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JMW Turner's The Slave Ship

2016

Sculptural installation featuring velvet rope, custom robotic stanchions
First exhibited at Angell Gallery, Toronto
Created with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts


A reproduction of JMW Turner's most famous painting.


Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope!
Where is thy market now?

-excerpt from a poem written by JMW Turner, originally displayed alongside the painting The Slave Ship.


How does a socially-engaged artwork function as a work of activism? Is there a point in the life-cycle of a socially-engaged work where its activist function ceases, or even reverses? How do capitalist forces built into the art economy serve to co-opt and neutralize the content of activist art?

This artwork poses those questions by taking J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting, originally titled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, but now commonly referred to as simply Slave Ship, as a case study.

The artwork is a series of velvet ropes. The number of velvet ropes vary depending on the specific installation. The velvet ropes can be placed either at the entrance to the gallery, or in the centre of the gallery. All the ropes are blue save for single red one. The two ends of each velvet rope are clipped to robotic stanchions that move them up and down pseudo-randomly, creating an effect that mimics the choppy ocean waves depicted in Turner’s painting.

The installation has three functions, that eventually loop back into each other.

  1. It is an artwork and, being kinetic, it immediately identifies itself as an “Object Recognizable as Contemporary Art.”
  2. It is a barrier to the space beyond it.
  3. It is an implicit set of instructions on how its effect should be navigated and propagated. The velvet ropes organize visitors into a queue, then consume that queue as a part of the artwork, drawing more attention to itself and to the elite space which it is barricading. In this way, it is a diagram of capitalist reproduction and the ways art is well-suited as an instrument of that reproduction.

Ultimately, this artwork aims to give form to the following concepts:

Capitalism persists in part due to its ability to assimilate critique, subversion, and counter-culture into the mainstream of its own reproduction. Contemporary art is both a facilitator of this phenomenon and a microcosmic exemplar of it. Nearly all critical or subversive artworks created by artists for galleries are intrinsically commodities. Thus, they perform their critical energy within a tightly insulated environment. In the case of works like Slave Ship, an optimistic argument can be made that by transmitting social values within that insulated environment, an artwork aims to “change the system from within.” This artwork questions whether or not that is possible.

The barrier is the artwork. Exclusivity and inaccessibility are defining features of contemporary art. If one accepts this position, it has consequences when assessing the efficacy, sincerity, and legacy of contemporary-art-as-activism. Work that attempts to use the platform of contemporary art for a broad public benefit will encounter the conundrum that the platform cannot exist without exclusivity. When white gallery walls perform the alchemy of legitimating the object as a work of art, they also act as an insulator and barrier.

I give form to these ideas not so much to raise awareness of these underlying issues, but rather as a way of “trapping” elusive ideas in some sort of container, so that they may be probed, tested, and hopefully better understood.

All photos: credit Mitchell F Chan