by Jon Lackman | 17 April 2009 | Museums
In the November 2008 Third Text (pp. 794-96), Amna Malik reviews the Tate Britain exhibition “The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting”:
The return to orientalism as a curatorial strategy at Tate Britain appears somewhat puzzling, if not completely insensitive … Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, seems all the more pressing now, after the events that have unfolded in the Middle East, and yet the upsurge in the art market in that part of the world, a new Christie’s in Dubai for example, the new Louvre designed by Jean Nouvel, or the frenzied art collecting of David Khallil in Britain, has inflated the art market to an extent that might financially support an exhibition of this kind and justify its overturning of Said’s writings. This overturning is conducted on two fronts: first with the support of ‘Islamic’ commentators such as Yasmin Alibhai Brown whose trivial responses to individual paintings are dotted throughout the exhibition as a legitimisation of the curators’ strategies, and second by recourse to the rather simplistic assertion of the primacy of the aesthetic object … an old modernist assumption: that the art object can somehow ‘speak’ unaided, a position that continues to fuel a rather romantic view of contemporary art … One has to acknowledge that despite some key examples of important works of art, most of the paintings in this exhibition can only be justified on the basis of the rubric ‘Oriental’, but are otherwise mediocre, kitsch in form and banal in content. What seems to be contested is a rather worn idea to do with ‘the politics of representation’, symptomatic of art historical scholarship in the early 1980s when postcolonialism and feminist discourses first made themselves felt, and which is precisely the initial basis for the impact of Said’s Orientalism. This rather misguided attempt to address that discursive framework from within the terms of self and other, without acknowledging the power relations that informed them, is precisely the reason why postcolonial critiques were first formulated … The emergence of cross-cultural scholarship in recent years in art historical scholarship was urgently needed to rupture Eurocentric art history by examining the aesthetic conditions that brought about the emergence of art and artists beyond the Euro-American context. However, it seems that in this exhibition it has been taken up to justify the same centre-periphery relationships, the European view of the ‘East’, and to underpin an apolitical and weak scholarly position.
