What Have We Here?

“What have we here?” is a wonderfully open question. It can be literal: what is this object before me? Or it might have a more general sense: what’s going on here? It could be prelude to an investigation, as when a detective in a police procedural asks this question upon arriving at a crime scene. Above all, it expresses some kind of curiosity, a desire to know.

All of these meanings are in play in Hew Locke’s terrific exhibition at the British Museum, what have we here?

Locke, a Guyanese-British artist, has put together a fascinating and provocative show in which he has looted (I use the term advisedly) the British Museum’s collection for the purpose of re-examining how the collection has been shaped by Britain’s imperial past.

But that makes it sound hectoring. And disturbing as the exhibition is, I found the title apt: Locke is clearly governed by curiosity and seems genuinely more interested in stimulating conversation and reflection than in lecturing his country about its moral failings.

The exhibit is dense but not large, with some 200 objects occupying a single large room. Packing crates form the dominant design element, with glassed-in crates displaying objects and occasional empty crates scattered across the exhibition space. We are never meant to forget that these objects were shipped from elsewhere.

Then, too, there are Locke’s figural sculptures, titled “The Watchers,” perched above the crates and observing us as we walk through the exhibit. With their arms outstretched toward us, are they accusing us of complicity in the evils of empire? I don’t think so. I think they’re asking us the governing question: what have we here?

We have ornamental brass discs looted from Benin City by British soldiers. Locke points out the broken edges and burn marks as evidence for the violence of their acquisition. “It’s almost like a whole civilization was boxed up and shipped out,” Locke observes. A photograph of soldiers with their loot leads Locke to comment, “In one day, these objects have gone from being venerated to being loot, something categorized like elephant tusks, a heap of this, a heap of that…”

On a photograph of Queen Victoria wearing the Kohinoor diamond (the original diamond remains in the Tower of London), Locke notes that Victoria disliked wearing it. “At least she has the good grace to feel guilty,” he observes.

Some of these objects should surely be repatriated. But the Kohinoor diamond? The British took it from the last maharajah of Lahore, but a timeline outlining its long association with violence and theft means that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran and Afghanistan all may have claims to it.

And what about the spirit figures created by the Taino people and found in a cave in Jamaica in 1792? Are there Taino people remaining to whom these can or should be repatriated?

All objects created by people hold meaning. Locke reminds us that the endlessly fascinating objects in the British Museum carry with them a long and substantial history of human meaning. Or, rather, they carry with them a multiplicity of meanings, far more than the simple wall tags suggest.

I’ve thought before about questions of identity and demands for repatriation of national treasures, but Locke’s selection of objects and questions about them has so deepened not just my thinking, but my feeling for objects in museums, I’m guessing that he has changed forever how I will feel each time I visit or revisit a favorite museum.