Two Temple Place Museum |
Cotton to Gold: Extraordinary Collections of the Industrial North West
The light glances off the copper/brass sailing ship weather vane as it shivers in the light cold wind of February, sitting high atop Two Temple Place beside the Embankment. The Thames River flowing out to sea can be sensed just beyond the small park alongside. This beautiful neo-Gothic building, designed by John Loughborough Pearson for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 is now a museum space run by the Bulldog Trust that annually brings art and museum collections from the rest of the country to London.
Cotton to Gold objects come from collections that belonged to northern English industrialists, bequeathed to public bodies and now managed by museums in the North of England, Lancashire: Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Haworth Art Gallery (Accrington) and Towneley Hall (Burnley).
It is made quite plain that the exhibition is using the collections of the collectors to give insight into the collectors’ world and choices. Thomas Boys Lewis’ (Blackburn) collection of Japanese prints, Robert Edward Hart’s book collection, Joseph Briggs’ Tiffany glass. From across the world the displays include a working loom, Roman coins, the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels, stuffed and mounted pairs of birds, a Peruvian mummified human skeleton drawings by Millais, paintings by J.W. Turner
The connection between these men, presented as benign philanthropists, is money and power, though not acknowledged in the wall text nor in the way the objects are placed. There is something quite restful about the displays whilst at the same time it is presenting trophies of trade and globalization as unproblematic. No mention is made of the movement of objects and people through the mechanism of the Atlantic slave trade. Nor of the origins of, for example, the cotton required for the factories that grew the finances for these industrialists. The omission is noted and must be deliberate. It keeps the men at the centre of the exhibition and we are given the impression that the objects from far away are almost drawn to the collectors as if by a magnet.
The agency of the maker and of the object are considered in some displays. A long glass vitrine displays a single line of coins that date from Antiquity. The hand and mind of Gutenberg are displayed in the first book printed in English. A number of unknown silent artists can be sensed in illustrated manuscripts hand painted in gold and green and blue with distinct and careful lettering, hours of labour and collaboration to make complex and beautiful books. The craft skills of the labour employed in the individual items is evidenced by the cuts, strokes, and impressions seen in the object and in noticing this the makers and their endeavours may be recognised by the viewer and a human connection made.
Turning a corner I come upon a glass mosaic picture of a pair of sulphur crested cockatoo – indigenous to Australia – hung on the stairway on dark wood panelling. What are they doing here? Made up of a vibrant collection of coloured glass in greens gold and white the cockatoos, whilst shining in their position, are out of place to me. As surely are many of the other things that are displaced on display. Later I learn that this glass mosaic picture has been on the Antiques Roadshow.[1]
. . .a shamelessly gaudy glass mosaic featuring a pair of cockatoos that was a recent star of the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow.
Amongst the most disturbing is a room of glass boxes with taxidermy birds. Two heads leaning toward each other indicate a friendly pair of birds, against a painted backdrop. One of 1950s romance, a couple (of humans – a man and a woman) illustrated behind the stationary fixed birds. The birds made more beautiful and sad by the contrast of a familiar scene animated behind them.
High up on the top cornice of the room a raven leans over looking at the visitors to the room, teetering, menacing, dead still with glossy black plumage. Creepy. There is a small sign at the exit from this room announcing that there are human remains in the next room. The curled up body is propped upright on its haunches so the head is eye height to the visitor, hollowed out eyes staring back. It’s wrapped in browned cloth and string and placed on a plinth within the cabinet
The Chachapayan mummified figure from Peru is held by the collection of William T. Taylor, Towneley Hall. The 12th century nobleman. As the wall text explains:
Taylor recalls the discovery of the mummy at a burial site in a nearby mountain range. Guided only by the flickering light of his candle, he lowered himself down a shaft and made his way along a pitch-black tunnel. ‘Giant’ bats, as well as human bones and skulls made progress difficult, but at the end of the passageway Taylor came face-to-face with the crouching mummified figure. Taylor includes ‘Before’ and ‘After’ pictures of himself in the diary, indicating the intensity of his experiences in Peru.[2]
All very ‘Indiana Jones’, but it is not credible that Taylor found the cave entirely unaided nor that he travelled unaccompanied by local and informed Peruvians in the Andes. The burial site would be known at the very least to those who undertook the burying: did Taylor ignore the fact that the ancestors of people he was meeting were buried here? Would he have stubbed his boot on the skulls and bones of his ‘own’ people whilst guiding himself through the dark with a flickering candle? Unlikely. His reported behaviour, in this small text, typifies the gentleman explorer of the early 20th century. This is how he collected a person from deep inside a cave, up-earthed from his resting place, took him across the world to the north of England to be added to his collection, stored in a cardboard and eventually displayed in Two Temple Place Museum many years later. Still crouched but no longer at rest, made mobile by the forces of industrial trade and globalisation. Similar to the taxidermy birds that are moved by hand, no longer by flight.
What else about this exhibition? The overwhelming experience is that the objects are from the past, from ‘ancients’ people who are ‘not like us’ nor ever were. That usual narrative of colony.
February 2015. www.twotempleplace.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacture_during_the_Industrial_Revolution
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/feb/01/cotton-to-gold-exhibition-london
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/cotton-to-gold-the-riveting-new-show-that-mines-the-art-riches-of-industrialists-9983047.html
[2] Wall text Exhibition Name Two Temple Place Museum, February 2015