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March 27, 2007
Here's a tough image to decode as there is a lot going on and the image has an historical feel to it.
The background is this reverberation of colonial British history that lifts the veil on an enlightened civilization engaged in the slave trade for over a century. It is the 200 anniversary of the British Parliament's abolition of the slave trade. Human slavery still exists in postmodernity as its current form is human trafficking.
Martin Rowson, apologizing for the slave trade, 2007
Rowson often reworks earlier images --an example ---and I 'm presuming that this is the case again. Can anyone with an art historical background help out? Is it the cartoonist William Hogarth again?
It is possible as slaves were openly bought and sold on markets at London and Liverpool in the early 1700s, and depicted them, but the style looks different. It doesn't look like Georg Grosz:
George Grosz, The Pillars of Society, 1926
This is more collage or montage became his expressive medium and complemented by such Futurist-inspired techniques as the simultaneous portrayal of multiple phases of motion.
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An indirect comment.
During the Commonwealth cames last year some people on the left used the perfectly apt term the Stolen-Wealth games. Such a renaming reveals the uninspected arrogance & hubris of our every day "normality"---the white man was born to rule and bring civiilisation and "culture" to the "heathen savages"---with copious use of MAXIM guns of course.
Some people on the "right" went into hysterical reaction as a response--Paul Gray for example.
That is exatly what it was--stolen wealth. The "mother" country systematically stole all or most of the wealth from the colonies.
Theft & plunder was the order of the day.
And as the cartoon above indicates the process of stealing wealth is still going on--even more that ever.