Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 375
G C ARTIST’S ARTICLE L R O O B S A S L I Uncomfortable Proximity: The Tate N G Invites Mongrel to Hack the Tate’s S Own Web Site
Graham Harwood
with a Commentary ABSTRACT by Matthew Fuller Uncomfortable Proximity is a critical web hack of the Tate Gallery’s web site, created by Graham Harwood, a member of the Mongrel collective. Commis- hen asked by Matthew Gansallo of the Tate The Tate’s scrapbook of British W sioned by Tate National Pro- Gallery (London) [1] to create the on-line project Uncom- pictorial history has many missing grammes, it mirrors the Tate’s fortable Proximity—a critical web hack of the Tate Gallery’s own pages, either torn out through re- own web site, but offers new site, drawn from the perspective of one of the prisoners buried vision or self-censored before the images and ideas, collaged from beneath the floor of the building—I found myself awkwardly first sketch. Those pages that sur- Harwood’s own experiences, his readings of Tate works and situated by my admiration for parts of the Tate collection and vived created the cultural cosmetics publicity materials and his my equal disdain for the social values that framed the creation of people profiting from slavery, mi- interest in the Tate Britain site. A of much of its art and of the collection itself. I felt nervous grant labor, colonization and trans- related critical text by Matthew about having to produce an on-line work from scratch in a portation. Clearly the images in the Fuller provides wider cultural context. month, and about tinkering with the bric-a-brac of the colo- historic collection and the image of nial masters in the U.K. It’s easy to wave a bit of shit on a stick the Tate itself are marked by the and carry it up the stairs until someone sniffs it. But there is past’s cultural cosmetic surgery, little or no point to this strategy, other than self-gain and no- made ready for the shoppers of the future. The skin of these toriety, which I find of little interest. I hoped the Tate would paintings is stretched over a psychological frame, a shield embrace this work as a legitimate counterpoint to some of its against which are thrown the filthy, diseased, rotting corpses own agendas and maintain the momentum for the glasnost of of daily life, profit and excess. The scrapbook’s excised pages the collection. will never be found, but their absence articulates the political Creating this web site forced me into an uncomfortable and economic relations of that society and of ours. While the proximity with the economic and social elites’ use of aesthet- Tate can never be fully inclusive of peoples’ histories that may ics in their ascendancy to power, and forced me as well to as- have run counter to its own, it can at least be a site of critical sess what this means for my own work on the Internet. I was participation in the present history of the cultural cosmetics delighted, of course, with the creative power and imagination of these islands. of the artists represented in the collection, enjoying the in- From adolescence I had visited the Tate, read the art books formation contained in the works, whether that be the aes- and generally pulled a forelock in the direction of the cult of thetic formalism, mathematical structures of perception, raw genius, on cue relegating my own creativity to the Victorian emotion, opto-chemical reactions of light across time or the image of the rabid dog. We know well enough that this was social history they contain. But when I stepped out of the tem- ple and smelled the filth of the Thames, overshadowed by the Tate, I was reminded that, down there—in the silt, under the Fig. 1. Turner, Mud Slime from the Thames and Scabs, 1840–2000, stones, beneath the floor—lay the true costs of such a delight. digital image, 2000. (© Graham Harwood) The tragedy of any social elite’s possession of public creativity and imagination has led me to try and trace at least two threads of this elite’s ascendancy in present history. The first involves mapping the rituals of tastefulness: the distance it creates from the uninspired Victorian mob, the language and manners of the tasteful, and the inherent hypocrisy that this implies. The second centers on the histories of different people: my friends and family, either ascendant, static or uncounted, who recog- nize themselves in terms of that tastefulness, or in reaction to it, and act accordingly.
Graham Harwood (artist), Society for Old and New Media, DeWaag, Nieuwmarket 4, 1012, CR Amsterdam, the Netherlands. E-mail:
© 2003 ISAST LEONARDO, Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 375–380, 2003 375
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 376
G C L R O O how it was supposed to be. The historical 1779 the government introduced an act Convicts were stripped, shaven and sen- B S literature on “rational recreations” states that created a new form of hard labor for tenced to penal servitude—not impris- A S L I that, in reforming opinion, museums prisoners in the hulks. It commenced onment—and spent the first 9 months of N G were envisaged as a means of exposing with the dredging of the river Thames— their sentences in solitary confinement. S the working classes to the improving a profitable precursor to expanding Before the birth of the prisons, punish- mental influence of middle-class culture. trade with the colonies—and made pro- ment was an open display of power: I was being inoculated for the cultural vision for building Millbank Penitentiary, public executions, floggings, disembow- health of the nation. among other things. elments, etc. The worry of the time was I have tried in the images accompany- The penitentiary was the largest in Eu- that such overt displays had become a ing this text to play with the broken links rope. It became the 19th-century cesspit source of contention to the mob, and pub- within the Tate’s web site, grafting on the for containing the rowdiest of the politi- lic order was threatened in various ways. skins of people who are close to me, drag- cal mob. Henry James, who visited the Parliament, therefore, removed punish- ging parts of the collection through the prison in 1884, made use of his visit in his ment from the public gaze and shunted it mud of the Thames, and infecting some novel The Princess Casamassina (1886), in into prisons. Middle-class society increas- of it with a relevant disease (Fig. 1). which he has Miss Pynsent describe the ingly condemned the poor as products of Tate Britain stands on the site of the for- brown, bare, windowless walls, ugly, trun- their own low and immoral natures and, mer Millbank Penitentiary, incorporating cated pinnacles and a character un- in 1834, the Poor Law was introduced, in part of the prison within its own structure. speakably sad and stern. It looked very which Disraeli announced to the world Many of the inmates’ bodies remain ce- sinister and wicked, to Miss Pynsent’s “that in England poverty is a crime.” Other eyes, and she wondered why a prison mented into the foundations of the build- should have such an evil air if it was comments of the time condemned the ing. The drains that run from the building erected in the interest of justice and poor as a vast heap of social refuse, the to the Thames, a stone’s throw away, bleed order . . . it threw a blight on the face of “mere human street-sweepings” who this decay into the silt of the river. the day, making the river seem foul and “serve as manure to the future crime-crop By 1776, transportation to the New poisonous [2]. of the country.” The main view of the as- World had been interrupted by the As with today, there was considerable cendant middle class was that the poor ex- American War of Independence, and old delay in government building programs. isted beyond the farthest reaches of sailing ships known as hulks were Transportation to Australia, made pos- civilized, art-loving society and were an in- dragged up the Thames and stuffed with sible in 1787, began to relieve the pressure dolent, ignorant, degraded, criminalized up to 70,000 prisoners. This practice was on the stinking hulks. It was not until 1817 sub-race. These views were structured into an “expedient” that lasted until 1859. In that Millbank Penitentiary finally opened. science by, among others, John Beddoe, a future president of the Anthropological Fig. 2. Mervin and Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On: After Institute. Turner 1840–2000, digital image, 2000. (© Graham Harwood) A racial or quasi-racial view of the poor was not the only view of the time. Liber- als, believing in the “leveling-up” theory (that the laborer would emulate the ar- tisan), dwelt upon the possibility of teach- ing even the lowest the virtues and satisfactions of self-help. The liberal elite of the mid- and late 19th century put their faith in the new persuasive power of museums, among other things such as schools and public parks. The birth of museums became a complement to that of prisons. The museum then, as now, provided a mechanism for the transfor- mation of the crowd into an ordered and, ideally, self-regulating public. The dem- ocratic education of the mob was an attempt to make them addicted to Vic- torian aspirations to tastefulness. For the new social elite, sharing what had previ- ously been private, exposing what had been concealed, became a totem of pro- gressiveness. The Tate, with a more or less free ad- mission policy, surgically removed the decadence and tyranny before offering to the public the morsels of taste gener- ated under previous forms of social con- trol. The museum provided a solution to the social chaos of the street: a site where bodies, constantly under surveillance, could be rendered docile through expo- sure to Gainsborough, Turner (Fig. 2)
376 Graham Harwood with Matthew Fuller: Uncomfortable Proximity
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 377
G C L R Programmes O O Companies can gain access to special B S A S benefits through membership of the Tate L I N Gallery Corporate Membership Pro- G grammes at Tate Britain and Tate Liver- S pool, or the new Founder Corporate Partner programme for access to Tate Modern and Tate Britain.
TATE BRITAIN The home of 500 years of tasty babes, luxury goods, own goals and psychological props of the British social elite. Tate Britain is the national gallery of Fig. 3. Hogarth, My Dad, 1700–2000, digital image, 2000. (© Graham Harwood) British art from 1500 to the present day, from the Tudors to the Harwood De and Hogarth (Fig. 3), instead of the The Tate is always interested to discuss Mongrel Collection. Tate holds the great- jailer’s whip and bludgeon. If the prison in-kind as well as cash sponsorships. est collection of British art in the world. changed one through discipline and Corporate Donations Nationalistic sentiment has been a vital punishment, then the museum was a way force in the making of the Tate Gallery, Companies can support the Gallery’s to show and tell so that one might look many of the donors giving generously in work through gifts of cash and equipment and learn. Here, the purpose was not to the belief that they were contributing to or private collections. All donations are an aspect of the nation’s cultural life that know about people’s culture, but to ad- gratefully received and acknowledged in was available to all, and thus the nation’s dress people as the subjects of that cul- the formation of the British National health, owing to the vital connection be- ture; not to make the population visible tween art and society [3]. Taste. Gifts from companies can be made to power but to render power visible to through Gift Aid and deeds of covenant The construction of the British Na- the people and, at the same time, to rep- as well as the American Fund for the Tate. tional Collection at the Tate is much resent to them that power as if it were NOTE: At present there is no significant more than a simple pointer to the bio- their own. The museum became, and is shift in the global economy that would logical or cultural sameness of the na- still, a technical solution to the problem alter the policy of principally buying tion. It is a construction of the British of displaying wealth and power without NATO member countries’ art, with the social imagination, mapped onto geo- the attendant risks of social disorder. exception of Japan. graphical regions and increasingly tech- The following material is a sampling of the texts and images that appear within the on- line Mongrel Tate Collection, with some minor Fig. 4. Giovanna Baccelli and Genine’s Hair, Syphilis: After Thomas Gainsborough, 1700–2000, digital image, 2000. (© Graham Harwood) editing to prepare it for publication in Leonardo. —Ed.
CORPORATE INVOLVEMENT WITH THE TATE There are a variety of ways in which com- panies can develop a close involvement with the Tate and its activities and actively benefit from their association. These in- clude: Corporate Sponsorship Companies ranging from multinational corporations to small businesses have sponsored award-winning projects at the Tate. Benefits include high-profile public- ity and promotions, exclusive entertaining, and targeted customer and employee priv- ileges. Projects can range from the con- servation of a particular work of art in the Collection (e.g. British Petroleum’s spon- sorship of the year-long conservation of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Self Portrait When Young, which brought the corporation into direct contact with the codes and systems of ear- lier social elites) to major temporary ex- hibitions such as support of Bonnard by Ernst & Young. Programmes for sponsor- ship at Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives are also available at reduced rates.
Graham Harwood with Matthew Fuller: Uncomfortable Proximity 377
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 378
G C L R O O From Henry Tate’s convincing the B S Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harcourt, A S L I to help out with funds, to Charles N G Saatchi’s position as a patron and the S Saatchi brothers’ hand in the 1979 Thatcherite assent, to the hacking out of an industrial age monument reinvented with new money, displaying to all the City of London how good it has been, how rich it has become, how powerful it is . . . To inhabit the carcass of dead in- dustries is a powerful metaphor: not to sweep it away but to burrow into it, oc- cupy it, show power over the generation of power itself. There will also be a full range of spe- cial exhibitions and a broad public cor- porate programme of events throughout the year. Bankside Power Station has been trans- formed into Tate Modern by the Swiss ar- chitects Herzog & de Meuron. The former Turbine Hall, running the whole length of the vast building, now marks a breathtaking entrance to the gallery. From here visitors will be swept up by es- calator through two floors featuring a café, shop and auditorium to three lev- els of galleries. At the top of the building is a new two-story glass structure which not only provides natural light into the galleries on the top floors, but will also house a stunning café offering outstand- ing views across London. The Tate receives support from the British Government and relies on the pa- tronage of Plcs, of foundations, and of rich and poor individuals to fund the full range of its activities. Support may be given towards scholarship, conservation, education or exhibitions. In its early years, the elite’s bull-baiting pit was oc- cupied by Tate, the ascendant “sugar boiler,” and by the static old boys of the Royal Academy of Arts. Whilst the deter- mined bulldog grip of the Academy was Fig. 5. My Nipple and the Du Cane Boehm Family Group: After Gawen Hamilton, 1734–2000, strong, it eventually proved too slow to digital image, 2000. (© Graham Harwood) bite for the modern economic bull ter- rier’s ascendancy to acceptance. Eventu- nological sites. It is an example of eco- the former Bankside Power Station on the ally distancing itself from The National nomic power organising itself around the south bank of the Thames. Gallery, this rebellion by the new eco- politics of the aesthetic. Tate Modern is Britain’s new national nomic elite was content initially to ap- Tate Britain shows British art in a dy- museum of modern art. As class compo- propriate the culture of the established namic series of thematic special displays sitions change, each new economic force social hierarchy, buying its art, its culture and exhibitions. Historic and modern takes over the mantle of British taste. and its history. Subsequent generations works hang together in challenging Each succeeding social elite must have its took it upon themselves to invent their juxtaposition, drawing out new meanings art, its brand around which secret codes own. from famous and familiar images (Fig. 4). and systems of value can be exchanged. Emerging social elites seem to find it This is usually in the form of what is to necessary to justify their “natural” right be tolerated and what is not, what’s in to wealth and privilege. This is done in TATE MODERN: and what’s out, who’s in and who’s out. many ways. The one that interests us here A SWEETENER FOR THE CITY New money needs to be part of history. is the use of aesthetics to negotiate the A major new gallery showing tasty babes, lux- With money you can buy your way into social positions of new economic forces. ury goods, own goals and psychological props art history. With even more money you Henry Tate himself directly convinced collected by the British social elite, housed in can shape the future of that history. Harcourt, the Chancellor of the Exche-
378 Graham Harwood with Matthew Fuller: Uncomfortable Proximity
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 379
G C L R quer, to help with funds to build the Tate the private networks held by corporations pened a few months before Tate Modern O O in order to circumvent the established and universities. The bulletin board sys- opened its doors on Bankside. Around B S A S aesthetic orthodoxy of the time. From its tems of the 1980s, such as the Thing net- the corner, Backspace, a space run by L I N beginning, the Tate has supported the work [4] (many of which are still running artists and others, which was one of the G taste values of whichever social elite was today) gave way to the Internet and later richest nodes of net-culture in London, S contemporarily emerging (Fig. 5). the World Wide Web, providing a widely had its doors closed by bailiffs [5]. The exploited realm for production, com- owners of Winchester Wharf have more munication and invention for artists and money to make from the local property TATE ST. IVES many others. “boom.” Boom suggests a blowout, a bit Modern British art in a spectacular coastal Throughout this time, such work was of excitement, but this was simply the setting located in one of the lowest-waged areas only occasionally and tangentially cov- story of the removal of access to land, of of Britain. ered by institutions. The Net is a tricky places to live, work and socialize from Tate St. Ives opened in June 1993 and space for organizations oriented around people in the city. This is a story stuck on offers a unique introduction to the new neatly provenanced objects locked into repeat. order of reality. This is a birthplace of standard-issue art modes. Although in The Tate itself has had little previous modern municipal art, where many the last few years several major museums connection to this area of work. As an in- works can be viewed in the surroundings worldwide have showcased this area of stitution, it has only recently come to ac- and atmosphere which inspired them: es- work, it remains at the showcase level— commodate photography or video: the sential form abstracted from concrete. like painting by chimpanzees. Although focus is firmly on visually pleasurable, The Gallery also manages the Barbara this is the first new medium since video, minutely disciplined, singular and valu- Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Gar- the art punditocracy reassured them- able objects. What is interesting therefore den, which gives a remarkable insight selves that they could safely wait a hun- is not simply that it has chosen to into the work of this great 20th-century dred years until Net art, like film, became begin an involvement now. For culture- sculptor. a respectable form. bunkers, the decision must be made to The action goes on independently. collect now or face the possibility of Artists set up web sites and circulate in- archival lack. This is of course only a pos- LIVERPOOL TATE formation via the Net. Mailing lists and sibility; there is much art in the collec- The largest modern art gallery in the U.K. set news services have grown up to link the tion of the Tate of which public memory up with the help of the Toxteth riots. information to people. When galleries is effectively repressed, or which exceeds Tate Liverpool is the home of the Na- and museums are used, it is mainly as an what is retrospectively in favor: kinetic tional Collection of Modern Art in the adjunct to a process that is already art, anyone? North of England and the largest gallery ongoing. These institutions provide le- What is interesting is exactly how the of modern and contemporary art outside gitimation, a range of vocabularies, theo- Tate has gone about beginning to estab- London. Tate Liverpool is housed in a retical tools for thinking through and lish an involvement with artists working beautiful converted warehouse which is making work and, importantly, access to in this area. According to sociologist Jean part of the historic Albert Dock. other audiences and participants. It is Baudrillard, “The fixed reserve of the The art shown is by 20th-century artists this, from the artist’s point of view, that museum is necessary for the functioning and is always interesting and thought- makes institutions worth dealing with. On of the sign exchange of paintings.” Mu- provoking. This construction of the one level, then, the process is equivalent seums often play the role of banker in the British national taste is much more than to dance music makers licensing some of political economy of paintings” [6]. The a simple pointer to the biological or cul- their tracks to majors and publishing Tate demonstrably follows this function tural sameness of the nation. It is a other tracks independently. But it is not of the art museum. But crucially, in com- construction of the British social imagi- only an alliance between traders. There ing to some accommodation with the nation, mapped onto geographical re- is a certain kind of utopian opportunism Nets, it has had to abandon the gold stan- gions and increasingly technological that dovetails nicely with the technology. dard that its reserve is founded upon. In- sites. It is an example of economic power This, on the one hand, allows artists a dividual authorship, good provenance of organising itself around the politics of greater area of maneuver. (Mongrel, for works, uniqueness of objects, the “au- the aesthetic (Color Plate B No. 1). instance, usually creates a triangular re- tonomy” of art—are all usurped by the lation of circulation for its work between artists, groups and processes producing art structures; cultures of the Net; and the the most suggestive work on the Web. ART MEET NET, social, familial and community networks (Coupled with this, of course, is a tidy NET MEET ART in which they operate. This allows them range of technological obstacles to the Commentary by Matthew Fuller to avoid being pinned down in any one prolonged collection, archiving and stor- Log on to the Tate web site and behind domain, but is also useful for creating age of networked material.) The gold the first window opened up in your ways of making the contexts in which they standard that the Tate calculates will suf- browser you’ll find another, its double. operate strange to themselves.) On the fice for now is that of the distinguished oeu- You’re not on the receiving end of an in- other hand, such Utopian opportunism vre of the artists commissioned for this formation service about the galleries, but finds in the Net a way to initiate or take series. But here’s the rub: those who pull in the middle of a work of art. Graham part in a process of producing clusters of off the best work on the Web are usually Harwood, a member of the artists’ group data, of signs, while not pretending or equally bent on pulling the rug from un- Mongrel, has copied the official web site even hoping to have any determining derneath themselves. and switched its contents. control over the outcome: data can be It is in finding room for their web site Artwork has been made via computer moved and data can be mutated. to be cack-handed, damning, unpre- networks ever since they have been At the same time, though, it is not an dictable and full of bad memories—in around. In the 1960s, this meant using uncomplicated story. Something hap- the way that it has with Harwood’s ap-
Graham Harwood with Matthew Fuller: Uncomfortable Proximity 379
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021 Leonardo_36-5_339-422 9/18/03 10:25 AM Page 380
G C L R O O propriation of the site—that the Tate suc- openness to use and participation, insis- linked in some circuitous way. Try setting off from B S ceeds, possibly as the first institution of tence on particular representational pro- here. See for instance nettime,
380 Graham Harwood with Matthew Fuller: Uncomfortable Proximity
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/002409403771048173 by guest on 29 September 2021