CONVENOR’S INTRODUCTION

Martin Myrone Convenor, British Art Network

As ever, this new issue of the British Art Network newsletter brings together varied reports and commentaries addressing current and emerging issues in British art curating. Each offers a sense of reflection and retrospect, sometimes marked by apprehension or self-questioning, but all also characterised by a sense of optimism about the relevance of British art research and curating …

Alice Correia outlines her important research on South Asian art in the 1950s, highlighting the transformative potential of regional collections in relation to established art historical narratives. Jenny Gaschke, Helen Record and Emma Roodhouse consider the last year of activity in the Landscape group, honestly assessing the multiple practical and emotional challenges of programming and networking, but also providing a renewed sense of importance which might be attached to the genre now. Finally, David Solkin, one of our most eminent art historians, offers reflections on four decades of art historical work and exhibition making, confronting the profound challenges the discipline of British art history faces today yet discovering, as well, reasons to be optimistic about its continuing – perhaps deepening – relevance.

There are reasons for being optimistic about the British Art Network as a whole. As of last month, the Membership list now runs at over 1,000 names, an increase of 25% since the end of 2020. This surge in interest is surely down to the energy and range of activities generated by the Network’s bursary holders and invited programmers, which over the last year has taken in everything from taxidermy to Brutalism, mapmaking to performance art, always with an open, expansive sense of what the curatorial might be, and what constitutes British art. And as of this month, our new British Art Network website has gone live, here. This gives more prominence to research activities and includes the beginnings of a Membership Directory which in time should become a major resource for everyone interested in British art and curating. Editorial work on the site continues, but we hope that you will find using the site easy and enjoyable, and that you get a sense of what it can do for the network and members. Over the coming months we will be building up the Directory, so all members who wish to be featured can be included. We will also be developing additional resources, and publishing content from recent programme activity, creating what will surely become a major archive for British art curating.

Summer brings for many of us a chance to break temporarily from work, needed this year more than ever. But British Art Network activity has continued and continues through August and September. In addition to research group activities, we have seen opening sessions from the two seminar series supported this year by BAN, Itinerant Imaginaries and Irish Modernisms, and the three online roundtables organised by Prof. Paul Goodwin as part of his programme Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain, which serves as BAN’s annual conference (with recordings and additional filmed content appearing later in the year). In each case the organisers have interrogated established narratives of art, exposing deeper and richer archives than are generally brought to light and expanding definitions of British – and Irish – art. With Genealogies of Black Curating, especially, the intensive focus on ‘the curatorial’ as such, and the surfacing of the largely unacknowledged role of Black and Asian curators in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, promises to be seminal, for it confronts fundamental questions about British art and curating relevant across the field.

The various themes highlighted here – revising and expanding British art histories, renewing our sense of cultural value and especially the value of collections, re-centring marginalised or overlooked narratives and identities, but above all re-focussing on the specificity and importance of British art curating – have been enduring features of BAN’s programme and activities, albeit interpreted in different ways since the Network was initiated in 2012. As we head towards the 10th anniversary of the Network, there is the chance to renew those commitments, and sharpen our focus and ambitions. As the various contributors to this Newsletter testify, in different ways, British art understood through and mediated by a curatorial framework – as collected and catalogued artefact, as displayed object, as experienced in a gallery or museum or online – has a distinctness which overlaps with but is not reducible to arthistory, theory or straightforward art-appreciation. How the curatorial framing of British art of all kinds and from all periods is pursued, rethought, and advanced in the context of contemporary life is a central question for BAN. So, too, is the question of what comprises curatorial expertise, how is it to be cultivated and applied? How, if at all, is it to be distinguished from art historical knowledge, artists’ entrepreneurship, or from the pragmatism of arts management and the machinations of cultural bureaucracy? In the immediate future, these are among the challenges to be addressed through the next round of bursaries, for research activity in 2022: these will be advertised in September. If you have questions about the forthcoming bursaries or would like to discuss making an application, please do feel free to contact us directly (full contact details appear at the end of this Newsletter).

In the meantime, the Emerging Curators Group have started work on developing content for the next Newsletter, due to be issued in October under collaborative editorship. This promises to be another important step in opening up BAN’s core questions – not just about what British art is, or what curating is, but even more fundamentally who gets to be a curator, and how.