Niccolo Gentile
November
Visiting London for the fall break and desperate for a reprieve from Menton’s cultural black hole, I was inspired to explore the city’s arts scene. During my short week there, I spent a number of hours in the company of London artists and heard their opinions on the city’s current state, which, accompanied by a few visits to local shows, galleries and exhibitions, revealed a city teeming with worthwhile nooks to experience. However, in keeping with the overarching theme of our Sciences Po curriculum, I noticed that the politics of London and the United Kingdom at large threaten this fragile community as the UK endures an extended and worsening economic and, increasingly, political crisis.
To ask what’s on offer in London probably entails a longer list than asking what isn’t. A brief survey of London’s most famous artistic endeavors is sure to include museums, such as the National Gallery, British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Britain and Modern. All of these are accessible to anyone for the incredible price of 0£ and display, in my opinion, some of the best-curated collections in the world today. While the ethics of the British Museum’s collection remains a hotly contested subject in the UK and around the world, the personal highlight of this selection for me is the Tate Modern.
The Modern not only contains a wealth of modern and contemporary art galleries but also uses its immense space, a former power station, to stage unique exhibitions on a monumental scale. The temporary display I encountered was “Open Wound,” by South Korean sculptor Mire Lee, though sculptures perhaps undermine the raw visuals of it. Suspended 5 meters above the concrete floor of the central hall, a turbine interwoven, or maybe caught, in chains and silicone strands reminiscent of strips of flesh slowly rotates, dripping a thick fluid onto a rack and the thin, cloth-like figures it supports. Throughout the display’s lifespan, these cloths were gradually dried and hung around the towering central hall. While I won’t wax too poetic about the images created, suffice to say that it certainly set a proper Halloween-esque mood.
Outside of museums, smaller galleries and art shops abound in the London streets. An occult bookstore contained one of the most eclectic collections of ephemera and obscure essays I’ve ever seen. The main event for my visit was a major exhibition of Peter Kennard’s works in the Whitechapel Gallery. Titled “Archive of Dissent,” Kennard’s life works outline a politically and socially engaged artist. You might recognize some of his most famous pieces, which lean heavily into anti-war themes by juxtaposing repugnant images of death and destruction (a soaring missile, a barren skull) with those of humanity’s endurance and fragility (a clenched fist, our Blue Marble as seen from space). More specific to the British component of his work, he depicted Margaret Thatcher as a skeleton wearing a human face. It was this image that was chosen as the exhibit’s headline picture, fittingly, given that though he has an impressive tenure in the anti-war movement, raging against the annihilation of human life from Vietnam to Gaza, today he works in a UK art world scarred by years of Thatcherism and its subsequent iterations under both Labour and Conservative Party politicians.
Speaking to Zoe Benbow, a long-time London-based painter, she expressed the prevailing discontent with the Conservative’s constant cuts to arts funding, particularly in regards to arts education, where it is becoming increasingly costly and restrictive to enter the art world even for students who continue to flock to the UK’s cutting edge humanities and arts courses. She also complained of the Labour government’s reluctance to counter this insidious cost cutting as they mirror the Conservative’s rhetoric of “tightening the belt” with continued spending decreases. These political pressures are being felt by artists in London, where an absurdly expensive property market is pushing more and more artists further and further from the city's beating heart.
This central region contains not just world-class museums but also one of the two great Anglo-sphere theater districts: the West End. Classic shows like the English adaptation of Les Miserables and The Phantom of the Opera sit alongside newer hits, including Wicked and Hadestown. Similarly, Shakespeare’s Globe presents some of the most seminal plays in the English language. However, some of the most unique and innovative showings appear in the National Theatre, where I saw the incredible David Oyelowo’s staging of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and A Tupperware of Ashes, a loose adaptation of King Lear set against the backdrop of a British-Bengali family navigating the tumult of the 2020s UK and the ails of dementia. The quality of both might only be contested by their ease-of-entry for students, who can show up an hour before they start to get 20£ tickets in prime seating.
The most meaningful of these plays, though, was Coriolanus. Intermixing Shakespeare’s medieval interpretation of the Ancient Roman Republic with 20th-century military aesthetics, Lyndsey Turner weaves a narrative that uses the antique tragedy to critique contemporary populism and elitism in equal measure. What emerges is a stark criticism of the brutal politics we face today. This reflects the messages of Lee’s viscera-strewn engine and Kennard’s fierce denunciation of the British state, one painting a picture of a British art world at odds with the conditions of the modern West.
Whether it be the exploitation of industrial workers, the wars waged by Western powers, or populism masking intense elitism, London’s artists contend with the same ills we study here in Menton. That art can express those issues in a more eloquent and widely-accessible form than any research paper should justify its inclusion in a robust political life.