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Trigger warnings have been placed around a ‘disquieting’ exhibition about flowers at one of Britain’s grandest stately homes – recently visited by the Queen.
Chatsworth House is hosting a temporary exhibition called The Gorgeous Nothings, with modern, floral-based artwork throughout the 17th century property.
Camilla attended a fortnight ago for her annual Queen’s Reading Room literary festival, alongside authors including Jilly Cooper, and took a short tour.
Areas shown to the Queen included the Baroque chapel – home to the most prominent trigger warning, which states: ‘The artwork in this room includes images of conflict, starvation and death’.
Management stress the trigger warning refers to a video montage by the late Lithuanian-born artist Jonas Mekas, depicting a ‘disquieting sequence of flowers intercut with images of disasters’, and not biblical paintings on the walls and ceilings.
The chapel’s focal point is a painting above the altar depicting The Incredulity of St Thomas when confronted by the risen Christ, by Antonio Verrio. The Italian artist, brought to the UK by Charles II, also painted at Windsor Castle and Hampton Court Palace.
At ground level, Mekas’s lengthy video, played on loop, on two large screens, begins with television news coverage of a huge fire in the US.
Footage then cuts to images of flowers and landscapes, interspersed with more clips of destruction and biblical quotes.
Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, which attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year
Avant-garde cinematic artist Mekas – imprisoned in a labour camp by the Nazis before moving to the US – made the video aged 95, a year before he died in 2019.
It aims to provide ‘a space for us to contemplate suffering and loss alongside the regenerative force of nature’.
Trigger warnings also appear alongside two further exhibits.
One room contains artificial peacock flowers set against bright yellow-painted temporary walls, in an exhibition called The Marias, by Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga.
She highlights how the flowers’ seeds were used to induce abortion – enabling ‘women living in conditions of slavery (subjects not only of forced labour but also sexual violence)’ to ‘break the chain of reproduction and exploitation’.
The trigger warning states: ‘The text and artwork in this room includes reference to people in conditions of slavery, sexual violence and abortion’.
The final trigger warning covers a book of ‘exceptional’ botanical paintings obtained by Clive of India from the Mughal Dynasty – opened on facing pages showing two marigolds.
The alert states: ‘The following text discusses the colonisation of India’.
Trigger warning erected in the chapel at Chatsworth House covers video display
Antonio Verrio’s celebrated masterpiece set with in the alabaster altar at Chatsworth House
A description next to the book refers to Clive – who headed the East India Company and went on to be governor of Bengal – as a ‘controversial figure’ who ‘amassed a vast fortune while his leadership impoverished the region’.
Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal and an Honorary Professor at University College London, said: ‘You would think the show was woke enough without more wokery.
‘I don’t really understand the purpose of these particular trigger warnings.
‘They seem merely to state what one might call the bleeding obvious.’
He said the warning in the Chapel might deter visitors from entering and could be misconstrued because it doesn’t explain it is referring to Mekas’s video.
Robin Simon, editor of the British Art Journal, criticised the ‘self-defeating’ trigger warnings
Artificial peacock flower display called The Marias by Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga
Mr Simon said: ‘What is this supposed to achieve? Worse, does it refer to the 17th-century paintings in the chapel on the walls and altar? Goodness knows, there are any number of biblical scenes that feature these unpleasant goings-on.’
Of The Marias warning, Mr Simon said: ‘This label is presumably meant to stop you in your tracks. It suggests again that any tender-hearted member of the public won’t now look at it at all. I think the phrase for the curators of this dottiness is ‘self-defeating’.’
Turning to the warning about the Mughal-era book, he added: ‘Of course India was colonised. What is added to the appreciation of the beautiful botanical illustrations in question by stating that in a text? If people are so fragile that the very thought of colonisation makes them break out in a cold sweat, this can only make it worse.’
Mughal-era book opened at pages displaying beautiful marigold flowers as part of exhibition
Mr Simon said: ‘As with so much modern art, it is telling us what to think. The reason is, alas, that otherwise we would never know what on earth it was about.’
Art historian and journalist Richard Morris called the warnings ‘a depressing example’ of ‘history filtered through a twenty-first-century lens with twenty-first-century agendas’.
He said: ‘There’s a sheer imperative to find something negative to say, to wring all pleasure and wonder to leave people thinking if they enjoyed a piece of work they should wear a hair shirt for a week as a form of penance.
‘Visitors leave anxious and weary, the hectoring trigger warnings risk becoming a massive own-goal.’
Chatsworth – known as the Palace of the Peaks – attracts over 600,000 visitors a year and is thought to have been the inspiration for Pemberley, Mr Darcy’s home in Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice.
It was used as a film set for the 2005 film adaptation of the book, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen.
The Gorgeous Nothings, ending this weekend, aims to showcase the ‘resilience and persistence of nature’.
A Chatsworth House spokesperson said of the warning in the Chapel: ‘The signage relates to a temporary video installation in the Chapel.’
Management added that ‘advisory guidance’ has been included with exhibits in order to ‘act in a responsible manner’.
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