A History of the World in 100 Objects (83 page)

It was also the decade of the psychedelic Summer of Love – played out to the sounds of Woodstock and San Francisco, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead. In the private realm there was a sexual revolution – Women’s Liberation, the contraceptive pill – and the legalization of homosexual relations. There is no earlier decade in which David Hockney’s etching
In the Dull Village
could have been published. Hockney began his art studies in the 1950s, but it was the 1960s that formed him, and he in turn helped shape the decade. He was gay and prepared to be open about it, both in his life and his work, at a time when in the UK homosexual activity between men was criminal, and prosecutions were frequent. He divided his time between California, where he made his famous paintings of naked young men in deep blue swimming pools, and Britain, where he drew and painted his family and friends.

In this etching, two naked men, who could be in their 20s, lie side by side in bed, half covered by a blanket; we are looking down at them from its foot. One lies with his arms behind his head, his eyes closed as if dozing, while the other looks eagerly at him. We have no idea whether the relationship between the two men is recent or of long standing, but at first sight this looks like a calm, entirely satisfactory morning after.

It is one of a series of etchings inspired by the poems of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, on which Hockney began work in 1966, while the Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was drafting the legislation to decriminalize homosexuality in England and Wales ; and it was published in 1967, just as Parliament passed Jenkins’s Sexual Offences Act. Hockney’s image was shocking for many then, and for some is still shocking today, even though there is nothing at all explicit about it – the blanket covers both men up to the waist. Yet it raises perplexing questions about what societies find acceptable or unacceptable, about the limits of tolerance and individual freedom, and about shifting moral structures over thousands of years of human history.

One of the constants of this history of the world, not surprisingly,
has been sex – or, more precisely, sexual attraction and love. Among our hundred examined objects, we have the oldest-known representation of a couple making love, a small stone carved 11,000 years ago near Jerusalem, we have harem women, voluptuous goddesses and gay sex on a Roman cup. Surprisingly, given this long tradition of representing human sexuality, David Hockney’s relatively decorous print was nonetheless a courageous – indeed provocative – act in the Britain of his day.

The young men in Hockney’s etching could be American or British; but they inhabit the place of the picture’s title, which matches that of Cavafy’s poem – ‘In the Dull Village’. The poem is about a young man trapped by his circumstances, who escapes his dreary surroundings by dreaming of the perfect love partner. So perhaps Hockney’s dozing boy is gently fantasizing his ardent companion, who is imagined, rather than actually present in the longed-for flesh.

He lay in his bed tonight sick with what love meant,

All his youth in desire of the flesh alight

In a lovely tension all his lovely youth.

And in his sleep delight came to him; in his sleep

He sees and holds the form and flesh he wanted …

The cosmopolitan family of Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) had moved between Turkey, Britain and Egypt and was part of the huge Greek diaspora that for 2,000 years had dominated the economic, intellectual and cultural life of the eastern Mediterranean. He lived in a broad, Greek-speaking world, which defined itself essentially less in terms of mainland Greece than in the twin centres of Constantinople and Alexandria. It was a world created by Alexander’s conquest of Egypt in the fourth century
BC
and which ended only in the middle of the twentieth century – a world we have encountered several times before in our history, notably in the Rosetta Stone, where the languages of Greece and Egypt appear side by side. Cavafy was very aware of this rich inheritance, and his Alexandrian poetry has a deep sense of ancient history, and of a Greek world in which love between males was an accepted part of life.

The world of Bradford as experienced by the young Hockney was a very different place. In Yorkshire in the 1950s, homosexuality was
an unmentionable subject and for an artist a risky one. So the poems of Cavafy, which Hockney found in the Bradford library, were a revelation.

I read more of his poems and I was struck by their directness and simplicity; and then I found the John Mavrogordato translation in the library in Bradford in that summer of 1960, and I stole it. I’ve still got it, I’m sure. I don’t feel bad now because it’s been redone, but you couldn’t buy it then, it was completely out of print. Mind you, in the library in Bradford you had to ask for that book, it was never on the shelves.

The fourteen poems that Hockney later chose for his series of etchings, poems of longing and loss, of the first meeting of future loves and intoxicating, passionate encounters, were both exciting material that he could use for his own art and an example of how an artist could make a public statement out of such private experience. Brought up by his enlightened parents to follow his own line and not worry about what neighbours thought, Hockney felt a responsibility to stand up, through his art, for his own rights and to join the growing campaign for the rights of others like him. Characteristically, he was determined that his approach would not be heavy handed. These etchings don’t preach, they laugh and they sing:

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.

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 the nineteenth century and the rise of new global ideologies and national identities. Nowhere has this been played out so bloodily as in post-colonial Africa. The late nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’ resulted in the parcelling up of the continent among Britain, France and Portugal as the leading colonial powers, alongside Germany, Italy, Spain and Belgium. After the Second World War there were moves throughout the continent for independence, and from 1960 onwards it was gradually achieved. But this separation from European powers was usually bitterly fought over, and because independence was so often attained only after fighting, it frequently contributed to great internal problems for the new states, including civil war. The Ghanaian diplomat and former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, has had personal and professional experience of this:

I think we have to start from the premise that most of these countries had not had experience of governing – running a nation, managing issues – and had to start almost from scratch. Given the history of their countries, there were civil servants, but very few of them had actually led and organized a country. And I think the skills that you need to fight for independence are not the same skills you require to govern, but there was an automatic assumption that those who fought for independence were prepared and ready to govern. So there was quite a bit of learning on the job, and also jealousies between groups and a feeling that one tribe, or one group, had more power or benefits than the other, and this often led to tensions and conflict over scarce resources – tense and brutal at times.

These fragile, inexperienced governments could look for support to either communist East or capitalist West, and both those blocs were eager to enlist supporters. After the nineteenth-century territorial scrambles for Africa came the twentieth century’s ideological ones. The consequence was a huge influx of arms to the continent and a series of bitter civil wars. The Mozambique civil war was among the bloodiest of them all.

Although it is entirely made from chopped-up guns, in its shape the Throne of Weapons looks like a conventional wooden armchair – the homely sort you might find in a kitchen or at a dinner table. But that’s the only conventional thing about it. The guns that make up this chair in fact track the twentieth-century history of Mozambique. The oldest, forming the back, are two antiquated Portuguese G3 rifles – appropriately so, as Portugal was the country’s colonial master for nearly 500 years until independence in 1975. That independence was won by a left-wing resistance movement, FRELIMO, which was supported by the Soviet Union and its allies. This explains why all the other elements of the chair are dismembered guns manufactured in the communist bloc: the arms of the chair are from Soviet AK47s, the seat is formed from Polish and Czechoslovakian rifles, and one of the front legs is the barrel of a North Korean AKM. This is the Cold War as furniture, the Eastern Bloc in action, fighting for communism in Africa and across the world.

When FRELIMO came to power in 1975, the new Mozambique became a Marxist-Leninist state with a declared hostility to the political regimes of its neighbours – white-controlled Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and apartheid South Africa. In response, the Rhodesian and South African regimes created and backed an opposition group named RENAMO and attempted to destabilize the country; so the first decades of Mozambican independence were years of economic collapse and murderous civil war. The guns in the throne are the ones with which this civil war was fought. It left a million dead, millions of refugees and 300,000 war orphans in need of care. Peace came only after fifteen years, when in 1992 a settlement was brokered and the country’s leaders began to rebuild their state. But although the war was over, the guns were still very much present. As Kofi Annan knows, it is notoriously difficult to re-educate a militarized generation to take their place in a peaceful civilian society, and in this case many of the soldiers had known nothing but war: