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01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Great Mughals' show in London reinforces colonial perspectives that museums claim to be questioning
' The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence ', on display at London's Victoria and Albert Museum until May 5, reanimates a familiar narrative in the historiography of South Asian art: one centred on visual luxury, courtly grandeur and imperial aestheticisation. While these themes are undoubtedly central to the Mughal repertoire, their uncritical recapitulation within the framework of a major museum exhibition invites serious scrutiny. The continued privileging of opulence – isolated from the complex political, intellectual, and religious histories that undergird it – risks reiterating the very colonial imaginaries that museums now claim to be interrogating. The exhibition's title alone signals a retreat into a historiographical mode that foregrounds aesthetic excess as the defining feature of the Mughal period. This is, of course, not without precedent. British colonial scholarship long deployed the visual richness of the Mughal court as a rhetorical device to simultaneously admire and diminish – to portray it as decadent, ornamental, and politically effete. By reproducing this frame without critical engagement, the Victoria and Albert Museum misses an opportunity to reframe Mughal visuality within the evolving debates around decolonial museology and postcolonial historiography. Closing soon - The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence @V_and_A and The 80s: Photographing Britain @Tate Britain, both in my #TopPicks for @Londonist >> #LondonArtCritic #LondonExhibitions — Tabish Khan (@LondonArtCritic) April 28, 2025 Structurally, the exhibition is organised around the conventional imperial triad of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan – figures who have long dominated narratives of Mughal art. Yet this familiar periodisation reproduces a monolithic view of dynastic succession, marginalising other regions, actors, and modalities of artistic production. Moreover, the geographical framing remains opaque: a gesture toward Gujarat by dedicating a section on objects that point towards the proliferation of trade and cultural exchange in this region during the Mughal period, for instance, acknowledges the region's importance in early modern global trade but fails to meaningfully connect it to the broader Mughal visual economy. The result is a fragmented inclusion that appears more curatorial convenience than conceptual necessity. The exhibition design, while visually restrained, offers little in the way of critical provocation. A linear spatial logic and uneven lighting suggest an aestheticised encounter rather than an interpretive one. While many of the objects on display – albums, textiles, architectural fragments – are remarkable in their own right, the interpretive framing tends to rely on their intrinsic beauty rather than on a nuanced curatorial argument. This places undue weight on the objects themselves to 'speak', without sufficient engagement with the methodological questions their display should raise. More of the The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence show at the V&A. Pieces of the pietra dura panels from the Taj Mahal show this arduously intricate technique of filling carved surfaces of marble panes with semi precious stones. — Nasser Rabbat (@nasserrabbat) January 5, 2025 Notably absent are holdings from major collections of Mughal painting and manuscript culture in Iran and Russia, which could have complicated the national and imperial boundaries often presumed in exhibitions of this kind. In this sense, 'The Great Mughals' presents a selective and at times insular vision of a profoundly transregional empire. The absence of such material not only limits the exhibition's scholarly reach but also undermines its claim to comprehensiveness. For audiences in the Global North, the exhibition may pass as a well-appointed foray into South Asian splendour. But for scholars attuned to the politics of cultural representation, the elisions are conspicuous. As decolonisation becomes a watchword across museums in Europe and North America, it is no longer sufficient to mount exhibitions that celebrate aesthetic brilliance while leaving intact the systems of knowledge that rendered those aesthetics legible through colonial frames. To do so is to focus on cosmetic changes instead of questioning the underlying structure.
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Was Leigh Bowery one of the most original artists of the 20th century?
Leigh Bowery was larger than life in all senses: a self-styled performance artist whose exuberantly physical antics took place in nightclubs rather than art galleries; a monstrous egotist who ruthlessly pursued – and achieved – fame as nightlife entrepreneur, fashion designer and musician; and an imposing physical presence, whose shaven-headed, unashamedly fleshy physique is the subject of some of Lucian Freud's most notable paintings. This major Tate survey, Leigh Bowery!, is one of a plethora of Eighties-centred exhibitions (including the National Portrait Gallery's The Face Magazine: Culture Shift and Tate Britain's The 80s: Photographing Britain) that appear intent on recasting the much-contested Thatcher decade as a time of radical creative experimentation and emergent identity politics. The Australian-born Bowery, with his penchant for sinister masks and makeup, is presented here as a kind of overbearing ringmaster to alternative Eighties London, in terms that are at once absurdly overinflated and disconcertingly personal. Bowery, we are told, was 'one of the most fearless and original artists of the 20th century'. Really? And while you might imagine that a show comprising Bowery's 'outlandish and dazzling' costumes, alongside painting, photography and video, could be wrapped up in a couple of modest-sized rooms, it's given one of Tate Modern 's very largest spaces. At the same time, the wall texts invite us to identify with Bowery as a human being – and to take him at his own estimation – in a way you'd expect of the lightest of popular biographies rather than a heavy-hitting retrospective exhibition. 'A smalltown boy from Sunshine, a Melbourne suburb in Australia. He's bored. Inspired by the punk scene, Bowery leaves fashion college and arrives in London in October 1980... It took time for Bowery to find his people.' Despite this apparently tight personal focus, the fact that many of the works in the first room – and throughout the show – are by Bowery's friends and associates, rather than Bowery himself, gives the impression of a show that is around Bowery, rather than about him. One example is the cartoon-like painting of our hero (as he's very much presented) in the bath by his close friend Gary 'Trojan' Barnes. Andhe makes a fantastic supporting player in Hail the New Puritan (1986), Charles Atlas's film about enfant terrible choreographer Michael he is, sprawled around his flat in that day's streetwear, blue pancake makeup inspired by the Hindu god Krishna, face piercings and a 'leather man' peaked cap. You don't get many people walking around London looking like that even now. Exhibitions revolving around performance and social scenes are often let down by the quality of their documentary evidence; this one is crowded with riotous and marvellously vivid photographs of London nightclubs. Not least among them isBowery's West End club Taboo, with its entry policy of 'dress as though your life depends on it, or don't bother'. Whether wearing a sequin-studded motorcycle helmet and leering black-and-white makeup, or carrying fashion designer and DJ Rachel Auburn over his shoulder with illuminated lightbulbs taped to his head with sticking plasters, Bowery is a borderline terrifying proposition. Seen in the exhibition, his outfits are exquisitely made in collaboration with his close friend (and later wife) Nicola Rainbird, with painstaking embroidery and use of sequins. Yet without Bowery's extravagantly corpulent physical presence, they seem just, well, costumes. Wall-filling videos of dance performances by Michael Clark reveal new aspects of Bowery's abilities, as designer and occasional dancer, though the fact that the presiding talent is Clark (the subject of a large exhibition at the Barbican in 2020) dilutes the focus on Bowery. His dedicated artworks, deprived of the self-aggrandising razzamatazz that no doubt accompanied them at the time, often feel a touch half-hearted. Ruined Clothes (1990), photos of some of Bowery and Rainbird's most lovingly created garments thrown into the street to be trashed by the weather and passers-by, sounds like the ultimate anti-fashion statement. Yet the original clothes, displayed here, look mildly soiled rather than outright ruined. And it's disappointing that a section labelled 'transgression' boils down to not much more than an argument with Clark over the use of the 'C' word. This exhibition has plenty of amazing material, but it's so woefully overextended, with too many repetitive videos and too much insignificant ephemera through too many large rooms, that some of the best material almost gets lost. (Bowery's wacky holiday snaps, for instance, could be anybody's.) Freud's now famous oil paintings of Bowery feel a touch inconsequential dropped in among all this stuff, with little in the way of context. More seriously, Bowery's later fashion designs, wearable surreal sculptures, which genuinely achieve the goal of being works of art in their own right, are seen only in photographs – if brilliant ones – by Fergus Greer. And some of his most powerful performances are barely documented. The night he sprayed water over the audience from his anus as part of an Aids benefit at Brixton's Fridge nightclub in 1994is lent poignancy by the fact that he died of the disease himself later that year, though it's evident here (perhaps unsurprisingly) only through a single photograph. The show's climactic and perhaps most extraordinary work, Birth, is a small and tremulous video shot at New York's drag festival Wigstock in 1993. An alarmingly corpulent Bowery got up in a surreal 'female' mask performs a tuneless rendition of The Beatles' 'All You Need Is Love', before lying down and 'giving birth' to Rainbird, who bursts naked from the front of his tights covered in remarkably real-looking 'blood'. The show's aim of showing Bowery as an explorer of 'the body as a shape-shifting tool' feels realised here – even if it's only for about three seconds. But the show's most revealing moments are excerpts from the BBC's mainstream fashion programme The Clothes Show, compered by Bowery in full flowered mask and dress and appearing completely at home. Clearly the master of outrage could charm all the grannies in the world out of the trees when he wanted to. But then, when you reflect that alongside his immersion in the European avant-garde at its most visceral, Bowery was plugged simultaneously into a tradition of camp outrage that goes back centuries – from, say, the court of Versailles to Kenneth Williams – the fact that he should have been a natural on early evening British television doesn't seem so surprising.
The Independent
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How The Face magazine turned style into an art form
A dizzying barrage of video images of late 20th-century Britain opens this celebration of one of the most influential and controversial publications of the age: The Face . Margaret Thatcher, Boy George, The Spice Girls, Oasis, Damien Hirst, you name them, are all there in Culture Shift , all set to a gleefully tacky synth-pop soundtrack that takes us straight to the moment of the magazine's launch at the dawn of the Eighties. That most scorned of decades is suddenly everywhere in art. And if Tate Britain's exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain wants to rub our noses in the grim and gritty side of the Thatcher era, this show wants to put a big celebratory smile on our faces when we're barely through the door. And in the early stages of the exhibition, at least, it's almost impossible not to succumb. Say what you like about the UK's original music, fashion and culture magazine – and it's had many detractors – it defined the brash, high gloss, unashamedly aspirational aesthetic of the early boom-and-bust era. And before just about anyone, likely even Margaret Thatcher herself, had realised there was going to be a boom-and-bust era. Founded by former NME editor Nick Logan, The Face launched as a glossy music-centred lifestyle magazine, a sort of Vogue from the street, an idea that seemed almost unimaginable at the time. Where 'rock photography' had previously been defined by gritty documentary reportage, invariably black and white, Logan put an emphasis on colour and sumptuous large format photography. This shift in production values brought about an immediate sea change in pop image-making, judging by the stunning, and hugely evocative images in the first room. Adam Ant looks positively Pre-Raphaelite clutching a rose in a 1980 image by Jill Furmanovsky. A very young Boy George looking like he's barely holding it together is captured by Derek Ridgers, while John Lydon glowers manically in a tartan suit for Sheila Rock. If Lydon had famously sneered at Sid Vicious, 'you're not a fashion model when you're a Sex Pistol', The Face effectively turned all its subjects into models, even before its shift from a glammed-up music mag to a principally fashion-focused publication. Sade on the cover of 'The Face' in 1984, as photographed by Jamie Morgan (Jamie Morgan) In 1983, Logan introduced a new wave of fashion photographers, including Robert Erdman, Mario Testino and Jamie Morgan, used to working with stylists who turned mere images into 'narratives'. 'Buffalo style', devised by Morgan and stylist Ray Petri, from a Jamaican term for 'attitude', introduced a new kind of hyper-masculine homoeroticism, with well-muscled models – both Black and white – standing foursquare to the camera in leather skirts, kilts and the shortest of shorts. The best way of promoting Black and gay emancipation, such images implied, was by demonstrating it was already happening. While The Face aimed to respond to – and lead – what was happening on the Street, the effect, from Eddie Monsoon's ecstatically zinging Neneh Cherry (1988) to Janette Beckman's wonderful snap of Run-DMC on their home street in Queens, was like looking in on some endless über-cool party. And if you felt you weren't invited, it was because you weren't working hard enough on your 'style', that great Eighties buzzword that The Face did so much to popularise. The images in the second part of the show, on the 1990s, are generally even bigger and more technically ambitious, but feel less extraordinary, perhaps because the rest of the world had caught up with The Face 's distinctive hyper style. Kurt Cobain in a dress and Beckham's six-pack dripping blood don't feel as edgy as they're intended to be. Corinne Day's England's Dreaming depicts a young woman in tight black vinyl trousers sprawled on a sofa surrounded by fag butts, tea cups and beer cans. The shot represents a Face -pioneered trend in anti-fashion photography – sometimes dubbed 'heroin chic' – yet it is still patently a fashion photograph. The arrival of digital photography around the mid-Nineties made everything possible but left the viewer feeling that nothing was that surprising. Inez & Vinoodh's For Your Pleasure (1994), which photoshops one of the duo's quirkily provocative fashion tableaux onto an existing slide of a rocket launch is without doubt technically remarkable. Yet while the wall texts describe it as 'surreal and ambiguous', it lacks the bite and edge of real Surrealism. 'Girls on Bikes (Sarf Coastin')' by Elaine Constantine from December 1997, as featured in 'The Face: Culture Shift' (Elaine Constantine) There's barely an image here that isn't brilliant on its own terms. The level of visual invention is stunning, yet the relentless pursuit of page-turning wow factor becomes monotonous. The Face set out to emancipate the reader by reviving the Sixties Mod idea of 'the face', the working class guy who is better dressed and infinitely more stylish than the city gent. Yet by identifying itself so closely with the self-regarding world of fashion, it didn't shift the culture quite as much as it could or should have done. The Face shrank from being too closely associated with the early 21st-century convergence of instant celebrities and supermodels – arguably putting itself out of business in the process. Yet its Eighties ideal of classless aspiration enabled a new kind of everyday mega-personality, typified by the Beckhams, Naomi Campbell and Harry Styles, all of whom feature in the exhibition. And at the end of the day, however much The Face tried to convince us we could all achieve street-level stardom by taking on 'style', they're all actual superstars, while the rest of us are still in the proverbial gutter, however much cool stuff we buy. 'The Face: Culture Shift' is at the National Portrait Gallery from 20 February until 18 May
