Art Kettles

I've just completed a really enjoyable course on the London National Gallery. I've taught its history from its inception in 1824 to its fortunes in the Comprehensive Spending Review of last month. However, had I finished the course this week, I would have had to include another event in its glorious history: its occupation by a group of students and artists; its precincts protected by riot police in Trafalgar Square.

That last image is something I never expected to see, but it recorded a real event; it also brings home the link between art history and what is happening on the streets of our cities these days, something I've tried to capture on this blog over the last few months using examples from the discipline. The NG occupation was the latest in a series of sit-ins, teach-ins that have seen art schools and museums like the Slade, Goldsmiths, and Tate Britain temporarily – some still going- taken over by arts, humanities and social studies students determined to highlight the importance of the arts to our culture and civic life in a peaceful and collaborative way. Controlling some of the other outbreaks of artistic resistance inevitably took the form of "kettling", a police containment tactic that is rightly attracting its fair share of criticism. I fear there are worse things than kettles to come in 2011 though.

It is telling how students are utilizing culture to battle kettling. The first T.V. pictures I saw on Thursday lunchtime were students shielding themselves with "book-blocks", each having the name of a famous title on its shield cover. So you had the bizarre spectacle of riot police laying into Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Adorno's Negative Dialectics", or whatever. It was potent in its symbolic impact, though the message was undoubtedly transmitted at the risk of serious damage to the sender. It was resourceful and brave for students to borrow a counter-measure from Italian students who seemed to have invented it in response to kettling in their country.  

Literature is literature though, and I'm an art historian who mainly deals with images. I found myself wondering what the effect would have been if images of famous paintings had been on these blocks making the situation a true art kettle? Sadly, I can't take credit for this phrase; it was coined by a colleague in the States who is observing the events with interest. I don't know the history of the kettle, but imagine my surprise when I discovered a possible example of an art kettle, although the story is likely to be apocryphal. The story is that the Russian anarchist Bakunin was helping a rebellion in Dresden in May, 1849; he suggested that Raphael's Sistine Madonna , a canonical work at the Dresden Museum, be hung on the barricades because the Germans were "too cultured" to open fire on such a precious masterpiece.

"Well, brother, no! A German is a civilized person, but the Russian is a savage, he'll start shooting not only at Raphael, but at the very Mother of God herself, if the authorities so command. Against Russian soldiers with Cossacks it would be irresponsible to use such means - you wouldn't protect the people and you'd destroy Raphael!"

I was lucky to get this information from a journal article by Irene Pearson on the perception of Raphael by Russian writers. According to her, there's a comparison to be drawn with "the native Russian tradition of carrying holy icons in front of a procession bearing a petition to the authorities." She mentions the view that because the Sistine Madonna was painted on canvas- rare for Raphael- it may have been intended as a processional banner. Checking my books on Raphael, I don't see this theory being entertained. It's true that the Sistine Madonna was an expression of Piacenza ceding voluntarily to the papacy of Julius II who seems to have commissioned the painting. Check out John Pope- Hennessey's discussion of the work in his lectures on Raphael. Julius was a warrior pope, and he surely would have ridden into battle with the papal standard- but not the Sistine Madonna! The idea of it as a processional banner seems to have originated in Russian folklore and religion, but it's a very compelling image in the context of 19^th century civil disturbance in Europe and Asia.

So, would the celebrated Sistine Madonna have been used to taunt the forces of a German kettle? Probably not. As Pearson says, Bakunin was almost certainly joking. One look at the photograph of him suggests a kind of anarchist dandy, causing violence, then melting into the multitude.  

I'm teaching in the NG next Thursday. It'll be interesting to gauge the atmosphere in the museum after the metropolitan uproar of the last few weeks. Things will have calmed down, I'm sure, but I won't be able to get that image out of my head- the riot police standing outside the NG. I don't know if they were kettling the demonstrators inside or those in Trafalgar Square. Recalling the pictures on the BBC unfolding on Thursday, it's an odd juxtaposition: a few days before, culture guarded in Trafalgar Square; a few days after, culture attacked – albeit symbolically- in Parliament Square by the same riot squad who protected it. The irony was probably lost on the kettling kops.

Sources.

John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael, 1970.

Irene Pearson, "Raphael as Seen by Russian Writers from Zhukovsky to Turgenev," The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 59, No 3 (Jul., 1981), 346-369.

Comments

[H Niyazi]

Very interesting David - though your description of a Raphael being shot at gave me chills!

I think it would have been great to have used paintings in the 'blocks' It would have had more luck connecting with the average person watching on the telly or passers by. Instead you have a procession of lofty books with hyphenated authors!

Who organises these people?!! Images were definitely the way to go in that instance

H

[Art History Today]

As I understand it, an branch of the resistance against the Con-Dems known as "arts against cuts" suggested using books- after the Italians. There are photos of kettle kops fighting book blockers on the web.

Good point about the visual dimension underplayed. Most of these book titles are philosophy, but no references to art history apart from the art in spaces that are occupied. I would be great to see reproductions of Mona Lisa, Raphael, Picasso etc up there. Art History strike back!