A Banana Skin on the Stairs

Eyes front and fingers stuffed in the ears is the order of the day when leaving Pimlico tube station. It’s a necessary safety precaution to shield the eyes from the godawful mural corridor of dreadful copies of famous paintings, and to protect the lugs from the horrendous sound of Turner, Mondrian, Dali, Degas, Gabo and the others spinning in their respective graves.

When you emerge from this abyss and reach ground level I’d also suggest resisting the temptation to do a Lot’s wife and look back. It’s not that you’re going to be salinated by seeing a vision of Sodom and Gomorrah – we are, after all, still in Pimlico, not Vauxhall – but you may catch a glimpse of one of Eduardo Paolozzi’s public works. And it’s not a pretty sight. It’s such a shame that one of the country’s greatest artists managed to produce such duds when ornamenting the outside of tube stations. Pimlico gets a metal box covered in pipes, grills and cogs, making it look like an air pollution monitoring unit or a poorly camouflaged ventilation duct (which, in fact, it is), while Euston suffers an even worse indignity being the resting place of an ugly, amorphous gray lump.

Thankfully, round the corner, brush in hand, standing guard outside Tate Britain is a nice, sensible statue of John Everett Millais PRA PRB to calm the nerves. I get a quick coffee and a pain au chocolat from the Djanogly Café and sit, trying to speed read yesterday’s Guardian, well aware that I already have a copy of today’s Observer burning a hole in my jacket pocket. I suppose it’s not a bad way to start a Sunday morning, catching up on world affairs and peacefully breakfasting amongst a typical cross section of London’s multiethnic, melting pot, hoi poloi. Well, maybe the people lounging around in the Tate do not represent an exact microcosm of all the capital’s demographic sectors, but there isn’t time now to theorise about the relationship between class and culture when there’s all that art on the walls just waiting to be assimilated and assessed. But, blow me, the big exhibition on show today is Artist & Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past and, with a title like that, I think we can be pretty damn sure that we’re in for a very sensible, very liberal GCSE level visual representation of the pros and cons of our colonial past – with perhaps just a little more emphasis on the cons than the pros. I don’t think we’re going to get too much Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts Neo-con revisionist UKIP spin here and I doubt that there’s going to be much along the lines of ‘what did the Victorians ever do for us?’ But then I don’t suppose there’s going to be too much of a Dave Spart, Marxist-Maoist denunciation of our blood-stained, lickspittle, capitalist, running dog colonialist, oppressive, exploitative past, either.

Cynics would argue that this is a show that’s been put on because not only will it give the Tate the opportunity to flaunt its politically correct credentials by adopting the official middle class party line on the iniquities of empire and colonialism, but it’s also a cheap show to stage. Evidently, some poor junior curator drew the short straw and was sent on an expedition to the dark depths of the Tate’s storage rooms with instructions to rummage around until she found some funny old Victorian paintings to highlight the various clichés associated with the empirical theme. And yes, they’re all here. We have scenes of brave Tommy’s kissing their sweethearts farewell as they embark on a journey to one of those strange faraway lands; there are more brave soldiers, grouped in small circles, surrounded by fearsome natives, making their famous last stands at Isandhula, Shangani and Gundamac; and there are portraits of colonial governors – suave, sneering and very confident of the rightness of their position in life. There’s also General Wolfe’s demise at the Heights of Abraham and, most impressive of all, Gordon of Khartoum, about to be inoculated by an assegai but expressing all the insouciant sang-froid of a man standing on the veranda of his club about to be served a gin and tonic.

I suppose it’s all quite entertaining. Kids will doubtless enjoy the blood and heroics, and parents will doubtless enjoy explaining to them why they shouldn’t. When these paintings were originally produced, they would surely have stiffened the resolve, sinews, upper lip and anything else that was in danger of exhibiting the slightest signs of detumescence, amongst the members of the Victorian public for whom they were created. Maybe when I was a child, fifty years ago, they would still have carried some resonance with a generation who had known and celebrated the glorious empire but today, with the old world certitude of Britain’s position in the world very much more fluid, everything looks a little absurd. It’s easy now to chuckle at the naivety of our forebears who, apparently, lapped up this outrageous painted propaganda, but I daresay future generations may well look back and find our own analyses of the current global political situation just as misconceived.

The final two rooms of the exhibition are given over to examples of work by artists like Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody, who left the colonies to settle in Britain – none of whom uses colonialism as subject matter – and then works produced by the next generation – who on occasion do. It looks a bit as though this coda was tacked on as an afterthought though I’m sure it would be completely incorrect to imagine that this suggests certain patronising colonialist attitudes occasionally continue to this day.

Enough of wading through these deep and murky political waters and off to Finchley Road and a short, but rather demanding, walk up a hill to get to the Freud Museum, where we can skirt round the edges of the even deeper and murkier waters of the subconscious. It’s a fascinating place to visit and an essential place of homage for anyone interested in the dark arts of psychoanalysis. Here one can enter Professor Freud’s actual consulting room and, amongst all the usual office clutter, see his desk, his collection of ancient statuettes and, of course, the famous couch.

Rather than let the Museum become a mausoleum to the exploration of the subconscious, the trustees of the place endeavor to keep it lively and relevant by inviting contemporary artists to soak up the atmosphere and then put on little displays of work throughout the rooms. Gavin Turk is the latest in a line of such artists and he’s summoned the spirit of Freud’s one-time Viennese neighbour, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to help explore the tangled psychoanalytical jungle. Apparently Ludwig thought Sigmund’s theories were all rubbish, so I’m not sure that Freud would have welcomed the waxwork of Wittgenstein holding an egg that Turk has chosen to plant in his study. I’m not sure either of the relevance of the egg, unless it’s a symbol of the problems that philosophers have with them and chickens and the correct chronological succession thereof.  Whereof, I can’t help thinking that it would have been a better joke to have placed a rhinoceros behind Wittgenstein, making pantomimic reference to the famous argument had with Bertie Russell about whether one was present in their college room.

Other Turk works spread around the premises are mildly diverting – a bunch of dead flowers that represent Freud’s interest in narcissism; some photos of smoke rings to symbolise the doctor’s nicotine addiction and the ability of people to see pictures among swirls of randomness; and some fluorescent lights that proclaim id, ego and super-ego in three different fonts. Again, I can’t help thinking that Turk has missed a trick by not secreting a banana skin on the stairs, thus initiating the potential for a real, live-action Freudian slip.

Revelations of the artist’s own inner workings comes with the relocation to the Museum of his work desk covered, as it is, with a collection of some of his personal knick-knacks (or fetish objects, as the psychiatrists would have it). These include a tray of marble eggs, an egg timer and a metronome and, without wishing to step on the toes of any professionals head shrinkers, I would hazard a guess that this either indicates the artist has got too much time on his hands or else reveals personal concerns about his own mortality, with the acceptance that he is no longer quite such a young Turk as he once was.

Back in the real world or, rather, the world of the ether, I get an update email from Elvina. Portugal is lovely at this time of year and it’s taken sheer, iron-willed determination to drag herself away from the bodegas, all night raves and cat-sitting duties to get out the laptop and start tapping away. But she’s managed it and, in short, the skeleton blog website is up for me to play around with. Which is all a bit jolly exciting.