MA Week 48 - Heritage Readings (2) - Laurajane Smith

Heritage readings (2): Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage.

 

Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD)

Laurajane Smith posits the idea of the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) (p28),which arises from the aesthetics of its policy makers and practitioners, and its institutionalisation within various national and international codes. This AHD is largely concerned with monuments that have a perceived universal significance and which are tangible. Smith identifies two challenges to this: the desire of local communities (geographically- and/or socially-cohesive groups) to demand recognition; and the backlash against ‘Disneyfication’ of mass heritage tourism.

AHD uses the rhetorical device of ‘the past’, which is vague in definition, and therefore needs experts to understand it for us. Such a term disengages from the “very real emotional and cultural work that the past does as heritage for individuals and communities. The past is not abstract; it has material reality as heritage , which in turn has material consequences for community identity and belonging”(p29). AHD reflects the grand narratives of nation and aesthetics and privileges the view and stewardship of the expert (p.42).

“Material or tangible heritage provides a physical representation of those things from ‘the past’ that speak to a sense of place, a sense of self, of belonging and community’” (p30). However, the primary form of identity associated with AHD is often national, but this is under challenge as it ignores sub-national identities. AHD also promotes elite social classes - “non-traditional” concepts of heritage are excluded. Smith quotes Barthel (1996, pp 68/9) talking about the industrial site, and the masculinity and general unpleasantness of the dirty, grimy workplace; these are not presented to the public in the sanitised reconstruction. In fact, the public are seen as empty vessels or passive consumers (p32) as heritage has simply become a form of consumption via mass tourism (p33). Alongside sanitisation, authenticity can also become an issue with reconstructions and dramatizations and we are in danger of the ‘heritage theme park’ (p40).

 

Heritage and identity

Smith states that “material culture as heritage is assumed to provide a physical representation and reality to the ephemeral and slippery concept of ‘identity’”. It “fosters the feelings of belonging and continuity” (p48). Often, however, this identity is assumed in the literature to be national identity, as mentioned above. She posits the idea of the use of “symbolic elements” (e.g. flags) at national level, but these can then be used at a sub-national level as reminders and constructors of identity (p49).As modernization erodes customs and expectations, individuals and communities are forced to re-articulate and recover a sense of the past. This sense of the past can be used to confirm or reject identity.  

Smith introduces the idea of intangible heritage as part of the heritage discourse: “while there may be a physical reality or aspect to heritage, any knowledge of it can only ever be understood within the discourses we construct about it”(p54). I conclude that the idea of heritage covering the non-material must have been quite new when the book was written; she describes intangible heritage, including memory, music and oral history, as quite distinct from tangible heritage (p56).

 

Memory and remembering

Smith identifies an increasing interest in commemoration, arising from War anniversaries and the Millennium. At the point of writing of the book, she had identified only a passing mention of memory in the heritage literature. She argues this may be because “memory may be seen as subjective and not always reliable whereas history is about the accumulation of fact within an authorized narrative” (p58). A group can constructs an identity for itself though shared memories, i.e. the collective or social memory. These memorise are socially constructed in the present and make meaningful common interests and perceptions of collective identity. The collective memory is passed on and shaped in the present and is reshaped daily by interaction between members of the collective (p59). Smith further argues that “memory is an important constitutive element of identity formation” (p60). Unlike professional historical narrative it is personal and powerful.

 

Place

“Heritage is about a sense of place” (p75, Smith’s original emphasis). Heritage provides not only a “geographical sense of belonging” but also a “cultural place or sense of belonging”. “Heritage…[can be used] to express, facilitate and construct a send of identity, self and belonging” (p75). Smith is clear that place is not only physical, but also socially constructed and posits that the national is actually constructed from many sub-national places, rather than the opposite. She also acknowledges the vital role that place plays in everyday life :. “place is part of lived experience …an embodiment… of feelings, images and thoughts”(p 76). Futhermore, “heritage as place… creat[es] an affect on current experiences and perceptions of the world”. Thus, a heritage place may represent … a sense of identity and belonging for particular individuals or groups” (p77).

 

Reflection

From Smith’s work I understand AHD is a restrictive construct, concerning itself with a sanitised version of the past, politically constructed to suit the “experts” in history. Its exclusion of non-tangible heritage necessarily removes the individual as all our experience and memories are different – even within the same communities and families. Its driver is often the establishment of a national identity, with regional identities being marginalised. Members of the public are expected to use the heritage site in the way it has been prepared for them. Smith paves the way for subsequent researchers to break the restrictions of AHD. 

She argues that the past does play a part in the construction of our identity. The use of symbolic elements as constructors of identity at sub-national level could bring into play the Yorkshire Rose, a unifying symbol of Yorkshire. But any emotional affect that the Yorkshire Rose, or any other aspect of heritage has, is outside AHD as it is not factual. Yet as Smith acknowledges, it is powerful, and it is more likely to shape our identity.  

Memory also plays its part as a conduit between heritage and identity. We constantly reform and repurpose our memories. They become a discourse rather than a fact. But how can we say history is factual? If researchers are using archival research, they are potentially interpreting someone else’s interpretation of a particular event. Surely history is also a discourse – as Smith eloquently argues throughout the book, it is deliberately excluding and including to serve its own ends. Heritage is also associated with a place. This can be a physical place but could also be one’s cultural place in the scheme of things. Place is inextricably linked to lived experience and causes affects in the past and present. 

Place construct is also complicated and at this point it serves us to reflect on how the past and the present, our physical and cultural places, and our individual and group identities, are commingled. As I read more of the literature on these topics, rather than clarifying boundaries between them, I find they are more intertwined than ever and that any given book or paper privileges one approach simply because of the background of its author(s). This is not problematic in itself, though, as it simply underpins the autobiographical nature of my practice and the complexity of trying to compartmentalise its various components. The more I read, the more I think the visual can portray these topics as well as, if not better than, the text-based discourse as the visual serves to unify rather than dissect them.

MA Week 46 - Psychogeography readings (3)

 “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography”

by Alastair Bonnett (2009).

 
This paper seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). He explains that radical politics of either side doesn’t like nostalgia as it stands in the way of progress, and he links psychogeography with trying to understand the past; radicalism moves on, but psychogeography is of itself avant garde so it seizes on what’s not in fashion, i.e. nostalgia.

This is all interesting but not directly related to what I’m doing. Of more interest is that it gave quite a lot of useful information about Iain Sinclair and his influence causing British psychogeography to become nostalgic, which Richardson had mentioned; in the mid-1990s psychogeography had a “quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past” (p47). I think we all probably do, to be honest.  Bonnett also pinpoints the feelings of loss for place as society moves on and the everyday space changes: “within avant-garde praxis, it was at the level of everyday space, especially of the changing urban scene, that we find nostalgia most forcefully asserted”(p52). This is much more pertinent for me as I try to find traces of my heritage and identity within various places around Leeds. There is a definite sense of nostalgia, and possibly psychogeography has (is?) more concerned with nostalgia and the past than I had thought; I had found it to be more about connecting with the environment and allowing open-ness to new experience. But perhaps the fact that you are walking in a place that many people have walked before you means you are just part of an ongoing palimpsest of passersby.

Tellingly, Bonnett states that “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space in which feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”. This can be extrapolated to mean a physical space or a mental space (“headspace”), and possibly other types of space I haven’t thought of yet. But it is very much a creative space, a thinking space, a linking/connecting space. The visual outcomes that I’ve been producing for the past 9 months all depend on psychogeography of some kind, whether through an actual wandering or an item of interest seen on a car journey.

Bonnett also touches upon the idea of the power structures which bind us and whose disruption fuelled the original derive. These are easily forgotten as the walker takes the urban wandering with their own viewpoints, but if we stand back they too can reveal something of the hidden. One thing I never commented on during the seminal Armley walk was the fact that some workmen (they all seemed to be men) were building the new Bradford – Leeds cycle superhighway on Armley Road. Quite why we need to spend so much money and disruption on this (bus stops removed, 10 passengers waiting in the rain, whilst one cyclist goes past once in a while) is not for me to answer, but the answer must lie in some political power construct somewhere.

Possibly the most pertinent statement comes in Bonnett’s conclusion; “attachments to the past and feelings of loss becomes sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and technique”(p63). I believe he speaks here to (at least part of) what I am trying to do; to critique and resist the loss caused by the deindustrialisation of Yorkshire.

 

MA Week 28 - Pylon Abstracts and Salford Symposium

Reflection on the past week – 23rd May 2016

 

Some interesting experiences and work this week. I haven’t been back into the print room, unfortunately, because I was ill on my afternoon off. Shame as I had written a list of things to try out. However, I have been making some progress with some little acrylic pieces. 

I pursued the idea of working up the repurposed pylon monoprint from my Week 26 post into four pieces. As time is of the essence, I decided to work straight into acrylics rather than work with pastels or cut paper as I might normally do when planning and developing  a piece. I wanted to see how the colours and paint would work.

 

Pylon 1 : spot the constructivist influence

This is one of the results at the first sketch stage. There are two or three layers of paint and I’ve used some masking tape too. It’s fairly faithful to the original monoprint but it’s clear that there is too much going on at the top left and not so much at the bottom right. I’m therefore working on a second sketch which is looking much more balanced and which I hope will be OK to reproduce on board for the End of Year show.  

It’s interesting how the marks translate, or not. The “grubby” marks of the monoprint, which give a nice industrial feel, don’t work so well in the acrylic. The inclusion of marks of different thicknesses in the acrylic version gives the work energy and movement. Not that they lack in the original; I have just had to think differently about how to represent them and how to rework the lines of the original to get the piece more balanced.

 

Crit in transit

The original four sketches were the subject of a three-phase crit at the end of last week! I put a couple of them onto whatsapp and there were suggestions they would work up as linocuts – I’m not overly experienced in linocutting but I might give that a go later on in the year. Then I had a crit with two classmates on our way to Salford (of which more later), now known as the “crit in transit”. This revealed some ideas of day and night, of lights beaming out of the darkness, and a very challenging question of whether this represents what’s going on in my head (who knows?). Later, when I finally got to Salford, another two classmates kindly had a look. There were further suggestions of taking the pieces back into print, perhaps by monoprinting from or into them, of further layering, and also the question of trying to get them up off the page more. They do look 2D, but perhaps that’s how they’re supposed to look. I’m not going to be able to try all these things before the end of year show, but I am definitely up for trying a bit more layering and I’ll do that when I go back to working on them tomorrow. 

The Salford jaunt was interesting. We met with MA students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford in a place called Atelier Artworks, an old light bulb factory. It was a strange space; industrial, dirty, under-used, disused almost, yet alive with the studios of a number of artists. Because of being ill I hadn’t really had much chance to prepare, so my responses were very much that – immediate.

 

Salford Piece 1

 

 

I concentrated on shapes and colour and produced two compressed charcoal and pastel pieces. On both the bottom layer was a rubbing of the metal stairs. There was a lot of improvement that I could immediately see; if I’d thought a bit more about it beforehand, I would have positioned my various images on piece 1 differently. As it was they overlapped too much. A lesson to learn. Don’t get overwhelmed by the situation and jump straight in. On piece 2 I think the red is a bit too intense. I liked the colour of the two doors, bright red and bright emerald green (these were their colours in real life), but I wish I’d left it as a black pencil drawing on the red rubbing.

Salford Piece 2

On the other hand, producing these as immediate responses means there is a lot to develop – there are no filtered or refined ideas in there. The shapes and colours can be used in different ways in future pieces. I really wish I’d taken more photographs and made more rubbings of the stairs to use now I’ve got back. Another lesson to learn. Part of the immediate response also means that these pieces bear the imprint of the site; not only the stair-rubbings, but the fact that I sat on the uneven, cracked concrete floor to do them. This means the lines are not straight because the floor was so uneven; something that I couldn’t filter out as I actually did the work.  I am beginning to understand, and to like, a little bit more about responding to place through these experiences (the Armley walk, the pylon photos, the Salford Symposium). 

We had a crit in groups of three and one of the comments on piece 2 was that it was like looking through a window when there was a dangerous chemical incident going on. It made me see the piece in a different way and I liked it a bit more then. I think the first stage in developing something from this would be to take the stair pattern from piece 1 and work with it; this was the first thing that captured my attention as walked up to the space where we’d be working. 

There wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked to interact with the students from other institutions. I think most of the others probably felt the same as I did – slightly nervous, happier to stick with our own classmates. It would have been nice to have had an ice-breaker to get to know people and perhaps more time to view each other’s work. Having had the experience, I wish I could go back and do it again and get more out of it.