Terence Gower: Enemies and Rascals review – so was US freedom born bad?

Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. The United States of America wants to annexe Canada. It starts by inviting Canadians to join the Greatest Nation on Earth but soon becomes more aggressive and strident. Canada, uninterested and baffled, stands up for itself. War looms.

But this is not about Donald Trump and the bullying threats to Canada he has been making since the start of his second term. Except, of course, that it is, even though he isn’t mentioned by name in Canadian artist Terence Gower’s Artangel commission Enemies and Rascals – monstrous rascal though Trump is. Gower has created a sound installation deep inside a neogothic Victorian library to revisit the first time the US made proprietorial moves towards Canada – in 1775-76 during the American war of independence. George Washington – introduced simply as a “Virginia plantation owner” and Benjamin Franklin (“printer”) are among the US founders whose quoted words make them sound like rapacious thugs desperate to get their hands on Canadian land, particularly that belonging to Indigenous peoples.

Vilifying the US and all its works … Canadian artist Terence Gower. Photograph: Thierry Bal

It’s a bleak reflection of how little hope or affection the US now inspires around the world as it prepares to celebrate its 250th Independence Day. You wander among empty metal bookshelves in a dingy, darkened space as 18th-century diplomatic dispatches, government pronouncements and pamphlets are voiced by actors. Here it is, an icy, measured accumulation of evidence that US freedom was born bad – that it always was a malign poison in human history, hypocritical, grasping and mendacious, whose manifest destiny was to produce President Donald J Trump.

This pessimistic vision of not-so-great America has surprising bedfellows: 18th century literary bigwig Samuel Johnson is heard pointing out acidly that the American colonists who shout most loudly about liberty are all slaveowners. Meanwhile, quoted sources suggest that while the British in the 1700s left large lands in the possession of Indigenous nations, rascally US revolutionaries couldn’t wait to despoil them. To the most infamous original sin of American Independence in 1776 – its failure to extend its promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to the Africans it enslaved – Gower adds nascent imperialism and precocious Trumpism.

But if you are expecting another Hamilton, giving the dirty lowdown on the 250th anniversary of the US with style and panache, forget it. This turns out to be the world’s most boring history podcast. Even with its obvious ironic relevance to current US-Canadian relations, it buries any bite in a recitation of sources without interpretation, discussion or comment. In an actual history podcast you might get debate about what happened between the fledgling US and Britain’s colony to the north back in the 1770s, why, and what it all meant, perhaps even some jokes. Here you are just crushed by quotes.

At intervals, the voices fall silent and you hear windswept northern plains, perhaps a distant storm brewing. Then back to the declamation of source material. But there isn’t enough poetry or mystery in this collage of voices. Calling it art seems like a cheap excuse for it not being something better: there are no characters to engage with so it wouldn’t work as drama, and the soundscape is banal, so it’s not music. Meanwhile, as history, which it apparently wants to be, it is thin and tendentious. In fact it has the texture not of sophisticated historical analysis, but conspiracy theory – the US, these unveiled sources might suggest, has always contained the embryo of today’s tyrant within it.

No characters to engage with … an installation view of Enemies and Rascals at the Maughan Library. Photograph: Thierry Bal, courtesy of Artangel

This attempt to reduce the story of the US to a single thread from the battle of Quebec to Trump v Carney doesn’t explain much about the last 250 years. In his vilification of the US and all its works, Gower comes close to praising the British empire: the British start to sound so much more civilised and liberal than wicked Washington and Franklin – a naive illusion.

The American Revolution unleashed ideals of human rights that inspired the French Revolution and the fight for democracy in 19th-century Europe and the Americas: you can’t dismiss its positive energy without effectively saying we’d all be better off living under absolute monarchies, aristocracies or emperors. Which is what this take on 250 years seems to intentionally or accidentally suggest.

The US contains multitudes. Racism, slavery, economic imperialism, wars and Trump, yet also rock’n’roll, the civil rights movement, Gloria Steinem, Jackson Pollock. It’s been a much wilder and sometimes more hopeful quarter millennium than you’ll find among these dead shelves.