Andrew Graham-Dixon on a show which bites the hand that feeds it
AT THE LAST count there were 1200 museums in Great Britain and Ireland. Roughly every week, a new British museum comes into existence. This strange phe¬nomenon has already spawned reams of commentary, and a new theory of Britishness.
In this year's annual "South Bank Show Lecture" Peter York argued that British nostalgia has now reached epidemic proportions. Robert Hewison's 'The Heritage Industry" (to be published by Methuen, 8 October), usefully summarises fashionable museum-watching opinion, explaining the boom as a symptom of Britain's fatal obsession with the past — a communal retreat from the grim social realities of the present to "a world that never was".
Palaces of Culture, at Stoke City Museum and Art Gallery, takes the debate into hitherto unexplored territory: instead of yet another text on the subject what you get, in installation, sculpture and painting, is a series of artworks that criticise the nature and structure of museums, and Stoke City Museum in particular. The exhibition is a kind of Trojan Horse — a brave gesture on the part of the host institution, giving a group of young British artists the chance to suggest new ways of looking at the museum's contents and preconceptions. Mark Wallinger's mischievous infiltrations set the tone. Gnomic Verse is a frieze constructed from four divots of artificial grass and nine plastic garden gnomes, inscribed with a quotation from Orwell's 1984 that could stand as the motto for the whole exhibition: "Who controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past." Wallinger's absurd ensemble works by exaggeration — an absurd mimicry of the museum industry's mass-production of a past filtered through nostalgia, satirically contriving a green and plastic land peopled by a happily smiling workforce of...
