Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of a healthily sceptical attitude to authority and self-importance. It is a great safety valve, as well. Perhaps because the British have been so effusive and inventive as satirists, as a nation we have felt less need to rebel in more active ways. Instead of dragging politicians from their seats of power and stringing them up, we have been content to satirise the swine. Well, it’s this attitude that has made us what we are today. In which case, it’s high time for direct physical action…
Satirical London, at the Museum of London until 3 September, offers over 350 examples of satire from the past three centuries in a display which is somewhat unclear in its presentation. The quality of the work on show is, for the most part, unimpeachably high, with very fine things by Hogarth and Rowlandson, Gillray and Cruikshank, coming up to date with Steadman, Scarfe, Martin Rowson and Steve Bell. But the exhibition lacks clarity and narrative drive. It’s loosely clustered in a congeries of semi-divided spaces, with insufficient thought given to chronology or theme. The gloomy wastes of this floor of the Museum are neither welcoming nor pleasant to visit, and the exhibition design doesn’t help matters. There’s a video loop from a 1985 Fluck and Law documentary which is so brief that anyone spending a reasonable amount of time looking at other exhibits in its vicinity (several sections of the gallery) is subjected to its inane repetition a dozen times. This is not only immensely irritating, it also destroys concentration.
In addition, there’s some similarly repetitive hurdy-gurdy music all too audible from another part of the museum. I know people are not expected to linger long in museums these days, but these intrusive soundtracks are enough to drive them swiftly out of the show, which is a pity because there’s so much good work to be seen and savoured.
The exhibition begins with a red earthenware chamberpot, dating to c.1810, with a face grinning up from its interior. Nearby is a star-wheel printing press from some 80 years later, exhibited with a couple of the copperplates that would have been printed on it. (One is a Rowlandson entitled ‘Miseries of London or a Surly Saucy Hackney coachman’ — fares have always been a transport issue.) Then comes a group of historical images to show the origins of pictorial satire: anonymous items, and prints by Robert White and Wenceslaus Hollar. The pace accelerates with the arrival of Hogarth on the scene, the first of several inclusions in the exhibition, with three images from his brilliant ‘Rake’s Progress’. Three of Paul Sandby’s etchings in mocking response to Hogarth spice things up a bit here, before the exhibition blossoms into full-blooded historical re-creation with a real bowed shop-front representing Mrs Humphrey’s Print Shop, its windows full of Gillrays.
After that chronological opening, the exhibition degenerates into thematic melt-down. The best I can do is to mention a few of the many interesting things on show. Anything by Leech and Keene is always worth looking at, and the comparison of a Keene preparatory ink drawing with the wood engraving made from it demonstrates how the subtleties of expression are often lost in the transfer. Roger Law’s scabrous poster ‘Maggielyn’ of 1990 shows Mrs Thatcher with her dress blowing up à la Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, and there’s a familiar Spitting Image polyurethane head of Mrs T. nearby. An excellent Ralph Steadman drawing ‘Sport and Politics’ has been hung next to a Gerald Scarfe, showing how much tougher an artist Steadman is. Later on, Steadman’s 1965 versions of Hogarth’s ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’ appear with the originals (the modern master on top form), juxtaposed with a couple of Rowlandsons in one of the exhibition’s finest pieces of hanging.
If you do go, look out for H.M. Bateman, Richard Doyle, Heath Robinson, George Belcher and Robert Dighton. Cruikshank is shown variously to continual interest, particularly in his intemperate Temperance images (‘The Bottle’ and ‘The Drunkard’s Children’), and the other side of the coin is offered by Scarfe’s potent image of Mr Blair as ‘Mine Jovial Host’ (‘I’m Not Closing Yet!’). In a pub called ‘The Leaky Ship’, Tottering Tony presides over a bar lurid with slogans — ‘Unhappy Hour All Day!’. A little further on, Martin Rowson’s sharp 2001 update of Hogarth is called ‘Cocaine Lane’. As ever, it’s a fine line with satire — is its main imperative a desire to reassert moral truths, or to celebrate vice, folly and humbug in all their gaudy plumes? It is, after all, primarily a form of entertainment. Perhaps we shouldn’t be cultivating the ability to ridicule so much as a lively sense of the ridiculous. That seems more positive.
The show’s unsympathetic layout and uncongenial habitat call for some very selective and probably speedy browsing. The handsome catalogue which accompanies it, The Art of Satire: London in Caricature (£19.95 from Philip Wilson Publishers), is written by the exhibition’s curator, Mark Bills. Broadly speaking, it’s a history of the development of London caricature from 1700 to 1900, with a few more contemporary asides and references. It’s also an exploration of the largely unknown satire collection of the Museum of London and is most welcome as such. I’m not sure that I entirely trust an author who describes his own book in its preface as ‘entertaining’, but it seems a readable enough account of the subject. An hour or two spent perusing its pages might be more profitable — and certainly more enjoyable — than visiting the Museum of London itself.
The exhibition seems to have been designed primarily with children in mind, which is an insult to the majority of the gallery-going public. (Museum as playground, not a place for serious study or learning.) Besides the usual interactive screen entertainment, there’s a series of ‘have-a-go’ hand puppets, a drawing station where young visitors are encouraged to do their versions of pictures they like (not a bad idea this, but entirely devoid of creative children when I was there), and a dressing-up station, where members of the public may don period-type costumes, hats and masks. This last proved very popular with European visitors during my visit — a German family and a group of Scandinavian adolescents were dissolving into shrieks of hilarity with ear-splitting regularity. Meanwhile a large Neanderthal-looking boy was stumbling round the exhibits bellowing and grunting, pursued by an ineffectual nutcracker-jawed female minder. A gaggle of teenage Koreans occupying the drawing station were busy extracting a wide variety of ringing tones from their mobiles. It was Bedlam. In the comments book someone had written (perhaps in the spirit of satire): ‘Le musée est très laid. Merci.’ Ugly, perhaps, but suddenly it seemed much stranger than that — like the setting for some nightmare cutting-edge social commentary: ‘Satire in Action’. It was too much for me; I beat a hasty retreat.
Comments