Economies of Dispossession

Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories Graduate Conference

Ontario College of Art and Design, University of Toronto, Canada

Missing Pieces: Curatorial Iconoclasm in Sonia Boyce’s Takeover of Manchester Art Gallery

On January 29, 2018, contemporary British artist Sonia Boyce’s takeover of Manchester Art Gallery came to an end with unexpected heated controversy and accusations of censorship. Working collaboratively with the staff of the Mancunian institution, the artist organised an evening of performances culminating with the temporary removal of John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, (1896) which she filmed in order to create a new piece of work titled Six Acts (2018). Her aim was to engage the public in curatorial practices in order to consider questions surrounding visibility and exclusion from major art historical displays and hence art historical Canon. The vitriol reaction that ensued both from the general public and the academic one, resulted in the haste rehanging of Waterhouse’s canvas and the resulting suppression of Boyce’s own artistic voice. 

My paper intends to read this recent event through the lenses of iconomachy and iconoclasm, in order to insert it within the history-long diatribe in Western culture surrounding representation. The aim is to demonstrate how Boyce’s act revealed the hypocrisy of the Western, specifically British, construction of its own ideology through art historical narratives as well as the underlining power still bestowed upon images. In fact a larger iconoclastic gesture was made visible: the centuries long devaluation of artistic practices and social presence of minorities in the Western phallocentric signifying system. My paper builds on Deborah Cherry’s and Griselda Pollock’s accusations on the revival of Victorian values through Pre-Raphaelite art historical narratives in the 1980s, parallel to Boyce’s involvement with the British BLK Art Group. Moreover bell hook’s theorisation of black female spectatorship as constructed through absence and negation is here exemplified in the sheet of questions Boyce left as a trace of her removal. Relating to Dario Gamboni’s analysis on oblivion and memory within museums, Boyce’s obscuration of Waterhouse’s painting paradoxically granted it renewed visibility, though at the cost of her own practice, yet again.