Tatsurou Bashi, Villa Victoria (2002)

Villa Victoria was created for the Liverpool Biennial in 2002 and is one of a series of works by Tatsurou Bashi (a pseudonym of Tatzu Nishi) in which domestic or semi-domestic spaces are constructed around public monuments, thus recontextualizing them and, crucially, changing the relationship with the viewer (Fig. 1).²³ In this instance the source material was the Victoria Monument in Liverpool, an elaborate piece of Edwardian baroque, created by C. J. Allen and unveiled in 1906. The statue of the Queen stands under a baldacchino, with allegorical groups around the dome and a statue of Fame atop it; a Fame that is also a Victory, the allegorical image of the Queen par excellence, replete with wings and a foot stepping triumphantly on the globe. The architectural exedra around the central statue has four allegorical groups marking its corners, representing Justice, Wisdom, Charity, and Peace, supposedly the virtues not only of Victoria herself but also of her empire.²⁴ This elaborate setting extends the meaning of the Queen’s statue; it makes explicit her global power, her apparent moral status, as well as the grandeur of imperial Britain.

Fig. 1

Tatsurou Bashi, Villa Victoria (2002). Photograph: Alistair Overbruck. Courtesy of the artist.

Bashi built a hotel space around the statue of the Queen: a stairway which led to a reception area outside the room and a fully furnished bedroom with an en suite bathroom, which visitors could book for a night’s stay. In Villa Victoria most of the architecture and sculpture of the monument disappeared: only the huge bronze effigy of the Queen, between columns, remained, an incongruous presence in the quotidian space. For this work, an important starting point was the oft-made observation that public sculpture, in spite of its size, centrality, and presence, is ignored or overlooked. Bashi remarked that ‘this phenomenon is much more interesting for me than the historical meaning of monuments’ (Nishi, pp. 173, 182). Nevertheless, in returning Victoria to hyper-visibility, Bashi’s work does the same for empire and its legacy. It forces its way back into the visual field but is now decontextualized; a reminder that in representing empire, these monuments also decontextualized themselves, replacing history with allegory or reducing indigenous agents to colonial puppets.

While his work brings people closer to the normally distant statue, it creates an uncanny effect; what might have been a more intimate encounter was in fact far from intimate, not least because of the inconsistent scale — the human scale of the room against the monumental scale of Victoria. Moreover, devoid of allegorical symbols and devoid of the ceremonial space, the statue became curiously inert and misplaced. If the monument was designed to animate public space, here the space disenchants the statue. There was an unresolved collision of imperial splendour and generic hotel room, of Edwardian luxury and contemporary functionality.

The choice of hotel room was carefully considered. Bashi made a connection with Liverpool as a port city, a place where, historically, people came and went. The hotel room is a temporary residence for those who are travelling and away from a fixed base. Bashi’s Villa Victoria thus thematized mobility and permanence in the stable presence of the statue set against the movement of colonial trade and governance, and, from the perspective of imperial history, a Victoria that collapses space and time in favour of unified and unchanging power. This is a reminder too, albeit unwitting, of Victoria’s image as a global traveller, taking up residence elsewhere along with her imperial machine.

The hotel room also has a hybrid status, neither fully private nor fully public. Bashi’s work swaps public and private but is less directly concerned with political conceptions of the public and more with the question of public space. Indeed, Bashi is interested in the way that public space is controlled and administrated. His works, including this one, have to be approved by public agencies and are usually funded by public-sector bodies, such as the Liverpool Biennial, supported by Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council, for Villa Victoria (Nishi, p. 182). These processes, along with the extensive bureaucracy, approvals, and resistance from opponents are all part of the project; the tensions between art and bureaucracy, the possibilities and constraints of public art and its governance, are central to Bashi’s work in theory and in practice, and this concern resonates in relation to the apparently natural presence of Victoria in the cityscape.

However, Bashi does not operate with a naively straightforward distinction between public and private. Indeed, Villa Victoria mimics the way that Victoria deployed public and private, using the circulation of her private image in domestic spaces to support her public political agency. This is repeated here, but the mismatch of the huge statue in the domestic space serves as a serious joke, asking what if, rather than Parian reductions of her portrait bust, or prints of statues in Osborne House, a full-size monumental sculpture were moved into a private room? And yet, this has a historical truth to it: the Queen did dominate and her image did expand to fill these spaces, conceptually if not physically. The domestication of Victoria’s image was central to its ideological efficacy, and here Bashi offers a witty or even absurdist take on the presence and workings of empire in such spaces.

Like Wodiczko and Kirkham’s, this work engages with the question of naming, albeit more obliquely. Victoria’s name is iconic; that is, it immediately generates a symbol and one that is fixed as a sign of empire and power; its use across the world is a means of asserting legitimate authority and imperial homogeneity. In contrast with this fixity, the artist’s name is constantly changing. Indeed, Bashi — better known as Tatzu Nishi — changes his name every year or two, in what he calls the ‘name change project’.²⁵ This is in itself an artistic project, engaging in debates about authorship, the signature, and the branding of the artist in the contemporary art world. Here, though, it takes on an additional resonance when brought into contact with Victoria, whose unchanging name is essential to the crafting of her image and its political function.

Unlike the other artists represented here, Bashi does not interfere with the sculpture itself. But in the thoroughgoing spatial relocation and the consequent demand to see the sculpture differently, Villa Victoria exposes a temporal misalignment between past and present and poses a question about the presence of this historical object in the contemporary world.

Sophie Ernst, Silent Empress (2012)

In Silent Empress, created in 2012, Sophie Ernst attached a loudhailer to the face of the statue of Queen Victoria in Wakefield, Yorkshire, from which issued a monologue comprised of quotations from the journals and letters of the Queen and extracts from speeches and texts by past prime ministers (Blair, Brown, Cameron, Churchill, Gladstone, and Lord Salisbury), as well as Lin Tse-hsü, Chinese Governor General at the time of the First Opium War, and Somerset Maugham (Fig. 2). These quotations form a patchwork of statements about empire, generally supportive, and, while recognizing that it was built on exploitation and colonial violence, asserting that no apology is necessary and that silence on the matter is preferable.²⁶

Fig. 2

Sophie Ernst, Silent Empress (2012). Photograph: courtesy of Sophie Ernst.

Ernst’s Silent Empress was a public commission for Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield. This may be why the Wakefield monument was chosen but, given its prevalence around the globe, it was an appropriate example. The statue was modelled by F. J. Williamson in 1904 and unveiled the following year. It is a replica of the statue Williamson originally sculpted for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. Williamson depicted the empress in state robes, complete with crown, sceptre, and pennant decoration. This came to be a particularly popular image of Victoria, both with the Queen herself and with commissioning bodies across the empire, with versions in Hastings, Paisley, Londonderry, Rangoon (Yangon), Perth, Auckland, and Christchurch.²⁷ Viewing Ernst’s work from the perspective of the statue’s history provides a useful reminder that Wakefield was also the empire, that empire was not just overseas in the colonies but also at home.²⁸ All these replicas of Williamson’s sculpture meant that the same empress at the same moment presided over the global empire, a spatial unity that was unchanging.

The central concern of Silent Empress was the legacy of empire and the question of apology for this history. It was not simply about articulating an apology; rather, it raised the question of what an apology might be, what it would mean to apologize, and how to avoid apology as an end point, as if saying sorry simply excused the past and closed debate. Indeed, the use of quotation from Victoria in the 1840s to Gordon Brown’s statement, made in a 2005 speech when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, that ‘the days of Britain having to apologize for its colonial history are over’ underpins the idea that this matter is not something consigned to the past, but — like Victoria’s image — has a persistent legacy.²⁹ Ernst has pointed out that she deploys the conception of apology as Eingedenken, as defined by Walter Benjamin. This is to remember the past from the perspective of the present; to conceive the apology not as the completion of the past, a fresh start as it were, but as signalling a continual responsibility.³⁰

For Ernst, a first step in addressing this was to attempt ‘to expose the rather heroic form of remembering’ in European public commemoration and the way in which colonialism was still marked by an aesthetic of presence, moral virtue, and even glamour. How might this heroic form of remembrance be undone? How might one draw out what such heroic image making ignores or actively suppresses? How might the statue as a form of forgetting rather than remembering be brought to public attention?

While the sound is crucial to the project, equally important is the visual and material form of the work, since this directly engages with the form of public sculpture both generally and, here, specifically in terms of Victoria’s image. The loudhailer, which appears incongruous on the Edwardian statue, breaks the carefully designed form of the empress’s body. Moreover, it hides much of her face, which was so important for Victoria in terms of recognition and the moral signals it gave. The duct tape used, crudely wrapped around the statue to hold the loudhailer in place, offers a hastily constructed and purely practical surface against the finely modelled and detailed surface of the empress. This has two important consequences. The first is that it provides an immediate sense of the collision of past and present, in keeping with the conceptual underpinning of the work. Indeed, it asks of the viewer how one might connect the Edwardian imperial effigy and the contemporary materials of the building trade and public life. Moreover, the performance of installation, involving traffic cones, red and white tape, ladder, and the high-vis vests of the technicians installing the work, opens up not only the gap between imperial mythology and the banality of quotidian tasks but also alerts us to the gap between the immaculate image of the empress — splendid, luxurious, and powerful — and the hidden labour and manipulation needed to support this mirage.³¹ The second key aesthetic function is that it becomes part of what one might call the work’s anti-decoration. Visual elements become parodic of the decorative impulse that shaped Victoria’s self-fashioning: thus, the red base of the loudhailer disrupts the monochrome unity of the statue; the red wires and the white iPod attached with blue tape to her wrist serve as an alternative set of jewellery, bracelets, and other adornments (and reminds one of the garland of shoes draped over Victoria in Bombay in 1896 by the Chapekar brothers).

While monumental form is cracked open by Ernst, what is most distinctive is the use of sound: that the silent empress speaks her own words and ventriloquizes others. Some of the quotations are straightforward, such as Churchill’s notorious comment about the starvation of Bengali people as ‘less serious’, not least because ‘Indians breed like rabbits’.³² Others are reframed in order to approach the notion of apology: for example, a line from a letter from Lin Tse-hsü to Victoria about the British opium trade asked, ‘By what right do they […] use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people?’. In Silent Empress Victoria poses this question to herself, asking ‘By what right did we use the poisonous drug to injure the Chinese people?’.³³ There are points at which historical detail is inevitably removed. The monologue proclaims ‘Liberty for ourselves, Empire over the rest of mankind’. The phrase was taken from a speech made by Gladstone in 1879 but, historically at least, cannot be taken at face value. Gladstone cites this principle as a precedent from ancient Rome that is simply wrong and must not guide British foreign policy.³⁴ Gladstone, after all, was critical of empire and opposed to expansion. Moreover, given the citing of a letter about the Opium War, one might add that Gladstone believed strongly that the Chinese should be allowed to deal with British opium smugglers as they wished.³⁵

Beyond this, Ernst plays somewhat fast and loose with her source material. For example, there are quotations from Victoria which were not originally about empire or foreign policy, but were in personal letters to Vicky, her eldest daughter. Thus, the phrase ‘Yes, it is an awful moment to have to give up one’s innocence’ was in a letter written on the eve of Vicky’s wedding, and originally read, ‘Yes, it is an awful moment to have to give up one’s innocent child to a man.’³⁶ However, what Ernst appears to be doing here is creating a monologue for Victoria that reconstructs attitudes to empire in the language of her time (and subsequently); or, perhaps a more generous interpretation still, that the words were spoken in an imperial context, one that haunted speech and writing.

The point of Ernst’s work is to make the statue speak the unspoken, including the wish that colonial violence remains unspoken. This is what the silent empress keeps silent, the silence that is the source of her mute statue’s power. Like Wodiczko, Ernst demonstrates the different ways in which sculpture and speech shape and address the public. In this project the tensions of public and private emerged in another way. While this was a public commission, after only thirty minutes, Wakefield Council demanded that the work be removed on the grounds that it was ‘disrespectful’.³⁷ The end of the video reveals the irony of this, as the sound tag is removed, the installation team leaves the site, and the empress is left, as she was, undisturbed and silent in her injunction to ‘say as little as you can on these subjects’.

Hew Locke, Hinterland (2013)

Richard Hope-Pinker’s statue of Victoria stands outside the law courts in Georgetown, Guyana, an imperial presence in an independent republic. In Hew Locke’s photograph, Hinterland, the statue is relocated from the orderly context of Georgetown into the hinterland where, ‘surrounded by the ghosts of empire’ as Locke himself puts it, Victoria is transformed by Guyana and its Afro-Creole culture (Fig. 3).³⁸

Fig. 3

Hew Locke, Hinterland (2013). Acrylic paint, ink, and pen on c-type photograph, 265 × 151.5 cm. © Hew Locke CC BY 4.0, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Charles Littlewood.

The statue was unveiled in 1894 outside what was then the Victoria Law Courts. The subsequent history of the monument parallels that of Guyana’s, as one might expect, given that history is one of struggle against colonialism, independence, and the realization of the nation. Thus, anti-colonial protestors dynamited the statue in 1954, blowing off its head and left hand, and the statue was removed in 1970 when Guyana became a republic. Cheddi Jagan, leader of the People’s Progressive Party, noted that the removal ‘had therapeutic value for the nation and the individual’, that it was necessary psychologically as much as it was symbolically.³⁹ To remove the statue was also to remove the myths of Victoria’s self-curated image. As Harold Lutchman noted in the year of Guyana’s becoming a republic, ‘it was for years part of Guyanese education to be taught that slavery was abolished because of the initiative of Queen Victoria the Good.’⁴⁰ However, the statue of Victoria was returned to its original site in 1990.⁴¹ This was, and remains, a contentious move, and the restored empress, occupying again the symbolic spot, suggesting that she remains the legal arbiter, the fons et origo of the law, was subject to further attacks, defaced with red paint in 2018.

Hinterland is not unconnected to such attacks; indeed, Locke describes his practice as ‘mindful vandalism’.⁴² Of course, his attacks take place on the surface of the photograph rather than on the sculpture itself, since the sculpture is not available for modification.⁴³ More importantly, rather than defacing or destroying, this aesthetic vandalism is about reimagining the sculpture. Locke uses art as critique, and critique as a means of making art; this is not a simple statement — as graffiti or defacement might be — but a work of art with a more complex engagement with the visual and material qualities of the sculpture, and of the history in which it is embedded.

The treatment of the statue itself emphasizes its violent history. The tracing of lines to mark the contours of the form clarifies the damage to the face and the missing left hand. Moreover, because the broken sceptre is the one part of the statue that remains uncoloured, it appears as if it is falling, as if the Queen were dropping the emblem of imperial authority. Most of the surface of the white monument is adorned with a design of brilliant colours; the plain robes are transformed into a vibrant costume at odds with the demeanour of Victoria and ideal whiteness of marble sculpture. This alternative decoration reflects a major strand of Locke’s output, which deals with imperial figures and royalty weighed down with the decoration of empire, and parodies the self-fashioning of Victoria, who represented herself covered with the badges of office, products of empire (such as diamonds), and objects symbolizing dynastic authority (Wood, p. 283). However, the decorative surface of Hinterland is not the baubles of empire but the stealthy and subversive decoration of the statue by Guyana and its history.

Indeed, colour and whiteness structure the work. Locke has said that he sees colour a means of reinvigorating sculpture, albeit a reinvigoration that simultaneously transforms its meaning. Here, the bright palette is a marked alternative to the pristine whiteness of the cleaning and repair effected before the monument was re-erected outside the law courts in Georgetown. Relocated away from the centre in the hinterland, nature takes over, the pattern on the plinth and figure resembling the way in which moss or lichen grows over stone surfaces, the liquidity of the swamp as a threat to the ostensible permanence of marble. This is also a reminder that the statue, when removed from its original site, had been left in the botanical gardens in the capital.

While there is no literal sound as in the works by Ernst, Wodiczko, and Hadley+Maxwell, Locke nevertheless represents the audible and its relationship to the ceremonial function of public sculpture. Hinterland depicts auditory ghosts haunting the silent presence of the marble Queen: four drummer boys, taken from nineteenth-century paintings by William Morris Hunt, George William Joy, and others, but now with ghoulish faces, spectral revenants of heroic sentimentality; a flute-playing girl, quoting a painting by Donna Tucker, the kind of contemporary art abhorred by the art establishment, which evokes fantasies of a tropical idyll, flanked by two skeletons; and behind the Queen, two strange musicians with animal heads playing banjo and harmonica. These ‘ghosts of empire’ create a counter-ceremonial.

The skeletons flanking the flautist might be gnawing bones or they might be gnawing sugar cane; in the sugar trade the two become equivalents. The visual rhyme between bone and flute connects the fantasy of colonial idyll and the reality of violent production. The world of sugar beyond Guyana is evoked by the semi-animal figures playing banjo and harmonica; the banjo, in particular, raises the spectre of the American Deep South and slavery. Moreover, the grotesque forms are a reminder of Locke’s interest in Mexican visual culture: these forms have a kinship with the popular imagery, cartoons of skeletons, and traditions of masquerade in the Day of the Dead. Kobena Mercer has remarked that Locke uses ‘cross-cultural assemblage as a critical device for examining fantasies of power’.⁴⁴ Together, this mix of sources articulates, first, the global nature of Guyana as a nation, that there is no pure indigeneity to be found but only a complex of transnational links; and, second, Guyana as part of the circum-Atlantic sugar economy, stretching from Europe, via Africa, to South America, the Caribbean, and the USA. The monument, of course, replaced the variegated structures of enslavement, colonialism, and trade with a singular image of empire, of a homogenized geographical power and moral legitimacy; Victoria’s image was designed to occlude the patterns of migration and displacement that shaped Guyana.⁴⁵

The colonial order that is supposed to radiate from Victoria as the centre of empire is displaced by disorder. The monumental figure fails to contain the encroaching hinterland peopled by the overlapping, half-visible figures. The statue is haunted by the carnivalesque ceremonial of what it wanted to repress; what was silenced finally makes itself heard. These ghosts return as the sceptre falls and the hinterland reclaims the monument.

Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary Kirkham, Queen Victoria (2014)

On 12 and 13 June 2014, in Victoria Park, Kitchener, Ontario, Krzysztof Wodiczko projected the bodies of six people onto the statue of Queen Victoria that has pride of place in the park (Fig. 4). The projected participants, five refugees and one woman of indigenous heritage, told the audience their stories. The statue in Kitchener was made by Raffaele Zaccaquini and unveiled in 1911 on Victoria Day, the tenth anniversary of the Queen’s death. Victoria Park had been named in 1897 to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee. Both the statue and its location were wholly identified with empire and its legacy. The participants’ narratives of marginalization and exclusion were told from a position of absolute centrality, both giving them a chance to engage in democratic exchange and to demand recognition, and ironically revealing the limits of democracy in the wake of the settler colonialism represented by Victoria.

Fig. 4

Krzysztof Wodiczko and Gary Kirkham, Queen Victoria (2014). Courtesy of CAFKATV.

This intervention is typical of the major strand of Wodiczko’s art. As one of the world’s leading public artists, he has staged similar projections around the globe, exploring the social and political tensions embodied in monuments and revealing the exclusions at the heart of apparently inclusive statues. His work interrogates the limits of democracy and democratic exchange and the way in which the public sphere, apparently an open space of civil society, is too often transformed into a space of ‘publicity’ instead, the domain of advertising, media, and corporations. Indeed, Wodiczko’s extensive work with monuments around the world has at its heart the question: what is the public in ‘public sculpture’? His projections and similar projects ask about both the actual constituency — that is, who is included and who is excluded — and about the conceptual and political understandings of the public that inform these monuments. His work is largely an attempt to complicate and examine the assumptions that are hidden by the all-too-easy articulation of ‘public’ in both political and everyday discourse and draws on radical trends in democratic theory.⁴⁶

Wodiczko terms his participants — in this case, those whose bodies and voices were projected onto Victoria — the ‘inner public’, distinguishing them from the outer public, those who form the audience for the work. This is a practical distinction pertaining to the making of his works, but one which also has a political resonance, not least because his ‘inner public’, as in this work, consists of those who are marginalized and can only become part of the monument’s public at a cost. This is pertinent to the crucial role of playwright Gary Kirkham in making the work. Kirkham, as a local writer, liaised with refugee and indigenous peoples, since these communities were not simply there to be gathered up by a world-famous artist, but were already embedded in social structures and hierarchies that required the building of trust. This work of forming the inner public is part of the artwork itself, and again reveals social divisions that are the legacy of what the Victoria monument represents.

Like Sophie Ernst, Wodiczko and Kirkham make the silent empress speak, and in so doing reveal the power of that silence. However, rather than having the Queen speak the words of those in power, the voices — and projected presences — are of those excluded from the imperial body, or whose inclusion comes at a price of self-abnegation. The superficial flickering images of the participants against the solid bronze of Victoria is metaphorical of social position, and this tension between film and sculpture, the ephemeral and apparently permanent, parallels the participants’ testimonies. Lamees Al Athari, for example, a refugee from Iraq who is now a Canadian citizen, describes the difficulty of being Iraqi-Canadian: ‘it’s not as easy as it sounds’, she says, as she describes the strangeness of having to pledge allegiance to the Queen and a new culture.

Importantly, the connection between naming and colonialism emerged in the projection, most forcefully in the testimony of Amy Smoke, a woman of Haudenosaunee heritage. Amy told her tale of a troubled life, rooted in not knowing what her indigenous identity meant. From here, she detailed something of her history of addiction and her recovery, made possible through aboriginal engagement in the form of a healing lodge. In reclaiming her ethnic belonging, she also reclaimed a sense of self, both of which had been negated by colonialism and its legacy. That this story of loss and reclamation emanated from the elevated figure of the empress was largely what made Amy’s testimony so poignant.

Naming is central to Amy’s story. It begins, of course, with her own name; not only Amy, as an alternative to Victoria, but she also refers to herself as Northern Lights Woman. She makes the point that although the event is staged in Victoria Park, this is not the name given to the space by the Haudenosaunee people: ‘You are on our land’, she says, bluntly.⁴⁷ This alternative nomenclature extends yet further. At one point, Amy is shown cradling her baby, and she says: ‘I named her Sky … for Sky Woman of the Haudenosaunee-Mohawk creation story. Sky Woman fell from the sky and landed on the turtle’s back, got up and walked around and made Turtle Island as we know this continent.’⁴⁸ Rather than Victoria as the Great Mother and Canada as her dominion, Amy cites the indigenous alternatives, which preceded imperial appropriation of Haudenosaunee land and attack on their culture. The familiarity of the names, their naturalization, bolstered by the statue, is evidence of imperial violence.

The history of naming has a further dimension, implicit rather than explicit. When the statue to Victoria was raised in 1911, the city was called Berlin — this was a German-Canadian city — and Victoria shared the park with a monument to the Kaiser, a bust by Reinhold Begas, the leading German sculptor. The complementary loyalties of German-Canadians were wholly consonant with Victoria’s own family; the Kaiser was her grandson, present at her death in 1901, and having unveiled the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace on 16 May 1911, just eight days before the unveiling of the Kitchener statue. In 1914, unsurprisingly, things changed. The bust of the Kaiser was removed (subsequently stolen and likely melted down) and in 1916 the city was renamed Kitchener, after Earl Kitchener, the hero of the Boer War, who had just died. The new name emphasized the connection to Britain and its empire.

This, in turn, points to a longer and more complex global history in which this monument is embedded and which adds resonances unarticulated but implicit in Wodiczko and Kirkham’s work. The money for the statue was raised by the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire (IODE). The IODE, whose motto was ‘One Flag, One Throne, One Empire’, was a hyper-imperialist, white supremacist organization founded in 1899, and one of many women’s organizations founded across the empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including the Victoria League.⁴⁹ The IODE was founded by Margaret Polson Murray after a visit to the UK, during which she was swept up in the jingoism in response to the Second Boer War. Like the naming of Kitchener itself, the war in South Africa determined the shape of empire in Canada. On her return to Canada, Polson Murray decided a women’s organization was needed to bolster ‘colonial patriotism’ and to maintain racial hierarchies in the face of the threats, as she saw it, of migrants and indigenous people.⁵⁰ The statue of Victoria, therefore, was intentionally intended as a symbol of white supremacy.

Thus, the statue is no neutral or convenient screen for the inner public’s entry into the public sphere. It is the potent symbol of what has barred those people from full democratic engagement. This is not just an engagement with the contemporary moment and democracy in Canada in 2014. With Victoria at the centre, as the material and symbolic fulcrum of the city, it is part of a longer history of political exclusion, of the workings of power through public space and its organization. This has been the legacy of Victoria’s self-fashioning.

Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen Still Falls to You (2014)

Hadley+Maxwell’s immersive installation transformed the statue of Victoria by John Hughes, unveiled in 1908 outside Leinster House, the home of the Royal Dublin Society (Fig. 5). Their work was first shown in a limited form in Australia at Carriageworks for the Sydney Biennale in 2014, and then an expanded version was presented at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in September and October that year as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Fig. 5

Hadley+Maxwell, The Queen Still Falls to You (2014). Photograph: courtesy of the artists.

Hughes’s statue was raised in Dublin to commemorate Victoria’s visit to the city in April 1900 and Irish participation in the Boer War.⁵¹ The Queen sat atop the monumental structure, while, at ground level, were three groups: Hibernia at Peace, Fame, and, most significantly, Hibernia at War, showing a dying soldier, clutching his rifle, with an allegorical figure of Ireland about to crown him with a laurel wreath. It was this group that crystallized the purpose of the monument as a paean to imperial loyalty. Inevitably, the presence of the British Queen and empress outside what became the parliament building of the Irish Free State in 1922 proved controversial, and in 1948 the monument was dismantled. In 1986 the central statue of Victoria was purchased by Australia to sit outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.⁵² The presentation of Hadley+Maxwell’s work in Sydney and Dublin was thus related to the history of the monument itself. The Queen Still Falls to You has a rough parallel with — or perhaps reversal of — the narrative of the monument’s own story, from its unveiling in affirmation of Irish participation in the Boer War, its removal as a response to nationalist politics, and then Victoria’s relocation in Australia. Accordingly, the iteration in Sydney used only the Queen’s body as material, while the subsequent version in Dublin drew on all parts of the disassembled monument. One might add a further unintended connection: Hadley+Maxwell are Canadian and there is a resonance with the approaches by a number of Canadian cities, including London, Ontario and Vancouver, to purchase Hughes’s sculpture in the late 1940s.

The artists worked with the decorative surface of both Queen and statue. This pertains to the actual process of making The Queen Still Falls to You. The material is cinefoil, a matt black aluminium foil used in film and theatre to mask light leaks or eliminate reflections. The artists used it to take a cast of the surface of the monument. Thus, the first step was to rematerialize the sculpture as a thin matt surface. These casts were then attached to a steel armature with magnets. The fact that the armature was no longer internal and hidden but wholly visible further emphasized superficiality.

The casts of the monument were reassembled into new sculptural groups: the Queen, Pall-Bearers, Stretcher-Bearers, and Tomb. These partial and fragmented revisions revealed the hollowness of the monument, a metaphorical emptiness inside the grandiloquent ornamental surface. The Queen was at the centre, but now utterly transformed in terms of substance and weight. The volume of the figure remained the same, but now the figure was inverted, presenting a void rather than a fictive solid. Victoria was suddenly weightless as the monument hung in space, seemingly floating upwards, reversing the form and meaning of the sculpture. It is as if empire itself is a dissolving surface; all that is solid, as it were, melting into air.

The other groups were reconfigurations of the remaining sculptures from the original statuary. Hadley+Maxwell retained the fundamental structure of a central figure and three supporting groups, but these now engage in a ritual circling around the Queen and signal death rather than eternal life. The dying soldier and his comrades, attended by a female allegorical figure in the standard iconography of sculptural allegory, become stretcher-bearers and pall-bearers, shifting the focus from noble sacrifice rewarded with eternal life to brute death, the body slain rather than the body transcended. The tomb, which may be that of Victoria herself, reinforces this, as does the blackening of the surface, deadening the patina of the bronze original.

The viewer was able to walk around and between the sculptural fragments, a far more intimate experience than in the original. The Queen’s skin, which was a distant screen for the projection of imperial desire, is now disturbingly close, fragile and vulnerable. This experiential engagement was enhanced by the use of coloured light and the uncanny cast shadows on floor, walls, and ceiling, and by a soundtrack.⁵³ The installation, which had a duration of around twenty minutes, was divided into three sections: ‘The Discharge’, in which the Queen appears in response to recognition from the public; ‘The Goading Crowd’, in which that public demands dethronement; and ‘The Lamentation’, in which the public mourns the Queen’s death. In each case the ways in which the crowd or public is formed through a different response to the individual, the Queen, is at stake: as a symbol for affirmation, as a scapegoat, and as the object of veneration.⁵⁴ Thus, The Queen Still Falls to You, as its title suggests, asks us to consider the complicity of the public in the crafting of Victoria and her image and, by extension, in imperial politics more broadly. The work did not simply reshape the sculpture, but provided an immersive experience with a new narrative, demanding of viewers that they consider their own position as a public for the monument.

Like Locke, Hadley+Maxwell have discussed their work in terms of dealing with ghosts and, like Bashi, they transform the monument’s spatial framework to reposition the public audience. In calling back the ghosts of the past and reconceiving the relationship of viewer and sculpture, Hadley+Maxwell bring to our attention certain features of monuments to Victoria that are all too easily overlooked. First, they remind us of the theatricality of public monuments. In a sense the use of the monument for a theatrical display is wholly appropriate, given its role in ceremonial and now, in works such as this one, counter-ceremonial. Second, they astutely insist on the role of allegorical adjuncts as more than supplementary; they do not merely decorate the figure at the centre, but the meaning of Victoria depends on these additions. To revise the understanding of the supporting cast is to change the significance of the empress herself. Finally, they present the decorative surface as surface; not a skin that reveals an interior, as Victoria herself would have it, but one that hides an emptiness, a myth. Here again, the fiction of imperial ornamentalism is exposed, whether in Ireland, Australia, or elsewhere in the world.