Exhibition’s ‘cakeism’ Measured response to mural lets Tate keep work on show while assuaging critics
In 1927, when a refurbished restaurant opened at the Tate Gallery, decorated with a 55ft-long mural by the British artist Rex Whistler, it was described as “the most amusing room in Europe”. Now? Four years after the restaurant closed, following a furore over racist imagery, the atmosphere in the space where the mural remains – accompanied by a well-meaning but clunky film installation by Keith Piper addressing its moral failings – is no longer jolly but admonishing.
Viva Voce, as Piper’s 21-minutelong film is titled, is presented on two screens arranged diagonally across the middle of what was Tate’s chic eatery – now empty, except for a horseshoe-shaped bar at one end and leather banquettes that still line the room’s perimeter.
The mural itself remains on view, although the lighting is so low you need a torch to inspect any element other than its (mostly blank, sky-filled) upper section, including those details – stereotypical depictions of Chinese characters; an enslaved black boy led on a lead by the work’s white protagonists – that went unnoticed for the best part of a century.
In the film, a Socratic-dialogue-style two-hander with the feel of a courtroom drama, a prosecutorial professor, played by Ellen O’grady, grills Ian Pink’s Whistler, who, with his stiff quiff and checked shirt, looks more like a rockabilly enthusiast than one of the Roaring Twenties’ Bright Young Things.
The viewer learns a great deal about the mural’s backstory – in the plodding fashion of a BBC dramadocumentary about a work of art. In a section about his influences, Whistler whips out postcards of paintings by the likes of Giorgione, Poussin, and Fragonard – one of the oldest tricks in the book. As a result – and this is to Tate’s credit – Viva Voce is essentially a film version of Oliver Dowden’s “retain-and-explain” policy vis-à-vis art that may offend contemporary taste.
I wish, though, that Piper had been more imaginative in his characterisation of Whistler, who comes across as an entitled, fatuous – and, eventually, ashamed – twerp; for all its ostensible even-handedness, Viva Voce is, perhaps inevitably, rather one-sided.
While the mural’s enchanting escapism – following the First World War – is acknowledged, there’s little sense of artistic irony or nuance, and Piper does not dwell on those caricatures or other moments of darkness within the mural, such as the flailing hands of a drowning child.
Still, Viva Voce is temporary: there will be other commissions in response. And by commissioning such a measured response from a black British artist to a work of art it cannot remove, Tate pulls off an act of “cakeism”: the mural survives, while hostility towards it will be, for now, assuaged. Alastair Sooke