Discussion: relevance of heritage as a
critical approach to my practice, and further points arising
If Harrison is
correct, heritage is not only concerned with railway engines and buildings and
statues of Queen Victoria. It is concerned with our relationships with
“things”, and more importantly, our attitude to those “things” – the ones we
love and keep, and the ones we reject. It’s also concerned with our
relationship with other people. He doesn’t overtly say this, but we may or may
not know those other people; we have a heritage that is uniquely our own, in my
opinion, but it is contingent upon and intersecting with the heritage of may
others.
Therefore it
follows to me that the desire to produce images of industrial “things” – the
gasometer, handtools, railway engines and so on that appear in my work – is a
product of my familiarity with, and affection for these things. These
familiarities and affections fuel my identity and my identity (values,
background, attitude) fuels them. The desire to produce and manipulate images
of myself is another way of looking at my identity, but also its make-up – i.e.
my heritage. This is supported by Harrison’s assertion that heritage is involved
in the production of identity. These two hitherto disparate parts of my
practice (heritage and identity) have become two sides of the same coin via Harrison’s
words.
When discussing
modernity, Harrison suggests it “can be understood as not simply a set of ideas
and philosophies, but also a quality of lived
experience” (his emphasis, p 24). This is the only time in my reading so
far that I have come across this. There seems to be a missing point here. If
part of heritage is predicated on the relationship between places, people and
objects (p14), then isn’t “unofficial heritage” – if not the official variant-
by definition being laid down by our everyday lived experience? We are
constantly forming and re-forming our familiarities and affections with “things”
so I believe that we are, to some extent at least, the authors of our own
heritage, and that of contingent people and groups of people. This would also
support Harrison’s notion of the role of heritage in the production of local,
regional and national identity. I believe that my practice comes from my lived
experience (therefore, heritage and identity) and that I am communicating this
visually rather than by written means.
If modernity is
concerned with a desire to get away from the past, there must be an equal and
opposite reaction (to paraphrase Newton) to yearn for the past. As you (well,
I) get older, I find the pace of change slightly more difficult to deal with.
There is also the effect of the throwaway society and of globalisation. Why is nothing
made in England any more? Answer: because it can be imported more cheaply from
countries where there is still industry. And so I develop nostalgia for the
past. But if we create heritage by viewing the past from the present, then by
definition I think there is re-purposing at work. Perhaps not necessarily
deliberate, but exaggerations and rose tinted specs do creep in. We long for
the simplicity and comfort of childhood and perhaps of the values of society at
that time – at least those that we consider to be more noble than the
equivalent values of today’s society.
Another question
that came to mind whilst reading Harrison is this : if we are makers/artists,
aren’t we interested in what’s gone before? How do we build on it
(literally/metaphorically)? We research for
practice (we look at what others have done) and by practice (we trial our own versions of their techniques). Things
(tools, brushes, techniques) from yesteryear that we still have and use in our
practices; are they really part of our heritage or really part of our present
and future? There is an indivisibility of the human and the non-human, whether
that is the natural environment or the created object.
Harrison also
touches on de-industrialisation, which is a recurring theme in my work. I have
a personal belief that it is part of the human condition to make things to use.
Therefore, if we are makers/artists, we have an inextricable link with
industry, as industry is “making” on a grander scale. So de-industrialisation
breaks or weakens this link, leaving a “loss”. This is where my memories kick
in, such as the smell of the hops roasting at Tetley’s when it was a brewery
and I was a schoolgirl. But they are now only
memories, re-purposed for my practice, just as Tetley’s has been re-purposed
as an Arts Centre. I express my memories in the hope of striking a chord with
others of a similar heritage.
If, as Harrison
suggests, heritage is concerned with place, and human interaction with place,
then perhaps this also explains some of my desire to record my wanderings on
the town moor. I was born near there and work near there and study near there.
I have quite a lot of photos of wanderings on there. Granted, some of this is
because I bought a new camera and it’s a convenient place to experiment. But I began
wandering to here in my previous life, when I worked in a stressful job in the
city centre. I wanted to escape the city and found the exercise and the green
lung of the moor a retreat in my lunchtime. In essence I was shifting back to
my roots, but whether this can truly count as heritage under Harrison’s
description is a moot point. It is possibly an exploration of my personal
history, but it could be argued that it is exploring my heritage and thereby
that of other contingent groups.
Extending this
argument, those photos form part of my archive, if indeed I have an archive. I
have deliberately got rid of a lot of my physical archive in an attempt to
declutter. But I carry an archive, an intangible archive, with me in the form
of my memories, as we all do. This forms a part of what I am attempting to
express visually. If archives are part of our heritage, then I think I am
vindicated in using heritage theory to support my practice.
My final thought
for the moment is this: exploring one’s lived experience is not always an
exploration of heritage. It can take a psychological viewpoint of dealing with
your past, rationalising, making sense of it. A piece I did after serious
illness is a literal archive, as there are documents collaged in. It’s a
layered piece, trying to show the complexity of illness.
But perhaps these that
are often present in my practice have multiple meanings. The outer layers may mask
what’s underneath, not only in the sense of the passage of time, but in the
sense of hidden emotions and feelings that are not on view to the wider world.
Developing the
layering in the work I’m currently doing, which breaks down the surface as well
as building it up, perhaps starts to reveal some of what’s inside, which is probably personal history rather than
heritage. But if, as I have argued, lived experience contributes to heritage in
the broadest sense, then they may ultimately show layers of heritage.
No comments:
Post a Comment