Art and Art History

John Davies began making 'landscape photographs' of cities in the early 1980s. A period of prolonged visual and documentary research on Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle, began at a time when these cities were experiencing a deep economic recession brought about by the progressive dismantling of their historic industrial activities. This economic decline was further aggravated by a hostile political, economic and social climate in the 1980s following the election of Margaret Thatcher. Signs of the post-industrial regeneration process multiplied as cities endeavoured to reconstruct their images and identities. This essay looks at how the photography of John Davies has engaged with changes in the northern post-industrial city in the past three decades. It considers the ways in which his pictures reveal the city as a palimpsest: a narrative constantly written over. It examines how the work performs as both a document and an aesthetic commentary on the changes in the urban fabric, functioning as a metonymic image of the socio-political and economic transformations witnessed in the wider north of England. It ultimately underlines the capacity of the work to articulate historical awareness. The attention to history is explored within specific pictures, underlining their capacity to depict urban landscapes as specific process-based outcomes. In considering the indexicality of images within the body of the work, the essay also outlines the historical discourse that arises from visual intersections.

Observations of global fluxes and networks as well as their impact on contemporary societies have been furthered in the past ten years or so by an attention to the derivative phenomenon of glocalisation. What is the process of ‘glocalisation’ and what might be its relevance to the artistic field? Barbara Czarniawska in her study on the glocalisation of city management entitled A tale of three cities proceeded to recall the emergence of the concept:

“[The] combination of homogenising and heterogenising forces attracted the attention of Japanese marketers as early as the 1980s, when, according to [Roland] Robertson, they coined the expression dochakuka. The word, in Robertson’s translation, means ‘global localization’, or telescoping global and local to make a blend”.1

From this basis, the term encompasses a range of different meanings. On the one hand, it has a practical application in terms of marketing strategy: that of tailoring commodities to local markets. This is exemplified by the strategies of large corporate businesses which adapt a core generic product to new and culturally diverse local markets of consumption.2 A related strategy consists in fetishising a specific place and its characteristics with the aim of branding a product.3

Both these marketing strategies can provide useful and problematic insights into the artistic production and diffusion within the art world at the end of the 20th century. However, at the other end of the spectrum, the term may be used to describe the capacity of a specific entity (a place, a person, an actor) to adjust the influence of globalisation and the process by which everything becomes more and more alike, to its specific conditions and requirements.

“A picture emerges in which globalisation and localisation happen simultaneously and entertwine, becoming the cause and the result of one another. In such a picture, globalisation might mean the movement of a form, or a practice from one locality to another, [or a translation of an embodied practice into a set of abstract concepts]; and localization might mean a ‘construction of a distinct identity’ according to a global prescription, or an opposition to the forces of globalisation via a defense of a local tradition.”4

Consequently, one of the issues that lies at the heart of the glocalisation process consists in assessing in which direction the trend is going: towards homogenisation, or towards heterogenisation?5 This interrogation could be considered within the broad history of the globalisation process, for it is rightly considered to be an ancient process. The self-christened ‘universal museums’,6 or even the 16th and 17th century ‘cabinet d’amateurs’ can be considered as early and exemplary receptacles of global artefacts.7 However, this paper will focus solely on some aspects of artistic strategies within more recent global history. In David Harvey’s analysis of time-space compression, it is the acceleration of the process and in particular of financial and information flux at the end of the 20th century that has brought considerable changes in what Eric Swyngedouw calls ‘scalar configurations’.8 In Swyngedouw’s analysis scalar configurations are understood to be ‘the outcome of socio-spatial processes that regulate and organise social relations’. In this perspective, the analysis of “the continuous reshuffling and reorganisation of spatial scales [which] are integral to social strategies and serve as the arena where struggles for control and empowerment are fought”, revolves around the attention to regulatory orders (institutions, governmental, or regional state bodies…), and economic networks, as well as the tensions that arise between economic and political life.9 In these approaches, cultural practices are subjugated to the determination of the economic and the political. Without neglecting the considerable importance of those fields, this paper shifts attention towards the artistic field as a participant in the glocalisation process, an actor thereby both determined and determining. The notion of scale as a constantly evolving process of interaction will be retained. On this basis, we will propose a preliminary approach to some of the scalar configurations in the recent history of art practices and art fields in the United Kingdom at the end of the 20th century. This will bring us to consider the embeddedness of artistic scales, the way by which different scalar levels (the local, the regional, the national, the international, the global), superpose the one on the other, and some of the dynamics, strategies, and opportunities that have been at play in the recent history of contemporary British visual arts within this entertwined and mobile system.

An interview with Declan McGonagle, director of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Declan discusses the history of art education in Ireland, the current state of art education provision in the country, its relation to the United Kingdom and globalisation, and alternative aesthetic strategies to further the role of art practitioners within society.

An interview with Alistair Wilson, artist and reader at the school of art and design, University of Ulster, Belfast. Alistair discusses the history and ethos of the Master of Fine Art in Belfast, and its position within past and present geographies of art education in the United-Kingdom and Ireland.

An interview with Ross Sinclair, artist and teacher at Glasgow School of Art. Ross discusses issues of art education in Scotland and the United Kingdom, the specificity and history of Glasgow School of Art, changing patterns in contemporary art within the Glasgow art scene, and issues stemming from the intermingling of art and theory in art education in the UK.

Après la fin de la Seconde guerre mondiale, les grandes conurbations du Nord de l’Angleterre ont progressivement été confrontées au déclin de leurs industries traditionnelles, minières, manufacturières, métallurgiques, portuaires. À la fin du 20e siècle, la revitalisation des économies locales fut pensée dans le cadre d’un changement radical imposé par le gouvernement conservateur de Margaret Thatcher, mettant
en avant les valeurs d’entreprenariat, de value for money [rentabilité], d’efficacité managériale, et l’adhésion aux lois du marché comme remède aux maux socio-économiques du pays. Contraintes de se redéfinir en terme d’activité économique, de reconstruire une image et une identité positive, les conurbations du Nord furent entraînées dans les voies de la régénération culturelle, en suivant les principes gouvernementaux visant à établir des partenariats public-privé comme méthode systématique pour les développements économiques, sociaux, culturels, susceptibles de recevoir une aide de l’État. Les pratiques artistiques contemporaines de ces régions ont été confrontées à ce processus à la fois de désindustrialisation et de redynamisation, ainsi qu’à la proposition controversée d’un nouvel avenir et des moyens associés à sa réalisation. De part et d’autre de cet élan politique, on peut discerner d’une part une créativité artistique qui vient s’opposer à la direction et aux valeurs promues par le gouvernement puis par les municipalités, et de l’autre, une production et un appareil de diffusion qui viennent s’inscrire dans les objectifs fixés par le nouveau paradigme établi au cours des années 1980.
Il s’agira ici, en prenant pour point de départ l’arrivée des politiques conservatrices « néolibérales » au Royaume-Uni au début des années 1980, de relever l’émergence de valeurs instrumentales et résistantes dans la production et la diffusion des arts dans le territoire du Nord de l’Angleterre. On s’efforcera de définir ces valeurs, de décrire leurs qualités, et la variété de l’éventail qui peut se dessiner le long du spectre instrumentalisation-résistance, mais aussi de questionner
l’articulation de ces valeurs avec leur contexte spécifique d’apparition historique, et l’évolution de leur déploiement jusqu’à l’époque la plus actuelle.

La Orchard Gallery fut créée par la municipalité de Derry, ou Londonderry, en 19781. La ville ne possédait auparavant aucune infrastructure ayant pour vocation l’exposition des arts
visuels, et sa création venait combler un manque flagrant dans une commune de près de 100 000 habitants. Dépourvue de collections, la galerie, financée par la municipalité avec le
soutien du conseil des arts de la région, se voulait dès ses débuts un espace de programmation d’expositions temporaires. Afin de construire et diriger ce nouvel espace artistique, la ville nomme à sa tête un jeune artiste, Declan McGonagle, originaire de la ville, et qui avait à l’époque entrepris d’enseigner les arts plastiques3. Celui-ci va largement définir à sa genèse la vocation de la galerie, qui perdurera sous les influences et les inflexions de ses successeurs durant les années 1990 et jusqu’à sa fermeture en 2003 : Noreen O’Hare, puis Liam Kelly et Brendan McMenamin. On trouve au coeur de cette vocation une volonté de placer les arts dans une relation étroite et presque indissociable avec le contexte local, le lieu spécifique de son
inscription, et les habitants de Derry. Prendre en compte dans la commission et la production des oeuvres la spécificité du contexte local au tournant des années 1970-80 impliquait un engagement profond avec les déchirures de l’histoire et de la géographie urbaine, régionale,humaine.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Arts Council of Great Britain launched the project “Arts 2000”. Every year remaining before the end of the century, a town or a region in the United Kingdom had the chance to organise celebrations around a particular form of art, such as music, dance, theatre, literature… The project was intended to be “a celebration of the artistic achievements of the country”, and to take the first step towards establishing “the foundations for cultural life in the new millennium”. Arts 2000 was a competition in which councils as well as regional organisations could participate. As such, the project was also presented as “a unique opportunity to draw public attention to the artistic strengths” of the candidate, “and help the arts promote growth and local pride”. A minimum financial funding of ₤250,000 was guaranteed to the laureates, explicitly on condition of significant local investment.
The year 1996, dedicated to the visual arts (VAUK 96) was coveted, won and organised by the regional art association “Northern Arts” which, at the time, brought together the counties of Cleveland, Cumbria, Durham, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear. From March to December the region prided itself on listing more than 3000 exhibitions, events, commissions and residencies, on a direct and indirect structural investment estimated to approach ₤60 million, and on an unprecedented popular participation enabling it to have achieved an “extraordinary success”.
This paper will look at the process that led to the organisation of the event, examining the relation between the aims of the organisers, in particular, of Northern Arts who developed the project, and both its clients and the providers of public funding: the state through the Arts Council. We will consider how VAUK can be seen as a generic example of the paradigmatic change in the organisation of cultural and artistic events in Britain at the end of the twentieth century, in relation to political and economic shifts. We will also seek to understand the intermingling of local initiatives with national criteria and overarching economic as well as cultural trends, whereby poles of decisions or influences become embedded, the one into the other in the course of modelling reality. Eventually, the paper will consider the impact of this combination of intents and actions on the local production and diffusion of art in the North of England.

Augustus W.N. Pugin published the first version of “Contrasts – Or, a parallel between the noble edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries and similar buildings of the present day shewing the present decay of taste accompanied by appropriate text” in 1836.  As much a pictured as a written argument, “Contrasts” aimed to attack decadent architectural practices inherited from the reformation while simultaneously praising late medieval architectural achievements. Although preliminary sketches had taken into account examples of rural architecture, the plates of the final edition comprised essentially visions of urban architectures. As Rosemary Hill underlined, the critique thus focussed on the city of the 19th century.  An imagined comparison between a “catholic town” depicted in the mid 15th century and what it had developed into five centuries later underlined the extent of industrial disfiguration.  The elegant spires of pointed architecture have been cut short and replaced by the smoking chimneys of proliferating mills.  The harmonious bird’s-eye view has been defaced by a wall of stern buildings. On the front-right-hand corner a charming chapel has been similarly vandalised by an annexe in the classical style. A jail in the shape of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon occupies the foreground of the drawing. Moral turpitude is further enhanced by the numerous divisive religious obediences listed in the caption: ‘Baptist, Unitarian, Quakers, Socialists.’  History has guided man and his environment to a fallacious destiny.
Yet at the end of the 20th century, an additional twist has informed this contrasted vision. The industrial architecture which Pugin condemned as barbarous has itself come to suffer the neglect of subsequent ages. The shift from Fordism to Post Fordism and the decline of the traditional industries in the West has led the mutilating architecture to uncertainty as the social and economic orders which sustained it disappeared. The enhanced importance of a service-based economy has conveyed new meanings to urban architectural projections. As Steven Miles and Malcolm Miles noted in their analysis of the “symbolic economies of cities”, growing cultural economies have led to attach an increased importance on urban images.  In that context, this paper aims to look through specific examples at how medieval architecture and its 19th century Gothic revival heirs often appear to find themselves within the same displaced functional framework as industrial, neoclassical and historically minded Victorian architecture.

Gregory McCartney has curated the exhibition Park Ave + Resident by duo Ackroyd and Harvey which is shown at Void in Derry Northern Ireland from the 31s of May to the 15th of July 2011. The work is displayed in Void’s two main galleries. It consists of a triptych displaying three fronts of houses and a panel presenting the face of a young man. The images are made of grass and displayed in a dark tonal hue. Gregory McCartney talks to Gabriel Gee about Ackroyd and Harvey’s artistic process and the specific work they have made for Derry.

The exhibition Democratic Promenade was held at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool from the 30th of September to the 27th of November 2011. Gabriel Gee talks to the Bluecoat artistic director and curator of the exhibition, Bryan Biggs. The exhibition is paralleled by the publication of "Liverpool: City of Radicals", edited by B. Biggs and J. Belchem (distribution: Liverpool University Press).

From Tate Liverpool to the Baltic Centre in Gateshead: culture seems to be thriving in North England. A range of phenomena have contributed to an opening up of the artistic scenes in northern England: the blossoming of artist-led initiatives, governmental and municipal strategies aiming to revitalize the urban fabric through investments in the cultural field, new information technologies facilitating the access to the international art world. All these elements have contributed to the dynamism of the contemporary arts in cities immersed in a transition to a post-industrial economy. But what is the relation between these new high profile museums, the municipal strategies of economic development, a system in which cultural investment is subject to principles of competition, and the initiatives of the practitioners living and animating the northern regional art scenes? What repercussions have the (over-) investments in the cultural policies characteristic of a period of urban renaissance on the production and the diffusion of the contemporary arts?

La partition en 1920 entre Irlande du sud et Irlande du Nord constitue un moment important pour le mouvement d’émancipation républicain irlandais. Elle marque également une césure géographique dans l’île, les six comtés du Nord se trouvant à la fois détachés de l’unité spatiale de l’île, et rattachés à l’ensemble plus large des îles britanniques. L’opposition entre les communautés protestantes et catholiques en Irlande du Nord s’accentue dans l’après-seconde guerre mondiale. Les sources les plus directes de l’agitation politique des communautés catholiques reposent notamment sur les difficultés d’accès au logement et une représentation électorale inégale. Dans le contexte international des mouvements de citoyens durant les années 1960, les revendications sociales et politiques s’accentuent, avant que le conflit armé ne prennent l’ascendant durant la période des ‘Troubles’ (fin des années 1960-1998).
A Belfast, entre les deux communautés, les murs à extensions verticales viennent physiquement renforcer la séparation de l’autre que l’ancienne histoire conflictuelle avait conservée vivace dans les esprits, depuis la construction des murs de Derry au début du 17e siècle. Les parades orangistes, qui célèbrent chaque 12 juillet la victoire des armées de William III d’Orange sur James II lors de la bataille de la Boyne, ravivent chaque année les tensions communautaires, par le tracé des marches qui franchissent les sillons symboliques signalant l’entrée dans l’espace de l’autre, dont est simultanément réaffirmée l’appartenance au tout du territoire britannique. Dans l’espace urbain, les affrontements de groupe par quartiers, le contrôle militaire du passage d’un espace de résidence à un autre, les attaques terroristes des deux camps menées par intrusion punitive, articulent l’identité d’une communauté en opposition à son homologue.
Durant cette période, il est possible de relever dans la production des arts plastiques contemporains, une attention et une incorporation de l’histoire frontalière telle qu’internalisée par les deux communautés limitrophes et au final constitutives de l’Irlande du Nord. En écho aux muraux qui marquent dans les quartiers tant protestants que catholiques l’adhésion à la cause politique et au groupe social, les artistes ont pu représenter et travailler les zones frontières, qui sont des espaces de séparation mais aussi de passage. En cela elles combinent et concentrent la complexité de la situation humaine et politique de la région dans la seconde moitié du 20e siècle, et on s’efforcera d’en analyser les différents modes d’apparence plastique, à travers notamment les œuvres photographiques de Willie Doherty et Victor Sloan, les sculptures de Stuart Brisley, Nigel Rolfe, John Newling, les peintures de Kerry Trengrove, ou encore les promenades de Philip Roycroft.

Session: Constructing interstitial heritage: architectures, visions & experiences

This session aims to explore the past and present modes through which alternate cultural heritage can be preserved and encouraged. In particular, it focuses on the realm of the interstice: a “space, opening, crevice etc, between things near together or between the component parts of a body”. Interstitial heritage can be located between entities as well as within them. By nature, it creates an aperture that forms an alternate field and conduit to existent structures. It needs not to negate necessarily a prevailing socio-political and economic frame (though it may well do so), but it ultimately provides individuals and groups with a ground on which to construct their environment and express themselves within it rather than be subservient to it. In the city, for example, spontaneous occupations of grounds and temporary archisculptures have offered models of interstitial production. In the ever increasing flow of images during the 20th century, visual strategies aiming to build alternate banks of visual data have grown inside and outside of the constraints of the society of spectacle. In the every day life of an increasingly global world, numerous attempts have been made to propose behaviours and experiences that challenge the predicates of top-down social fabrics. This session is concerned with the history and the present of interstitial architectures, visions and experiences. And crucially, it is concerned with the issue of their safeguarding. Given the alternate nature of interstitial production and living, their sustainability is central to the articulation of empowered individual and communal consciousness. The panel invites proposals that explore historical and contemporary forms of interstitial heritage, such as spontaneous architectures and three dimensional constructions, visual archives and alternate visual production systems, as well as the transmission of a varied and fertile bodily creativity.



Convenors: Gabriel Gee, Franklin College, Switzerland (TETI)
Michelle L. Stefano, Maryland State Arts Council and the University of Maryland Baltimore
County (UMBC) (TETI)

250 words proposals should be sent along with a short cv to Gabriel Gee ggee@fc.edu and Michelle Stefano mstefano@msac.org by February 1st 2012

Registration fees 315USD/220euros

Publication of papers will be considered by the International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS) and TETI

www.tetigroup.org

Constructing Interstitial Heritage: Architecture, Visions and experiences
Inaugural conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, June 5-8 2012

This session aims to explore the past and present modes through which alternate cultural heritage can be preserved and encouraged. In particular, it focuses on the realm of the interstice: a “space, opening, crevice etc, between things near together or between the component parts of a body”. Interstitial heritage can be located between entities as well as within them. By nature, it creates an aperture that forms an alternate field and conduit to existent structures. It needs not to negate necessarily a prevailing socio-political and economic frame (though it may well do so), but it ultimately provides individuals and groups with a ground on which to construct their environment and express themselves within it rather than be subservient to it. In the city, for example, spontaneous occupations of grounds and temporary archisculptures have offered models of interstitial production. In the ever increasing flow of images during the 20th century, visual strategies aiming to build alternate banks of visual data have grown inside and outside of the constraints of the society of spectacle. In the every day life of an increasingly global world, numerous attempts have been made to propose behaviours and experiences that challenge the predicates of top-down social fabrics. This session is concerned with the history and the present of interstitial architectures, visions and experiences. And crucially, it is concerned with the issue of their safeguarding. Given the alternate nature of interstitial production and living, their sustainability is central to the articulation of empowered individual and communal consciousness. The panel invites proposals that explore historical and contemporary forms of interstitial heritage, such as spontaneous architectures and three dimensional constructions, visual archives and alternate visual production systems, as well as the transmission of a varied and fertile bodily creativity.

Gabriel Gee and Michelle Stefano for TETI, Textures and experiences of transindustriality, www.tetigroup.org

Gabriel Gee, (Assistant Professor of Art History, Franklin College, Switzerland)

Michelle L. Stefano, PhD, (Program Coordinator, Maryland Traditions; Folklorist-in-Residence, University of Maryland Baltimore County)

Program, Wednesday 6th of June 2012

Session 1: 1.30 3-30 pm, room S005


Introduction: Gabriel Gee and Michelle Stefano: a bird eye’s view on constructing interstitial heritage (5mn)
Maria João de Matos (CIAUD, Faculdade de Arquitectura – Universidade Técnica de Lisboa): Spontaneous housing as element of cultural landscape – two capitals at the edges of Europe (20mn)
Worrasit Tantinipankul (School of architecture and design, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok): Thailand’s neglected urban heritage: challenges for preserving the cultural landscape of provincial towns of Thailand. (20mn)
Discussion 15mn
Jennifer Preston & Dr Naomi Stead (University of Queensland): The stairs within an urban slot: the interstitial architecture of Moore stairs (20mn)
Discussion 10mn
Brack Hale & Alison Vogelaar (Franklin College, Switzerland): “The Space Between”: The Problem of Natural Spaces and Invasive Species in a Global Era (20mn)
Discussion (10mn)



Session 2 4-6 pm


Marita Gilbert (Michigan State University): Celebrating the Saints: Black women in the interstices of 'home' in the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans (20mn)
Alison Vogelaar: Making Space for a Revolution: The Rhetorical and Pragmatic Functions of the “Encampment” in the Operation Occupy Movement (20mn)
Julia Székely (Budapest, Central European University), Hacking the history in Budapest (20mn)
Discussion 10mn
Andre Cicalo, A voice for the past, discussing (missing) representations of the African slave trade in the urban space of Rio de Janeiro
Toby Juliff (Leeds College of Art), A spectre is haunting (Europe) the UK - the spectre of (communism) architecture (20mn)
Discussion 10mn

“Boy the times they are changing”, although as common sense has it, who thought it would be any other way? The Association of Art Historian shakes its head in disbelief and warns with its customary courtesy of “the clouds gathering on the horizon”.[1] The world of fine art education recoils in horror from the government’s exit-crisis strategy, which appears to be modelled on an ancient maritime treaty whereby all unnecessary loads can go overboard if it might prevent the ship from sinking (this would probably sound acceptable if it did not include an exclusion clause pertaining to the captain’s and the first officers’ belongings that are to remain on board at all cost). And this is not just a UK thing, it is the whole world that’s going for a life dedicated to maintaining access to priority elemental survival components: food, clothes and mobile phones. In times of crisis, you have to stick to the bread and butter, and it is not good old Myerscough and his “Economic importance of the arts”[2] that’s going to prevent us from diving into another dark age: a sad landscape made of isolated residential towers complete with authoritarian landlords and vegetable patches. The fine arts will return to craft status once again, and, actually, there are some nice examples of technical mastery in this year’s degree shows.

Paul Usherwood looks at the Northumbria fine art show, and indeed beneath the playful surfaces finds lurking anxieties. In London, Gabriel Gee and Innes Meek ponder the merits of the increasingly global orientated Chelsea BA and MA shows. Also in London, Anne-Laure Franchette disregards the body pains induced by life in the capital to cover exhibits at Camberwell and the Slade, both respectable members of the London Art Schools’ merger that Toby Juliff blasts in his thought-provoking introduction to this year Pied-à-terre’s degree show issue entitled: ‘The art school is dead, long live the UK art university’. Finally, Pete Clarke insightfully responds to a series of question regarding the modus operandi and goals of the Master in Fine Art at the University of central Lancashire, while Karen Watson takes us through the rope of East Street Arts’ successful relation with Leeds upcoming fine art graduates, which revealingly and imaginatively involves the organisation’s recognition of the importance of the practical aspects that any aesthetic practice has to contend with. We are particularly grateful to London based artist Miguel Pacheco for providing a visual for the front cover from his series Concerning the UFO Sighting (2010). The monadic eyes of the UFOs screening a green and pleasant land stand as a powerful incarnation of the Degree Show’s visitor and his pleasure in enjoying or loathing the wide range of talented displays every year seems to bring to the fore.

Gabriel Gee& Sophie Orlando