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Caribbean Memory as “Mindful” Vandalism

The role of carnival in Hew Locke's recent projects
Marine Schütz

Abstracts

The article addresses the work of British artist and Guyana-raised Hew Locke, between 2007 and 2014. It aims to examine how this work participates in the construction of a cultural memory to make visible, through projects imagined for British imperial monuments, memorial policies that consider the history of diasporas in Great Britain.
To do this, the study draws on the analyses of Kobena Mercer, who has reassessed the transnational dimension of Caribbean art in London by revising the art historical habitus of assigning a work to a single place. This allows us to understand the artist’s links to the carnival, within a broader spatial network, including Georgetown, Brixton and London.
Caribbean memory in Hew Locke’s art is approached to elucidate, through the analysis of primary sources (the published interviews of the artist), how he came to engage with these different carnivals. Then, the study focuses on the transnational migration of aesthetic elements, such as color and gesture, what Hew Locke calls the “Guyanese palette” to reveal his visibility strategy and address its status within modernism.
The study of the reception of his work by the artistic press completes the approach by revealing the difficulty he had, as a Caribbean artist, to enter Britain’s artistic and national space. It completes the analysis of the artist’s relationship to institutions (press, modernism and museum) by describing the artist’s project at the Turbine Hall of the Tate in London, which he addressed not only to imagine a contemporary carnival, but also to draw attention to the discrimination experienced by the Black population of Notting Hill. Finally, the article focuses the reflection on the transnational dimension of this work conceived as a memorialisation and a reconstruction of the Caribbean carnival in London. It proposes reading the work, ultimately, as a paradigmatic artistic expression of the diasporic cultures of the Black Atlantic.

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  • 1 His work has circulated in the art world and attracted attention. He took part in Infinite Islands,(...)

1Stating that “everything in [his] work starts from Guyana” (Locke 2014: 525), Hew Locke expressed the importance of his postcolonial identity for creation. Born in 1959 in Edinburgh, the visual artist grew up in Guyana, which was a British colony for over two hundred years, from 1966 to 1980, before returning to study in the United Kingdom, where he graduated from Falmouth College of Art in 1986 and the Royal College of Art in 1994. For the artist, today based in London, who is of the same generation as Black British artists1, including Keith Piper, Isaac Julien and Sonia Boyce, Britain’s colonial past has been a lifelong obsession (Orlando 2016). In 2007, he achieved Restoration (Figure 1), a project that offers a historical narrative of the slavery/colonial past as it is carried into British public space, using forms that involve his Guyanese heritage. Black British artists have a rich history of engagement with carnival and carnivalesque masquerading, articulating around performance and exhibition (Tancons and Thompson 2015). While Notting Hill Carnival is considered the largest street theatre event in Europe and has been followed by other carnivals such as Bristol’s, we can notice that Hew Locke is not the only artist to have responded to this cultural tradition. Bristolian artist embarked on a project, The Seven saints (2019), celebrating first-generation Caribbean cultural and political figureheads via larger-than-life murals on prominent exterior walls of St Pauls streets. However, the ways Hew Locke uses carnival rather taste for its visual aesthetics than its history.

2This article aims to examine how Hew Locke’s work composes his visual vocabulary from his memories of Caribbean practices to question normativity of British memorial politics. The aim is to understand the extent to which his work, as an “intercultural assemblage” (Mercer 2021: 481) in which temporalities and spaces are intertwined, integrates the public dimension of carnival as a means of transgressing the spaces reserved for Black British artists within the British art scene as well as to reimagine public memory.

3To do so, the study will draw on different approaches to Hew Locke’s work, starting with that of Kobena Mercer. His studies address the transnational dimension of Caribbean art in London by revising the art-historical habitus of assigning a work to a single place. His methodological approach is critical of modernism, which, he writes, “has never been able to consider the diasporic condition of belonging to multiple places” (Mercer 2021: 482). While there is no doubt that Guyanese culture forms the matrix of Hew Locke’s artistic approach, the diasporic dimension of his career has been just as structuring. Consequently, by considering this diasporic dimension at the heart of Hew Locke’s art, it becomes possible, following Kobena Mercer, to understand the artist’s relationship to Guyana within a wider spatial network, including Great Britain and Europe.

Engaging new modes of history and representation

  • 2 For a study of Edward Colston statue toppling, see Schütz, Marine. “Down by the river. De la destit (...)
  • 3 For an in-depth analysis of these persona, see Blevins, Steven. Living Cargo: How Black Britain Per (...)
  • 4 For a complete approach of the responses made by citizens to Bristol’s colonial past, in the 1990s, (...)

4In 2007, Hew Locke was invited by Bristol’s art center Spike Island to carry out the Restoration project. Comprising four large-scale mixed-media photographic installations, his series was exhibited at St Thomas the Martyr Church in Bristol. Initiated ahead of the wave of colonial statue removals2, the project took as subject four bronze statues commemorating figures considered heroic at the height of the British Empire, over a hundred years ago, in Bristol city. They were: Edward Colston, Bristol’s eighteenth-century slave trader whose place in the monumentalisation of the city’s history has been hotly debated, ending in its toppling in 2020; Edmund Burke, the social conservative and economic liberal who was also Bristol’s Member of Parliament between 1774 and 1780; Samuel Morley, Bristol’s Member of Parliament from 1868 to 1885; and King Edward VIII, who made a great contribution to the growth of the European economy3. The choice of these figures is closely linked to the artist’s desire to reveal the links between the city and the empire, whose “legacy is all around us in our daily lives” (Locke 2006). The fact that Restoration was set in Bristol gave the project a critical dimension. The city in the West of England was a nodal point for commercial and cultural exchange and hubs in the transportation of enslaved persons stretching back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries4. The politics of memory encapsulated this past from the nineteenth- century onwards, but in a form that denied the complete story of slavery, with its forced migrations and death.

Figure 1. Hew Locke, Restoration, Edward Colston, 2006.

Figure 1. Hew Locke, Restoration, Edward Colston, 2006.

Photograph with mixed media, 112 X 244 X 15 cm. Commissioned by Spike Island and first shown at St. Thomas the Martyr Church, Bristol.

Copyright by Hew Locke. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.

  • 5 Restoration belongs to the Statue work series (2004). It emerged formerly as a project dedicated to (...)

5Driven by the narrative of Britain’s development as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation, Restoration aims at producing a new mode of representation of Britain’s slavery past. Indeed, the artist proceeds by covering the images of the statues with sub-objects - cowries, shells, gold coins - that carry complex and intersecting histories, recalling the votive function he has been working on since 20045. The photographed face of Colston, for example, mounted on an aluminium support and covered with gold tassels and necklaces, is disfigured, losing its identity and taking on a new one. Hew Locke’s graphic remodeling clearly evokes the cultural synthesis or the interweaving of cultural narratives and symbols resulting from colonial contact and the history of slavery. In this respect, the conception of colonisation at play recalls Paul Gilroy’s writings on colonisation who described that it never went as a one-way process, but as a story of “multidirectional influences” (Gilroy 2015: 11).

6In 2020, British curator Carol Jacobi described the work as a “gesture of Colston's Africanisation” (Jacobi 2015: 43), mapping thereby the artist’s desire to reimagine the sculpture’s original content. To what extent, however, can the memorial remodeling of a British identity made by its diasporas take on a similar agentive dimension to that of the activists who are its contemporaries? Steven Blevins suggests that Hew Locke’s work describes:

a mode of public history work of critical historiography of reparation, a reflexive and performative stylisation of the past that imagines the possibility of historical justice in the face of its undeniable backwardness and inadequacy. (Blevins 2016: 7)

A “mindful vandalism”: disfiguring imperial icons

7That this artistic production can effectively produce new modes of history and representation relies on the fact that the photographs are themselves inserted into the public space, high up, where the eyes of the individuals and communities who inhabit these spaces are focused. Hew Locke’s emphasis on the agentive nature of his approach can be assessed through his own words, as he considers his work a genuine form of “mindful vandalism” (Locke in Wood 2006). His adhesion to this traditionally ill-received practice of destruction might be explained by the sense of freedom it unfolds, situating him thereby in a longer tradition of avant-garde artists praising tabula rasa. The way Hew Locke attacks the images of political power could for that reason be read in conjunction with West Berlin graffiti on monuments, as they both long for a free world (Gamboni 2015).

8That Hew Locke could articulate anti-imperial arguments through gestures recalling his West Indian identity and has relied on photography seems quite congruent. Kobena Mercer has associated the technical and social statuses of photography with its increasing use by Black artists in the 1980s. This tool would be particularly capable of conveying the poetics of cultural mixing, as Kobena Mercer states:

with the cut-and-mix logic of collage in the image-text and independent film practices of the 1980s, we are well placed to understand how Black British artists opened a new perspective on cross-cultural processes of hybridity which, in turn, reveal deep patterns of transculturation in the long-term history of modernity as a whole. (Mercer 2021: 485)

While photographic uses have been constructed by Black artists to convey a poetics of cultural mixing, Hew Locke’s work also inhabits this seminal heterogeneity by seizing through the dimensional images of sculptures, allowing for a regime of heterogeneity. As Hew Locke makes clear, he is to explore the duality of sculpture and photography

In these works, sculptures and photography are brought together in ways that not only demonstrate what he calls the ‘magnetic relationship of attraction and repulsion between these two media’. (Locke 2006)

9As Jon Wood remarked about the artist, by placing his work at the intersection of the two media, Hew Locke occupies a well-established place in the genealogy of the sculptors who, since Auguste Rodin and Willi Baumeister, have used the photographic image to break the stranglehold of the formalist specificity of the artistic medias (Wood 2006).

10Incidentally, in its use by sculptors, photography presents itself as a form that interferes with hierarchies and escapes a disciplinary history of the medium.

11However, Hew Locke had initially imagined working on the monuments in a physical way before changing his mind. As his propositions of interventions on real monuments in London were refused, he began valuing the preparatory drawing, i.e. the photograph of the monument diverted, for the work as such. With photography, he found a form of creation that not only allowed him to shake up artistic categories but to talk about his own migratory journey, and the way in which identity as a diasporic subject has itself been “pasted” and “mounted” into the history of global modernity from the beginning (Mercer 2021: 485).

12Beyond the fact that photography allows the artist to assemble and reassemble references to Guyanese and British cultures, in a logic of circulation, according to mechanisms adapted to a hybrid poetics, it accompanies his research around his project of “conscious vandalism” (Locke 2006). If Hew Locke’s approach as a “simple statement” is to be distinguished from graffiti or degradation (as proposed by Michael Hatt), it nonetheless involves a form of violence, when the physical integrity of the photograph is degraded by the drills, or the weight of the tassels. As the artist writes:

This three-dimensional treatment of the image was also linked to the idea of vandalising the photograph [...] You take a drill; you drill holes in it and you drill hard things and you make them hang and put everything on top. It's about attacking the preciousness of the photograph as well as the preciousness of the object that I'm actually proposing to cover. (Locke in Carol Jacobi 2015: 234)

13While we might question the effectiveness of vandalism and the work’s potential for destruction in celebrating the cult of Colston, some aspects of the theory of photography invite us to consider the organic relationship between the photographed and the photograph.

14“The photograph”, as Barthes wrote in 1980, “always carries its referent with it [...] it belongs to that class of laminated objects whose sheets cannot be separated without destroying them both” (Barthes 1980: 5-6). From this point of view, attacking the physical integrity of the photographs by drills and defacement would ontologically incorporate the possibility of the disappearance of Colston’s public memory.

15This iconoclastic approach is particularly evident in Hew Locke’s Hinterland project (2013) around the statue of Queen Victoria (Figure 2). It should be noted first that this sculpture, whose “image was designed to obscure the patterns of migration and displacement that have shaped Guyana” (Hatt 2022), before being repositioned in front of the Georgetown courthouse, was itself the witness to the first historical expressions of the debunking of colonial statues. In the greenish background of the work, which is presented as a photograph of the monument, the artist depicts skeletons, remnants of the violence experienced by the colony of Guyana, in a reworking of archetypes from nineteenth-century paintings by William Morris Hunt, George William Joy and others. As Michael Hatt points out, the four drummers, themselves drawn in transparent thin floating lines, seem to appear in Hew Locke’s work “with ghoulish faces” (Hatt 2022).

Figure 2: Hew Locke, Hinterland, 2013

Figure 2: Hew Locke, Hinterland, 2013

Acrylic painting, ink and pen on C-type photograph, 265 × 151,5 cm

Hew Locke. DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Charles Littlewood.

16For this reason, Hatt proposes that the plastic organisation can be commented on as a form of narrative of the decolonisation of Guyana. First, he emphasises the way in which the monumental figure photographed seems submerged by the visual chaos of the coloured lines adorning the Guyanese dancing figures: “The order that was supposed to emanate from Victoria as the centre of the empire is replaced by disorder” (Hatt 2022). Second, as he suggests, the work introduces “the carnivalesque ceremonial of that which it sought to repress; that which was silenced is at last heard”.

17Carnival thus seems to be used here by the Guyanese group in the background to articulate the role of resistance groups played by indigenous cultures and their links to the processes of decolonisation of colonial spaces. But at the same time, it is exploited by Hew Locke as a tool of disfigurement: it is the emancipatory function of the mask that emerges here, when it goes so far as to annihilate the face, thereby undermining any identification with authority figures.

The uses of carnival: recomposing memories as conjuring the British art scene “chromophobia”

18Hew Locke’s comments on the significant role of his own Guyanese culture can be more specifically illustrated by the way in which the meaning of his artistic practice has been shaped by carnival aesthetics, its colours as well as its decor. For him, the carnival is first and foremost a culture associated with his past and his attendance as a child and then as an adult of the Brixton and Notting Hill carnivals (created in 1965). As both a West Indian cultural expression and a claim for political freedom, the status of the Guyanese form of carnival known as Mashramani in Georgetown allows us to understand the emancipatory signification that this form holds for Locke. Indeed, Mashramani was created to commemorate the independence of British Guyana in 1966. Spreading over the regions of Pomeroon, Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice, this territory formerly populated by Arawaks and Kalinagos had been subjected to multiple colonisations from the Dutch (in the late Sixteenth Century) and British empires (after 1814) (Mars 365).

19In his dialogue with Sarat Maharaj, the artist mentions the Amerindian ceremonial headdresses he saw in Guyana as one of his many stylistic sources, along with The Madonna de la Macarena of Seville (also known as the Black Madonna) (Locke quoted in Tancons and Thompson 2015: 21). Commenting carnival, he reveals the way in which he has integrated this culture as an obvious and irremovable part of identity:

How can any of us in the diaspora not feel distant from carnival? It's part of us, even in such a passive way today. And in my own work, I abhor the kitsch into which much of commercial carnival falls. (Tancoons 2015: 19)

In his words, the “us” refers first and foremost to the shared relationship of diasporic communities to carnival. It is the very condition of diaspora, in its dimension of forced displacement, that would explain the desire of artists for this form. As Krista Thompson suggests in her essay for the exhibition catalogue En mas:

The modes of production and exhibition of the carnival also made it possible to link different temporalities, the perpetual return to the past and the complete project of freedom, across the geographies of the circum-Caribbean region and the metropolis, from Toronto to Notting Hill, where Caribbean populations have settled. (Thompson 2015: 31)

20From this point of view, Hew Locke’s artistic practice presents itself as a space for translating the cultural practices that have marked his diasporic experience, as well as a crucial formal resource in the critique of statue works. Indeed, the artist frequently refers to his desire to create colourful and visible works, that would be able to seduce his audience. Although, as Krista Thompson reminds us, he was a participant in the “multisensorial space of the parade” (Thompson 2015: 31), his main interest in carnival remains purely visual, in direction of the “redundancy of carnivalesque and bling aesthetics” (Thompson 2015: 21). Concerning this dimension of carnival, Krista Thompson explains that they were strategic, as they “ensured visibility for the otherwise invisible lower classes” (Thompson 2015: 21).

21While the issue of visibility in carnival was historically a response made by the Black lower classes to the plantation system, in Hew Locke’s case, gaining visibility in the art system or through the very colours of his work, seems to be more broadly a way of dismantling a historical visual heritage pervading the present. Nicholas Mirzoeff has made clear how – regarding Black subjectivities – the system of plantation in the West Indies (1660-1860) saw visual issues develop as integral parts of the expression of power. He explains that a model of racial classification and spatial segregation was constructed, seeing enslaved people being also controlled by the way they were seen (Mirzoeff 2011). The modern visual complex of the plantation, where slavery manifested itself visibly and invisibly, resulted in Black subjects demanding visibility, which can be addressed today as a central issue in the fights for emancipation.

22While its colourful nature ensures Hew Locke’s work greater visibility, the artist incorporates the contrast between the colours and the white as a reminder of the differential narratives that have structured art history. In Hinterland, the Queen’s skin is vividly coloured, disappearing under the variegated features that contrast with the previous unity and whiteness of the stone. This plastic choice seems to reflect the fact that Hew Locke’s critique of the colonial empire probes systemic racism in terms of its relationship to colour. As Anne Lafont puts it in L’Art et la race. L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières, in Eighteenth-Century’s French Empire, the hierarchy of colours encountered by enslaved people in their social lives reflected in the academic aesthetic discourses, as painters began to build their canvases on contrasts of the skin colours, between artistocratic women and their Black servants as in Pierre Mignard’s court painting (Lafont 2019).

23From this point of view, Hew Locke’s use of colours can’t be considered apart from these enduring norms. In using swirls of bright colors, Hew Locke breaks with such European prejudice against colours as reflected in the idealised whiteness of the statue of the Queen. While he displaces in his work the stereotypes associated to his ethnicity, he also plays with the class positions associated to his status, as a West Indian artist in London.

24The artist has stated that frequent criticism was made of his works, for endorsing the stylistic association of “cheap kitsch and classical iconography” (Locke 2014: 530). As it is associated to bright colours, carnival in Hew Locke’s work is often read as an obstacle to its reception. As he explains, he has often been asked: “Where are you from? What festival are you doing this for?” (in Mercer 2021: 490). Such questions reveal that the reception of the carnival theme in his works would, for some critics, situate it in the space of folklore, in the past, and at a distance from the centre – a position held to be incompatible, according to modernist temporality, with advanced art, reduced to occupying a fictional centre. Therein, they are part of what contemporary artist and writer David Batchelor calls “chromophobia”, the feeling that excessive colour choices are simply “too much” to be compatible with serious art (Batchelor 2000).

25Seeking to rejoin modernism, and aware that the reception of his coloured sculptures was determined “by [his] accent and background”, Hew Locke explains that he came to make black and white, monochrome cardboard drawings and sculptures for a time “because people could take it seriously” (Locke 2020).

26This renunciation must have been more conflictive for the artist, as giving up colour was in a way tantamount to giving up the form of reconnection with his own past that his plastic approach provided. As he explains, for him, “colour palette [was] a means of translating Guyana” Locke 2014). He adds:

When I look at certain artists like Frank Bowling, I’m immediately there - in Guyana, with the Guyana colour palette, because I understand, at a fundamental level, what it’s all about, where that colour comes from. There are shades of orange and red that, for me, represent the water in the streams. It’s nostalgia, but it’s more than that. It’s nostalgia for the past, but not really because you know that the past no longer exists. If I’m lucky, when I’m working, I can sometimes remember, for twenty seconds, my fifteen years in Guyana. I’ll remember something. It’s the colour of a particular bathroom or sitting in a patisserie eating dhal puri. Then it’s off. All those Queen reliefs are dripping. (Locke 2014: 530)

27Colour becomes for Hew Locke a means by which he attempts to materially reconnect with his country of origin. Beyond painting, he has also used modes of making that are even closer to his culture of reference, such as mask and costume making. Translating the materiality of carnival more literally in his research, he produced the performance/installation Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival at the Tate Modern, in August 2014 (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Hew Locke, Give and Take, 2014

Figure 3. Hew Locke, Give and Take, 2014

Performed during Up Hill, Down Hall – An indoor Carnival, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 23 August 2014.

Photograph by Oliver Cowling. Copyright Tate.

28Hew Locke locates the genesis of this project in a reflection on the transformations of the Notting Hill district as the violence of the state of emergency on the populations of the districts coincided with the process of gentrification. The situation that Hew Locke was trying to describe was that contemporary carnival, which had its historic roots in the area of Notting Hill was heavily policed and under threat of being relocated.

29As described in the En mas exhibition catalogue, the performance itself consisted of approximately six drummers and fifty-four performers. Imagining the performance as a battle between two groups, denoting policemen and carnival participants, he made a series of costumes from cardboard onto which were pasted photographic panoramic views of a neighborhood devoid of people. The first group was holding cardboard shields with large photographs of the famous stucco-fronted terraced houses of Notting Hill, including an image of a house where the artist himself lived in the 1980s. The panoramic angle used by Hew Locke referred to a photographic sweep of the neighborhood, which can be interpreted “as an extension of and representation of a surveilling gaze, one that claims and asserts ownership and blocks many other racial and class dynamics from view” (Goodwin in Tancons and Thompson 2015: 11).

30By relying on such a hybrid form, tying photography and cardboard, the work exploited the historic material heterogeneity of carnival costumes. The costumes of the Trinidad carnival that took shape in the late eighteenth century were “made from many types of materials, from banana logs to sugar cane to sponge” (Thompson 2015: 28). Bananas, Western objects, and many other disparate materials could be used by enslaved persons to make their costumes, conveying the entanglement of spaces produced by the slave trade. The care and time they spent making the costumes could evoke labour. But if the artist’s gestures evoked labour, they did so in a roundabout way, because “the incorporation of the production of Black labor into the costume as a redirection of Black labor toward aesthetics ends” (Thompson 2015: 28).

  • 6 At the end of the performance, the costumes were to be discarded. The fact that the costumes are di (...)

31Thus, by diving back into the memory of the gestures of carnival, Hew Locke seems to speak even more explicitly than in the statue works of British slavery past through the very nature of the artistic work involved6.

The mix as a memory of Guyana's global nature and a dialogic of diasporic identity

32As revealed by the examples described above and Hew Locke’s desire to capture the material dialogic memory of carnival to reinterpret today’s ethnic divides, the artist’s interpretation of identity fosters cultural entanglements. Interestingly, the forms of reference to carnival are always placed in his works within a continuum of other cultural references stemmed from Europe.

33As Hew Locke explains, his approach explicitly consists in a cultural mix:

I had a background of making sculptural objects in boats; making strange figures, rider figures and this was a lot of stuff taken from looking at African festivals that up with looking at lots of art from Mayan culture. So it’s a strange mix that I suppose I picked up from growing up in Guyana—just the interest I had to say? (Locke 2014: 530)

34Such an understanding of Guyana’s culture thus emphasises the global nature of a nation, where “there is no pure indigeneity to be found but only a complex of transnational links” (Mercer 2008: 12). While the mainstream press is eager to reduce the perception of his work, Kobena Mercer rightly points out the importance of the forms of the “synthesis of two or more cultural traits of different origin, giving rise to new cultural forms” (Mercer 2008: 12).

  • 7 See Burgin, Victor. Thinking Photography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

35In this process of mixing cultural references, Hew Locke was certainly guided by the British artists of the first diasporic generation, for whom artistic modernism had always constituted a counterpoint from which to construct their own identities. Where Guyanese artist Frank Bowling (born in 1934) mobilises the history of American modernist painting to speak of the forced migrations that punctuate transatlantic history, Hew Locke addresses the transnational migration of aesthetic elements. He appropriates photoconceptualism, a form anchored in the practice of British conceptual artist Victor Burgin7 at the end of the 1970s, which embodied a form of normativity for students and artists seeking to exhibit. However, while for Burgin it aimed to reflect on language, Hew Locke subjects this form of 1970s modernism to an operation of transculturation. In doing so, he produces back-and-forth movements between indigenous forms and modernity, to make histories coexist and to tear them away from the past.

36This specific functioning seems to align with the cultural logic at work in Caribbean artistic production. Different definitions of the diaspora, including those of Stuart Hall and Kobena Mercer, emphasise that, in Black cultures, the transnational character plays an important role. Following Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and its questioning of the “natural” dimension of the nation-state as the primary unit of social life, it is no longer a question of defining the diaspora “as a tragic loss of organic roots but as a polycentric network of intercultural itineraries” (Mercer 2021: 481). From this point of view, Hew Locke’s geography of art and culture is a polycentric one, that reads identity not in terms of fixity but rather in terms of transnational circulation.

Conclusion

37The place of Caribbean memory in Hew Locke’s art reveals a conception based on the use of Guyana’s cultural practices and the artist’s souvenirs, which he recollects from his youth in London and the Brixton district. Hew Locke’s research around the color of his works emerges within his very interest in Guyana, leading to the chromatic use of green, yellow and red that he calls the “Guyana palette” (Locke 2014: 538), both linked to the works of Frank Bowling and the aesthetics of carnival. Inscribed in a strategy of visibility, the recollection of memories of Caribbean culture is invested to question the lack, in the public space, of diasporic memories, when it comes to commemorating British identity. Hew Locke’s strategy, however, as the reception of his work reveals, was not without its problems: critics reproached the artist for his bling-bling, his kitsch, thereby showing the normativity of memorial politics as well as of a certain fringe of the horizon of contemporary art in London, determined by racial prejudices unfavorable to Hew Locke’s subjective position.

38Reflecting on the silences of memory by introducing the agency of the carnival is then revealed as a way of questioning who has access to the public and institutional spaces. Latent in his two-dimensional work, this aspect was particularly exploited in the installation-performance Up Hill Down Hall: An Indoor Carnival at the Tate Modern in August 2014, during the Notting Hill Carnival weekend.

39With its spectacular dimension, the memory of carnival was replayed in a physical form. This time, it was a question of exploring the physical violence experienced by the city’s Black populations, both physical and social in the face of police violence and of gentrification, in its connection with the festival-goers’ gestures of opposition, the recollection of memory revealed here, like Hew Locke’s entire work, the protest power of carnival as a collective and popular expression.

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Bibliography

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Notes

1 His work has circulated in the art world and attracted attention. He took part in Infinite Islands, a retrospective exhibition of Caribbean artists held in New York in 2007 and in 2005 he held a major solo exhibition at the New Gallery in Walsall, UK. In 2025, the British Museum has organised the retrospective exhibition “Hew Locke what have we here?”

2 For a study of Edward Colston statue toppling, see Schütz, Marine. “Down by the river. De la destitution de la statue d’Edward Colston à la création de monuments éphémères au pouvoir noir.” Frédéric Lefrançois (ed.). Nakan, Revue d’études culturelles (1), 2021.

3 For an in-depth analysis of these persona, see Blevins, Steven. Living Cargo: How Black Britain Performs Its Past. U. of Minnesota P., 2016.

4 For a complete approach of the responses made by citizens to Bristol’s colonial past, in the 1990s, see Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski. The British Slave Trade and Public Memory. New York: Columbia UP, 2006; Dresser, Magde. Slavery Obscured: the Social History of the Slave Trade in an English Provincial Port. London: Bloomsbury, 2018; and Chivallon, Christine. “Bristol et la Mémoire de L’esclavage.” Annales de la Recherche Urbaine 85: 100-110, 1999.

5 Restoration belongs to the Statue work series (2004). It emerged formerly as a project dedicated to bringing physical intervention on London imperial statues and to giving them the face of votice projects. Facing the refusal of his “imagined proposals”, Hew Locke came with the idea to work graphically on the photographic paper (Locke 2014: 525).

6 At the end of the performance, the costumes were to be discarded. The fact that the costumes are discarded almost immediately after the parade underlines that the making of costumes is less about the creation of an object than about the process of making and transforming the pieces, which become ends in themselves. The work can be seen as a response to the observations that carnival is now big business.

7 See Burgin, Victor. Thinking Photography. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1. Hew Locke, Restoration, Edward Colston, 2006.
Caption Photograph with mixed media, 112 X 244 X 15 cm. Commissioned by Spike Island and first shown at St. Thomas the Martyr Church, Bristol.
Credits Copyright by Hew Locke. All rights reserved, DACS 2015.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8850/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 77k
Title Figure 2: Hew Locke, Hinterland, 2013
Caption Acrylic painting, ink and pen on C-type photograph, 265 × 151,5 cm
Credits Hew Locke. DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Charles Littlewood.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8850/img-2.png
File image/png, 1022k
Title Figure 3. Hew Locke, Give and Take, 2014
Caption Performed during Up Hill, Down Hall – An indoor Carnival, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 23 August 2014.
Credits Photograph by Oliver Cowling. Copyright Tate.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/angles/docannexe/image/8850/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 115k
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References

Electronic reference

Marine Schütz, Caribbean Memory as “Mindful” VandalismAngles [Online], 19 | 2025, Online since 01 April 2025, connection on 15 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/8850; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13ofx

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About the author

Marine Schütz

Marine Schütz is a lecturer in contemporary art history at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne and head. A specialist in post-1960 art, she is the author of a book on graphic practices in Pop art published by Presses du réel as well of several articles on contemporary drawing and issues of memory (colonisation and slavery) in contemporary British and French art.

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Copyright

CC-BY-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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