (in Britain he’s instead remembered for banning mince pies), of the East India Company, of the Opium Wars, of dividing and redividing the world according to its designs. 

Entering Tate Modern and being greeted, in the distance, by Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) – the 2019 Hyundai Commission for the Hall – is almost overwhelming. In the Turbine Hall you’re first met with Shell Grotto (2019), a large, water-borne shell, reminiscent of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1486), standing at the front of the Hall. But the goddess herself is absent, and instead a young boy’s head is overcome by waves at the shell’s bottom as he gazes into the sky; instead of the contained swirl of water that circles the shell and the feet of Venus in Botticelli’s painting, there is a boy drowning with tears running down his face.

Venus, absent from her stage, is at the head of Fons Americanus itself, at the back of the Turbine Hall. Whereas on top of the Victoria Memorial, which informed Walker’s piece, is a gilded personification of victory, wings and all, above a seated statue of Victoria herself flanked by truth and justice, here Venus is throwing back her arms and baring her breasts as water flows from them as easily as from her neck – downward past a caricature of Victoria flanked by a hanging tree, a ship’s captain, and a slaver. As a gift “to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world,” the didactic accompanying the 42-foot-tall statue reads, it not only “redirected the fates of the world” but also sharks’ migratory patterns to follow the British slave ships of the Middle Passage. 

“This is a piece about the oceans and seas, traversed fatally,” says Walker in her profile for the Tate, as an allegory of the Black Atlantic. And so, in the first of the two pools at the bottom of the fountain beneath Victoria and the slavers, instead of the proud bows of ships at the base of the Victoria Memorial we see sharks encircling slaves as they struggle to stay afloat. 

The lowest level of the fountain is sparser, with fewer figures. Here the sculptures are more expressionistic, with one figure resembling a Kathe Kollwitz woodcutting through its distress and mournfulness; another has a face that mirrors the anguish of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), as it’s hounded and harassed by a figure with a haircut suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s. But Trump is only a small part of the fountain, as much as he is a small part of US and British imperialism.

Rianna Jade Parker, writing in ARTnews, is right in asking whether British artists would be commissioned on such a project, and be given the same resources and international stage that is granted to an American artist here – recalling that Boris Johnson’s promise in 2008 for a bronze statue memorializing the victims of British slavery went unfulfilled. Would another work by a British artist be more nuanced than Walker’s Fons Americanus, she asks, highlighting Walker’s misunderstanding of British history when Walker says slavery never happened on British soil – even failing to recognize the Tate’s own foundations that were built on slavery, and so failing to meet the criteria of the Hyundai commission that is to create a site-specific work for the Tate’s Turbine Hall. Had a British artist been commissioned to undertake this project, Parker writes, it would have been an opportunity to build and publicize a British discourse around race and slavery that is distinct from the American experience. But Walker herself deserves more credit.

Rather than an “an unnuanced portrayal of a subject Walker doesn’t know enough about,” as Parker claims, Walker recognizes the function of monuments and memorials beyond their official purpose. In discussing the forgettability of monuments, Walker describes first seeing the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace on her way to the airport, taking photographs in passing, and then promptly forgetting about it. “There’s this very peculiar quality that they have of being completely invisible,” she tells the Tate in a promotional video. “The larger they are, in fact, the more they sink into the background.”

And so Walker’s monument, contrary to Parker’s claim, does “what any good statue should – deal with its site and the context surrounding it.” Rather than adding another monument into the public that sits beside those like the Victoria Memorial, Nelson’s Column, or the Diana Memorial Fountain, any monument sanctioned by a British government that is headed by a notorious racist and which still fails to address basic inequality would have rung hollow. And so this is not a “counter” memorial but a negative memorial, a memorial to that failure and unfulfilled promise. When Parker “wonders whether a more introspective version of the monument was possible – and whether Walker was the right person for the job at all,” this refusal to have another memorial sit alongside them is this introspection. 

Walker’s monument then isn’t one that demands that it’s understood, but recognizes – however unjustly – its place in the British psyche. Slavery is thought as a purely American phenomenon that sullies that nation’s history, and which the US must still contend with. Britain instead celebrates its having ended slavery sooner than the US, without, of course, acknowledging its pivotal role in the American slave trade in the first place – and not to mention that its ships were still transporting slaves even after slavery itself was made illegal. It’s seen as an exclusively American problem; a novelty import from America that sits beside all its other cultural artefacts that gives us films about slavery as readily as Mad Men (2007–2015).  

Fons Americanus is a monument against this novelty of the British attitude towards slavery, that recognizes the intransigence of many of its viewers and the history of the country it exists in, presenting, as the didactic reads, “the Citizens of the Old World” and “The Monumental Misrememberings Of Colonial Exploits” in a way that putting a traditional monument a mile down the road from the Victoria Memorial could never achieve.

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This review, by a new contributor at artcritical, is published on the 50th anniversary of the death of Adorno, August 6, 2019

Academic, stuffy, German – Theodor W. Adorno has become emblematic of a certain sense of unfeeling in art. He was critical of TV, partial to Schoenberg, and aggrieved by the crassness of life in exile in 1940s America. Some of his students, infatuated with the youthful spontaneity of 1968, supposed that Adorno represented the old institutions that continued into post-war Europe, seeing his criticisms of mass culture being ‘pre-digested’ as identical to the conservative dismissal of contemporary art, culture, and even values. Determined to take action, they scrawled ‘If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease’ on the blackboard. Three of them surrounded him and exposed their breasts as others handed out leaflets proclaiming, ‘Adorno as an institution is dead.’ Adorno would confide in Max Horkheimer, writing: ‘To have picked me of all people, I who have always spoken out against every type of erotic repression and sexual taboo!’

It is here, then, that we arrive at Aesthetics, a book that immediately appears to confirm this suspicion of conservatism; with lectures on Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics, the enlightenment, Bach, beauty, ‘sensual immediacy’, Jugendstil, they hardly relay the sense of urgency felt in Europe in 1968. Published as part of a series of Adorno’s lectures ranging from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to topics as broad as metaphysics or history and freedom, Aesthetics works both as an introduction to his final work, Aesthetic Theory, and an exhaustive look at aesthetics itself. But to make the assumption that these lectures on aesthetics or any other book in this series are conservative in their approach would be to make the same mistake as those students, who praised youthfulness and energy above everything.

One of the first points that Adorno stresses is that art criticism is not confined to the history of art. It is not something that is exclusive to the classics but must necessarily come up against the most contemporary artwork. Adorno is then able to discern antagonisms crucial to art beyond movements themselves in ways that surpass writers like John Berger who came after him. For while Berger looks at art’s necessary social content, Adorno is able to recognise not only the social content of art but its historical content and ideals – whether through the technique of its form or its rebellious spirit – and tie this to the contradictions internal to art as that which is necessarily excluded from it.

Recognizing that classical sculpture ‘showed no trace whatsoever’ of this exclusion, however, one student questioned whether this was the case for all forms of art. But this exclusion should not be taken as a literal and material exclusion. ‘This aspect can potentially lie in the principles of artistic design. […] [I]t may even crawl away and entrench itself behind the choice of any objects at all.’ Classical sculpture, as an art form that ‘flourished in the classical Athenian city-state, connected the urban citizens to the extent that it incorporated, one could say, the protest against the harming of the human body within the civil process of life. It is certainly true that the free citizens of Athens at that time did not perform manual labour themselves, and that they consequently remained free of the bodily deformations that the work process so easily inflicts on other humans.’ Art in Hellenistic society was informed by the ideal of the human body and its form in its essential embodiments – the form of the athlete in Discolobus, or beauty in Venus de’ Medici – but this ideal necessarily excludes the foundation of Athenian society as a slave society. Embodied in its art was the contradiction between that ideal and the material it necessarily obscured to achieve that form, and so the concrete form itself becomes mediated by this exclusion.

And so, while Berger can lament Jean-François Millet’s peasants as an overlooked subject in European art history, Adorno is able to relate art to its totality; its colour, its subject, object, composition, not as a mechanical application of the golden mean, not as subject to rationality but a rationality itself that nevertheless relates to what is external to it. ‘[A]nd the relationship between these … aspects keep changing at every stage of art history.’ Aesthetics demonstrates Adorno’s approach to form and social content that separates him from other critics, historians, and philosophers, providing an essential framework to understand art in its development from classical to modern art. This is felt most keenly when discussing the fact that art’s fate is not sealed through rebuttals but a ‘strange antiquation’, or the injustice of rendering the horrors of the Third Reich in a crude mimetic conception of art. Soon, any resemblance to the repressive institutions of post-war Europe is exposed as merely a passing one.

Theodore W. Adorno, Aesthetics. [Translation of Ästhetic (1958/50).] , Eberhard Ortland (Editor), Wieland Hoban (Translator).  Polity Press, ISBN 9780745679402. $69.95hb; $28.95, pb; $15.19 Kindle edition.

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