Dan Snow's History Hit - The Objects That Made Britain

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

What can art tell us about a country's history? Well, a lot! In today's episode, Dan is joined by Art Historian Temi Odumosu and popular historian James Hawes to discuss the cultural works they think reveal something vital about the history of Britain.James enthuses about the Staffordshire Hoard- the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found and what it tells us about the tumultuous political situation of the 6th century. Meanwhile, Temi explains the impact of the autobiography 'The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano the African' on the abolitionist movement in 18th century Britain. It lay the foundations for new genres of literature and new ways of understanding the experiences of enslaved people.Both Temi and James appear in the new BBC series 'Art That Made Us' that through 1500 years and eight dramatic turning points presents an alternative history of the British Isles, told through art.James' accompanying book to the series is called 'Brilliant Isles'.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.We need your help! If you would like to tell us what you want to hear as part of Dan Snow's History Hit then complete our podcast survey by clicking here. Once completed you will be entered into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend in the History Hit shop.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm going to look back now across 1500 years of art. 1500 years of the art that's made us. It's in coordination with the BBC series coming out, that one which leading historians and creatives all look back at the art of the British Isles and talk about the art itself, but also what it tells us about what was going on at the time. Love a bit of art history. The older I get, the more I think art history matters. I'm very pleased on the podcast to have Temi Odomosu and James Hawes. James has been on the podcast before. He's a historian and writer. Temi is an art historian.

She's a professor and curator at the University of Washington Information School in Seattle. They're two wonderful contributors to the TV show. I want to get them on task about what they've learned about British history through art and what bits of art did they particularly love and enjoy discovering and learning more about. If you want more art history, we've got some available on History Hit TV. You just follow the link in the description of this podcast. You just go down there, you click on it with your finger. It takes you through to a website, History Hit TV. And that's like Netflix for history. It's everything you need in life. It's a gigantic repository of wonderful podcasts, including podcasts on art history,

and then TV shows, including some TV shows on art history as well. So head over there and subscribe to that. Two weeks free if you sign up today. It'd be great to have you on the team. But in the meantime, here is the art that made us. Enjoy. James and Temi, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you. Great to be here.

You know, the other day I was in the Tate Modern with my kids and there was some bonkers installation. And we were all obsessed by it. We just watched it for hours. And I've never been more struck by the fact that art is absolutely pointless and absolutely wonderful at the same time. And I just wondered what you guys could just tell me what you've learned. What does art mean? What's the point of art as you've looked at it across history during this series and across

your careers? Tell me, let's start with you. Thanks for that question. I think for me, art is a number of things. It's a way of doing a sort of a headstand, right? To see things from a different perspective, even if that perspective is not one that I necessarily share.

But it's sort of like, oh, I didn't think of that. I remember Grayson Perry gave a series of lectures on contemporary art. And he talked about speaking to a child and how the child said, oh, like, you know, artists notice things. And I think that that is what I've learned across the board, not just from looking at art, historical art and contemporary art, but also spending a lot of time engaging with artists as a curator. engaging with artists as a curator, they notice things, they pick up on the details, they help you to flip perspective around, whether it's just about the way you perceive an environment or the way you think about a social issue, a family issue, how you consider memory, how you think about the materials that you're surrounded by, how you relate to the environment. So I know that there are moments where art can be very confusing and you just think, what is this? What am I looking at? But I think that that's also a healthy moment to have that

sense of not knowing, but being introduced to something new. More people admitting to being confused, I think the world would be a better place. Absolutely. James, what about you? Well, I love what Temi said there about artists picking up on things, because to me, the great revelation in a way of looking at British art through the whole span since the Anglo-Saxons arrived, has been this sense that art is a seismograph. It's actually artists, it's the people who are doing stuff, creating things, who somehow seem to have their finger

on the pulse in a way which maybe they themselves don't understand on what's going to happen next, not just what's happening now. And for me, one of the great examples is Tracey Emin's Tent, actually, which frankly, I'd never really thought about much. But when I started thinking about it, I suddenly thought, geez, this is actually 20 years before everyone started parading their emotional and sexual histories and lives around on social media. She did it then. And what she was doing as one person in a gallery is now what hundreds of millions of people do every day, which was not technically possible or even thought of when she did it. So it's that kind of thing, how art's ahead of the game, basically.

While I've got you, what's one piece of art that inspired you generally, or that you came across in this series that you love, or just throw one out there for me. Go, tell me. Wow, that's an amazing question. There's so many artworks to think of. It's brutal. It's a silly question.

I'm sorry. I should not have done that. It's like asking me who I'd want to come to my historical dinner party, and I hate that question. Well, also because there's so many people, you know, it's like, who do you thank at the Oscars? You know, you want to say, you want to foreground artists that people know, but also don't know. So of course, Tracey Emin and other artists who have been at that sort of vanguard of British contemporary art, but you also want to talk about new artists. For example,

Lynette Yadom, you want to talk about artists like Lubaina Hamid and Sonia Boyce. You also want to talk about the curators who support those artists. So I don't know. But then also I'm thinking about historical artworks that have had a lot of power to change things. Works by Turner. Turner's Slave Ship is a painting that kind of recurs and has a lot of rhetorical power as well as visually being in front of it. So yeah, I can't pick one at the moment. That's hard. That's fine. I'm glad you said Turner's Slave Ship. I love that piece. This is interesting, this series, because it's art that made us rather than art that we made. This is interesting, this series, because it's art that made us rather than art that we made. Did you have to choose art that tells a story about history? And was that a problem?

Like, why don't you just go, this art tells us absolutely nothing about the period in which it's created, but we just love it. Or is all art illustrative and instructive and for putting on our kind of historian's hats? I mean, that's a good question, because art can do many things, right? It can speak about the times within which it was made. It can speak about the social relationships around it, the artists themselves, of course, the people who commissioned it. But it can also speak about contact, right? And I think when you enter Western museums

and particularly British museums, you are entering into a kind of network, actually, a cultural network that is about the things that British people thought about, but also who they met along the way and who entered into the space that we call Britain and transformed things. And that happens in the wider culture in terms of food, in terms of architecture, but then it also happens quite specifically in the art space. So I actually think that this thinking about art as being networked, right, as speaking about its context, but also thinking about the encounters and the context that happen around it. I think that's a really important way of approaching this material.

Yeah, I mean, the more you know about when and how and under what circumstances a piece of art was made, the more meanings it seems to throw out of you. And what I love most, one of them is when we take Sarah Lucas to see one of the Misericords in Lincoln Cathedral. one of the Misericords in Lincoln Cathedral. It's an amazing late 14th century sculpture showing a knight in full, top of the range, full aristocratic armour, killed by an arrow falling off his horse. And you think at first, well, this is the late 14th century, so maybe this is the craftsman thinking about Chrétien Poitier. But then you think, hold on, this is actually just five years before the Peasants' Revolt. This is an English-speaking craftsman, undoubtedly, working every day underneath bosses who will speak Latin and French around him and to each other. And yet in the Misericourt, underneath the seats where the priests rest their buttocks, he's allowed this freedom to just let rip. And he's chosen in this

moment of freedom to make this amazing image of an aristocrat being brought down by an arrow in the back this is not someone being killed in war in a cavalry charge this is someone being assassinated you know it's saying you watch your back my lover quite literally to the ruling orders it's fascinating james what about the staffisher hall which for those who don't know it's a series of precious metals destroyed, bits of frontispiece-off bibles that are torn up. Yeah, bits of really valuable sword pomace, carefully inlaid, gold and garnet, little chambers almost of filigree metal

that the top jewelers today would have trouble making. You know, this is not only the greatest in terms of size and weight of gold Anglo-Saxon hoarder discovered, it's got this amazing story behind it, which is that uniquely every piece of this was deliberately destroyed before it was buried. This is priceless stuff, which is not only buried, which in itself is slightly weird,

rather than given out as trophies to get guys on side, it's actually deliberately smashed, and particularly this incredible helmet, which is broken into more than 1,000 pieces and is of such value and such extraordinary steel and gold construction, it can only have belonged to someone of the very, very high strength. I am convinced this is actually the record of one of the most important battles of the Dark Ages, the battle at which this weird multicultural place called Dark Age England saw an alliance between pagan Englishmen and Christian Welshmen to defeat Christian Englishmen, because they were different

kinds of Christians. The Christian Celts were homegrown, the Christian Northumbrians owed their allegiance to Rome, and King Pender and the Mercians still owed their allegiance to their German gods from across the sea, to Woden and Thor. And they had this extraordinary sort of three-way culture crash where the English pagans united with the Welsh Christians to kill King Oswald, the most powerful king of the day. And it's just at the right place in the right time. You mentioned the word dark age there. I know you're just using it as a term people recognise, but when you look at that, you think England wasn't so dark. I mean, that's technological

sophistication, it's technological sophistication. It's artistry. It requires quite an advanced system to produce that. It's extraordinary. It does. And what it doesn't require is peace. That's the challenging thing for some of us perhaps today to remember, that England in the, whatever we're going to call it,

in the 6th or 7th century was a place of absolute brutal and endemic warfare of seven or more, at least seven English kingdoms fighting amongst each other and fighting the Welsh and the Cornish and the Irish and everyone else. But nevertheless, somewhere in this chaos, there flourished workshops where this gold of like Fabergé, 19th century Fabergé-like quality could be produced, and monasteries where people could produce these incredible things, illuminated manuscripts and so on. That's right. See also 15th century Italy for further artistic military mashups. Tell me, what about the 18th century?

Because I love the 18th century, so I'm very excited to talk about this. And slavery and the art. You've been looking at art around slavery and also of Europeans going out and having these exchanges with the non-European world. The art of this period is beautiful. It's also romanticised. It also contains images of people considered others, which means you have naked bodies of black and brown people, but you also have images of people who are dressed up in kind of European style, but clearly come from elsewhere. So you have what is essentially a kind of worldview that is trying to come to terms with

the growth of empire. And in that thinking about intercultural exchange and contact, that of course is not equal, right? So who has the gaze, which is for the most part, not equal, right? So who has the gaze, which is for the most part, Britain looking outwards, determines how we think about and how we look at this period. But that doesn't mean that when we encounter images, for example, the portrait of Omai from Tahiti or portraits of Aladdo Equiano in the frontispiece of his book, that doesn't mean that we aren't looking at a real individual that once lived but also had agency in that moment. It just means that there is artistic license that's taking place around their representation. So this is what I've really been thinking about. When we encounter people from other places, when we encounter kind of

colonial logics, which are about like ordering people into different groups and categories. What do we find? Who do we find? What kinds of values are kind of installed in these images? And what do we think about them now? You know, how do we process the fact that this history was part of a history

of a much wider colonial power play? How do we reconcile with that? And how do we change the way we talk about it in museums and so on? So it's actually quite a big project of encountering things that are curious and you don't know what they mean and trying to figure out what they do, but then also stepping back and thinking, okay, that was the way in which they thought and the worldview that they crafted then. How do we think about it now? You listen to Dan Snow's history,

I'm talking about the history of art. There's quite a lot of it. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research

from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. you mentioned equiano there his book is one of the most important books written in the 18th century and in your survey of art you include this text as well yeah absolutely i mean equiano's story

is pretty amazing for the 18th century right he's a person that is captured into enslavement, mistakenly, in what is now current-day Nigeria, taken to the Caribbean, to Barbados, and then from there goes to the United States, and then from there comes back to England. And in this, he is an enslaved person, but he's also a kind of body servant or supporter of various English captains and people who, for the most part, see him as being quite bright and enterprising and so support him in small ways. Mostly he gets educated and learns to read. And this gives him a certain kind of license that allows him to sort of think about his own position in the world. And eventually he buys his own freedom by way of kind

of slowly saving all the small bits and bobs that are given to him throughout his journeys alongside a naval captain, but also in the colonies. And it's from there that his story kind of gets interesting because not only does he become an example of African enfranchisement out of a colonial context, but he also continues to travel. So his first migration from Nigeria out is forced, right? It's as an enslaved person. But then after he buys his freedom, he continues to travel and he goes to Turkey and he goes all over Europe and he goes to Greenland. This is something I've been looking at recently because I'm sort of connecting him to other people who enter into the Arctic region. And then he has all of these experiences, which he then writes down. So what we're getting is

a first person testimony of what it meant to be an African person in the new world, but also in a world that was shifting, changing, the atlas was changing according to the bigger imperial project. And that is unique. And it comes with challenges. I kind of pause there because I know that historians are trying to grapple with, well, what are his true origins? Some people say that he was born in the true origins? Some people say that he was born

in the Carolinas. Some people say that he was born in... So there is all of this contestation that happens with memory work. But essentially, what his story represents is one of against all odds. And there are instances, large and small, for example, of course, he's telling you about, he's trying to convince the people who are reading his books about his own agency as an African and his capacity to learn to thrive as a kind of representative of his own people. But then you hear him talking about going to visit, for example, other Africans that appeared in the 18th century. There was a woman with albinism that was displayed in the 18th century called Amelia Nusham. And he goes, we think that she is the woman with albinism that he goes to see. So he's

also meeting other Africans, he's exchanging letters. So I mean, he's part of a culture. And his writing, unbelievably powerful, it becomes a kind of essential abolitionist document. We've got actually a piece of that writing from the BBC series you guys have worked on. It's read out by Andrew French. The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself and almost suffocated us. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains

and the filth of the necessary tubs into which the children often fell and almost suffocated. Shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable. Temi, that is astonishingly powerful. What effect did it have at the time? Well, I mean, this kind of language is affective language. And when I use that word,

I mean that it's language that really kind of pulls on all the senses to be involved. The body is really kind of motivated. The emotions are called into action. And this was important because so much of the kind of political rhetoric around abolition was very much about, you know, numbers and the business of slavery. But this is the experience of slavery. This is actually what we're doing to other human beings. And it really galvanized a lot of political support. It was part of a range of materials that were foregrounded by the Society for Affecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, SEAST, who supported Equiano, but also used other means, the Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion and other broadsheds, sheets describing modes of

punishment. This was all a sort of collection of evidence that was used to help people understand that this business is horrible. It's violence. And we are doing this to other human beings. And we are calling ourselves virtuous, Christian, you know. So it was asking people to really grapple with their own moral relationship to this trade, which was one of the major driving trades of the 18th century. So Equiano's story and his mode of storytelling was important because it was a first-person voice. I mean, very few enslaved narratives in general, whether it's in the Americas or the Caribbean, Latin America. So his is a rare first-person testimony about really experiencing this profound violence of the Middle Passage.

Is that, James, looking at the longer threads of, because you've written a book about the effects of art all through British history, I guess art's doing many things. It's showing us the world, the reality of things, like Equiano does, but it's doing all sorts of other things as well, right? I mean, it's fulfilling a bewildering array of tasks. Well, it is because it's what humans feel like doing, and humans, they're often not aware of why they want to do it. In some ways, only we later on can perhaps see that. One of the lovely things about the WPS I love is the medieval period, this period before the triumph of the Word. And we kind of forget, particularly, I think, in Anglo-Saxon inverted

commas culture, because that sort of Protestant obsession with the Word of God, the Bible, the printed Bible, the black and white printed Bible, is so strong that we forget that before the Reformation, culture in the British Isles was this kind of fiesta-like riot of colour. All our churches were painted in the most garish possible colours with gorgeous sort of plaster angels and wooden carvings everywhere you looked. So it's to recover things like the way that the art people produced changed on these gigantic tectonic shifts, because that, to me, is one thing that we've totally failed to understand about our national story.

And Tem is right to say that the Georgian era is a typical case in point here, because every estate agent in both these islands, Ireland and Britain, rubs their hands with glee when they hear the word Georgian, because they know that everyone wants a Georgian house, because somehow the Georgian era has come to stand for this kind of tradition, allegedly timeless, traditional, quintessential British landscape. But in fact, it was completely radical. And before it, we were the first nation to execute their own king by process of law. Before that, we were the first nation to execute their own king by process of law before that we were the first brexit the reformation before that you had this weird situation where england

uniquely in western europe was a country where the elite spoke a completely different language to ordinary people for centuries and so our history is not one of oh our lovely timeless traditions that go on unchanged and it's actually one of complete unparalleled disjointing and knocking down and rebuilding like no other country in Western Europe's experience. And I think that's precisely why our art is so interesting because our history is so goddamn interesting and so much more wild, frankly, than we usually get taught it in schools. Terry, do you think, is there something about English or British art? If we were Spanish,

wouldn't we be saying that about Spanish art? Like, what have you come across? I'll ask you both. Like, what do you think is distinctive about what you've studied in the course of making this big sweeping series? I mean, that's a really good question. I think there has always been a healthy agonism, a healthy conflict in the space of culture historically. Because I mean, in other contexts, art is used mostly as propaganda. And we have that kind of imagery as well. But we also have a lot of counter imagery. And for someone who studied, you know, caricature in the 18th century, it's amazing to think that, you know, in a culture that you could be prosecuted for sedition in other modes of art, for example, in literature, in the visual arts, they kind of found a loophole to do things,

you know, on the sly and kind of in code, in order to kind of produce other kinds of images. And it's like, well, the high and the low, it depends on perspective, right? And I think that that seems to be a kind of ongoing thread, whether you think about filmmaking or whether you think about even the television that we watch, there's a kind of sense of that countering dominant narratives. Even as we know we want to tell a particular kind of story, still there is this other impulse to subvert it, to challenge it, to question it. And I think that that healthy agonism is something that perhaps could be considered quite British, that it's kind of done with some good humour and a little bit of irony to it. That's something I think I've learned,

particularly from spending a lot of time with the madness of the 18th century, for sure. James, what about you? I felt, as we were getting this programme together, that there really is a thread, and to me that there's this thing that appears again and again as if from nowhere, and it's this idea, whether it's in Beowulf, or in Harry Potter,

or in Skyfall, or whatever, this idea that somehow, we in this country are obsessed with stories about defending a last redoubt, somehow, about defending something, and preserving things that are worthwhile under siege, to take forward into the future future in times of huge dislocation and change. There's something, I think, specifically British about that. It's very, very different from the way the Americans are obsessed. You know, the Americans are obsessed with this idea of stories about personal renewal. And, you know, you dig deep into yourself and you throw away your past and go forward into the limitless spaces of the frontier land. We aren't like that at all. Our stories seem to always be about defending something that's under siege and saving something for the future. What a thought to end on. I love that. That's

great. Thank you both very much indeed. How can people engage with the series? Well, the BBC is using the series as a centrepiece for the whole, you know, the art that made us festival. Museums and community groups and such up and down the country are holding events based around this to try and encourage people to get out there and not just look at stuff or experience stuff, but to do stuff of their own. And maybe the next person who has their finger on the pulse of what's coming next is out there now listening. I hope so. Thank you both very much indeed thanks so much thanks hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go bit of a favor to ask i totally understand if you

want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.