CONVENOR’S INTRODUCTION

This issue of our regular BAN Newsletter tackles the theme of the global and international in relation to British art. The various Members’ contributions included here provide an array of perspectives on the issues and questions involved – about the histories associated with British art, who qualifies as ‘British’ (whether in history, in art, or in contemporary society and working life), and whether ‘British art’ holds up as a category. They bring a wealth of experiences, from their working lives as exhibition organisers and researchers, and in many cases as people who have relocated globally themselves. Some pieces are clearly celebratory, others are more sharply political. Several reflect on how porous the category of ‘British art’ already is – but also see this as an unfinished project. There is common ground across a few the pieces here in reflecting on Brexit as a negative force in recent times, causing division and unease. With contributors invited earlier in the year, but writing in March and April, the topic of the terrible war in Ukraine surfaces at several points, understandably. The legacies of colonialism and empire are apparent here as well – although not in a way that reactionary commentators often seem to assume, as an absolute and inevitable block on engaging positively and creatively with British art, art histories, and history.

No single vision or version of British art emerges here. There is common ground – in experiences of migration (historical and more recent), in the readiness to see British art as a porous or mutable category, one which is always open to being re-examined, and in seeing the role of curating in contributing to that rethinking. Exhibitions, displays and art projects are shown here to be catalysts or forums for making connections, drawing parallels and marking differences, gaining knowledge and asking questions. And cutting across all these contributions is an expansive, diversified sense of curatorial practice. That diversity, combined with the common ground which is not simply consensus nor, quite certainly, based on any denial of conflict, trauma and complex histories, reminds me again of the philosopher Bernard Yack’s reflections on ‘Community’ as involving ‘awareness of difference as well as commonality’ . Community is in this definition not a simple given – a birth right – nor merely artificial or contrived, but produced by a collective effort involving mutual acknowledgement.

The principle of allowing difference to abide within or along with community is finding expression of sorts in the online collection produced by BAN Members, the British Art UnCanon. This now includes 30 articles, ranging from Tudor painting to contemporary video art. With the selection driven entirely by the Members’ individual choices, not by art-historical conventions or the multiple commercial, institutional, and practical pressures that come into play with realworld exhibition projects, the UnCanon embodies a multiple and various ‘British art history’. What is emerging is far from ‘balanced’ or ‘coherent’, judged by existing art historical narratives or the many mainstream museum presentations which seek to achieve a measured representation of art history through supposedly proportionate display of certain kinds or periods of art. There are, by those standards, ‘too many’ women artists in the UnCanon, ‘too much’ contemporary art, ‘not enough’ historic painting by familiar names or works by Turner-prize winning contemporary artists. What the UnCanon offers instead is multiplicity, and, despite its unpromisingly rigid-looking grid-like layout, scope for some ‘rhizomatic’ connections across time and space and cultural contexts. Re-reading Deleuze and Guatarri – the thinkers who influentially utilised the term to initiate or provoke non-linear and multiple ways of thinking (the rhizome being a continuously growing, non-linear underground root network) – I was struck by a passage that confronts the idea of a norm or standard in language, but which might equally be applied to art history: 'There is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages ... There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity'. The risks of imagining that rhizomatic ‘free for alls’ can be realised by mere formal means – as a style or design – has been pointed out by architectural critic Douglas Spencer, referring to the proliferation of such pseudo-liberatory motifs in commercial and corporate buildings. He makes salient points about how such performative freedoms may compound and mask inequalities and injustice. But taken in the context of BAN’s working practices and expansive programme of seminars and workshops, the UnCanon is hopefully one way that the Network is helping foster spaces and moments where the ‘mother tongue’ of institutionalised art history is displaced (if only temporarily) by a throng of curatorial and creative dialects, patois, slangs and specialized languages. Certainly, the collective work of BAN’s Research Groups, Emerging Curators Group, and the new Seminars and YCBA/BAN Curatorial Forum, noted by Lizzy Harris below, promises to generate a productively crowded and various programme in the coming months, engaging with British art curating in an expanded sense, activating global perspectives and encouraging multiplicity rather than unity and openness rather than fixity.

Martin Myrone BAN Convenor