14 minute read
change, challenge and disruption’ – an interview with Sarah Victoria Turner
Sarah Victoria Turner is an art historian, curator and writer. Since 2013, she has been Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (PMC) in London and, in March 2023, she took up the role of Acting Director on the departure of Mark Hallett, who has been Director of the PMC since 2012. Sarah has taught art history at the University of York and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is co-editor of British Art Studies, an awardwinning digital arts publication, and the co-writer and co-host of the Sculpting Lives podcast. In 2018, Sarah co-curated The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, with Mark Hallett. She is also the co-editor of The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018, an open-access and peer-reviewed digital publication consisting of texts by over ninety authors, which was the winner of the People’s Voice Webby Award (2019).
She co-leads the London, Asia research project with Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow at the PMC. Together with Amy Tobin, they are curating an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge on the artist Li Yuan-chia and the LYC Museum and Art Gallery he established in Cumbria in the 1970s. Much of her writing has focused on the entangled relationships between Britain and South Asia and she has published widely on this topic. She was a founding partner of the Leverhulme-funded Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism and the Arts c.1875–1960 international network, and was also Co-Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Internationalism and Cultural Exchange c.1880–1920 network with Grace Brockington.
Sarah was a member of the British Art Network Steering Group from 2015–2022. From April 2023, she will be co-chairing the Group with Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain. Here, Sarah discusses questions from BAN Convenor Martin Myrone about her career, curatorial engagements and the changing state of British art studies.
MM: You joined the Paul Mellon Centre in 2013. Given that your own career and experience has spanned the university, the PMC (a research centre and publisher), and museums and galleries with your various curatorial engagements, what would you say have been the key changes affecting the way art histories are explored and presented across these different contexts, over the last decade? Have there been changes in what, and how, the PMC supports research in British art?
SVT: Yes, most definitely – there have been significant changes in the last decade or so that have impacted the ways art histories are explored and presented. Key among these is what we might describe as a ‘digital turn’ that is having a radical impact not only on the way in which we access and process research, but also in how we communicate our findings to wider audiences, whether that’s through publications, podcasts, exhibitions or social media platforms for example. I’ve been involved with the PMC’s open access journal British Art Studies since it was founded in 2015. When we started the journal, we had to do quite a bit of persuading of potential authors that their work would be taken seriously online and that its academic credentials would be the same as a print journal. I never have those conversations now – the tone and concerns have completely shifted. Now, the conversations often turn to questions of how digital tools and methods can be incorporated into the published article – an interest in revealing how research is done and making resources, such as data sets or digitised archival material – available. I find these questions really energising as they are part of a larger conversation about opening up what we do as art historians, communicating it better and thinking conceptually and practically about our methods.
I started my career as a university lecturer in 2008 and since then I’ve witnessed quite seismic shifts in how British art is being positioned. Without any shadow of a doubt, this is all for the good! When I was a PhD student, there was often a defensive attitude about
Sculpting Lives Podcast
British art studies – an eagerness to demonstrate that is was somehow not inferior to its European neighbours. That feels like a bit of a redundant argument now. The pressures are bigger, more challenging, more urgent and more global. Questions about who and what has been excluded from the histories of art are now prominent concerns. Art historians who have grappled with the relationship of British art to the histories and politics of empire have made fundamental shifts to bring topics of nation, race, class and economics to the fore.
The ‘British’ part of the British Art Network or the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is no longer a descriptive term, but the site of a debate about the relationship of nation to history.
Before you joined the PMC in 2013 you were Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York. Given that traditionally there has been quite an established ‘track’ within academic careers, could you share a bit about that decision, and also about your engagements with curating – which once upon a time might have seemed like departures from academic research?
I started teaching when I was at the Courtauld Institute of Art doing research for my PhD I had the incredibly good fortune to be asked to be the Teaching Assistant for Lisa Tickner’s new MA module on twentieth-century British art. Lisa constructed a course which engaged the student with approaches outside of the academy – whether that was the conservation work being carried out by the National Trust on the murals Stanley Spencer painted at the Sandham Memorial Chapel, the private collection of Nicholas Goodison, or the oral history project Artists’ Lives housed at the British Library. I loved the plurality of approaches Lisa exposed her students to – all connected by a critical question about how the histories of modern art had been constructed. Before that, I had studied for an MA in Sculpture Studies at the University of Leeds, in partnership with the Henry Moore Institute. That’s where I experienced research-led curating for the first time, and it was formative. I’ve never had much truck with a supposed separation between the academy and the museum. I feel that kind of division is pointless and separates an already small field. For me, what really matters is sharing research and constructing conversations around it. Now I think about it, most of the major research projects I have been involved with have had a public-facing output and exhibition making is an important way in which ideas and arguments can be given expression through objects. I’d never describe myself as a curator if someone asked me what my job was, but I like the idea of thinking curatorially.
It is clear from many of the projects you’ve been involved in and your personal statements, that you’re very committed to collaborative ways of working. How does such collaboration sit in relation to more established ways of working – whether in a university setting or a museum context: is there a natural progression or are there tensions as well? I’m thinking of how, traditionally, both universities and museums have emphasised individual authorship –with the single-authored monograph or the curator’s name appearing alongside an exhibition. How do you make collaboration in research work?
Collaboration is really important to me, and I think I do my best work when working with others. I like the idea that research is about posing questions – and ones which are best approached from a multiplicity of perspectives. However, there is a friction between these methods and traditional academic systems of merit in which the single-authored monograph is prized most highly. And I’ve never written a single-authored book, so that probably says a lot! As an art historian, I’m interested in groups and networks of artists, so I think I’ve found a way of working that is also networked and thinks about artists and art works in relation. I also think it’s important to look outside of the discipline of art history. For the Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, Modernism and the Arts c.1875–1960, I worked closely with musicologists, historians of religion, literature specialists and cultural theorists, and it was revealing how that opened up different channels of exploration of shared interests in how spirituality and mystical thought shaped cultural production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A lot of my work at the PMC has been about creating and supporting communities of researchers and of trying to foster dialogues across the field of British art. I’ve been involved with the British Art Network since its early days and have always been energised by my interactions with it. Of course, collaboration isn’t always easy! One of my longstanding collaborators, Hammad Nasar, often uses the example of the Tai-Chi-based exercise of ‘pushing hands’ – there is certainly energy, force and sometimes friction in any collaboration. But ultimately, I think any research or curatorial project is collaborative, always the work of many hands, and built on the ideas of generations that have come before us (even if we are rejecting them).
Your research has always focused on the complex cultural relationships between Britain and Asia, and one of your first publications is on E.B. Havell, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Indian art in Britain, c.1910–14 (Visual Culture In Britain, 11:2, 2010). Thinking back, what are the main changes that you’ve seen in your areas of specialism – oth around how Indian art is viewed from the perspective of British art history, and perhaps how approaches your period (late nineteenth–early twentieth century) have shifted?
It’s been an immense privilege to be part of a community of scholarship working on the entangled histories of Britain and South Asia. It’s meant that I’ve been working as part of an international network of research that has had a significant impact on how I think about British art. Giving papers about my research in India or at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong has helped me think about the perspective from which I research, write and speak, as well as the connections between historical material and contemporary politics. One of the main changes is that scholarship that is attentive to the histories and politics of empire is no longer in the footnotes of the histories of British art, but it now much more centrally focused on debates and projects. In my specific area of specialism, I’ve also seen the number of people working on the cultural relationships between Britain and South Asia grow in number. In terms of the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century period I’ve focused on, it now seems unconscionable to reckon with the histories of modernism without attention to the geo- and cultural politics of colonisation. There’s been a turn from ‘reception studies’ – say of how Indian art was viewed and displayed in Britain – towards critical understandings of how imperialism structured collecting practices, museums and the methods and terminology of art history itself. It’s a lively, discursive area – there’s still much to learn and much work to be done.
Your current research focuses on Li-Yuan-chia (1929–1994), a Chinese artist who lived in China, Taiwan, Italy and Britain, where he spent the last twenty-eight years of his life, setting up the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in a house next to Hadrian’s Wall. His life story obviously illuminates not only a ‘global’ story of art but also a lot about the regional and the non-metropolitan. – could you tell us more about the project and in particular how your research will be expressed in the exhibition project, which opens at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in November 2023? Are there differences or special challenges in dealing with a globalised art history in the form of an exhibition, as opposed to academic research?
This project is the culmination of the London, Asia research project which I have co-led with Hammad Nasar at the Paul Mellon Centre since 2016 – again another collaboration and network that has sought to expand, enrich and disrupt histories of British art. Hammad and I co-organised, along with Lucy Steeds (University of Edinburgh), a symposium on the work on Li Yuan-chia and the LYC Museum, to accompany the Speech Acts: Reflection, Imagination, Repetition exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery (co-curated by Hammad and Kate Jesson), which was part of the Black Artists and Modernism project. There was a special energy in the room at that event and Hammad and I decided to develop an idea we had for a curatorial project on Li that could also speak to some of the larger themes we’ve been exploring through the London, Asia project –complex topics such as migration and diaspora, how to account for the local and global in dialogue, the figures who are not included in the histories of modern British art (despite, in Li’s case, living and working as an artist in Britain for over thirty years, and being highly regarded by his contemporaries), as well as issues of language, translation, understanding/misunderstanding. Li’s practice as an artist and curator and what he enabled at the LYC Museum & Art Gallery (exhibiting the work of over 300 artists in a decade) lays down a challenge to established or conventional methods – he was an experimental disruptor! The LYC Museum was established in some buildings that Li bought from fellow artist and friend, Winifred Nicholson in the early 1970s. Bringing Li and Nicholson together –not just biographically – but also within a history of art that takes seriously friendship as a creative act is one of our interests in curating this group show; it brings together Li’s work with some of the artists who were important to the LYC, as well as the work of contemporary artists who are interested in Li’s ideas and practices at the LYC. We very specifically didn’t want to curate a monographic exhibition with a few other artists for comparative purposes.
Li Yuan-chia, Untitled, 1994, hand-coloured black and white print. Digital image courtesy of LYC Foundation, Li Yuan-chia Archive, The University of Manchester Library.
Photo: Vipul Sangoi. (British Art Studies, issue 12 - Fig. 20)
We’re staging this at Kettle’s Yard, which is part of the University of Cambridge. It’s now a gallery and museum space that was also a home to Jim and Helen Ede, so the coexistence of art and life is a strong thread. Several artists in the exhibition were connected both with Cambridge and Cumbria (and beyond!). It’s going to range from flower painting to experimental film-making and include artists from different parts of the world. The challenge of this exhibition is how to weave all these threads together and create a narrative and experience for audiences that inspires them to want to find out more. Many people will not have heard of Li Yuan-chia before.
The exhibition is research – of course, it’s different to a book, but we will have print and digital publications to accompany the exhibition, as well a busy programme of events. I really like how exhibitions offer a way to channel energy – you have to do a tremendous amount of practical work just to make them happen (the loan requests, the conservation, the framing, the writing of labels etc). Once the exhibition opens, that’s an invitation for others to build further on your work. I think exhibitions are very visible, tangible stepping stones for the histories of art.
In 2017, you initiated the ‘Write on Art’ competition, along with Art UK. This is aimed at 15–18-year-olds, and is designed to encourage an interest in art history among young people. We’ve heard a lot over the years about how art history has been viewed as a pretty exclusive subject for school students, and has arguably become only more so. At this juncture, how do you feel about the future of British art history? I do feel positive. There are undoubtedly huge challenges faced by our sector. But these challenges are shaking things up and asking us hard questions about the way things operate and are structured. I think the main thing is to be open to change, challenge and disruption.
