Gower's Enemies and Rascals: Anti-US Art That Flatters Britain
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- Terence Gower created the Artangel-commissioned sound installation "Enemies and Rascals," set in a neogothic Victorian library, using 18th-century diplomatic dispatches, pamphlets, and government pronouncements voiced by actors to revisit the 1775-76 US attempt to annex Canada.
- The work portrays George Washington as a "Virginia plantation owner" and Benjamin Franklin as a "printer," with quoted sources arguing US revolutionaries couldn't wait to despoil Indigenous lands that the British had left in Indigenous possession.
- The installation draws an explicit line from the Revolution's failure to extend liberty to enslaved Africans and its seizure of Indigenous territory to "nascent imperialism and precocious Trumpism," timed to the US 250th Independence Day.
- The reviewer calls it "the world's most boring history podcast," saying the piece buries any interpretive bite in endless recitation of sources, with no characters, no drama, and a banal windswept-plains soundscape.
- The reviewer argues the work's relentless anti-American framing comes close to praising the British Empire, and that dismissing the Revolution's positive legacy — from inspiring the French Revolution to the civil rights movement — effectively suggests the world would be better off under absolute monarchies.
- Samuel Johnson is quoted in the installation observing that American colonists who shouted loudest about liberty were slaveowners, cited by the reviewer as one of the piece's "surprising bedfellows" in its pessimistic case against the US.
Why it matters: The reviewer makes a contrarian case against a politically fashionable piece: that Gower's argument that US freedom was 'born bad' is undermined by its own implication that the British Empire was the more civilised power — a framing that, in trying to indict 250 years of American history, erases genuine contributions from abolitionism to the civil rights movement.
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