Over the weekend at Cumberland Lodge we have celebrated the art which surrounds us in Windsor Great Park - the paintings from the Royal Collection and from Arts Council England which are on our own walls, the ancient art of heraldry, which is the subject of a temporary exhibition here, the award-winning architecture of the Visitors’ Centre, the fine equestrian statues of George III, Prince Albert and the present Queen, and the radical design of the new rose garden at Savill Gardens. The written word has not been ignored, with the novelist Louis de Bernières reading from his work and a recital programme telling the history of the Lodge in the words and music of those most closely associated with it.
Our purpose was to show the range of art which can be seen in the Great Park and at Cumberland Lodge, and the centrality of it to many of our discussion programmes. We also wanted to underline the fact that art extends far beyond the conventional perception that it is just about painting and sculpture, but also embraces garden design, statuary, recitation, chivalric motifs and of course architecture. Few of these are recognised today by the Arts Council. In the course of our deliberations this weekend, issues of human rights kept being raised and one realised anew how intrinsic the arts are to freedom of expression and to human dignity. Andrea Rose and Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, respectively the Director of Visual Arts at the British Council and the former Director of the same at Arts Council England, gave chapter and verse on how much the arts speak up for human rights. A banner strung across the facade of Tate Modern calling for the freeing from unjustified incarceration of the artist Ai Weiwei was one example. Nina Miall, Director of the Haunch of Venison gallery in London, showed images of work by artists commenting on the changing politics of South Africa. As Andrea pointed out, art is not just about aesthetics; it also makes a statement about the context in which it is produced. When she sends works of art by British painters and sculptors to exhibitions or sites in other countries she is consciously trying to say something about the values and ethics of Britain itself.
There are compromises in this. A tableau painting showing some fish on a plate alongside a small sandwich on a nearby table ran in to huge trouble in a Muslim country because the sandwich filling might have been ham. The artist was prepared to concede that the pink filling might have been tomato or salmon, but the offence ran too deep and the painting was returned to sender. It reminded me of how, when I was commissioned by the Arts Council to write the text for a display of twenty panels describing the state of British fiction in the mid 1990s, I made Salman Rushdie’s work central to my overview. It was at the height of the problem over the fatwa which had been pronounced against him. One hundred copies of my panel exhibition were produced to go to most of the 110 countries in which the British Council is represented, but when the first one reached a Muslim area we were in trouble. What does one do in such a situation: withdraw the whole exhibition and leave British fiction unrepresented, refuse to change the text and run the risk of the embassy being burned down and lives being put at risk (this had already happened elsewhere in connection with the fatwa), or re-design the exhibition so that a version of it could be seen in sensitive areas in which the novelist I regarded as the most innovative in our country at the time was not mentioned? In these situations, as any arts bureaucrat knows, compromises of principle sometimes have to be made, but they leave a sour taste and even a feeling of personal failure.
Art and literature are uniquely placed to draw attention to injustices, but they also celebrate the worth of every kind of person. I recall being in Australia when a national craft competition was won by a woman from a remote aboriginal community in the Northern Territories. She had created a magnificent woven wall tapestry showing a life-affirming sun. When the work was hung in the main gallery in Melbourne the press turned out in force to interview her, but she had already flown back to the north in order to be present for the funeral rites of an elder of her community. She placed values to do with her people way ahead of any personal celebrity she might have enjoyed. It was reminder that all art, especially commissioned public art, says something about the self-worth of the society in which it is produced. Art and human rights are inextricably connected – which is not to deny that some art can show unpleasant values and illiberal attitudes. The next time I look at a portrait of an aristocrat belonging to the Royal Collection, or to the paintings by Bloomsbury aesthetes Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant which are on display at Cumberland Lodge, I shall remind myself of what was emphasised at our conference this weekend: all art speaks of the human values of the context in which it is created, even the most patrician or esoteric works. I hope that this applies as much to the setting in which it is displayed. If art reflects human values, so presumably does the place which houses and exhibits it.
Alastair Niven
