One of Lubaina Himid’s recurring themes has been to deconstruct the works of European masters. The most ambitious and humorous of her ‘deconstructions’ has been a pastiche of Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode part 4 (The Countess’s Morning Levee). The installation A Fashionable Marriage, comprise cut-outs, paintings, drawings, etc.  

 

Her work is a satire that examines the position of Black people within British society and in particular the art world. Himid replaces the stock characters of Hogarth’s satire with her own contemporary examples: the castrato becomes the art critic, the feeble envoy the funding body and the Countess and her lover become Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan, President of the USA.

 

As in the image of 1743, Black people are still marginalised onlookers, but Himid turns Hogarth’s Black servant into the Black artist and the Black child slave into “Ka – the spirit of Resistance”, thereby creating a message of unity and resistance for Black people in the UK.

 

In the eyes of Himid London in the 1980s was a go-getting opportunistic society driven by mayhem. She claimed "Everyone who shook or moved in UK artistic semicircles or political whirlpools was treated as a deserving dartboard." She took aim and threw.

 

Hogarth's Satire

 

Hogarth was a critic of eighteenth-century manners and morals, painter of theatrical themes, storyteller, history painter. He used black people to highlight the evils and misdeeds of almost everyone he saw. They were signifiers of European hypocrisy and the falseness of white people. Black people in Hogarth’s work nearly always reveal pretentiousness, artificiality and the dreaded sophistication.

 

The star of the piece for Hogarth is the Countess, who has recently had a baby, so lounges casually at her dressing table, having spent the previous afternoon at the auction rooms, while her husband, the earl, is away. She is having her hair done. Himid turns her into Margaret Thatcher, the first woman prime minister of Britain, leader of the Conservative party, champion of business, destroyer of the trade unions, the welfare state and staunch supporter of apartheid.

 

The Critic/Castrato sings dressed in an embroidered coat.  His body may be mutilated but it is enormous; he dominates the room.  His voice is clear, high, false and full of artistry; it fills the room. He is seductive, famous – a star.  We need him to reassure us of our importance, we need him to bring culture to our lives.  The foolish and deluded, breathless and newly-arrived find him fascinating.

 

Hogarth links the waiting ambassador with the castratro visually and sexually.  The ambassador has his legs tightly crossed, his foot pointing to the inner thighs of the eager listener. In Himid's cut out he appears as the dithering art funder, unable to decide between the critic’s song and the fad of the day. 

 

The transformation of Hogarth’s slave servant, a man in a green uniform, into a black woman artist with articulated arms and an elaborate dress covered in wooden painted fish took centre stage but also partly hidden.  She had much to offer and poured it towards the eager listener: her energy. 

 

Himid argues that whilst the ground has shifted, it becomes  clear that little had changed in five hundred years, black artists worked for nothing; they still do. They are signifiers of white corporate wealth, expensive to keep, but oh so decorative and useful for dealing with awkward situations and people.