 Throughout October 1998, travelers on the London Underground might have paused for a moment to register a rather striking poster hung in various stations. A photograph of Sumch's period interior, a library in a stately home perhaps, with a freeze-frame tableau of servants listening at the door, as an assembly of finely dressed men focused their attentions on a central figure, who peers out of the frame. Some may have registered the identity of the figure, the celebrated British artist Yinka Shinobare, a recognition facilitated perhaps by the poster text, which advertised an exhibition featuring a new series of work at INEVA, the Institute of International Visual Arts in East London. For many, though, the poster will have become a blur on the wall. Just another advert for a new TV show or film, perhaps? A period drama, no doubt. Hi, my name is Lizzie Robles. Welcome to the final film in a series of six, 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 Hallant 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 look to the ways in which two distinguished contemporary British artists, Lupena Hamid and Yinka Shinobare, have responded to Hogarth's legacy and key works from their own practices. Produced in 1998, Dire Victorian Dandy is made up of a series of five photographs of a day of luxury and leisure in the life of the titular Dandy, played convincingly by the artist himself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the serial format of the sequence, which is marked by the days passing hours and the presence of the Dandy, have yielded comparisons to the pictorial sequences of William Hogarth that have formed the focus of the films in this series. O'Rake's Progress has featured prominently both in its critical reception and in Shinobare's own reflections around the work. The significance of this invocation has been examined many times over as a co-opting of Hogarth's penchant for social criticism, or else as an allusion to the racial politics of his practice. While these approaches offer us rich and interesting insights, they have overlooked a central component of the work, the pairing of Hogarth with the Victorian period. Put simply, Hogarth was not Victorian. Indeed, his lifetime only just overlaps with the most expansive definitions of what historians have called the long 19th century. Historical accuracy in the realities of time and place fall to the wayside here, making way for both Hogarth and Shinobare's Dandy. This pairing of artist and era produces a striking interrogation of nostalgia and the implications of looking back for an artist perched on the cusp of new labour's cool Britannia in the aftermath of the political and cultural reclamation of the Victorian era that occurred in the preceding decade. During this period, the image of the mouth-bungled hypocrites derided by Lytton Strachey in the deeply critical Eminent Victorians, published nearly two decades after Queen Victoria's death, was cast aside for something altogether different. Rather, ensconced in dire Victorian dandy we find the bootstrap pulling of Margaret Thatcher's Victorian values, the polished wooden floors and broken-in club chairs of the Laura Ashley look, and Jane Austen's Mr Darcy, as played by Colin Firth. On its surface, the series does not seem to bear any immediate signs of contemporary interventions and history. The suits, waistcoats and night dresses are convincingly ruffled and tailored, and the women's dresses are rich confections of bustles and lace. The hairstyles, furniture and decor all seem, satisfyingly, historical. This carefully constructed period sheen has facilitated several critical interpretations of the sequence as an allusion to historical figures such as Ignatius Sancho and Elauda Aquiano, colonial era black British anti-abolitionists who gained access to elite circles through education and activism. According to this reading, Chonobare's presence as a black man in an overwhelmingly white world represents the visual reinstatement of black faces in stories, interracially exclusive national narratives. For other critics, these stories are not confined to a relatively small group of notable individuals who are able to overcome the far-reaching implications of historical structural racism and include the wider narratives of slavery and colonialism that underpinned an economically supported Victorian society. Though these approaches can provide interesting insights into the work, they seem to sideline the complexities that underpin Chonobare's exclamation that it is not about expressing something that once existed but people did not know about. It is Ignatius Chonobare in that picture, not an obscure historical character. Unlike, for example, British writer David Dabidine's A Harlet's Progress, an ovalized version of Hogarth's other moralizing sequence of the same name, published in 1999, so only a year after Diary Victorian Dandy, and is told from the point of view of Mungo, a young black slave boy. Diary Victorian Dandy is neither an alternative representation of history nor a representation of an alternative history. Rather than Martin Eakin, writer and theorist Franz Fanon's reflections around his own post-colonial relationship to the past seems to echo through the photographs, I am not a prisoner of history, he wrote with black skin and white masks. I must not look for the meaning of my destiny in that direction. I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life. I am endlessly creating myself. Chonobare plays in the spaces where past and present overlap and intersect. The slippages produced when we look back to write and rewrite histories, creating and recreating Yinka Chonobare as the Victorian Dandy. The Victorian period, as constructed in the contemporary imagination, is rife with these slippages, these precarious in-between spaces. For the scholar Jennifer Green Lewis, the Victorians are in and out of history, always already dead, yet still alive. They are in history, not only by virtue of being dead and gone, but also because of their important position within historical narratives of national development. During the 1980s, this position in history was solidified by a political and cultural reassessment and rehabilitation of the Victorian period. In a 1983 interview with London's Evening Standard, Margaret Thatcher invoked the notion of Victorian values, a term that first surfaced earlier that year when she was interviewed by Brian Walden for ITV's Weekend World. Remembering her own upbringing at the hands of her Victorian grandmother, Mrs. Thatcher seemed to outline a model of self-reliance, patriotism and enterprise born from the desire to turn back the clock from the permissive social and political climate of the 60s and 70s to the simpler and happier times of empire and industry. We were taught to work jolly hard, she said. We were taught to prove yourself. We were taught self-reliance. We were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness was next to godliness. You were taught self-respect. You were taught to give a hand to your neighbor. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. This vision of Victorian was almost immediately seized upon by historians, critics and other politicians, including a young Neil Kinnock than the Shadow Minister of Education who countered it with a Dickensian specter of a place where few got rich and most got hell. As a specious political construct, it remained a touchstone of British politics throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. In popular culture, it manifested itself in the growth of the heritage industry and the vogue for period decor and heritage colors that comprise the Laura Ashley look and the rise of film and television costume dramas. The rise of neo-Victorianism during this period led Shinabari to reflect on his own relationship to it. Living in England with my colonial relationship to this country, one cannot escape all these Victorian things because they're everywhere in architecture, culture, attitude. In the 80s, Margaret Thatcher started talking about bringing back Victorian values, the time when everything was so proper-proper. And I started to think, what do these Victorian ideas mean? Why do we need to bring them back? What was so good about it all? What was so good about it all indeed? As Shinabari seems to hint at, the rehabilitation of all things Victorian was complicated not only by the harsh realities of that period sharp class divides, institutionalized racism and sexism and the global implications of the colonial project but also by the turbulent social and political climate of the 1980s a decade marred by urban race riots, public service strikes and mass unemployment. Scratching the surface of the heritage veneer, the viewer is encouraged to ask not only why do we need to bring them back and what was so good about it all but also more basically what exactly is being revived. By re-presenting the aesthetics of 1980s neo-Victorianism Shinabari's series highlights the Victorian's place out of history the ways in which they have been divorced from the historical specificity and open up to constant reassessment and reinvention. Indeed, the description of Victorian values provided by Mrs. Thatcher as a part of her weekend world interview was the closest she ever came to fleshing out what exactly the term means or how it might be mobilized within a national political context. She further destabilized its historical specificity when two weeks after weekend world in a speech to the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce she claimed that they are quote not simply Victorian values they do not go out of date they're not tied to any particular place or century and if we just write them off and wave them goodbye destroying the best of our heritage. What began as a lament for a lost golden age quickly became an assertion of continuity between the past and present. Similarly, the rise of the heritage film encompassed heavily stylized filmic versions of everything from pride and prejudice to a room with a view spilling over even the most generous boundaries of the long 19th century. Perhaps it is best summarized when in the closing pages of an effusive text Laura Ashley's biographer isolates the essence of the designer's aesthetic thusly In their homes she rescued a corner of the past that had belonged to ordinary people and restored it to the descendants of those same people with enhanced value. In the early 1980s the implications of this political and cultural neo-Victorianism were made visual several times perhaps most famously in Hans Haakka's unfinished portrait of Mrs Thatcher taking stock. Here Haakka asserts he places her into the world that she represents providing an indictment not only of Victorian values but also of the closed networks of power, art and money that they foster. But looking back to the 1980s from the first years of New Labour's cool Britannia diary Victorian dandy shifts the focus from the representation of neo-Victorianism to the processes that write and rewrite history. It is this preoccupation with the cycles and processes of history making it would seem that inscribes Shenabari's invocation of Hogarth and precludes it from being simply a by-product of the ahistorical pick and mix of the post-modern appetite for retro. He highlights the ways in which, like the Victorians Hogarth has been placed simultaneously in and out of history by the looking back of subsequent generations. Whilst in poorly Hogarth predated the Victorian period his legacy is tied to the looking back of the artists and critics who came after him. Indeed it was Ruskin who, in the introduction to Ernest Chesnow's The English School of Painting wrote that it is from Hogarth that English painting may be truly said to date. But the Victorians Hogarth provided an idealized and archetypal British artist producing an equally idealized and archetypal British art. For those who followed him he presented a chimerical ideal prompting the caution of one reviewer from the times who in 1863 wrote that Hogarth's are not common and the attempt to wield Hogarthian weapons will often are proof of snare than a success. Of course some elements of Hogarth's practice set uncomfortably with the aesthetic and moral precepts of his descendants. For example his interest in depicting vice and low modes of popular culture and his unique synthesis of high and low art forms. Rather than diminish Hogarth's status though these low elements came to represent space for improvement over the evolution of a national school. Though Hogarth himself was not a Victorian by chronologically reframing one of his most iconic sets of images Shunabari draws attention to the ways in which his legacy is. The pairing of artists in era here highlights the ways in which they have become entwined. Joined together by Victorian artists and critics looking back to reshape Hogarth as a progenitor of a unified national narrative of artistic production. Looking back at both Hogarth's Victorian legacy and contemporary neo-Victorianism Shunabari concocts a dramatic amalgam of the moralizing sequence of the former and the much loved period dramas of the latter. He strips Hogarth's series of its narrative and by proxy its moral arc. Where the canonical artist carefully set the scene for Tom Raquel's moral and physical decline creating detailed images rife with iconographical references to the narrative and to his inner moral character Shunabari plays with costume dramas emphasis on mise-en-scene sometimes at the expense of narrative logic or character dialogue. Well see highlights the passing of time which is conspicuously recorded in the title of each photograph. The images and the activities therein do not form a cohesive drama. Though the bedroom scene might be perceived as the first image its relationship to the others is almost entirely undefined. Does it depict the night after the day before or vice versa? Tellingly perhaps it is one of only two images that appear to draw directly from the subject matter of Hogarth's series. The other seems to be the Leveille which similarly documents a moment of money to leisure. However the moralizing cause, effect and change signaled by Hogarth through iconography are absent. There are no telling beauty spots here. Rather by representing Hogarth out of history Shunabari collapses historical specificity making room for a period composite in which to return to Fanon's earlier assertion Shunabari's dandy can endlessly create himself. This shift from drama to display is mirrored in Shunabari's substitution of the Victorian dandy for the Hogarthian rake. Whilst there is some overlap between the two figures they are not necessarily synonymous and carry subtle implied differences. The rake is generally defined by his lust for women, and gambling, overtly transgressing societal moors. He is a moralizing trope, a figure that must either repent and be redeemed or meet an untimely end as a result of his own moral bankruptcy. In contrast the dandy's identity is staked in an ability to assume and move between fixed identities through social performance. Historically he was very often a wealthy member of the middle classes who appropriated the dress of the elite through love of beauty and art and was defined by the 19th century French poet and writer Charles Baudelaire as one who elevates aesthetics into a living religion. However the dandy's performance hinges upon the codes and laws of society that serve as backdrop to his pose. He must always be in and out of society as Shunabari writes. He must trespass. He must walk on forbidden territory. He must disobey. That disobedience must never be degenerate. Here Shunabari creates an amalgam of the dandy and the rake by drawing on the basic elements of both figures to play with their transgressive capabilities. Like his representation of Victoriana though the authenticity of his dandy is secondary to its received accuracy. Unlike Hogarth's rake well who is painted literally putting on the clothes of the rake the Victorian dandy's transformation is not depicted. The viewer is introduced to him in situ and he remains an unfaltering and quintessential dandy throughout the series. He is a dandy because that is what he appears to be. Operating within Shunabari's heritage space modeled on the precepts of period dramas that constructed a neo-Victorian aesthetic to suit the interests and expectations of contemporary viewers. The dandy emphasizes the artist's interest in depicting the line in between spaces and he goes in and out of history as a figure whose identity rests on his ability to endlessly reinvent himself in and out of society. In much the same way that Shunabari destabilizes the temporal movement of his dandy he also destabilizes his physical movement by re-engaging Hogarth's topographies. After the levée Tom Raquel consistently appears outside of a domestic setting. In a Covent Garden brothel riding in a sedan in a church a Soho gambling den Fleet Street prison and finally Bedlam the capital is embedded deeply within Raquel's narrative. Shunabari's dandy, however, is confined to anonymous interior settings though it is unclear whether the sequence follows the dandy from room to room within the same opulent house or whether these are different rooms in different buildings. Here Shunabari invokes the visual language of the heritage film which is Simon Joyce writes is a televisual genre that obsesses to distraction about finding authentic locations and elides the evidence of modern life through careful cinematography. To achieve this authenticity Shunabari divorces his space for the multicultural metropolis that grew on the foundations laid by Hogarth's London and moves it into the meticulously restored confines of a heritage property. Whilst the uncritical depictions of luxuriant access in heritage films have come under fire for creating and reifying a narrow story of Britishness rooted in a spectacle of one class and one identity through a fetishization of the splendor's a period detail the Victorian dandy's relationship to both authenticity and the luxury that it celebrates is acutely subversive. In Shunabari's words access is the only legitimate means of subversion I wish to produce the fantastic I strive to reach ecstasy I crave joissances He envelops himself in the trappings of money, power and privilege in a gesture that mirrors the aestheticism of the Victorian dandy and resists either direct critique or complete complicity Rather he examines the ways in which, as he says to reflect upon history is also inextricably to reflect upon power. In this way Shunabari inscribes himself into a tradition of looking back, rooted in nostalgia operating in the gaps between representations of history and historical authenticity. He plays with the purported political and cultural desire to overcome this schism expressed as much in Ruskin's canonization of Hogarth as in Mrs. Thatcher's Victorian values whilst highlighting the ways in which it is woven through contemporary interventions into history. He does not attempt to return to or uncover a past veiled by the traumas and erasure of colonialism or to expose the hidden spaces and stories of the Victorian era There is no evidence here for a search for roots or lost origin Rather he shifts focus from the representation of history to the representation of the processes that write and rewrite history. From a vantage point at the cusp of new labour's rebranded cool Britannia which despite its emphasis on everything new and modern of course nostalgically summoned the specter of rule Britannia Shunabari looks back to both Hogarth's Victorian legacy and the Victorian's Thatcherite legacy highlighting the slippages between past and present that lurk underneath the surface of a unified and monophonic national history. He brings to life the literary critic Edward Said's observation that appeals to the past are among the commonest of strategies and interpretations of the present. What animates such appeals is not only disagreement about what happened in the past and what the past was but uncertainty about whether the past really is past over and concluded or whether it continues albeit in different forms perhaps.