Personal Blogs

 Other preparatory reading completed:

Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities (click to see in new window)

Schama Landscape & Memory (click to see in new window)

Elkins & Naef (Eds.) What is an Image? (click to see in new window)

Moxey, K. (2013) Visual Time: The Image in History (click to see in new window)

Boswell & Evans (eds.) Representing the Nation (click to see in new window)

I have been invited by Coursera to take this course leading to the role of an invited mentor for learners on one particular course. Here is the first exercise.

The course is;

"Modern Art & Ideas

The Museum of Modern Art”

To read about the course's aims and objectives, see: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-art-ideas/home/info

Steve’s view: This course focuses on ‘ideas’ as a tool for engaging with Modern Art. It defines the latter through the holdings of the first and arguably most influential institution for the representation, collection, storage and display of ‘Modern Art’, The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This needs to be said before we start because the function of selection runs through this great institutions’ role: in decisions about what to buy and maintain, what from this store is to be displayed and where.

1.     Think back to when you took this course as a learner. Which part of the course did you find the most challenging or interesting? (This is the topic you will use to respond to the next question)

2.     Write at least 200 words to explain the topic you chose above to a learner just starting this course. Make sure your explanation is clear, detailed, and easy to understand.

·       The modular nature of the course enables participants to take on central ideas as they emerge and focus on a well-selected number of art-works for comparison and evaluation focused on that idea. For me the key idea (and that I did my coursework on - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=204161) were contrasting ideas in art and art criticism & history of ‘space’ and ‘place’.

·       Approaching ‘modern art’ can be problematic for people who look in it for a picture representing a world they can always recognise – something you identify as a place, such as my place of birth or where I met my husband. Instead modern art has considered a more fundamental idea – what is ‘space’ and how is it represented without the familiarity assumed in the notion of ‘place’. Space can be two, three or four-dimensional (that is it can be a flat shape, have depth as well as length or breadth or have time as a component as well as depth, etc.)

A lot of theories of modern art have identified, for instance in the 1950s by Clement Greenberg (and in the claims about his own work of Jackson Pollock), that the fundamental problem for art is that it needed to avoid the illusion of a picture having depth (or perspective) and understand that it’s essence was pattern built or composed on a flat surface. Here ‘space’ was an idea that included not depth illusions (only width and length of a given canvas) but which did include ‘time’. Pollock talked about his painting as having rhythm like music or poetry (both time-based arts) and being composed in the action of their making (over time) and the action of the observer’s duration of gaze at the picture.

You will see lots of art in this section that makes both space and place a problem (as in Van Gogh’s Starry Night) where the painter’s claims about the space he inhabits contrasts with simpler ideas of ‘place’. Starry Night is definitely not just a picture of the town, Saint Remy, that Van Gogh’s asylum window looked down upon.

This idea is even more difficult in Rachel Whiteread’s House where she recreated (the East London artwork was demolished) the space INSIDE a house as a solid object or in Matta Clark’s Bingo (which is shown on the course) since that conveys the meanings of house space by translocating a wall of a demolished house with a flat inside and outside into MoMA itself. We see stairs and doors but are they such in a detached single wall or only ‘spaces’ that tell us something about what we mean by living in the world. In Rachel Whiteread’s artwork, space in becoming solid no longer can be anyone’s ‘place’ (a home that is lived in). So what is it?

1.     Think back to when you took this course as a learner and choose another part of the course which you found difficult or interesting.

2.     Write at least 200 words to explain the topic you chose above to a learner just starting this course. Make sure your explanation is clear, detailed, and easy to understand.

·       Rather than choose another module week title as above, I’d like to take one word from one week – that is the word ‘Transforming’ from ‘Transforming Everyday Objects’. That is because in each week you will examine how things (even everyday things like walls and houses) are transformed by becoming art and / or being placed in an art-museum.

·       I think art has always ‘toyed’ with the idea of ‘transformation’. A favourite source for an artist’s subject-matter was the Latin poet, Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, where things change into other things all the time – like the young woman Daphne pursued by Apollo turns into a laurel tree. Bernini couldn’t resist sculpting this in stone in the seventeenth century.

In ‘modern art’, this issue is both less and more complicated. For instance, putting a single wall (like that in Bingo) in a museum makes us see (and perhaps interpret) it differently.

The thing now in the museum (whatever it starts off as being named) is in a new context physically but also takes on the ability to mean more and different things to different viewers.  What happens when we put fur round a tea-cup? You’ll see this very thing so I won’t give the game away yet so you can ‘see’ it – whatever it is- for yourself.  In a complex sense, we recognise art as ‘strange’ when things we thought we ‘knew’ about now seem strange to us.

Even what looks like very ‘realistic’ painting of a real-world place, such as that in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, actually makes the world look queer - we see it from the stance of a grasshopper but yet we also see it in human dimensions, so that single bits of grass at the front of the picture as being as visible as Christina’s house on the horizon. Our sense of vision is ‘queered’ (it’s transformed). In Wyeth’s picture, this may help us to see3 the world as Christina as well as one containing Christina. If we take the time we learn that Christina (she was a real neighbour of Wyeth’s) could only mobilise comfortably by a kind of side-ways crawl over the ground. In this way art makes us see the world anew. Jump in! Enjoy it!

MONET & ARCHITECTURE: Continued from here (click to open prequel in new window)

This exhibition’s curation is a return to the tradition of the 'monographic' (as NG calls it) exhibition. Obviously, the work of a senior academic art historian it is of the ‘old school’ while dressing itself up in a trendy and novel theme: architecture. However, architecture is widely understood to include village church spires, older picturesque built phenomena in ruins or restored or the new build villas of the bourgeoisie who formed the clientele of Monet’s Art. Within this remit a lot gets included and one can’t help but see how the thematic structure of rooms – picturesque village & town, urban modernity and finally monumentalism is a cover for largely preserving a chronological presentation of remarkable stylistic developments.

This isn’t true entirely though because the themes also expose the contradictions that make up the whole phenomenon of Monet’s art. Whilst producing some instances Thomson calls ‘modern’ that are self-consciously aware of industrial and commercial capitalism as a change-agent not only of landscape but the media we see landscape through – the media of space, time, light and variant density of volumes. It is these latter that allow London's polluted fog to become a subject as much as the motif - say Waterloo Bridge - we see (sometimes dimly) through it. But for me Monet’s take on the produced landscapes of capitalism is weak. The Coal-Heavers (1875) is a remarkable picture in which, as Thomson says, everything is man-made. I was dying, as they say, to see it but it disappointed. The depiction of working-class people turns them into ciphers and their impact on the environment is likewise eradicated. The planks over which they carry heavy bags of coal do not even receive their weight and, likewise, the Seine beneath them is barely touched by the coal droppings which must have discoloured it. One effect is of a Monet water piece (with all the shimmering play of light on water) that sort of blithely ignores the labour going on round it. It strikes me, as Ruskin would have said, as ‘untrue’.

So, this was a wonderful experience – not least because as Monet ages we see the increasing ways in which purely visual effects – things we notice as a surprise by virtue of heightened perception – become less cognitive and more emotional (perhaps despite Monet who still though he painted only what he saw) such as the Rouen West Front of the Cathedral series or late Venice or London paintings. And this is not all stylistic. The concentration of Monet increasingly on effet rather than motif or a balance of the two, allows him to remove all figures from his late pictures – those tourists he so hated and lambasted – although he was one such.

But these are beautiful pictures. They aren’t though, to my mind, great pictures – although the chance to see this collection made something wondrous accessible – a man’s journey through the psychology of vision. I say not ‘great’ though because that psychology was far from a social psychology. It eradicates the social eventually – although only via some wonderful experiments in urban art – which we see here in his mid-career Paris pictures.

In what instances might we accept photographs as evidence or accurate records?

This is a very loaded question to which, after working through this week’s material, you really want to answer that ‘in no instance should a photograph be accepted as evidence of the meaning of an event that has really happened’. This seems to be the point of Mandel and Sultan’s art-joke in their book of photographic documents named ‘Evidence’. The title begs the question since the work itself makes us question whether our assumptions about what evidence is contain a lot of unexamined and hard-to-validate assumptions. Even the look of their work in Mandel’s words has this effect: ‘It looks like it's kind of a library binding, and it's made so that you would think that it is some kind of evidentiary document.’ The point is we learn that we are being duped. We assume a photograph evidences a truth and its potential meanings but the book will puzzle us and generate meanings quite out of any range intended by the original photographer. Likewise, Meiselas challenges one narrow feminist conception of ‘carnival strippers’ by allowing new meaning to be generated by her images: they do show us ‘what is there’ but we are challenged to find a simple meaning – not least inj the women themselves who are more than just ‘victims’ of the male gaze.

What makes photography’s relationship to truth so complicated?

Papageorge’s comparison of his and Winograd’s images of a mixed race couple and their pet monkeys is fascinating. The latter’s image compresses into its frames ideas about children and parents that arise from the juxtaposition of the monkey and an ambient child holding his father’s hand at the back of the monkey, via some unacknowledged but deeply-culturally ingrained racism in white viewers. To see this picture then is to see ‘racism’ in action although it is not ‘evidence’ of it. The point is that documents show us something complex, full of multiple (and sometimes contradictory) meanings. This is true of Atget’s use of the term ‘documents for artists’. Meanings come from all directions and I think Atget knew that they would and that not all of them would be under his control. This is the case of Mandel and Sultan – where juxtaposed images ‘infect’ each other with meaning.

In what ways do a photographer’s artistic choices and point of view affect the meaning of a picture?

The above does not say that the way a picture is ‘made’ (framed, cropped, focused, printed) does not change meaning – it does – as we see in comparing Winograd and PapaGeorge where the latter’s pictures is somehow much simpler in semiotic terms. It is also to say that even in less conscious hands the photographs framing and other features however unplanned or intended for another function will begin to take on functions of which its photographer was totally ‘innocent’. I think Meiselas is very wise here in giving up some of her control of choices to her ‘subjects’ – the carnival strippers. Their desire for ‘portraits’ imposes an intention on her oeuvre that feels alien to Meiselas’ open feminism but which is in the end reconcilable with that feminism – since the women are not just subjected to the photographer’s gaze (in this sense just as they are to male gaze) but also able to make new meanings out of that event that have autonomy from both gazing men and the female photographer.

Threats or opportunities in future heritage thinking. Leiden MOOC Week 6

One of the most telling lessons from the course is that 'heritage' and 'threat' are often co-defined. In wars or revolutions (or other variations including wars of ideology or attitude between contrasting groups) I only identify my 'heritage' when it is under threat of extinction. This threat can be conceived as active and agentive or as the effect of natural and everyday forces that are not confronted and in some way seen as something into which we ought to intervene. I see these issues underlying the concerns of Holtorf (2016).

As soon then as I sense that 'my heritage' is under threat, I need to ask (aided by this course): By what? By whom (if it is a person or group)?. A deeper question that precedes that is 'to whom' is this perceived as a threat. Here 'me' would be an insufficient answer since identity can bew conceived of as distributed in such ways that we need to look at what aspect of identity is threatened - identifications for instance with locality, group, gender, ethnicity, occupation, nation and do on. We need to determine whether we see the threat arising from the agency of others, or something we conceive as 'other' or from our failure to respond to a change that is inevitable and where no other agency need be invoked than our own. Of course, 'doing nothing' in relation to a perceived threat is also an option but it needs to be conceived as an active choice - an act of omission at least.

My concern with Castle Hill throughout these exercises has been to present that phenomenon in terms of its ontology as it might be perceived by different stakeholders or different strands of identity in myself. It is possible to conceive of the different aspects in competition where one concept of the phenomenon takes hegemony over others. Thus, an interest group may want to preserve evidence of pre-industrial mining and aim to open adits for inspection by tourists, building on the top of the hill, facilities that inform and create opportunities for remembrance (souvenirs, books, leaflets). To do so would compromise the pre-Roman earth works. Hence one idea of what Castle Hill 'means' and 'is' can threaten another.

However, that is only if we see reconstruction in terms of a choice between alternatives from different domains and times-of-origin of the particular facet. Reconstruction can be done (Byrne 2008) through other media and social actions (videos, e-construction software (see Cunliffe on Palmyra), imaginative opportunities - story-telling etc.) in ways that allow one site to develop itself in many ways without one function compromising another. That seems to be the purpose proposed by the Paris Declaration wherein developers and other stakeholders are encouraged to enter into dialogue about what they mean by both 'development' and 'sustainability' in relation to any proposed project - of international significance. This is called 'development with a human face'. My only concern is that sometimes it is difficult to differentiate a face from a 'mask'.

Multiple construction of sites by partial differentiation of its developments and multiple 'ownership' (not necessarily non-conflictual since dialogue involves resolution of conflict) relations seems to be the key. This too can be covered by Holtorf's (2016) idea that no one idea or ideology of the heritage represent by Castle Hill asserts the need for 'timeless continuity of existing forms' over the rights of other existing and yet-to-be-proposed future forms associated with it in 'fluid continuity'. This will integrate too awareness of ecosystems at the level of flora and fauna. 

In part this means priority processes involved in the 'interpretation' of heritage over the physical phenomena of the site itself and hence an acceptance that those phenomena are not and cannot be remade as we suppose them to have been in the mythologies surrounding their origin. It is an argument for keeping interpretation open to diverse practices that might assist in the process - which must include more than those available to academic expertise. This also means making the meaning of 'visiting' a site more fluid too, such that visiting does not demand so great a local infrastructure that it buries the site in necessities involved in its own maintenance. Visiting can include the multi-media opportunities already proposed.

This means that 'doing nothing' will sometimes be a choosable option for part of a site at least. In those cases we realise that the meaning of a site may not be entirely the product of our human agency but that to keep that diversity we have implements active means to prevent intervention that comes from less thoughtful domains - at least in part. 

Humanity-made threats to heritage

The topics discussed this week have to do with the various threats to heritage and we mostly focussed on man-made threats. How does this relate to your site? What could be potential threats to your heritage? How would you counter these threats, both in theory and in practice? Write about these issues in order to show - both to yourself as well as to your fellow students who will be grading your work - that you understand them and you know how to incorporate those with your chosen personal heritage. Through thinking about these issues and incorporating them into something of your own you will learn how these concepts influence heritage managing decisions.

As I work through these exercises I am finding them more and more challenging. I begin to ask myself why I am trying to relate the issues in the module with ‘my heritage’. After all, what seems to be suggested is that there are problems with the term, ‘my heritage’ and the ontology of heritage it implies – as something whose being depends on its importance to me.

To tell truth, I have struggled from the beginning to define ‘my heritage’. This is partly because deriving from a post-colonial colonising culture, ‘My heritage’ has been formed outside myself – in histories of an over-determined shared consciousness of ownership of a world or universal heritage – the kind of ideology Hamilakis (2012:4f.) sees as supportive of the idea of the ‘universal survey (or panoptic) museum’ (like the British Museum).

I struggle with that ideological inheritance and it pushes me to empathy with emergent post-colonial local identity in order to identify with cultures threatened by neo-colonial thought. That empathy might advocate the repatriation of the ‘Elgin’ Parthenon marbles, and support for the removal of the icons of colonial thinking (Rhodes-Must-Go! Victoria-Tower-on-Castle-Hill-must-go!). For me it makes me value values of my own ‘sub-culture’ that are under threat from being immersed in majority OR hegemonic cultural icons (such as being a gay man, or class – these themes came up in my Castle Hill pieces).Yet Hamilakis (2012:8) argues that this binary presentation of the issue is itself a fallacy. His preferred position is the ‘exilic imagination’ and I must say that this resonates with me. What it suggests is that there is nothing warm, comfortable or easy about determining your heritage: ‘about ongoing clashes with the colonial and neo-colonial regimes of authority and rule, not only in faraway places, but … in our own nation-states and localities, ….our own projects, our own writing and scholarly practice.’

That raises for me another perspective on statues of Rhodes and Victoria Tower, that emblem of mock-Gothic superiority over the Indian sub-continent in a town-environment now home to many families, once self-identifying exiles of that continent, even if no longer. 

Victoria Tower on Castle Hill. By Richard Harvey - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1005635

Victorian imperial heritage and intangible culture linked to it are part of my ‘heritage’. The point is NOT to rip them down and pretend they too are forgotten but to exile yourself from them: they are heritage not ‘my heritage’. They need to be understood in all their complexity but not as symbols of assurance for a stable identity but as memorials that nothing is as stable as is comfortable in our identities and that relating to objects, sites and practices from the past is necessary as exiles if we are to imagine them differently (under new ontological conditions, in Hamilakis) in the future.

So ‘my heritage’ (exiled from the present comfort with itself) is not universal and not local in significance but in continuing evolutionary and perhaps revolutionary emergence. It is there and must be understood but only by some kind of struggle, even if that is struggle in writing and thought – deep down in the ontology of the self.

So that is why I think the kind of unprotected ‘multi-temporal perception and embodiment of materiality’ is my Castle Hill – and on it still stands it Victoria Tower with its uneasy relation to my ‘self’. But if this is not comfortable, it is also difficult to make practical for a heritage manager. If we venerate the pre-Roman site is that at the cost of eighteenth-century mining adits, or of complex unreconciled sites of Victorian early working-class radicalism or later Victorian comfort with a wealth-creating imperialism. Where would I start to preserve – or perhaps I preserve bits, some parts of which will be documentary interpretation and showcase them all, or do I just turn it into a forgotten state that will reap its rewards in physical deterioration of all these features. Whatever, I do, what would I do if this later perceived as an excellent site for a nuclear-bomb bunker in a new Cold-War against an imperialist Russian or American state? Who knows? All Hamilakis says is that, it is hard, isn’t it!

My favourite quote – still getting my head around it is Pels in his interview:

 Is this translatable thus? What matters is attributing and respecting the multi-assignability of the significance of all heritage and finding ways of respecting that whilst still struggling against colonialism and racism. Maybe so!

Who defines heritage and who cares for / maintains it?

Bertaccchini et.al (2015:13) summarise evidence based on analysis of processes of international decision-making that huge influence is wielded by nations with common economic interests. In this case, these nations are ones with much political investment in the economics and ideologies of growth. These aims may in various cases be at loggerheads with value systems based on local, religious or communal practices that attempt to preserve heritage, tangible or intangible, natural, human-built or theologically inspired. The case of the preservation of forests in the face of economic interests is a case in point. Here nations acting in concert can block forest-heritage conservation in another nation often because not doing so would threaten their right to exploit their own ‘uneconomic’ heritage. In nations with declining ability to sustain growth by deforestation (because it has already largely happened), an apparently ‘more balanced’ view might equally be led by self-interest. Preservation of forest in third-world countries is their only chance of defending their ecological survival.

Regarding Castle Hill, preservation is no longer an urgent issue because of the declining value to developed capitalist countries of localised defensive uses and human-made formations in them of natural hill-tops. Castle Hill is overlooked by power. Such economic interests that took a stake in it – small household farmers building adit mines or the remains of a defunct public house – were never a great threat and could be sustained with the preservation of the much earlier earthworks and land-markings because they didn’t need each other and didn’t get in each other’s way. Now that both are consigned to economic, social and cultural irrelevance (in the views of majorities), they may be allowed to decay together.

I will concentrate on Byrne (2015) as an analogue to my further thoughts. Although such religious traditions as might have been important to pre-Roman civilizations are now not fully understood, they die because communities of ‘souls’ no longer have enough interest to maintain their important sites or the intangible heritage that makes them understandable. Of course, intangible heritages are a site of changing meanings and this is why, I think, the practice of Buddhist communities and individuals in ‘maintaining’ or ‘restoring’ shrines are resisted by some national and academic heritage interests because bearers of that intangible heritage may, and probably will, maintain and restore something in ways that change it because of forgotten or now seemingly irrelevant aspects of older parts of intangible heritage.

This is a dilemma. Castle Hill represented almost certainly a hill-top means of defending against Roman imperialism but the value to me of Castle Hill is sometimes that it represents the focus for Chartism in the 1840s – a tradition that contained some political beliefs and interests that still are radical and would be seen as such. When a powerful Huddersfield bourgeoisie commissioned Victoria Tower on Castle hill top, it also served to change the meaning of the hill from association to liberty and anti-imperialism (Brigantine or radical working-class Chartism). It became a monument to Empire under the Empress of India in fact.

The Chartist association is forgotten because it has little intangible heritage to value and re-interpret it from a radical working-class perspective. Hasn’t Castle Hill as heritage already been then preserved as a heritage that only serves the few – those to whom movement on to new political and economic definitions about what matters to communities in the present, past and future. Byrne’ practising Buddhists keep Buddhism alive after all, not monuments frozen behind boundaries. But, of course, it is not that simple. Ownership of heritage then needs to reflect many stakeholders. In doing it, we would still have to accept that what survives is partial and the product of dialogue with a future-moving tendency. Any answers out there?

‘GEOGRAPHY’ AND MINING: This term may have to go! Terminology to talk about ‘mining art’. (And some frustrated venting about capitalism).

In talking about mining as a function of the term ‘geography’, there are significant problems. Whilst we can identify geographical areas on the surface of a landmass as ‘Coalfields’, this is a long way from the understanding internal space necessary for, and probably internalised by, the miner-artist. 

The academic discipline ‘geography’ is indeed already deeply challenged in earth sciences as insufficient for even a descriptive account of the earth. Rudwick (1996:272.) argues that the very fact of mining opened the eyes of any ‘mineral geographer’ to a third dimension of the term geography, ‘that converted distributions of the earth’s surface into structures in the earth’s interior.’ Speaking of rock ‘formations’ was the lexical sign of this change and of evidence seen by the all working miners as well as mineralogists of ‘the three-dimensional spatial relations of ‘mineral bodies’ or rock masses (ibid:274).’ In epistemological terms the science of geography historically in this particular gave way in the eighteenth century in France to that of ‘geognosy’ or ‘knowledge of the earth’. This science was the categorising features of the earth above and below its surface (or anything else) that required penetration of surface distinctions (land / sea, mountain / plain, boundaries of political entities related to the ownership of parts of the earth). That science itself gave way in the mid nineteenth century to a causal science that by importing temporal understandings of cross-sectional space so that a geographer’s discourse could move easily between describing strata as not just spatially lower in the earth’s interior (in geognosy) but also as ‘older’ strata. Thus was born ‘geology’ in the nineteenth century (established by 1840).

Whilst Rudwick treats of this as part of the epistemological history of earth and natural science (since fossil records were also part of the process of development), I think we need to show that this was not a matter concerning intellectual developments for leisured and educated classes. To miners, such understandings were essential to their work, health and safety. I sense the complexity of this in some of McGuinness’ development of an art that utilised strata as a means of conveying the interior life of the miner as a person and a class defined by social determinants. So, through ‘geography’ as a study of earth’s surfaces can be sufficient for studies that stop at the consideration of art as an ‘object’ of trade, as a commodity as in A843, it is not for the study of art as experienced by working miners.

My example of this is McGuinness History of Mining. Here the development of mining towards greater mechanisation and labour efficiency throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century Northern Coalfield history follows backwards the much longer (unimaginably longer) history of development of the coal seams of that same Coalfield. As mining gets more up-to-date and shapes its internal spaces with a difference, miners themselves must regress through geological time to the deepest and earliest time-spaces. It would not take us long to see herein a metaphor similar to Freud’s use of the palimpsest. Miners were travelling back to a time of greater vulnerability that was presenting itself as if it were greater security. Just as a causal explanation based on geological catastrophes explains the formations under the earth of the strata of the carboniferous period of geological time, so the miner is shaped and reshaped by political considerations that dwell on the earth’s surface but push him ever deeper. It is an allegory of political oppression and the role within it of mechanisation and central management. The deeper the miner goes under the earth – the lower their sense of agency and autonomy as a socio-human being.

Isn’t Capitalism the pits!

Rudwick, M. (1996) ‘Minerals, strata and fossils’ in Jardine, N., Secord, J.A. & Spary, E.C. (Eds.) Cultures of natural history Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 266-286.

This interesting topic was raised in a Tutor Group Forum in A843. To date I've been puzzled. However, recently I read Ann Gibson's wonderful book on Abstract Expressionism in the USA. This book queries why artists who had a theme or subject, especially one related to their own gender identity, sexual orientation or were marginalised by the canon that favoured (admittedly very great) Painters like Pollock, Rothko and De Kooning. The use of language about language is employed to characterise the difference between: 

• 'universal' art whose symbolic value was great but difficult to pin down on any 'local' meaning; and,
• those which indicated themes (by allegory and metonymy) in the artist's life and 'personal politics' and which merged some figures with their abstractions.
  

She uses the contrast between painted symbols & metaphors in art in cotrast to the allegory (in narrative painting) or metonymy in subject-based topic (Ossorio on his sexual orientation for instance). I find that pretty useful - if not for A843 where it isn't safe to use material not 'on the course'.

All the best

Steve

The PASSAGE below is the one I find most useful - jargon or worth working at:

A  Great show at the Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham Based on pre and mid surgery elective surgery.

The portrait artist, Yeo examines what the pursuit of physical beauty means in a world where elective surgery is used to re-shape bodies based on ideas that reflect insecure consumer values that feed off that insecurity. 

Most of the images are of Mammary Augmentation, showing the acts of line drawing surgeons use on womens' bodies to visualise their aims. The most chilling are those labelled Extended Superficial Muscular - Aponeurotic System Facelift, & the most intriguing those on Reduction Rhinoplasty. Research shows that selfie's on mobiles form notions self-conceptions trhat one has an overlarge nose. 

 The whole asks where does art begin and finish? 

The master works are fragmentary paintings from: 

1.  gender reassignment operations (female to male at the point of mammary section) which question what the term 'elective surgery' means; 
2. A beautiful full body portrait in which contours and edges merge of Siena Miller pregnant; 
3. Lilly Cole in a modern Madonna - 'Mother & Child' 

 Really worth seeing - this great Northern chateau musuem is coming to life. It also redresses the lack of interest in figural modern and post-modern art in A843. 

 All the best Steve

My contribution is based on a heritage that is already lost in some important ways, because of changes dictated by the policy of the owners of the objects, spaces and buildings that made up the heritage. In short, this heritage is that of coal-mining practices in County Durham where I now live. County Durham was in the last century seen as a tragic case of over-specialization in one dominant industry, coal-mining, but also its allied industry, such as iron & steel.

Ownership is surely only one relation of a heritage to groups with a stake or interest in it. In 1947 nationalization took many of the remaining coal - pit sites into public ownership, but the degree to which that changed the stake in the organization and future of the site by local miners was minimal, in practice, although NCB publicity and training films often promoted the notion that committees with miner involvement represented that voice.

What followed is a long story but it involved vast changes in the siting of coal-mining (from the interior of the county to the coastal seaboard). From exposesd coalfield drift mines and low shafted mines to deep seams that extended off coast under the sea (Vane Tempest and Easington). Gradually West Durham pits closed, new towns were built and populations migrated (internally) to new modern mechanized pits. The end of the Miners Strike in 1987 strook the death knell of even these pits and they were gone by the early 1990s. NCB as owners had a policy of destroying all pit buildings central to the site, re-landscaping the sites and reducing their visibility as memorials of a past truly to be consigned to the less visible parts of history - like the underground engineering architecture of the mines themselves.

If miners and their continuing families are stakeholders in this heritage, then policies determined by ownership (even public ownership) did much to remove nearly everything that could be its memorial, apart from small sculptural reliefs - which often sentimentalized miners, ponies and pit-lamps.

Here is a heritage under threat. Its memorials now are often version of intangibles translated into other media and discourses - mining art galleries, show pits (none in Durham) and photographic and textual archives.

This need work as a theme.

All the best

Steve

         i          First, choose a means of representing what ‘heritage’ might mean to me or My Heritage.

       ii          Secondly, this medium/media with a text. It can be brief, but should contain

1.     Your thesis, research question, or topic, shortly introduced

2.     Introduction: in what scientific/historical discourse or context are you putting this? How are you approaching this topic? Why is it important?

3.     Are there heritage theories that you can exemplify with this heritage? Can you connect it to discussions, e.g. among our experts or to subjects Sada Mire mentioned?

4.     Conclusion: summarize your project or discussion very shortly and re-connect it to the research question or topic, posed in the introduction. Are there implications for the future of this heritage?

The following piece is less an attempt to follow the prescription above but to make reflective links for my own purposes. For me, nowadays, its what I want from learning!

Steve

Like Amy Shrecker, I feel very uncomfortable with the possessive pronoun here. What I think of as ‘heritage’ is far from singular -  it covers many places, nations and cultures even though the relationship to each is unequal and of varying quality. Moreover they endure in ways that aren’t always all present to me simultaneously and can appear separate from each other, or can variously interact both positively and negatively with each other. It is as if they were like a palimpsest of laid down experiences that can variously and in different combinations be called into action to help me act, reflect on myself, my social roles and my sense of what makes action or reflection meaningful. It relates to communities whose traditions are nearly always intangible and, when tangible, far from universal to the whole ‘community’ in which they are found. An important sense of identity to me is my identification as a gay man and that in itself is not represented by one kind of discourse or object-set.

(i)                I’m going to represent this sense of fluid and amorphous heritage by an exercise I did for another course, in which I was urged to devise a representation of my relationship to my work. That work is as a part-time lecturer mainly operating at distance from learners in online settings. It can be accessed here:

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=198558 (opens in new window)

This page also gives access to the analysis I used with this artefact in my Social Research module. Here, I want to use it rather differently, so on to (ii).

•  Your thesis, research question, or topic, shortly introduced
• Introduction: in what scientific/historical discourse or context are you putting this? How are you approaching this topic? Why is it important?
• Are there heritage theories that you can exemplify with this heritage? Can you connect it to discussions, e.g. among our experts or to subjects Sada Mire mentioned?
• Conclusion: summarize your project or discussion very shortly and re-connect it to the research question or topic, posed in the introduction. Are there implications for the future of this heritage?

I chose this collage of images representing me at work – preparing an online ‘room’ for synchronic (and recorded) teaching purposes. I did it because it illustrates what I mean by the multiplicity and interactivity of various images from my past and their use in the present, but also in terms of the different kinds of space which form ‘my’ heritage. This includes notional online cyberspace interpreted by metaphors from other spaces – rooms, whiteboards, markers, highlighters and so on. Pictured entering an online room to prepare it variously interacts with the solid physical room I enter to start that work. 

But that 'room' contains multimodal objects which open up other cultural spaces and places. Either that or objects that inhabit space to change it in ways that, at some level, I have, at some past point, desired. By saying this, for instance, I mean the ways I have placed photographs or art by friends' children or in reproduction in certain spaces picked with varying degrees of acknowledged intentionality. 

This placing sometimes means, as in all palimpsest structures – or archaeologies – places where I have placed images on top of or obscuring other objects. I am very aware of this as I look around the room now, although I’m also aware that some objects have stayed where they are. The book combinations on the shelves has changed as have some objects, although a poster I bought in Leningrad (before the fall of the Soviet Union) represent Mir (peace) ironically as a young soldier holding a wild flower in his hand and by his eyes STAYS. Its meaning has probably changed for me a little though, although it represents a trip I made with my partner thirty years ago, now (after legalisation in 2006) my husband, on a train-linked trip to Moscow and Leningrad.

Memories change in ways that act like palimpsests too. The object may have had its original meaning obscured by what now is its purpose in the present (my politics have changed somewhat as has the left (with which I still identify) in general) as if it had been layered over by another version of itself.

To the other side of where I sit are photos, put into one frame following the funeral of my mother of a holiday to Blackpool as a child in the Huddersfield ‘Wakes Week’ (the common annual holiday given in working-class districts by the factories in which my mother worked).  The same shelf that holds that picture-holder allows it jostle with photographs of me (now an out gay man and somewhat then alienated from my parents) holidaying in Tunisia as well as mementoes of past pets (the present one – now enfeebled by arthritis can be heard climbing the stairs to achieve some closeness she wants for reasons best known to her).

And there is also personal and impersonal clutter – debris from the signs by which I attempt to make room for new books to fill new learning needs by dispatching ones less present to me through EBay at give-away prices. In this room the books are really mixed – behind me books on online teaching and art, to my left philosophy and classic (the latter two being in part debris from recent online course I have studied) but which have left a nearer sense of the presence of other parts of a heritage – of Classical Greece for instance.

Sometimes debris from the past – a kind of unsorted waste from throughout my 64 years – also tells you a lot about what heritage might be. Just above my comfortable line of sight are a set of ‘digital stop-clock’ timers I used to use when I taught experimental methods in schools for Psychology foundation courses. I notice that I look again, resolve to recognise their total obsolescence and throw them away – but I don’t (and deep down know I won’t) because these too are part of the heritage, serving to remind me that I once switched from over-exclusive study of the arts alone to sciences – and I catch sight of my model skeletons and ‘brains’ (all used in present teaching on mental health in online synchronous & asynchronous interactions).

It is the nature of heritage as represented by my collage that I could go on infinitely perhaps, so I won’t.

I have tried to argue that cultural heritage and identity have an uneasy relationship in which cultural objects and intangible practices often interact and sometimes don’t do so – but lie dormant (perhaps temporally forgotten or otherwise obscured or buried. Heritage might be called a kind of data mining.

Well it’s a start.

Steve