A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [246]
What one must remember about some of these pictures is that they were partly propaganda of something that hadn’t been propagandized, especially among students, as a subject: homosexuality. I felt it should be done. It was part of me; it was a subject I could treat humorously.
Gay rights were of course only one of the many freedoms asserted and fought for during the sixties, but they were a particularly challenging issue in the context of universal human rights. Most of these concerned groups of people discriminated against on the grounds of gender, religion or race, and there was a wide consensus in the aftermath of the Second World War that such discrimination was wrong. Sexual orientation and behaviour, on the other hand, were seen as something quite different – indeed they were not even mentioned in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948. Hockney and campaigners like him eventually changed the terms of the debate, taking questions of sexuality firmly into the arena of human rights in Europe and America. In some countries, their campaigning changed the law, but in many parts of the world private sexual acts that deviate from an accepted norm are still considered religiously unacceptable or a threat to society, deemed criminal and punished – in some cases by death.
In 2008 the United Nations General Assembly considered a statement condemning killings and executions, torture and arbitrary arrest based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The statement was endorsed by over fifty countries, but prompted a counter-statement opposing it and the matter remains unresolved.
Hockney’s etching is arrestingly sparse. A few black lines suggest a wall here, a blanket there. There is nothing to tell us where this bed is. We do not even know whether both figures are really present or just dreamt of. This insistently unspecific image reminds us that sexual behaviour, although totally private, is also totally universal. Society’s responses to it, on the other hand, are most definitely not. Forty years later, the frontier of human rights is still being bloodily negotiated: our world is less global than we like to think.
98
Throne of Weapons
Chair made of weapon parts, from Maputo, Mozambique
AD 2001
For the first time in this history we are examining an object that is a record of war but which does not glorify war or the ruler who waged it. The Throne of Weapons is a chair – or throne – constructed out of parts of guns that were made all over the world and exported to Africa. If a striking feature of the nineteenth century was the growth of mass markets and mass consumption, the twentieth century can be characterized by mass warfare and mass killing: the two world wars, Stalin’s purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia’s killing fields, Rwanda – the list goes on. If there is one small, positive side to all this devastation it is that the twentieth century has more than any previous one recorded and articulated the mass suffering of ordinary victims of war – the soldiers and civilians who paid with their lives. Across the world there are Tombs of Unknown Soldiers; the Throne of Weapons is in this tradition. It is a monument to all the victims of the Mozambique civil war and a record of crimes against a whole country – indeed a continent. It is also, most unusually for such a commemorative piece, a work of art that speaks to us of hope and resolution. The Throne of Weapons is about human tragedy and human triumph in equal measure.
These closing chapters of our history chart the fading of empires that flourished and grew throughout