The Nature of the Beast

Abstract

Goshka Macuga's installation The Nature of the Beast was on view at London's Whitechapel Gallery April 5, 2009–April 18, 2010. The first in a series of yearlong artists' commissions, the work responded to the Whitechapel's 1939 exhibition of Pablo Picasso's Guernica in support of the Republican forces fighting in the Spanish civil war. It incorporated Picasso's tapestry version of Guernica, which was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller and which since the 1980s has hung outside the Security Council chamber at United Nations Headquarters in New York. Exhibited as a deterrent to war, in 2003 the tapestry was covered by a blue curtain in front of which Colin Powell delivered his speech on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Macuga designed her installation to accommodate meetings, discussions, and debates around a central table, with the Guernica tapestry as a backdrop. Local political groups, university classes, and other community organizations came to use the conference table and the assembled reading materials. Near the end of the exhibition, the artist designed her own tapestry, based on press photographs of the Guernica tapestry while on display at the Whitechapel. Woven in Flanders, it depicts Prince William giving a speech and questions the political efficacy of her own work, as well as placing Guernica in a longer history of social image-making.