It's all Greek to me

Luke Burton, 'Westminster Coastal' at Bosse and Baum 8 February - 2 March 2024

Byzantine, bureaucratic, cryptic, convoluted, obscurantist, obsolescent, archaic, esoteric, dogmatic, declining, myopic, mystifying, superstitious, pedantic, irrational – we are, of course, talking about the Civil Service (or its representation in Luke Burton’s exhibition, ‘Westminster Coastal’).

The show recreates a section of the Home Office within the Peckham gallery, Bosse and Baum. Sun-bleached foolscap folders, brown-on-brown filing cabinets and ergonomic-ish plywood desks are littered with the residue of the civil servants who apparently work there. Yet their coffee cups and crisp and chocolate bar wrappers are encrusted with mosaic, as if over hundreds of years these workday pleasures have become formalised into a rigid quasi-liturgical order. In Burton’s telling, Westminster and its officials, however modern their corporate architectural façades and factory-made suits, are as swaddled in ritual as the most contriving courtier in all Constantinople.

Many of the former possessions of the Byzantine Empire (and later the Ottomans) have often been cast as enlightened Europe’s ‘other’ – in it but not of it. The key gesture of ‘Westminster Coastal’ is, I think, to apply a similar process of distancing to the goings-on of British officialdom. Defamiliarization is intensified by absurdist memos in neat piles on the desks, calling for the regulation of employees’ consumption of meal deals, or introducing a statement on an unfair dismissal with a reminder about ‘policy changes on new furniture procurement’, all of which are interspersed with stacks of twiglets and delicate little enamelled fish.

Burton’s paintings pick up on this process of self-exoticisation. They contain the likenesses of usually faceless bureaucrats who have been thrust into the spotlight (such as Sir Philip Rutnam, who resigned accusing Priti Patel of bullying, or Simon Case, currently on indefinite sick leave following the publication of the office group chat) floating uncertainly next to labyrinthine crossword puzzles or columns of croissants running up the margins. With their sense of pattern and networks of formal and figurative correspondences, the paintings impute to their subject the beginnings of the kind of coherent visual style you’d associate with a medieval government, not a modern one.

Britain’s Byzantinism isn’t a new idea. Harold Macmillan called Roosevelt the Emperor of the West and Churchill the Emperor of the East: a somewhat self-indulgent analogy, but a resonant historical rhyme nonetheless. ‘Westminster Coastal’ adopts the aesthetic value (and avoids the political implications) of this comparison, presenting it humorously but mercifully free from back-patting, and exploring it with extraordinary multifacetedness for an exhibition in a small space.

The show also gestures towards a more engaged politics, drawing a link between the untranslatability of Home Office customs and the fact that this department is where the applications of newcomers to these islands are processed – but it is low in the mix. The matter of ‘Westminster Coastal’ is more its unexpectedly convincing archaeologisation of our present moment: a moment that corresponds with our culturally received (and no doubt glaringly inaccurate, even offensive) notions of the Eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire, a moment which seems to be spiralling beyond reason.