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Stanley Spencer : Journey to Burghclere
Get PDFAs one of Britain's most eminent 20th century painters Stanley Spencer's work has often been overshadowed by his chaotic and colourful private life. This is the first book since Richard Carline's Stanley Spencer at War (1978) to focus entirely on the painter's service as an orderly, soldier, and patient in the First World War, and to critically evaluate his time in Bristol, the Balkans and Burghclere between 1915-1932.
Drawing on Spencer's letters, illustrations and paintings, and interviews with relatives, curators and others who knew him, Gough examines Spencer's journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of the Macedonian campaign, to the commission for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere. Through a close reading of contemporary texts and artwork, the book locates Spencer's work as a key component of the commemorative era after the Great War, situating Spencer's paintings of resurrection as a response to the complex bureaucracies of commemoration and a visual re-imagining of the exhumations and burials that were then taking place in battlefields across Europe. Spencer's work is examined in the context of other architects, sculptors and soldier-artists of the period, but is also positioned within the discourses of haunting and memory construction.
A number of the themes in the book were aired through several conference papers: 'Resurrection: reviving the dead in the work of Stanley Spencer, Otto Dix and Jeff Wall' Spaces, Haunting, Discourse conference, Karlstad University, Sweden (15-18 June 2006); 'Heroic death: models and counter models', WAPACC conference, USA (28-30 October 2006)
Planting peace: the Greater London Council and the community gardens of central London
Get PDF‘Peace’ has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In the furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edge of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of ‘Peace’ had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of ‘victory’ or ‘triumph’. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long-term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens. This paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to the radical political agenda of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, but they were borne out of grander visions for world peace, multi-lateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage
Documentary: The Margins of Reality
No full textIn using case studies such as Touching the Void (2003) and the films of Nick Broomfield, this introduction to the growing field of documentary explores the definition and understanding of the form, as well as the relationship between documentary and drama, specifically the notion of reconstruction and reenactment. Paul Ward also discusses animated documentaries, the fertile genre of comedy, and feature-length contemporary works that have achieved widespread cinematic release
Sites in the imagination: the Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial on the Somme
Get PDFThe Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is a 16.5-hectare (40 acres) tract of preserved battleground dedicated to the memory of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, who suffered an extremely high percentage of casualties during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Beaumont Hamel Memorial is an extremely complex landscape of commemoration where Newfoundland, Canadian, Scottish and British imperial associations compete for prominence. It is argued here that those who chose the site of the Park, and subsequently reordered its topography, helped to contrive a particular historical narrative that prioritized certain memories over others. In its design, the park has been arranged to indicate the causal relationship between distant military command and immediate front-line response, and its topographical layout focuses exclusively on a 30-minute military action during a 50-month war. In its preserved state the part played by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment can be measured, walked and vicariously experienced. Such an achievement has required close semiotic control and territorial demarcation in order to render the ‘invisible past’ visible, and to convert an emptied landscape into significant reconstructed space. This paper examines the initial preparation of the site in the 1920s and more recent periods of conservation and reconstruction. The author examines precedents for the preservation of battlefields, the spatiality of commemoration and the expectations aroused by such sites of memory. By focusing on the Beaumont Hamel memorial site the author explores several areas of contention: historical accuracy, topographical legibility and freedom of access
Manipulating the Metonymic : the politics of civic identity and the Bristol Cenotaph, 1919 – 1932
Get PDFThe city of Bristol was one of the last major cities in Great Britain to unveil a civic memorial to comemmorate the Great War 1914 – 1918. After Leicester (1925), Coventry (1927) and Liverpool (1930) Bristol’s Cenotaph was unveiled in 1932, fourteen years after the Armistice. During that lapse, its location, source of funding, and commemorative function were the focus of widespread disagreement and division in the city. This paper examines the nature of these disputes. The authors suggest that the tensions in locating a war memorial may have their origins in historic enmities between political and religious factions in the city. By examining in detail the source and manifestations of these disputes the authors offer a detailed exemplar of how memory is shaped and controlled in British urban space
Corporations and commemoration – First World War remembrance, Lloyds TSB and the National Memorial Arboretum
Get PDFThis paper explores the role of corporations and financial organizations in maintaining a memory of employees who have served during the wars of the twentieth century. Focusing initially on memorial schemes devised by finance houses in the commemorative era after the Great War, the author examines the emergence of a broader approach to organizational memory and the social construction of collective memory. Taking the Lloyds TSB finance group as a case study, the author examines the origins of the company’s war memorial in central London, and the recent attempts to re-locate a number of memorial objects and icons accumulated during the expansion of the group. This case study indicates how the social memory of an organization might be understood through an appraisal of the monumental furniture that lives, often invisibly, within an organization. The paper concludes with a number of questions concerning the nature of organizational memory when confronted with a history of merger and acquisition, and the difficulties of finding a commemorative site able to represent and safeguard these histories
‘Invicta Pax’ Monuments, Memorials and Peace ; an analysis of the Canadian Peacekeeping Monument, Ottawa
Get PDFThis paper explores monuments to peace and peacekeeping, as distinct from monuments and memorials that commemorate the war dead. Two principal lines of enquiry are explored: the first examines whether it is possible to create secular monumental sculpture that promotes peace or espouses reconciliation. Secondly, the author asks whether monumental art is able to advocate peace without relying on the frameworks or discourses of commemoration and remembrance. Through an initial examination of the differences between ‘monuments’ and ‘memorials’ the paper explores the iconography and discourses of peace and pacifism. The paper then focuses on the Peacekeeping Monument in central Ottawa, Canada: a monument that was intended to mark forty years of international peacekeeping, but was unveiled in the same year that Canadian troops fought as part of a military coalition in the Middle East and were embroiled in a civil war in Africa. By comparing the Peacekeeping Monument with the nearby Canadian War Memorial the author explores the manipulation and creation of heroic landscapes, concluding that far from advocating peace and reconciliation, the Peacekeeping Monument captures a defined period in Canadian polity
Defining ‘Animation’: The Animated Film and the Emergence of the Film Bill
No full textIn this article I shall explore the position of animated films in the first decades of the cinema's existence. This will involve outlining not only how definitions of "animation" changed throughout this period, but also how these changing definitions were signs of major shifts in production, distribution and exhibition. One of the key points of this piece will be to trace how different kinds of film the focus being on animated films came more and more to be recognised as precisely that: different. Issues of product differentiation have been discussed before in relation to the emerging Hollywood studio system (e.g. Staiger in Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson, 1985). Such product differentiation works together with industrial standardisation and streamlining, and is a defining characteristic of modern capitalist business practice, which operates around the apparent contradiction between repetition and novelty. A similar process can be seen to be at work in relation to the increasingly sophisticated exhibition practices adopted by the people showing films: the refining of the early period's (i.e. up to c. 1906) "variety" system of presenting films, into the "film bill", where the range of films on show was emphasised. Crucially though, there was not only an emphasis on range and variety, which had been there from the very start anyway, but also on some types of film being more important a greater attraction than others, which were subordinated. Thus I shall be tracing the historical moment at which longer, fictional films became the chief attraction on the film bill, but the main focus will be on how this shift impacted upon animated films. Indeed, the impact was such that production moved away from certain types of animation technique, such as the "retracing" method used by Winsor McCay, and the cel process became the standard. The main reason for this was that it was a system that best suited the new conditions of exhibition, providing a regular flow of short, animated cartoons, often as part of a split-reel package with other "supporting material" such as newsreels or educational shorts. The argument is not that these films were unimportant: on the contrary, they were vital to the system in that they added emphasis to the primary product, the narrative feature film. As we shall see though, the ultimate positioning of specific types of film was the result of complex historical forces. In many ways, this essay attempts to delineate similar terrain to that covered by Eric Smoodin (Smoodin, 1993). Or rather, it wishes to outline some of the issues and developments in this area in the period just prior to where Smoodin's excellent study begins
Underline I, II & III (Open House Festival London)
Get PDFUnderline produces public film and live performance events. Thus far, it has had three iterations (2022–4), which were staged as part of Open House Festival, London.
It would re-imagine urban public space through artistic intervention, encouraging active co-existence and co-experimentation. Its past programmes featured an open call and invited participants, an inclusivity that places the inexperienced (of all ages) next to international figures, who are all locally connected. The exhibited film and performance work was presented after dark, in an otherwise overlooked location, a Victorian railway bridge that divides the historic terraced street, Beck Road, in east London. The road was closed for the event and the arch of the bridge was repurposed, becoming a screen, creating a truly common space, an inclusive ‘stage’, that brought residents, artists, visitors, neighbours alike together as creators and audience - European Heritage Days, observed it ‘featured a remarkable line-up of locally-made video art.’
Underline explores the re-imagining of urban space, an environment in which a disconnect can develop between the individual and place, producing disenfranchisement, a contested realm. Its method addresses ‘sense-of-place’ and its impact on ‘sense-of-self’ and community, proposing that artistic intervention can engender creative participation and collective engagement, which can help produce more common understanding, a new ‘sense-of-ownership.
Creative Interventions: valuing and fostering creative arts students’ work-related learning in the public and third sectors.
No full textThe Creative Interventions research project examined creative arts student experiences of work-related learning (WRL) activity in the public and third sectors. It set out to explore how such experiences contribute to students’ employability skills, how these are identified by the students and how the activities are valued by students, the higher education institution (HEI) and the external partners involved. This report was primarily written for academics (both within the creative arts and other
disciplines); the Higher Education Academy (HEA); employability support workers (e.g.careers staff); and employability policy-makers.
The project took place between 2008-2010, and was a collaboration led by the University
of the Arts London (UAL), in partnership with the Arts University College at Bournemouth (AUCB) and the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE) at the University of Surrey. It was part of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project strand initiative funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and managed by the HEA