State Britain A Review
In the closing years of the 1960s, the Vietnam war and sexual liberation made protest popular; a time of sit-ins, love-ins and Woodstock. In this milieu the young architectural group Archigram created the concept of the Instant City; a mobile habitat that could arrive and be bolted together overnight, providing the architectural landscape for an instant community. Today, walking into the Duveen Galleries situated at the heart of Tate Britain, and stumbling upon ‘State Britain’ the latest installation by artist Mark Wallinger, I am reminded of the Archigram dream that architecture could bring change – but now it is not an instant community but instant protest that spreads out before you.
Mark Wallinger’s installation creates a facsimile of the ‘peace camp’ that, since the early days of the Iraqi conflict, has become a popular tourist attraction in London. Brian Haw, architect of the original site, has protested outside the Houses of Parliament – 24/7 – since June 2001. His camp is made up of the usual detritus of protest: banners, daubed white bed sheets, plastic sheeting and posters of the key protagonists; George Bush and Tony Blair. The site grew as visitors collaged their own rudimentary additions to the portable structure of the protestor’s stakeout; a coalition made up of religious groups, anti-war protesters and general well wishers. All have added to Brian’s ‘home’. From humble beginnings: a banner or two, sleeping bag, cooker and chair, the protest crept along the pavement until it reached 50 meters or more – like a favella it grew imperceptibly in the shadow of Big Ben. Until, under a newly constituted law (‘Serious Organised Crime and Police Act’ prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square), Brian Haw’s protest was raided by the police and reduced to a mere fraction of its original size. Wallinger’s ‘State Britain’ is both artwork and archive. Painstakingly recreated Wallinger has made the snaking tail of the original protest into another, equally venomous, statement on contemporary Britain.
If the original protest was a place you eyed from a bus window or quickly walked passed to a backdrop of traffic noise and police sirens – the experience is completely re-orientated in the context of an art gallery. It is a question of scale, for the slogans easily read at speed or distance; BEEP FOR BRIAN, CHRIST HAS RISEN INDEED!, become less interesting as you become aware of the minutiae of its bulk. Wallinger’s installation allows the viewer to study the sprawling encampment – like an archaeological dig you begin to unearth how this structure grew. One of the landmarks is a ‘bloodied’ t-shirt with the slogan BLIAR, it hangs from a make shift cross forming the epicentre and one of the highest points of the piece. The structure, along its length, is pockmarked with photoshoped images (mainly of Blair and Bush) – faces warped into nightmarish gargoyles. These fabricated images sit uncomfortably next to photographs of adults and children; dead, dying and dismembered, in war zones across the world. Also alongside the computer generated images are the more traditional fare of a 60s protest: sloganeering, transcribed Buddhist chants and peace flags. There is a large canvas by Banksy; depicting heavily armed soldiers in the process of painting a peace sign – the CND logo, blood red.
Wallinger’s installation, the Tate tells us, sits on the edge of the police exclusion zone – enforced by a change in the law which led to the original dismantling of the site: ‘Wallinger has marked a line on the floor of the galleries throughout the building, positioning State Britain half inside and half outside [of this zone]’. But this is an imagined political frisson the exhibition does not need. The work is a success, or not, because it captures one man’s uncynical, unmediated action: that protest can still change things. Wallinger has recreated this protest in the gallery and even here – with this silent, de-odorised facsimile of the original, the graphic language of protest still carries a faint clarion call to the conscience.
Colin Davies 2007
I don’t agree that the the line of the exclusion zone is - whether an imagined political frisson or not - something that ‘the exhibition does not need’. I felt this is where the Wallinger stopped being a an archive, facsimile, of a past-historical political event and brought it straight into the contemporary moment. This line is not a facsimile but, imagined or not, a reality.
/Ray Marsh 28/02/2007