British Art since the 1980s

This paper explores how the Greater London Council (1981–1986) deployed community focused cultural policy initiatives to disseminate cultural forms of nuclear scepticism during its ‘GLC Peace Year 1983’ campaign. Drawing upon archival sources and interviews, this paper will present an overview of Peace Year’s cultural programme, which promoted London’s ‘nuclear-free zone’ through arts commissions, poster campaigns, pop concerts, murals, documentary films and photography exhibitions. Focusing on two GLC funded projects aimed at promoting positive representations of women’s peace activism, this paper will reflect upon the emotional and political impacts of the GLC’s radical cultural strategy.

The work of British artist Liam Gillick (born 1964) offers a quintessential model of a flexible, multifaceted, project-based practice, while a number of his key works thematize contemporary post-Fordist production more widely. Examining the complex inter-articulation of Gillick’s artistic labour and his allusive portrayal of broader conditions of production, this essay constructs a picture of Gillick’s ‘post-Fordist aesthetics’ by focusing on activities related to the artist’s 1997 novella Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, as well as the research project, Construcción de Uno, ongoing since 2004. The performative dimension of Gillick’s artistic labour is revealed to be key to an understanding of his practice; the sovereignty of discrete works is constantly thwarted by Gillick’s dynamics of proliferation and delay, and a perpetual relay between exhibition and text. By systematically attending to the constellational interplay of the various elements of Gillick’s work, a clearer picture can thus be formed of a practice that enacts a ‘flexibilized’ divergence from, and convergence with, the very cultural logic that it seeks to diagnose.

This paper studies the case of a landscape photography project by British photographer Simon Roberts: We English – the project comprising the book published by Chris Boot in 2009, exhibitions of the large format prints of the photographs, and the artist’s dedicated website with a blog and forum for the public to propose subjects. We address the question of English national identity in Simon Roberts’s photos through the concept of “banal nationalism” coined in 1995 by Michel Billig. The first part draws on Billig’s thesis that the nation is “flagged” in the most banal everyday environment and activities, and discusses whether Simon Roberts’s documentary photographs evidence such subliminal national “flagging”. The second part shows the limits of the concept of “banal nationalism” when studying We English because of the complex, collaborative and reflexive nature of the project. By revealing how personal and intertextual references inform both the photographer’s and the viewer’s perception, the artist documents the dialectical process and negotiations at work in national identification. The third part contends that this dynamic approach of Englishness allows Roberts to propose his own re-imagining of the homeland.

British Art Studies is a new online journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC), London, and the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), New Haven. Since the launch of issue 1 in November 2015, over 16,000 unique users have accessed the content of the journal.

Submissions are now being solicited for both scholarly articles (which are subject to peer review) and proposals for innovative special features to be included in issue 5. Please download the call for submissions for further details. Deadline: September 30, 2016.

http://www.britishartstudies.ac.uk

Unlike the high philosophical boredoms that have an obverse of profound self-reflection and creative stimulation, recent scholarship has compellingly argued for an aesthetics of minor or nebulous responses, including boredom. There may be a less articulate low-grade boredom, induced by situations or projected onto situations that are not necessarily boring. It may not exist in any way conventionally accessible to our mind or senses; and that very lack of features is part of its alien power, as it configures itself to resemble those mental habits we can describe. There are many possible questions related to a contemporary aesthetics of boredom, of which some might be: would such an aesthetic account for almost any form of response or lack of response? Is boredom restlessly configured by predicaments of fractured contemporary economic and social conditions, its monotony assuming a local coloration? Here, boredom is tested in the context of British art of the 1990s.

This is the exhibition catalogue for Bobby Baker. Jars of Chutney that took place at La Casa Encendida (Madrid 2019). This show introduces audiences to the extraordinary universe of British artist Bobby Baker, offering viewers the first opportunity  for visitors to see the series of drawings, watercolors and engravings that the artist systematically made throughout her career. The richness and relevance of Bobby Baker's work is portrayed in this exhibition through her everyday references and her sense of humor, that form the pivots around which most of her work revolves.

This conference will examine the ways in which the dialogues and discourses initiated by the Black Arts Movement are unresolved and ongoing. It will continue to unpack and unpick questions around the efficacy and outcomes of the tenuously labeled Movement and reflect on the ways in which this period, only thirty short years ago, has become historicized (or not). It also aims to push debate forward, to ask how the aesthetic, historical, methodological and/or critical threads of the ‘critical decade’ wind through the 1990s and beyond; to address the rise of globlalization, multiculturalism, digital networks and technologies, developments in the bio-sciences and post-racial debates to the playful posturing of the YBAs and an increasingly transnational art scene.

In meinem Vortrag skizziere ich, wie der Kunstmarkt von Damien Hirst in einer als Performance inszenierten Kunstauktion gegen sich selbst gewendet wird. Am Tag, als die internationale Bankenkrise ihre sichtbarste Ausprägung, den Crash von Lehman Brothers erfuhr, versteigerte Damien Hirst, vorbei an seinen Galerien, und damit an den Regeln des Kunstmarkts ohne Zwischenhändler, erfolgreich 223 neue Arbeiten bei Sotheby‘s. Die Werke seiner Auktionsausstellung Beautiful inside my head forever fungieren wie Requisiten in einer ironischen und affirmativen Kunstmarkt-Performance. Im Mittelpunkt stand Hirsts Zugpferd der Ausstellung, die Plastik The Golden Calf, ein teils aus Gold gegossenes, teils reales totes Kalb, in Formaldehyd eingelegt. Hirst legt damit die praktische Bedeutung des Kunstmarkes für sein Werk offen, um sie zugleich ad absurdum zu führen und zu bestärken.

This essay examines a body of photography books and exhibitions from the 1990s and 2000s, produced in Britain by professional photographers and supported by social and cultural organizations, which engaged with notions of collective identification and subjectivity, thus making significant political statements at a time when British society was going through major social changes and years of soul-searching. On the one hand, we specifically discuss how notions of identity like class, ethnicity and nation were addressed by photographic projects and were the subject matters for the politicization of the medium in the two decades. We argue that the demise of traditional forms of social documentary within professional art photography allowed for new artists and political issues to emerge. We show how some photographers and galleries engaged with “identity politics” at a time when multiculturalism was taking centre stage both in political and media discourse and in cultural policies. On the other hand, we also explore some of the more indirect ways in which photographers may have construed ways of dealing with notions of belonging, other than identity, or beyond identity, and suggested forms of collective and political subjectivity through concepts of historical and national narrative, connectedness, or social cohesion.

Based on rare archival material and numerous interviews with practitioners, Art in the North of England 1979-2008 analyses the relation between political and economic changes stemming from the 1980s and artistic developments in the principal cities of the North of England in the late 20th century. Looking in particular at the art scenes of Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle, Gabriel Gee unveils a set of powerful aesthetic reactions to industrial change and urban reconstruction during this period on the part of artists including John Davies, Pete Clarke, the Amber collective, Richard Wilson, Karen Watson, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, John Kippin, and the contribution of organisations such as Projects UK/Locus +, East Street Arts, the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust and the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool. While the geographical focus of this study is highly specific, a key concern throughout is the relationship between regional, national and international artistic practices and identities. Of interest to all scholars and students concerned with the developments of British art in the second half of the 20th century, the study is also of direct pertinence to observers of global narratives, which are here described and analysed through the concept of trans-industriality.