by Rod Mengham
The Visitor Centre allows for this, but puts the case for retrospective Englishness with its final annexe, devoted to the Kingdom of East Anglia, AD 500–869. This caters to local patriotism, but also to a grander ambition that regards East Anglia as the seed-bed for a national character that gradually encroached on the rest of the available space. It is a fact that the earliest runic inscription in Old English yet discovered was found at Caistor by Norwich. It dates to the fifth century, and possibly even the fourth century, which raises the possibility of an intriguing overlap with the Roman presence. The evidence is inscribed on a foot-bone from the skeleton of a roe deer, and consists, very helpfully, of the word for roe deer, ‘raihun’, a detail that put a spring in the steps of a pair of Tolkien-enthusiasts who preceded me in our tour of the display cabinets. But if the self-naming object was not a caprice on the part of a visiting Belgian surrealist, and early East Anglia was like a fifth-century version of Swift’s Laputa, with every Wuffing hiking around with a glossary of objects in his rucksack, we should recall that the version of English spoken by Raedwald was the version which also evolved into Swedish, not to mention Danish, Norwegian, German and Dutch. There is a strong case for saying that Sutton Hoo does not mark the beginnings of Englishness, but its end: no money, no Christianity, and no island mentality. Whoever was buried in Mound 1 did not die in the ship, but he did live in one, conceptually, at least – his people were joined by the sea, not bounded by it.
The present-day access to the site is by car to the Visitor Centre, then on foot through a small, crooked avenue of thorn trees, onto a table land where there are acres of polythene-covered crops and a small roped-off area, which is where the mounds are. Only one of them now commands rather than solicits attention. Totally rebuilt in 1993, steep-sided and picturesque with gorse, it looks down on the others which have all slumped sideways, having lost their centres of gravity to centuries of ploughing. Anti-glider trenches from the Second World War run across the heritage features. On a stormy spring day, larks swing across the bright windy spaces above, and there is the savour of salt in the air. The cloud anvils are pale to the west, and dark to the east. Not-Raedwald, progenitor of Not-England, no longer even darkens the soil.
Shot by Both Sides
The medal as an art form is ideally suited to represent a microcosm of the world. A flat metal disc reflects the circular appearance of the globe if not its spherical form, while its reversible sides seem tailor-made for alternative, and even contrasting views of experience. The basic design of every medal thus supplies a pretext for the conceptual division that has marked the history of making and awarding these tokens of praise and blame, permitting the growth of opposite traditions either honouring recipients or else smearing intended or imagined recipients with attributions of dishonour. The structural reversibility built into the genre from the start has paved the way for the present exhibition, but the antithetical energy that runs so vividly through the exhibits has been generated by the convulsions of history, by specific reminders that there are two sides to every story. Medals can be thought of as aesthetically complex forms of name-calling, deploying both positive and negative terms, as if in line with Churchill’s paradoxical statement that ‘a medal glitters, but it also casts a shadow’ (1941). Churchill is referring to the mixed feelings that may greet the award of a medal, not to any ambivalence in its design, but his motto serves as a formulation of the way in which examples of the genre always carry the potential for a contradiction in terms.
In the hands of Mona Hatoum, the medal is transformed into the indispensable medium for representing the double-sided character of our current ideological environment. Hatoum’s medal is blank on the reverse, but her design does not need to encompass more than one side, since its depiction of the globe as a hand grenade, juxtaposed with an Arabic inscription, implies a world view that cannot be imagined without reference to its antithesis. For those without Arabic, there is a further reversal of expected meaning in the translation of the inscription, which does not sponsor violence but disowns it, and in doing so offers a check to western assumptions about the distribution of honourable and dishonourable conduct in the socalled war on terror.
Medals are conceptually Janus-faced in their relation to history. They possess both transitory and enduring characteristics, with their origins in a forgotten topicality that art transforms into persistence. The two traditions of honour and dishonour manage the relationship with history in different ways. Medals of honour are more likely to be conventional and stereotypical in form, paradoxically consigning their subjects to oblivion, while the inventiveness and originality of many designs in the dishonour tradition are more likely to preserve in the memory these responses to ignominy. This is nowhere more true than in the Chapman brothers’ medal, which provides an epitome of the concerns reflected in their recent installation Fucking Hell (2008). In both the medal and the larger project to which it refers the theatre of war does not figure as the principal setting for the kind of behaviour recognised and rewarded in the medals of honour tradition, but is instead the total environment within which both terrestrial and infernal economies have become undivided. The world is not contained within its sphere nor within the visible circumference supplied by the shape of the medal, but extends beyond imaginative control in a limitless killing field whose iconography is associated with the conflicts of different historical periods as well as of different discursive fields: economic, socio-political and cultural, as well as military.
The Chapman’s hell is resolutely postmodern in its mixing of registers and in its secularising and routinising of the theologian’s evil. Grayson Perry’s ‘For Faith in Shopping’ is in many ways its perfect complement, deploying a deliberately archaic style of representation, with aspects of Christian iconography that relate to an historical period when devotional art was, practically speaking, universal in its control of the cultural imagination, and yet substituting as the object of devotion a way of being in the world that is controlled ultimately by the power of the spectacle, no longer in the hands of fine art, but at the mercy of fashion and the media. The technologised sleekness of fashion products is clearly opposed by the palpable craftsmanship with which the worship of fashion has been modelled, giving Perry’s retrograde artisanal skills the aura of authenticity in an era of virtually infinite reproducibility. Of all the works in the exhibition, his miniature tondo is the most resistant to the medal’s habitual gravitation towards two dimensions; it is an anthem against flatness.
Cornelia Parker, on the other hand is an artist who has experimented enthusiastically with flattened metal in the past, sometimes flattening objects, such as brass musical instruments, whose function requires the preservation of volume. The conversion of a three-dimensional presence into a sheet of metal connoting absence signals her recognition of the extent to which the transfer of any utensil into an art context changes its meaning; the translation of its physical reality into another form is emblematic of its conceptual transformation. Parker has also made relevant use of the disc form, exploiting the ambivalence attached to the binary structure of the medal. For her Moon Landing project, she created a series of plaques parodying the conventions of National Trust signs, reproducing the shape and typography favoured by this organisation, but producing an effect of contrariety with the introduction of black rather than white backgrounds. This negative or alternative universe of heritage refers to an object that has been lost rather than conserved, perhaps commenting on the selective attitude towards history exemplified by heritage organisations whose interpretation of the past may displace the object of scrutiny by the manner in which they seek to retrieve it. The aversion of the two faces in Parker’s medal focuses attention even more dramatically on the practice of concealment now identified with the conduct of the Iraq war, highlighting the culpability of politicians whose cover-up operations affect the making and not just the interpretation of history.
Richard Hamilton’s medal seems at first glance to offer a
counter-example to Parker’s twin images of retraction, with its full exposure of smiling faces. However, there is an element of exaggeration in these brazen expressions, a suggestion of strain and artifice, of the erection of a facade. Hamilton is a shrewd observer of the interface between public persona and the individual whose personal motivations for public actions remain inscrutable. The element of performance in political life combines exhibitionism with concealment, requiring an almost contradictory enactment of identity, a suturing together of almost opposite tendencies; this unnatural process of collaging the self is captured brilliantly in Hamilton’s well-known painting, Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland, which is partly an ad hominem attack and partly a more general indictment of the inauthenticity of the political role, of a mode of operation in public life that resembles the condition of Frankenstein, stitched together from different versions of the self, some of which are more alien than others, grafting sincerity onto masquerade, and expediency onto conviction. The distortion of parts of the face in the portrayal of Gaitskell is echoed more subtly in the medal’s characterisations of Blair and Campbell, where the careful manipulation of bas-relief effects literally adds a dimension to the artistic expression of Protean mutability. By moving the position of the medal, or moving one’s own position in relation to it, the facial expressions of government are seen to change, to be capable of meaning more than one thing at once. Closer inspection of the milled surface reveals an unusual alternation of convexities and concavities that dramatises the chiaroscuro effects that can be achieved by more conventional modelling. Hamilton has achieved an advance in the capacity of medal-making techniques to embody alternatives and make duplicity seem ingrained, almost putting us in the position of seeing both sides at once.
The Iraq war has attracted more attention than any other scenario featured on the medals commissioned for this exhibition. The enormous media coverage it has received has turned it into a twenty-first-century theatre of cruelty, in which the testimony of sounds and images counts for more than language in any attempt to locate the evidence of honourable or dishonourable conduct. Yun-Fei Ji’s medal makes a direct contrast between the hypocrisy of political rhetoric and the carnage that is performed in its name. The obverse seems to illustrate an episode in a beast fable, in which animals are given human attributes in order to make generic points about examples of folly or wisdom, moral or immoral behaviour. But in a world controlled by the interests of those embraced by the phrase ‘coalition of the willing’, states and their governments revert to violence in a mimicry of instinctual predation by animals. The human cost of this militarised feeding frenzy is counted on the reverse of Steve Bell’s ‘Collateral Damage Medal’, which encapsulates the effect of the war on civilians in the single figure of a dead child. The distilled pathos of this image jars grotesquely with the monstrous image on the obverse, echoing the concealed and camouflaged heads and faces of the medals by Cornelia Parker and Richard Hamilton. Bell’s unmistakeable reference to the head of the sovereign submits the familiar image to a form of deranged swaddling, indicative of an obsessive need to see, hear, smell, taste nothing, precisely because the evidence of the senses is the only thing to be trusted after language has been corrupted by the obscene euphemisms of war.
The two remaining medals that subvert the genre’s traditional iconographic focus on the portrait head are Ellen Gallagher’s ‘An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity’ and Michael Landy’s ‘ASBO Medal’. The experiment referred to in Gallagher’s title withheld medical treatment from American black men suffering from syphilis between 1932 and 1972 in order to collect data on the progress of the disease up to the point of death. The face of the nurse depicted on the medal is accordingly reduced to the representation of a single cyclopean eye, indicting the substitution of mere observation for the medical duty of care. The ravaged state of the neck subtended to this mutant surveillance device transfers the disease from patient to researcher in a comment on the psychological morbidity of those responsible. Michael Landy’s medal is concerned with another social experiment, much less vicious, but one whose effects are less easily calculated and less easy to control. The conferring of an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, intended as a mark of disgrace and dishonour, has been regarded by some recipients as the opposite. The necessarily local scale within which the order has currency changes its value according to the premium placed on celebrity – especially in the form of notoriety – among those to whom other forms of distinction are unavailable. In this respect, there is almost a quaintness adhering to the criminal mug-shot displayed on Landy’s medal, when compared to the inscrutability of the acronyms on the target-like disc of ‘Virtual World’ by Langlands and Bell. The ASBO has meaning only within the context of a ‘knowable community’, and is almost nineteenth century in conception, whereas the criminality associated with some of the organisations behind the acronyms in ‘Virtual World’ can only be assessed within a global context, within which different ideological perspectives would map the world according to diverse criteria of merit and demerit. Warfare in postmodernity is orientated increasingly towards ideological conflict rather than competition for territory, which makes the worldwide web, whose scope reverberates through the domain names on the reverse of the medal, a significant battleground in the war of definitions that has turned the history of medals into an extension of war by other means. Meanwhile, Felicity Powell’s medal ‘Hot Air’, is a satirical reminder of the most significant form of territorial defeat in a war in which there are only losers. Global warming is the product of an excessively technologised biosphere, but the two sides of Powell’s medal are equally unswerving in their denunciation of the source of the problem: in the human condition for which technology is only an aggrandised form of prosthesis; and in the arrogance of a species whose self-indulgence has often been in direct proportion to its talent for self-deception.
The liveliest episodes in the history of satirical medals have almost always involved visual expressions of the right to free speech, or of resistance to censorship, or have trained their focus on banned or taboo subject matter. Among those artists featured in the current exhibition, those who have lived for long periods of their lives under oppressive regimes exemplify the extremes of direct and indirect forms of challenge to authority. The savage humour of William Kentridge’s assault on complicity in political injustice almost leaps out of the chosen medium, literally projecting from the surface of the medal, while the coded reticence of the Kabakovs’ subversions is folded calmly into its structural ambiguities. The unmanageable centre of attention in Kentridge’s saw-toothed vision of social and political abuse is an autonomous megaphone, a classic emblem of the means of amplifying one point of view in order to drown out others; the megaphone is the instrument of political oratory, of spokesmanship, the essential prosthesis for those who wish to speak for the people rather than allow them to speak for themselves. In Kentridge’s vision, it has been disconnected, uprooted and given a roving commission, no longer transmitting the voice of a human agent, since the conceptual wiring that would sustain the illusion of sincerity has long since decayed, its fundamental message a repetitive confirmation to the listeners that they are screwed.
Perhaps the most enigmatic and most powerfully elliptical of the medals on display is that of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Their exclusive focus on the image of a single fly, resembling the presentation of a zoological specimen that stands in for an entire species, is also one instance of a thematic preoccupation that they have returned to several times in their work. Each return to this imagery reinforces the terms of a fictional theory that associates the collective behaviour of flies with the social politics of the totalitarian state. That the single fly can be regarded as a synecdoche for this complex of associations is confirmed by the drawing shown as part of the installation, ‘The Life of Flies’, where the anatomical drawing in black is enclosed within a diagram outlined in red representing the sum total of flies in the atmosphere above the
Soviet Union. The symmetrical shape of this gigantic swarm indicates the highly organised principles that govern the lives of these insects, whose ‘civilisation’ generates patterns that reveal its symbiosis with the fortunes of the Soviet state. It is usually the bee, with its industriousness and cooperativeness, that is chosen as the fabled exemplar of civic responsibility in a well-run community, rather than the fly, with its associations of opportunism, parasitism, abjection and decay. The disjunction between the utopian programming of the communist era and the historical reality of mismanagement and waste is both explained away and mystified by the controlling agency of the fly, whose impact on human society is well in excess of Biblical proportions, since according to the Kabakov’s satirical theory, the upper limit of the swarm is 60,000 kilometres above the earth. The medal of dishonour identifies the fly as culprit in the assessment of ‘turning-points in our history that are still unexplained from the point of view of human behaviour’(The Life of Flies), an identification whose absurdity is bound to prompt reflection on the role of human agents whose behaviour has resembled that of flies, not in respect of the abstract beauty of their orchestrated movements, but in their scavenging for the rich pickings to be gleaned from a dying carcase. The apparent neutrality of the image belies its conceptual subtext, and provides a telling example of the unique properties of the medal in its ability to compress and encode a host of contingent details, telescoping an astonishing array of polemical issues in its presentation of a world in little.