Book Review: The Whole Picture
“As an engaged museum visitor, your task is to remember that a museum is a box of things, put there by a collector . . . and presented as complete - so ask yourself, what’s missing? Whose eyes are we viewing the story through? How has this history been massaged and clipped into a narrative? Is it the same old Great White Males, at it again?”
- Alice Procter, The Whole Picture (2020) p. 18.
I asked for ‘The Whole Picture’ by Alice Procter for my birthday.
I have to admit, I hadn’t been aware of Procter’s work for long before this, but as soon as I heard the premise and looked more closely into her work with ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ and ‘The Exhibitionist’ I was completely hooked and needed to know everything about her work.
‘The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it’ (2020) is Procter’s debut book. Procter is an Art Historian and Anthropologist. She started ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ in 2017 in response to her art history degree, which she saw as heavily skewed towards studying white men, while completely ignoring the colonial history which had created the museums and galleries she was studying. The book grew from these tours and her studies.
Procter’s debut is split into four chronological sections - The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. The labels are used to differentiate between the kinds of museums and art galleries. The chapters within each of these sections focus on a particular object or painting which tells a broader story. For example, in The Memorial section there is a chapter on Mokomokai, which there are seven in the British Museum. Mokomokai are mummified heads of the Maori people. These were part of a sacred funerary right for the family of the deceased until the 19th century. The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa requested that the British Museum return the heads saying they were ancestors and not objects, but were denied. This is just one example Procter discusses.
What is great to see is that Procter believes we are a turning point. Museums, especially smaller museums, are more willing now to engage with their history than in the past. Change is happening, even if it is slowly. She believes that museums are beginning to ask questions about how they diversify their audience and in Australia, some museums are including tours by Indigenous artists and curators. In late 2019 a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron called for a mass return of all African objects currently held in French museums to their country of origin.
In 2019, The New York Times ran an article ‘Penguin Sex and Stolen Artifacts: Museum Yours Through a New Lens’ about the UK’s new museum tours. In it, Procter spoke about her own ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ which are currently run through the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, The Queen’s House Greenwich and Tate Britain. It also spoke about Dan Vo and his work with the Polar Museum in Cambridge University. Vo was running his first ‘Bridging Binaries: L.G.B.T.Q.+’. Similar events were held at the Museum of Zoology and Fitzwilliam Museum. In 2015 he hosted a tour exploring gender and sexuality within the Victoria and Albert Museum collections. It is now an award-winning tour held monthly. Change is coming.
I highly recommend ‘The Whole Picture’, and next time I’m in London I’ll make sure I can attend one of Procter’s ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’. If you want more information please head to The Exhibitionist website, where Procter has resources including various reading lists and links, as well as information on how to book a tour.
I’m currently working through the back catalogue of ‘The Exhibitionist’ podcast and currently Procter is working on season two of a new podcast called ‘Historical Friction’ which is about “storytelling, pop culture, the past, and why we reenact it” which is also definitely worth a listen.
Sources:
https://www.theexhibitionist.org/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-14/art-tour-guide-galleries-museums-racism-colonialism-exclusion/12241850
https://www.adelaidereview.com.au/arts/visual-arts/2019/04/13/alice-procter-uncomfortable-art/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/uk-alternative-museum-tours.html
https://publishing.artshub.com.au/news-article/reviews/writing-and-publishing/mem-capp/book-review-the-whole-picture-by-alice-procter-260187
https://camd.org.au/alice-procter-the-whole-picture/
https://camd.org.au/alice-procter-display-it-like-you-stole-it/
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/arts-music/article/3090653/alice-procters-uncomfortable-art-tours-london