Tate Britain Commission 2022: Hew Locke, The Procession review – An overriding mood of unquenchable subversive energy

Hew Locke’s sculptural interrogations of Britain’s imperial past may be bang on the spirit of the still-smouldering Black Lives Matter moment. But there’s an elliptical, miniaturist finesse to the British-born, Guyana-raised artist’s work – even when it’s not physically small – a reluctance to make the obvious statement that made me wonder how he’d fare in Tate Britain’s massive Duveen Galleries. Classic Locke works such as Souvenirs, antique busts of long-dead royals, encrusted in gold jewellery referencing the colonial past or For Those in Peril on the Sea, a flotilla of miniature boats suspended in a church nave in Folkestone, go for the evocative association, rather than the bombastic overkill necessary to make an impact in these enormous spaces.

I needn’t have worried.

The first figures in The Procession, Locke’s installation for this year’s illustrious Tate Britain commission, have all the model-making intricacy and precise cultural referencing you’d expect: a group of fife and drum-playing children dancing towards the gallery’s enormous neo-classical entrance, decked out in clothes printed with the share certificates of long-obsolete colonial companies, sporting masks that draw on the forms of Guyana’s historic colonial architecture. But far from being models, they’re life-sized and followed by 145 more mostly adult figures parading through these august and sterile halls in an all-dancing, horse-riding, stilt-walking, flag-wielding bricolage of painted cardboard and patch-worked and silk-screened fabric. Locke and his apparently small team of assistants have clearly been very busy.

Skull-masked women baring cardboard breasts bring a touch of the Mexican Day of the Dead, while a group of black-cowled figures carrying a huge, masked figure on a kind of bier recall Holy Week in Seville re-envisioned as an African masquerade. The masks are sculptural fantasy versions of African masks rather than replicas, but classical African art appears printed on robes and banners in the form of Benin bronze figures from the British Museum, alongside photographs of crumbling colonial buildings in Guyana, paintings of colonial battles from the Tate’s own collection and a repeated image of Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square smothered in Afro-cosmographic symbols.

There’s a lot of humour as well as prodigious invention in this exuberant collaged tableau vivant, with each figure deftly highlighting an aspect of the troubled Caribbean past – the sugar trade that helped fund the Tate Gallery, Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and a whole cast of mildly sinister folklore characters. It’s all assembled with Locke’s customary care and attention to detail in a mass of textures so dense and rich that it’s hard to tell what’s stamped and printed and what’s been drawn, painted and stitched by hand.

While the wall texts stress the work’s ambiguity, its allusions to “pilgrimage, migration, trade, carnival, protest, social celebration or our own individual journeys through life”, it’s the fourth of those notions that visitors will immediately fix on. The Caribbean Carnival may have developed as an opportunity for slaves to satirise their masters, but the sense here is of a form of super-celebration capable of subsuming all other celebratory traditions and cultural forms into its euphoric train.

Indeed, The Procession ties in perfectly with Tate Britain’s excellent Life Between Islands exhibition, on Caribbean-British Art from the Fifties to now (which still has two weeks to run). But it also makes a surprisingly revealing postscript to the gallery’s just closed Hogarth and Europe show. Locke’s men in mud-stained dinner suits, their bizarrely masked faces dripping jewels, and a posse of prancing track-suited figures with what may be colonial-era coins for faces – they look more like brass tea trays – bring a sense of a tumultuous, multi-cultural contemporary London, a place that Hogarth himself would very much have recognised.

open image in gallery

If you’re looking for the kind of underlying conceptual conceit we’ve come to expect from contemporary art, you may wonder if The Procession is much more than a wacky handmade parade of multifarious Caribbean references. Certainly, it’s hard to get a sense of the resonance with “urgent contemporary concerns” – the climate emergency or invasion of Ukraine – suggested in the accompanying texts. For all the nods to the darker side of history, the overriding mood is of unquenchable subversive energy. And that, of course, is the point. Carnival is the ultimate expression of the hybridity that is the essence of Caribbean culture, embodied here in Locke’s hyper-charged 3D collage. Whatever the adversity, it seems, the people will splice together whatever ideas and materials are available to them through the essential medium of the Party. And in the current circumstances, hell, do we all need a load of that.

Hew Locke, The Procession is on at Tate Britain until 23 January 2022