Exhibition Review: On Hew Locke's The Procession
Hew Locke’s The Procession fills Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with the eerie silence of over 150 life-sized figures in celebration and protest for this year’s annual commission. Through an intricate assembly of cultural, historical and creative material, Locke interrogates the past of our species as we proceed into the future.
The crowd is where the chaos of humanity moves as one, be it in protest, parade, or a panicked rush. Flâneurs, lovers of the crowd, take pleasure in anonymously observing the world as it passes by, whilst others are eager to escape the discomfort of the commotion. Artist, Hew Locke, masterfully combines these ‘ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort’ by blurring the boundaries between the two, so that both friends and foes of the crowd are immersed in the surreal experience of The Procession.
The free to visit annual Tate Britain Commission enables artists to transform the monumental Duveen Galleries into their own personal blank canvas. Following Heather Phillipson’s multimedia immersive experience in 2021 and Mike Nelson’s mechanical installation in 2019, Locke initially felt a ‘slow creeping fear’ when facing this prestigious space, wondering ‘how on earth am I going to pull this off’. The artist, who has been shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and exhibited internationally, of course, did pull it off.
The Procession transcends the intimidating grandeur of the gallery by sweeping visitors into a curated crowd of children drumming, adults chanting, flags being waved, and horses being ridden, all without a sound being made or a muscle moved.
A three-dimensional collage of around 150 handmade figures layered with printed and painted images, fabrics and textures, allude to the many themes that Locke has explored throughout his career. In what he calls an ‘extended poem’, the poet combines intricate historical references, from colonial military medals to antique share certificates, with the vibrant though dark tones of his previous works (Cardboard Palace, 2002 and Sovereign, 2005). The statue symbol has appeared throughout Locke’s work and is eptimosed by this latest exhibition, where the form unites extensive allusions to colonialism, carnival, and slave history alongside global economics, trade, and environmental disaster.
Remembering his early years in Guyana, Locke recounts the startling experience of seeing the Queen Victoria statue dumped in Georgetown’s Botanical Gardens; a monument notorious for its cycle of removal, re-erection and defacement from 1954 up until 2018. Locke’s figures are not rigid structures of metal or marble, but malleable beings made from cardboard and cloth. Despite their masked and blank faces, they do not appear as lifeless statues but as lively impressions of ourselves.
On entering the exhibition, you may recognise silhouettes from your own life’s procession toward the future and, looking closer, you might even notice the muddy tide marks tainting the sharp suits of those silhouettes. These figures do not seem to have arrived bubble-wrapped in boxes labelled ‘Fragile - This Way Up’. Instead, they have journeyed here themselves, through time and space. We are encouraged to inspect every detail of The Procession, from the tide-marks denoting the rising sea levels threatening Guyanese architecture, to illustrations of Taíno sculptures that the UK refuses to return to Jamaica. Locke emphasises the importance of interrogating both our past and our future. After all, The Procession is moving forward not backwards.
When faced with the perpetual question of what he would have become if not an artist, Locke replies, ‘a historian’. Using the past as his material, Locke looks into the future and suspends the spectator in a state of timelessness. The longer we stand still contemplating the artwork the more we morph into it. Walking up and down The Procession, the figures, with their feet hovering just over their plinths, seem to continue and move forward in our absence.
The Tate Britain Commission authorises artists to be subversive.
In the rooms on either side of the stone gallery are faint pastel walls neatly lined with artworks positioned at average eye-level, accompanied with evenly spaced information plaques. The marchers of the Duveen procession, however, demand visitors gaze up and down, close by and from afar. The backstory of each of the 150 artworks is not conveniently explained. Rather, it is yours to decipher. Locke’s vibrant spectacle is a silent uproar that tactfully overwhelms the senses and disorients the viewer. I felt the childlike urge to weave under and around the figures, but subversion has its limits, as prescribed by the floor tape reminding me to walk alongside but not within The Procession.
Eventually, we must leave Locke’s procession unmoved from when we first joined it. Perhaps we continue the movement as we proceed forward into the bustling crowds of our everyday; encouraged to interact in the processions of our present, before they too become frozen memento mori of the past.
Hew Locke’s The Procession is on exhibit at Tate Britain until 22 January 2023. For more information about the exhibition visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/hew-locke.