 Divide the room into two overlapping worlds. Place the black people at the centre, politically active, as knowing intelligent catalysts of change and revolution. Here is a scene in London in the middle of the 1980s. It was a crowded, confusing, bitter and twisted place. Reflecting on the creation of a fashionable marriage, a large-scale installation work, British artist Loubena Hamid outlined her approach to the work by William Hogarth, upon which her own work is based. Here, in a slightly larger-than-life-size installation made from collage cutouts and found materials, Hamid restages the fourth of the six scenes that comprise the 1743 series Marriage à la Mode. She engages directly with Hogarth's work to investigate not only the poignancy of that image, but also to instigate a reassessment of Hogarth as a canonical artist, a craftsman, a satirist and an instigator of myths of Britishness. My name is Lizzie Robles. Welcome to the fifth of a series of six films organised by the Paul Mellon Centre as part of their programme of public lecture courses. All have been made in collaboration with filmmaker John Law. In the first four films, Mark Hallett and Meredith Gamer brought to life Hogarth's modern moral subjects through analysis of a selection of his most notable and complex pictorial sequences. In the final two films of the series, I will look to the ways in which two distinguished contemporary British artists, Loubena Hamid and Yinka Shunabare, have responded to Hogarth's legacy in key works from their own practices. Let's return now to Hamid's installation. Initially displayed at London's Pentonville Gallery in 1986, it was created at the height of what has come to be known as the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, a milieu of artists, exhibitions and activities in which a young Hamid took an active and important role. The work was later revived in 2014 for an exhibition at Tate Liverpool and more recently was displayed at the Nottingham contemporary version of a series of exhibitions under the title The Place is Here. Between the first and most recent iteration, elements of the installation were made and remade, reflecting not only the artist's evolving approach to the work, but also the material implications of its delicate and large and thus difficult to store components. However, what remains indelibly marked across the work's three decades of life is the complex relationship that Hamid constructs with Hogarth and his work. Let's look then to the work upon which a fashionable marriage is modelled. Coming in the middle of a narrative sequence that chronicles the ill-fated marriage of convenience between the son of an impoverished aristocrat and the daughter of a wealthy, though untitled, merchant, the toilette depicts the appropriately named Lady Skwonder Field. She is surrounded by foreign musicians, African servants and assorted hangers on, an entourage constructed by Hogarth as a marker of her wealth. We find her in conversation with her lawyer and paramour, Silver Tongue, who hands her an invitation to a masquerade. In one appraisal of the scene, William Haslett emphasised the infinite activity of mind, which his artist displays on every occasion. From the coronet above Lady Skwonder Field's bed, indicating her husband's ascendance to Erldum, the screen depicting a masquerade foreshadowing the lover's entertainment, to the young African servant playing with a figure of Actaeon, an auction house Brickabrack, summoning the spectre of the auction house, as a site for the trade in both enslaved people and cultural commodities. Though similar in format and narrative outcome to his two progresses, a rake's progress and a harlot's progress, which were the focus of two previous lectures in this series, Hogarth's newspaper advertisement for the work makes it clear that the artist conceived this series as something altogether a bit different. He claimed that, unlike in the existing series in which contemporary public figures would have been easily recognised by the public, none of the characters represented here shall be personal. In doing so, Hogarth made a claim for the universality of his pictorial sequence. In Hymid's hands, the toilette becomes a fashionable marriage, something new yet familiar. The painted figures are cut away from the canvas and transformed into three-dimensional multimedia cutouts, creating a plastic tableau vivant. Though all of the figures are accounted for, only some of the opulent furnishings are restaged, a sofa here, a screen there. The old master paintings behind the lover's allusions to Coregio's lot and his daughters and Jupiter and Io on one side and Michelangelo's The Rape of Ganymede on the other are replaced with others in the style of late Picasso. For Hymid, this gesture highlights the misogynies that link together the historical and modernist canons of art. Plenty of rape scenes to choose from. Many women's bodies to penetrate and destroy, she notes. In the art world, on the left of the installation, the musicians have become a critic, a dealer and a funding body, the figures that hold the keys of the artistic success and, more broadly, the Western Canon. At the edge of the scene are the contemporary artists, the white feminist artist whose hulking body is built from an upended set of drawers containing clear references to the work of Judy Chicago, Helen Chadwick, Susan Hiller and Mary Cowley and a set of entwined, fashionable painters from the Glasgow School of Art. Placed slightly behind the feminists and on the boundary of the art world and the real world, Hymid has placed the black woman artist. She takes the place of an African servant offering hot chocolate and biscuits to Lady Squander Field's entourage. Taller, reaching close to nine feet and more sturdily built out of building quality birch plywood rather than flimsy cardboard, she stands at the centre of the scene. In what Hymid calls the real world, Hogarth's lovers are transformed into Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan whose invitation now promises admission to the Third World War. Hogarth's assertion that, quote, none of the characters represented should be personal in his sequence is cast aside by Hymid in her reconstruction of political power. In the foreground, the young African boy is replaced by a radical black activist with white frock coat and sitting on a brown suitcase. A gun balanced ominously on top. Before delving further into the work, I would like to briefly think about the complex engagement with Hogarth that Hymid mapped out in an essay that was published 25 years after the Pentonville Gallery show. Throughout the text, she refers to Hogarth as her ally, a fellow artist critic bent on satirising the foibles of society, the amorous relationship between art and wealth and the hypocrisy of the elite. However, the text's epigraph also signals an important part of her engagement with and relationship to Hogarth. It begins with a series of quotations illuminating William Hogarth's artistic legacy, taken from prominent and celebrated historical figures. William Wordsworth deems Hogarth a painter of the people and Samuel Taylor Coleridge celebrates this great master. Aside from the Hogarthian play with quotation and self-reference, initiated by beginning a text-based discussion of a contemporary visual quotation with historical quotations, the epigraph sets forth Hymid's engagement with Hogarth as a fellow artist and dominant figure within British art history. However, rather than signaling Hymid's self-inscription into a long history of tribute to Hogarth, it seems to hint at an active and complex engagement with the fellow artist and the narrow notions of a national self that have canonized him as a father of English painting. The shift from Hogarth's painted canvas and engravings to Hymid's constructed cutouts is central to this engagement with both the artwork and with Hogarth himself as an artist and engraver. Indeed, in much the same way that, as Mark and Meredith reminded us earlier in the series, we must reconcile Hogarth the painter with the Covent Garden artisan. It's important that we keep in mind Hymid's early years of artistic training when she chose to train in theatre design at Wimbledon Art School. Learning to make props, costume and furniture, this early training continues to echo through her practice and these elements from the cutouts, which were constructed using theatre methods for propping up scenery to the flamboyant multimedia costumes that they wear, are at the core of a fashionable marriage. Hymid cites several historical precedents for the cutout figures, including their use in Britain from the early 17th century when figures of servants, soldiers and occasionally saints were made as visual jokes, covers for fireplaces, advertisements and to guard doorways. Notably, she also alludes to the cutouts produced by American artist Alex Katz, who cut the central figure from his painting and attached them to plywood panels, creating freestanding figures. The cutouts enable Hymid to bring these diverse sources, historical and contemporary, fine art and craft, to bear on cutouts that she identifies first and foremost as paintings. Hymid's interest in opening up and playing at these in-between spaces is further highlighted by the use of collage in the construction of many of the cutouts. Here collage is mobilized in much the same way that Hogarth used subtle visual iconography, a coral rattle to denote motherhood, a blemish to indicate disease. The components that make up each figure provide a critical indication of the role within the installation and within the real-life cycles and circuits of social and cultural power in which they operate. Augmented by contemporary artifacts, found materials and newspaper clippings, Hymid's Hogarthian figures are fixed in a state of temporal flux. The traditional clothing is strewn with relics of the contemporary and simultaneously invokes Hogarth's painted image and the contemporary context of Hymid's installation. Let's turn then to take a closer look at the ways in which collage operates in some of these figures. Like Hogarth's castrato, the critic's mouth is a gap in song. However, the critic's voice falls flat and he cannot engage with the viewer. Within the installation, his voice is not silenced and his audience, comprised of the gatekeepers of the canon, lean closer to hear his song. Placed next to the white feminist artist, the black woman artist stands back, unconvinced by the critic's song and highlighting the uneven relationship between her and the canonical center. The nature of the center is embodied by the critic's costume, which in appearance hasn't changed very much from the sumptuous garb of the castrato. It is still made up of the same articles of clothing, though Hymid has substituted the silks and splendor painted by Hogarth into clippings of text taken from several popular and respected contemporary journals. Headlines from block, screen and timeout replace the castrato's fashionable shirt sleeves and lapels, whilst text takes the place of his shirt's luxurious material. The frills of his shirt are replaced with a cacophony of rubber gloves, which, like the press clippings, are mass-produced and disposable objects. Clothed with comments that Hymid writes may be clear, concise and to the point current even, but of minute importance over many years of making artwork. They are the bare essence of both his career and the power he wields within his world. Like the costume of the critic that of Lady Squanderfield emerging in 1986 as Margaret Thatcher, or the grocer's daughter as she's named in a preparatory watercolor for the work, is comprised of a multimedia collage. In 1986, her dress was littered with newspaper clippings, detailing the fallout of her legacy, her policies, gaffes and her everyday management. Whereas Lady Squanderfield's fashionable and expensive dress subtly signaled to Hogarth's audience her social status and on stintation, Thatcher speaks loudly of her time and power and the politics that have become her legacy, from her stance as a staunch supporter of apartheid to the decimation of the unions, seen in the 2014 installation in a striking news image taken at the Battle of Orgrave, placed carefully on her skirt. In the 1986 iteration, the bottom hem of her dress is decorated with quotations that, though taken from print media, are spoken in Thatcher's own voice, such as one that reads, My party is very anxious to maintain good relations with immigrants. Alongside the clippings are drawn and painted on bananas that, in the watercolor, are inscribed with the names of some of her administration's most controversial elements, Soweto, Botha, Libya, Reagan, Belgrano, Sanction Buster, Selling Council Housing, Minor Strike, Unemployment. These realities produce a striking juxtaposition with the platitudes attributed to Thatcher that drag along the floor on the hem of her dress. The painted bananas themselves carry multiple meanings, from the comic trope of the slippery banana peel to the banana republic style of third world economic neocolonialism perpetuated by her government during the 1980s. Notably, it's her own image clipped from newspapers and magazines that is repeated across the figure's costume in the 21st century reworking of the figure, a reference perhaps at once to her role in reshaping the landscape of print media via union busting and also the cultural legacy of a figure whose careful construction of her own image continues to shape popular political narratives. The controversies articulated in the 1986 installation are here smoothed over, replaced by images of serene waving and smiling. Central to Hamid's scene and to the Hogarthian sequence that they're drawn from is a notion of national identity. Hamid engages with Hogarth both as an artist appropriated by the canon's construction of a national narrative and also as an artist interested and invested in producing his own vision of the nation at a time when a very powerful myth of English rather than British exceptionalism flourished. As a scholar John Stiles has put it, in Hogarth's London, sometimes England was considered to be better because it was exceptional, sometimes it was considered to be exceptional because it was better. Was this myth undoubtedly buoyed the racial hierarchies of the concurrent colonial project? It was complicated by the influence of continental tastes, particularly amongst English elites. Indeed it was this society immersed in the myths of its own exceptionalism most dressed in French fashions, dining on French cuisine and enjoying Italian opera that drew Hogarth's ire. In this way the sumptuous French styles of Lady Squandrick Field and her entourage, the presence of the Italian castrato and the many European paintings and artworks found in the toilette signaled to us not only that lady's wealth but also the link between her profligacy, her taste and her moral shortcomings. Within a 20th century context Hogarth's distaste of continental influences serve as a poignant reminder of the cycles of transcultural exchange that have shaped historical formations of a collective British national identity. These are further brought to light in the presence of the two African servants that Hogarth included in the toilette. For some scholars these figures provide positive foils for the white upper classes who often found themselves in the artist's crosshairs, a reading underpinned by Hogarth's reported unease about the colonial project and sympathy with the plight of enslaved Africans. Crucially they also highlight the growing black population of George in Britain. However in Hamid's hands these figures do more than stake a claim for historical black presence in Britain and articulate more than a criticism of white society. Here they speak to the possibilities and implications of radical change across the art world and the real world that lays in the hands of black women. As discussed previously the servant offering hot chocolate itself a symbol of wealth and colonial trade and the young page boy playing with bric-a-brac at Lady Squandered Fields transformed into the black woman artist and the radical activist. Looming large over the installation at the interstices of the art world and the real world the black woman artist is invested with new radical potency. Her outward gaze emphasizes her dominance and she is the only figure to look at the viewer directly rather than engaging with the action of the other figures within the installation. She is also the only cutout built with articulated arms and thus the capacity to physically act. Jux deposed with a stocky solidity of the white feminist artist body made from a clunky set of disused drawers this marks her as the possessor of a unique agency. In her transformation from the male servant to the black woman artist the figure's costume has changed though its style has not. She wears an elaborate Hogarthian style dress covered in fish made from painted wood with a voluminous skirt painted in blues and greens evoking the oceans and landmasses of the globe contrasting richly with the other figure's costumes. In the place of her historical counterparts hot chocolate she had as him he notes a larger offering and poured it towards the eager listener energy. This energy pours also towards the back of the white feminist artist who's turned away and engaged with the entwined male artist at her side. It arcs out towards her empty drawers and stands in stark contrast to the offerings of the rest of the figures in the art world who according to Hameed's preparatory sketch for the art critic present to each other and to the viewer not a lot. Writing retrospectively about the black woman artist Hameed recalls thinking at the time that quote we as black women artists held the center and although she acknowledges in hindsight that quote in fact we rented rooms there it is this initial belief in her radical transformative potential that shapes the figure in Hameed's words in 1986 I was full of hope and looking for a fight as we stormed the Citadel to help us we needed sharp and committed political minds black minds convinced that culture could be an effective weapon for change position between the two worlds physically dominant capable and wearing the world on her skirt the black woman artist is undoubtedly a ready facilitator for this radical change like the black woman artist the radical activist is an agent for change an mediator between the installation and the viewer in 1743 the auction house Bricka Brackett is feed drew explicit links between the buying and selling of both enslaved people and commodities like artworks coordinated in London's coffee houses in 1986 in Hameed's preparatory sketch the radical activist plays with weapons of war including tanks, bombs and guns in the 2014 installation the figure is now a woman and the weaponry of the sketch has been transformed into a woven basket of books with titles by the Senegalese scholar and political leader Sheikh Anton Diop and Guineas historian and activist Walter Rodney with her keen understanding of the cycles and circuits that dictate the culture and political spheres the radical activist becomes an all-knowing narrator like the page boy and the adult servant she is quote absolutely in tune with what is happening in the room however unlike the black woman artist the radical activists subversive power is not heralded by her costume or the capability for physical movement and change her costume remains much the same as her Hogarthian predecessor white front coat though it's actually modeled on a photograph of the Scottish poet and artist Maud Salter as a young child taken on a visit to Glasgow Zoo it masks her true power disguises her motivations and capabilities under the guise of a seemingly innocent and young servant unlike the other costumes in the installation that carry manifold signs of their wearer's essence and intent here the costume gives little away but her status as an agent of change rather than storming the Citadel and pouring her energy into the art world the radical black activist performs her difference as a type of Trojan horse seemingly innocuous and ignored but ready to strike at the heart of a white political and cultural class that from 1986 to 2014 to today continues to marginalize the voices of black women in this way with Hogarth, bad-tempered, ambitious, genius and critic of 18th century manners and morals painter of theatrical themes, storyteller, history painter art xenophobe as her artist satirist ally Hamid challenges us to confront the enduring foibles and hypocrisies of the art world and the real world