Terence Gower Enemies and Rascals: bold thesis, dead air
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- Terence Gower's Artangel commission Enemies and Rascals is a sound installation set inside a darkened neogothic Victorian library, where actors voice 18th-century diplomatic dispatches and government pronouncements
- The work revisits the US's first attempt to annex Canada in 1775-76, quoting George Washington (introduced as a "Virginia plantation owner") and Benjamin Franklin ("printer") to portray the founders as rapacious
- Gower builds the installation around the thesis that US freedom was "born bad" — hypocritical, grasping, and mendacious — with its manifest destiny culminating in President Trump
- The reviewer describes the piece as "the world's most boring history podcast," criticizing its recitation of sources without interpretation, discussion, or humor, punctuated only by windswept northern-plains soundscapes
- The review argues the work's anti-US thesis comes "close to praising the British empire," a framing the reviewer calls a "naive illusion" that effectively suggests life under absolute monarchy would have been preferable
- The reviewer pushes back that dismissing the American Revolution ignores its documented role inspiring the French Revolution and 19th-century democracy movements, noting the US contains both "racism, slavery...Trump" and "rock'n'roll, the civil rights movement, Gloria Steinem"
Why it matters: The review surfaces a tension in revisionist art ahead of the US's 250th Independence Day: by collapsing 250 years of history into a single thread from the Battle of Quebec to Trump, Gower's installation accidentally flatters British colonialism while ignoring the Revolution's documented global influence on the French Revolution and 19th-century democracy movements — a critical blind spot for audiences engaging with the anniversary.
