Old Tantra Catalogue
Chris Dorsett
Mid-November 2021. Fifty years ago the Tantra exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery was due to close. I remember that its popularity kept the show open longer. However, back then I’d seen enough. My head was full of ideas about exhibition-making as a creative practice. Anniversaries usually commemorate self-contained events but I’m still stuck somewhere between Tantra’s opening and a postponed end-date. I was on a journey then and I’m on that journey now, so it seems appropriate to mark fifty years of non-arrival with a new blog. Everything that follows is related in one way or another to the catalogue I bought at that exhibition.
In November 1971 the distinctive red catalogue from the exhibition became a permanent fixture in my studio at the Royal College of Art. A year later, the curator of ‘Tantra’, Philip Rawson, joined the staff and became my tutor for the remainder of the course. During the following decades, as I went about establishing my career as an artist-curator, Philip mentored my engagement with museum collections.
While I work on my blog I’m borrowing a copy of the catalogue that Philip annotated as he was preparing his follow-up publication ‘The Art of Tantra’. He has signed and dated the cover – June 3rd 1972. The following September he started teaching at the Royal College. The catalogue is on my work table now. I’m using studio items to both bookmark and hold down interesting pages.
My Rawson-style projects began with a photograph at the Pitt Rivers Museum taken by the anthropologist Into Konrad Inha. In 1894 he recorded two brothers in a remote Finnish village ritualistically reciting their family tree. While curating an exhibition in Finland (Pielisen Museum 1996) I documented myself re-photographing the brothers in a 19th century mirror.