Unhomely: Redefining the British Decorative Arts

The teacup scene stayed with me as I walked through the spaces of the British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Completed in 2020 to the tune of around $22 million, the refurbished galleries promised to display 400 years of “British history and ornamentation from one of the largest empires of all time”.³ Though I’ve visited the gallery several times now, as a curator who contributed to its redesign and a visitor, I found myself struck by the uncanny materialities of the space. I had never before noticed how the glass shelves and luxurious display cases created strange, displaced reflections that contaminated spaces in which they did not belong, defying a sense of containment or order (fig. 4). Instead of marveling at the variety of teapots made by proud Staffordshire potters and domestic porcelain factories in England, stacked like a tower of British civility in the center of one gallery, I saw the eerie reflections of the Indian ivory objects contained in the pocket galleries, hovering like ghosts in the glass shelves, the periphery haunting the center (figs. 5 and 6). I found myself repeatedly mapping the charged encounter with the teacup in Get Out onto these symbols of entrepreneurial ambitions and creativity, each object of useful beauty shadowed by a phantasmagoria of colonial violence and its long aftermath (fig. 7).⁴

Do such trinkets deserve a space entirely of their own? One aim of the issue is to argue for the importance of museum collections and displays as porous and open conceptual sites for thinking openly and broadly about the British decorative arts and their relationship to the past, present, and future. Several of the features in this issue were prompted by temporary exhibitions and permanent installations, which raised questions of temporality, display, and audience in ways different from an academic context. The present issue emerged from an earlier “Conversation Piece” feature in BAS that prompted a community of thinkers to ponder the question of luxury and crisis, and how one might inform the other. ⁷ These two terms, it turns out, were less alien to each other than at first appeared. In retrospect, I realized that two major reinstallations of British Galleries had coincided with two historical crises that have come to define our own times. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s refurbished British Galleries opened at the end of 2001, the year of 9/11, while the Met’s version opened in 2020, the year that the COVID–19 pandemic and the death of George Floyd brought a sudden halt to the prior rhythms of everyday life. Taking place over several years, the timing of redesigned museum spaces never aligns perfectly with events taking place in the outside world. Nonetheless, current events shape the meanings of seemingly atemporal museum spaces in untold ways. I think it is fair to say that the viewpoint that museum institutions are neutral spaces is untenable. Crises actively defy institutional attempts to control the meaning or main themes of a space planned years in advance. They can also offer opportunities for rethinking things outside of a normal and normative context. While much has been made of attempting to make museums “topical”, “relevant”, and “timely”, what needs to be acknowledged is the temporal disjuncture between the institutional spaces dictated by a false sense of permanence and timelessness, and the accelerating pace of the world outside. It’s not about catching up to the times, but providing a nexus where the past can meet the present in flexible and dynamic ways. As the articles gathered in this collection make clear, the decorative arts are inherently political, bringing to the fore the way in which issues of scale, material, and color become of political importance when dealing in the realm of the ancillary or superfluous. Instead of attempting to categorize, classify, and discipline the decorative arts by offering a precise definition of what this term means, the issue places it in a more expansive field of material and representation, from vessels and no-longer extant sculptures to dress and the practices of dressing-up. The political dimension of the decorative arts becomes even more evident when they are not seen as part of a fixed heritage, but rather as part of a radically open field of production, in considering the paradoxical power of the small and portable format of the Wedgwood medallion, which circulated across the globe to reach abolitionist audiences, or the outsized reactions about taste, when Thomas Longmore and John Hénk’s giant majolica elephant was displayed at the 2015 Sculpture Victorious exhibition at the Tate (fig. 9).⁸ The decorative arts demand that one expand, alter, or bend the parameters of taste.

This issue proposes a double move to readers. First, it foregrounds the fact that slavery, colonialism, and empire were integral historical components in the production, consumption, and reception of the British decorative arts. Second, it suggests that readers unhinge the “heritage” aspect that has long been associated with the British decorative arts, proposing instead a move of defamiliarization and making strange the routines of domesticity that seem self-evident and simply “the way things always have been”. The power of a film like Get Out precisely resides in making the seemingly everyday practices of American suburbia strange and unhomely. It also shows us the deep racial, political, social, and historical schisms that have always already existed in the collective mythologies of “home”. The idea of the home as a protective space of domestic virtues, a space of retreat away from the real world, is of course a myth that has been shattered long ago.⁹ The persistent belief in the home as last refuge from outside change has been adopted as an ideology of sorts, leaving the back door open to reactionary forms of colonial nostalgia. This is evident in the strong reaction to the important study published by the National Trust exploring the links between its properties and slavery. Those who saw the stately homes as belonging to the nation no longer felt “at home” in history, when the facts of the past drew a clear link between the elegant and stately residences and “the global slave trades, goods and products of enslaved labour, abolition and protest, and the East India Company”.¹⁰ As it is clear from the historical record, the country house was never isolated from the racist sinews of imperial power and violence. 

Confronting the past can often be a daunting experience, but it can also provide the way for new narratives to be written. As David Scott reminds us, new futures depend upon retellings of the past.¹¹ The uncanny picturing of the domestic setting also speaks to how the British decorative arts are capable of channeling certain unseen and unspoken rules in ways that are quite different from painting or sculpture, auratic works meant to be viewed from a protective distance. Though handled and touched, the decorative arts enter slyly and cunningly through the peripheral field of vision. Caught in a quick glance rather than being the central object of concentrated focus, decorative objects nonetheless unsettle and startle at a different visual register, when they shatter loudly and break into a million pieces. But their power, as this special issue insists, lies precisely in the ability to disrupt grand narratives and the visual and material field from the colorful periphery and the superfluous margins.