Convenor’s Introduction

The conjunction of past and present, and of multiple, different ways of engaging with historic and emerging art are things that surface constantly across the activities of the British Art Network. The Research Groups and bursary holders span the centuries and the full range of media in their interests and expertise…..

These and the membership as a whole represent a wide diversity of approaches, disciplinary affiliations and working contexts. This might seem to work against the idea of BAN as as having any sort of unity, even if we accept that ‘British art’ has a straightforwardly coherent meaning and status – something that continues to be very much in question. Does an art historian working on the 18th century share any common ground with a programmer for a contemporary art space? What brings together a curator in a museum and an academic art historian based in a university? Or a curator in a national museum, focussed on highly specialised sub-sector of British art, and someone in a regional collection, quite possibly not holding the job title of curator, juggling numerous roles and tasks? Or, most sharply of all, any one of these individuals in employment and an independent artist-researcher, curator or producer working on a freelance basis?

One of BAN’s central functions is to help create a sense of community among a membership with such different working lives and backgrounds, whose circumstances are continuing to change given the present times. What ‘community’ really means in this context is open to interpretation, perhaps more than ever. I recently read something by the philosopher Bernard Yack which seemed to offer a productive point of reflection on this front: ‘Community’ he suggests, ‘involves awareness of difference as well as commonality. In other words, communities are composed of individuals who focus their attention on something that bridges, rather than erases, their differences’. Maintaining a sense of difference in our personal and professional experience, and our ways of thinking, as well as between the historic, modern and contemporary, while also coming together and sharing productively, is perhaps one of the central collective challenges for BAN. There is evidence of this below in Cora Gilroy-Ware’s reflections on her sensate encounters with the historic sculpture featured as our lead image, John Gibson’s Hylas and the Naiades, in the report on the works commissioned by the British Landscapes Research Group and in the various research interests/approaches set out by our Emerging Curators Group profiled below. Their different working contexts and ways of operating capture the diversity of professional and creative experience which is characteristic of the present time. Meanwhile, there are reflections on curatorial precarity from Marcus Jack, which highlights the conditioning experience of our particular moment. Emily Pringle’s careful reflections on research in museums point to the possibilities for a programmatic rethinking and reorientation of what the curatorial may be or mean. This may be apparent too in the productive academic-museum collaboration reported upon by the Research Group, Post-War Painting in Regional Collections.

BAN itself needs to reorientate and rethink, so that it help respond to and reflect upon these shifting contexts, ways of acting and modes of practice. The reformation of the curator role, and the now familiar refrain about becoming ‘inclusive and representative’ (or attempts at ‘decolonising’) are not opposed or even separate projects. How our different histories – personal, collective, present or forgotten, obscured or materialised in the art we engage with and in roles we may occupy – can be kept productively in view alongside that effort is another question again, which can nonetheless hardly be avoided.

Some of the first events organised by this round of BAN bursary holders are flagged below and register something of the collective effort towards reengaging British art curating, across sectors, professional constituencies, and disciplines. The BAN team is also making plans for later in 2021 and 2022 which we hope will further this effort at rethinking the curatorial, with these questions in mind. This will include supporting a programme of activity that takes the place of our annual conference in the Summer and working towards a new round of bursaries to run in 2022. But we are also effecting changes within BAN. We will launch a new website later this year, with potential for more contributed content, more news and information, and greater transparency about who BAN is – the team, the steering group, the bursary holders and the membership at large. It will be, we hope, a way of extending and deepening the sense of BAN as a community – at least in the nuanced sense set out by Yack.

Martin Myrone Convenor, British Art Network