It is essential for the practice of power that its excercise be, if not unintelligable, at least ineffable. In a sense, to begin to attempt to analyse it, to second guess it, as in the mode of institutional critique, is to fall prey to this. Minutely detailed cataloguing of repressions belongs perhaps to the academy. Harwood appears as another mug in place of the face of the painted. The archive becomes a space of subjective involvement and invention, of fantasy as much as a location for critique.
Life stories feed into history, feed into aesthetics.
And this is surely where Harwood is aiming. To produce an open difficulty in the representation of the Tate, to effect a thoroughgoing conflict with its procedures and modes of operation and representation. But also to weave that difficulty into a process of his own self-composition, as a member of a class that has been scrubbed from the walls of the Museum, is to provide the foundations for opening things up still further. 1 Michel Serres, 'Turner Translates Carnot' , trans.