The Whole Picture
For July / August, as part of SP BOOK CLUB, we will be reading ‘The Whole Picture: the colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it’, by Alice Proctor.
How to deal with the colonial history of the art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue we’re only just beginning to address. Alice Proctor, creator of Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells stories that have been left out of the canon.
“No object in a museum is by accident. Someone has chosen every item on display. Someone is directing you around the space, shaping your interpretation and dictating what you may look at and how.
I started my unauthorised Uncomfortable Art Tours around museums in London from a place of frustration. I was tired of the lack of acknowledgement of the colonial history of our galleries and the inability of the art world to recognise that it often unconsciously perpetuated the inequalities created by colonialism. I was tired of these histories being treated like something that only happened elsewhere.
Now a public conversation around repatriation and restitution is building and important questions are finally being asked. Who has the right to hold these objects and tell these stories?
In ‘The Whole Picture’, we take a tour through an imagined museum and unravel the biographies of some key objects. Each section describes a different type of collection or gallery, from the Palace and the Classroom to the Memorial and the Playground.
As an engaged museum visitor, your job is to ask yourself, what’s missing? Whose eyes are we viewing the story through? How has this history been massaged into a narrative? Once we ask these questions, we can start to understand museums as places built on ideologies. There is always more than one way of looking. “ — Alice Proctor
21 - 07 - 20