Being ‘saved for the nation’ A844 Ex. 1.12

(a)   Thinking back now to Colls and Dodd’s thoughts about ‘race, class, gender’, and the notion of ‘critical heritage studies’ introduced earlier:

·        To what extent do you think this has had an impact on what is ‘saved for the nation’ and acquired and displayed by public bodies?

·        Are there examples you can suggest from your own locality, or that have had a high media profile?

1.      My immediate response to this was that I had explored this issues in the University of Leiden MOOC Heritage Under Threat I completed over the summer. The list of contributions is nearly complete in my rather poor contribution to Ex. 1.9. These contributions mainly relate to a given task performed on a chosen example from ‘my heritage’. It was introduced here. The point the course sought to make seems to be that learners explore what ‘my heritage’ means to each one of us. Through these I came to some rather reflexively convoluted conclusions about whether any individual owns any one unitary ‘heritage’. It also, involved thinking about what, in a heritage site, represents ‘my nation’. This site contains (at least):

·        an early ‘British’ (Brigantine?) defensive earthwork, probably much altered by the Romans it was set originally to defend against;

·        Eighteenth-century adit mines, made by families to eke out an income or subsistence.

·        The invisible site of a Chartist meetings by Huddersfield Chartists in the early nineteenth-century;

·        A tower built at the end of the nineteenth century to celebrate the ‘Empress of India’, the Victoria Tower.

·        The site used by my grammar school to focus hill-climbing cross-country runs;

·        A public-house used by people in the sixth-form of my class for safe ‘under-age’ drinking. It was a dive!

If ‘my nation’ then is anything it is a palimpsest – a thing in which has different meanings for different parts of me at different layers of its archaeology and retrospective development. For me,  these indicated issues of ‘race’ (Romans as invaders / colonisers, the limp connection to Brigantines or pre-Roman tribes, the India celebrated by the Victoria Tower in the perspective of the large East-Asian population who immigrated into Huddersfield at the time of my late adolescence), class (imperial against democratic interests divided by class – Victoria Tower  & the Huddersfield merchants who built it by subscription, coal-miners and Chartists and being a working-class council-estate dweller (before the term CHAVS was invented) in a predominantly middle-class grammar school) and gender (given the debates of the problems of identification implied by binary gender and heteronormative forms).

A palimpsest has a number of places where different layers of the past impinge upon one with different resonance through your life and self-reflection.

2.      This is such an example in my view because it links to work done on A843 and for the EMA. There I concentrated on the term ‘place-making’ in relation to the changes to my now native Bishop Auckland following the developments looked at in the preceding A844 exercise example – the attempt by Jonathan Rutter, a City investor and millionaire and highly formal Anglican Christian. His aim expanded since the newspaper campaign referred to in A844. By 2017 Bishop Auckland was being ‘place-made’ in very different wats, with the revival of:

·        Auckland Castle, its deer park (including deer-lodge) and original walled-gardens.

·        A Mining Art Gallery relating to local Durham mines and miner-painters opened 2017 (this was my EMA);

·        A faith museum currently being built behind the Gate House in Auckland Park,

·        A view-point and modern information centre being built in front of Auckland Park Gates (with a view to Binchester Roman Fort – the only developed hypocaust systems still visible in Britain).

·        A Spanish Art Gallery to completed the Zurbaran Jacob and His Sons (originally collected by a Bishop of Durham as a mark of his interest in a Jewish homeland) set and based on lending from the Prado and purchases enabled by Art-Fund.

·        A centre for Visual Art of Durham University.

If this place-making, in part justified by potential tourism-based income, is to be described as teasing out of the ‘place’ Bishop Auckland, some layers of a palimpsest buried at different levels of its past, including the subterranean underground paintings it houses by miners & former-miners. This palimpsest includes class and gender issues (the rooms of the Mining Museum are divided by gender) and even issues of race – the complex history of anti-Semitism in the Anglican Church for instance.

(b)   Here now are some final, very open-ended, questions for you to discuss with fellow students on the discussion forum and your tutor group:

I wonder how much I will use the forum. Through A843, or so I was told in an email by the Course Director, other learners were offended by how much I wrote and my generally strong personal take on things. All I could have said was that this was not meant to offend nor put other people off from shorter, more focused and course-centred contributions. However, I found all that process quite hurtful in the end and I think I may prefer talking to myself in the cyber-void of these blogs. The point is to stimulate my thought. Views from others helps but I’m not getting many, so I’ll just carry on.

Here goes!

·        Do present policies and strategies for ‘saving [works of art, visual culture and heritage sites] for the nation’ reflect the reality of the cultural constituency of the place where you live?

• • Clearly not. I think the ways in which heritage speaks in the Auckland Project represents various heritages and voices within these heritages. Saving Zurbaran takes on a new menu given the purchase through Art-Fund of an El Greco and collaboration with other Durham galleries owning significant Spanish work from the seventeenth century and later – including Durham University. This is best represented by the publication: Baron, C. & Beresford, A. (Eds.) (2014) Spanish Art in County Durham Bishop Auckland, Auckland Castle, The Bowes Museum & Durham University. The constituency is probably largely middle-class, professional & clerical and perhaps academic.
  • This is less the case for The Mining Art Gallery nor for the ‘intangible heritage’ projects that spring from it and are fostered by the Auckland Project such as older miners’ reminiscence grand memory groups, proggy-mat making, course in printing – using Tom McGuinness self-bought printing-press.
  • Local walkers (with & without dogs) in the Deer Park.
  • The range of variety of cultural audiences addressed can be over-estimated but there is more inclusive diversity here than could be predicted when the issue was just saving Zurbaran’s.

·        Is ‘saved for the nation’ now an outmoded concept?

• • Yes. Or it ought to be, although the maddest fringes of Brexit thinking will most surely resurrect it. Cultural mix in Durham is probably near the lowest in the region. Strangely that has fed the survival of nationalist (dare I say, racist) thinking in some quarters – although hopefully that is minimal.

·        If so, should it be updated – and if that is the case, how?

• • Not by simple place-making as explored in A843. Maybe I’d call it – palimpsesting: exploring the visible and invisible heritages of place and their diversities, communalities and interactions. Thus Bowes Museum was bought by the wealth made by one of the cruellest of the private coal companies that has fostered dark memories in working-class traditions. How are these conflictual interactions placed and discoursed. Not simply as a past curator, Frank Atkinson, did in this gallery by including mining memorabilia in the permanent collection, but perhaps by making these conflicts readable across the range of heritages – and including commonalities.
  • In a sense I’d do a repeat of my Castle Hill project for the Leiden university course. It would be a lifetime’s work. So don’t hold your breath.

All the best

Steve