Group show featuring: David Birkin, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Tess Hurrell, Jeremy Hutchison, Guillaume Paris, Sarah Pickering

“Power itself must be abolished – and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles – but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal”

From Dominion to Hegemony, Jean Baudrillard

An attempt to glimpse into the current nature of the ever-shifting relationship between Art and Power is the quiet purpose of this exhibition. Quiet, because the territory the show maps out is familiar, the conceptual routes by which we might navigate it well worn, the concerns and problems that haunt it persistent. To be anything other than quiet in the company of human suffering, which is the necessary product of power, would be vulgar and self-serving. In falling to this fear the show mirrors a dreadful suspicion that runs through almost all cultural work that defines itself as critical in relation to power – that its inevitable political ineffectiveness renders it merely obscenely ornamental, like a glacé cherry adorning a grave.

Yet an awareness of its own limitations may be the foundation for a meaningfully defined ‘political art’, as Judith Butler observes: ‘The critical image… must not only fail to capture its referent but show its failure’.

In History Painting Now, seven artists (two of them combined in a duo) based in London and Paris are brought together. Their work addresses war and weaponry and their depiction. Tellingly and intelligently, the relationship of all the works to both power and what might be very crudely be termed ‘the real’ is elliptical, evasive even. Were an equivalent group of artists assembled two centuries ago, when History Painting was the preeminent cultural expression of the ideological requirements of the nascent Nation State, the gallery would be full of heroic depictions of encounters during the Napoleonic Wars.  

Here, now, more than a century after Modernism re-cast the role of the artist -from a servile handmaiden articulating the instrumental demands of societies’ elites, to a heroically subjective and critical consciousness adrift in a hostile world - instead of the figurative and the idealized we are presented with abstraction, negation and self-conscious artificiality. Instead of the illusion of proximity and presence offered in another age by History Painting and today by the media, our mediated distance is underlined by the work.

In doing so these works acknowledge that the only space in which Culture can contend with Power without being instantly overwhelmed is the realm of thought, in which, after all, ideology is constructed. In not overreaching themselves, in being in awe of Power, which is necessarily terrible, these works allow that which is not seen, that which remains un-depicted to remain the monster that it is.

Nick Hackworth