Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces

Nick Cass, Gill Park, Anna Powell, Nick Cass, Gill Park, Anna Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429624384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte generale

Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces considers the challenges that accompany an assessment of the role of contemporary art in heritage contexts, whilst also examining ways to measure and articulate the impact and value of these intersections in the future.

Presenting a variety of perspectives from a broad range of creative and cultural industries, this book examines case studies from the past decade where contemporary art has been sited within heritage spaces. Exploring the impact of these instances of intersection, and the thinking behind such moments of confluence, it provides an insight into a breadth of experiences – from curator, producer, and practitioner to visitor – of exhibitions where this juncture between contemporary art and heritage plays a crucial and critical role. Themes covered in the book include interpretation, soliciting and measuring audience responses, tourism and the visitor economy, regeneration agendas, heritage research, marginalised histories, and the legacy of exhibitions.

Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces

will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museum and heritage studies and contemporary art around the globe. Museum practitioners and artists should also find much to interest them within the pages of this volume.

Chapter 9 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Nick Cass, Gill Park, and Anna Powell

Aims and rationale

This edited volume has its origin in ‘Intersecting Practices’, a series of events which occurred in 2014–2015 that were funded by the Creative and Cultural Industries Exchange at the University of Leeds. Organised by Nick Cass (University of Leeds), Gill Park (Pavilion), Anna Powell (University of Huddersfield), and Louisa Briggs (Brontë Parsonage Museum), the event series focused on the growing phenomena of commissioning artists to respond to historic sites, houses, and landscapes, with the resulting work to be experienced as a juxtaposition with that site or location. Given the relatively recent rise in popularity of this type of commissioning, the seminar series sought to explore the role and impact of contemporary art in heritage contexts; in particular, ways in which we might capture, measure, and articulate the value of these intersections. The seminars focused on themes including interpretation, soliciting and measuring audience responses, tourism and the visitor economy, regeneration agendas, heritage research, marginalised histories, and the legacy of exhibitions. Attended by representatives from across the academic and professional arts and heritage sectors, the events generated significant discussion which underlined the complexities of contemporary art and heritage co-existing in the same space and became the catalyst for further collaborations and research in this area by the editors of the present volume.

The decision to develop these events into a book is timely, as the heritage and contemporary art sectors in the UK have become increasingly collaborative. In recent decades there has been a notable increase in the number and scope of projects where heritage organisations have worked with artists. Major UK heritage organisations such as the National Trust, English Heritage, and the Canal & River Trust have invested significant resources in contemporary art commissions. English Heritage, a membership-based charity with its origin in the nineteenth century, is responsible for over 400 historic monuments; with Stonehenge as, perhaps, its most famous site. The National Trust is also a membership-based charity, similarly established in the late nineteenth century, and looks after miles of coastline, thousands of square kilometres of land, and more than 500 heritage sites, including monuments, country houses, gardens, and parks. They also make significant claims to reach a diverse audience:

Through the Trust New Art programme, the National Trust has completed over 200 projects at more than 60 places with a combined audience of over three million. This strategic approach has established successful models for commissioning and exhibiting contemporary arts at National Trust places. The National Trust continues to make contemporary arts an integral part of its regular offer at selected places, building broader and more diverse audiences for great art as well as working in partnership to offer new opportunities to diverse groups of artists at key stages of their careers.¹

Within this context, the Arts Council England (ACE) plays a significant underpinning role. It is funded by the UK government in order to promote access to the arts, which it does principally through its responsibility to distribute money from the National Lottery. Taking over responsibility for museums, libraries, and archives in 2011, ACE is the principal driver of publicly funded contemporary arts activity in the UK, and has supported the programming at these, and many other key heritage organisations. It is in this landscape of heritage management and public funding for the arts, that this shift towards contemporary art commissioning in heritage sites has developed. As can be seen from a number of examples included here, there are a wide range of other, less centralised, collaborations happening, contributing to the scope and scale of this activity.

Despite some initial research projects such as the AHRC-funded Mapping Contemporary Art in the Heritage Experience (MCAHE), which is referred to in this volume (Chapter 2, Chapter 8), there has, to date, been a lack of academic publishing on the relationship between these disciplines and, moreover, on the implications of their ‘cohabiting’. The MCAHE project was led by Newcastle University, with Nick Cass representing the University of Leeds as a partner in the research. It also involved a wide range of art and heritage partners and is one example of an interdisciplinary effort to understand better the nature of this juxtaposition. We deliberately use the term juxtaposition because it was central to the Memorandum of Understanding between the National Trust and Arts Council England, in 2008, renewed in 2014, where they argue that their policy is founded upon their belief that:

the art of the past has an inextricable synergistic relationship with that of the present and that a dialogue between them is essential. That dialogue – in the form of the juxtaposition of contemporary art and historic setting – stimulates artists and audiences and facilitates new perceptions and innovations.²

It is interesting to note that this phrase has disappeared from the most recent iteration of this agreement in 2018, which raises a question over how the motivations have changed over this period of development. Therefore, it is pertinent to ask what new perceptions and innovations arise out of this practice? How can we understand the way in which sites, artists, and audiences are affected? And, how might this practice have changed in recent decades?

A complex relationship

Contemporary Art in Heritage Spaces, then, is founded upon the conviction that to exhibit contemporary art within heritage spaces forms an ‘intersection’ of practices which is significantly complex. As researchers and practitioners, we believe this complexity arises because neither cultural phenomenon is straightforward in its own right. For example, much as museums’ central focus has shifted from being object-based to being audience-focused in recent decades, heritage today is understood to have moved away from a focus on material to be preserved, to a dialogical intertwining of ‘people, objects, places and practices’.³ It remains, however, difficult to define and, consequently, difficult to research.⁴ Much literature explores the role of heritage in ideas of national identity and individual identity politics. In this way, heritage is also profoundly problematic. As Stuart Hall so powerfully argued, one person’s heritage can represent another person’s oppression and, through a process which is ‘highly selective, it highlights and foregrounds, […] it foreshortens, silences, disavows, forgets and elides many episodes which – from another perspective – could be the start of a different narrative’.⁵

Much like experiences in and with heritage, an experience of art is entirely entwined with ‘spatial, temporal and material conditions it shares with the viewer’.⁶ The ‘event of seeing’ is a complex embodied temporal experience.⁷ Furthermore, the use of the term ‘contemporary’ to delineate a particular periodisation of art is indicative of art’s relation to both time and history.⁸ To place an artwork that is articulated as ‘contemporary’ in a location which is defined as ‘heritage’, is to set up a temporal dialogue in which the ‘pastness’ of the one, and the ‘nowness’ of the other become emphasised, despite the fact that the experience is a contemporaneous unfolding of an artwork, heritage, and viewer relationship. As Peter Osborne notes, there has been a particular shift towards the idea of the contemporary, but only a ‘recent rush of writing trying to make some minimal theoretical sense of the concept’.⁹

These commissions are thus enmeshed within overlapping discourses, emphasising paradoxical temporalities, and seemingly refusing to accept that one practice can exist as part of the other. There are, however, examples beginning to emerge of practitioners, theorists, and professionals seeking to reconceptualise this art–heritage relationship. For example, the concept of ‘heritage-art’ has been used by Sallie Anna Steiner to describe the way in which artefacts and artistic practices can take on an identity as heritage even in the contemporary moment. Steiner asks:

when does a cultural phenomenon or practice go from being a normal, everyday part of life to something a group of people re-appropriate to symbolise themselves, to encapsulate their identity?¹⁰

The significance of Steiner’s words in relation to this book lies in the rendering of art and heritage not as separate entities, but as shifting and context-dependant phenomena, located within changing spatial and temporal social and cultural values. Thus, it has to be asked whether it is useful to position contemporary art as temporally distinct and separate from heritage. In whatever way these practices and temporalities are articulated, there is an anticipation – perhaps even an expectation – that their juxtaposition will generate productive outcomes. Many of the chapters in this volume explore the various ways in which this benefit might be manifested and evaluated.

Scope and approach

In 2005, the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (the Faro Convention) stated there was a ‘need to involve everyone in society in the on-going process of defining and managing cultural heritage’.¹¹ It is with this is mind that we have purposely sought to include a diversity of approaches in terms of context, content, and writing style. This has enabled us to incorporate input from across the academic and professional sectors in an effort to provide an insightful range of voices, each being a microcosm of the idea that heritage is a process constituted and performed through a diversity of actors. With a view to presenting a dialogic and fluid approach to the concepts around which the book is founded, we are conscious not to postulate singular or definitive interpretations of ‘heritage’, ‘the contemporary’, or ‘practice’. Through our effort to bring a diverse range of voices and case studies together, we hope that the chapters in this volume demonstrate very clearly that there are many possible manifestations of meaning across all of these terms.

The concept of ‘intersection’, which underpinned the initial seminar series, also remains central within this book. ‘Intersectionality’ has a particular genealogy, being first deployed by Kimberlé Crenshaw to articulate ways in which institutional and social policy structures embody racial and gender discrimination, where discrimination occurs at the intersection of these prejudices in ways which are obscured when one is focused on at the expense of the other.¹² This resonates with a particular element of heritage site critique in the UK, whereby sites have been challenged as obscuring or eliding difficult narratives, or for erasing them completely in order to neatly present a history designed for easy consumption. It also echoes the ways in which the use of the terms ‘heritage’ and ‘contemporary art’ presupposes that heritage is necessarily incapable of being contemporary, and that the responsibility for corrective narratives only resides in the intervening artworks. In this context artworks are framed as outside of, that is, not being a part of any kind of heritage. Despite this clear resonance with Crenshaw’s feminist genealogy, our use of the concept of ‘intersectionality’ was, however, first inspired by Jane Rendell, who suggests that the ‘meeting point’ of different disciplines is a productive space, as it is at these intersections that practices can work to undo hegemonic structures.¹³ It is precisely these hegemonic structures indicated by the uses of the term ‘heritage’ and ‘contemporary art’ that this book seeks to unpick.

Within the context of the discussions around contemporary art and heritage presented here, an understanding of site-specificity necessarily becomes complex, and the very term ‘site’ requires consideration. Ashton, in her chapter ‘A room of one’s own: strategies of feminist arts interventions’, refers to the writings of Laurajane Smith to remind us that ‘place’ and ‘site’ should not be confused or conflated with ‘heritage’, and that to assume ‘heritage’ as existing materially and spatially is to overlook what Smith recognises as its true nature; that is, as cultural and social meanings and values. When considering the complexities of the art–heritage relationships described in this book, existing definitions of site-specificity in which artwork and its surroundings become inextricably connected (the idea that ‘to remove the work is to destroy the work’) seem particularly relevant.¹⁴ The art–heritage relationships suggested in some of the chapters could be seen to simultaneously align themselves with and deny existing views on how we understand site-specificity, such as the definition posited by Miwon Kwon that site-specific art is that which ‘gives itself up to its environmental context’ and is ‘formally directed or determined by it’.¹⁵

We recognise the dangers of a narrow geographic...