British Art News: Newsletter of the British Art Network, May 2024

BRITISH ART NEWS

The British Art Network (BAN) promotes curatorial research, practice and theory in the field of British art. Our members include curators, academics, artist-researchers, conservators, producers and programmers at all stages of their professional lives. All are actively engaged in caring for, developing and presenting British art, whether in museums, galleries, heritage settings or art spaces, in published form, online or in educational settings, across the UK and beyond.

CONVENOR’S INTRODUCTION

This issue of the newsleter features pieces by Members whose primary focus is architecture – places, spaces, buildings, their use and representation.

We have invited contributions from a range of Members engaging with architectural history, theory and practice. The resulting pieces – some case studies, some critical essays, some more personal reflections – reflect an array of disciplinary, critical and professional orientations.

The presentation of these pieces puts a spotlight on the range and vitality of architectural thinking around the membership. It begs the question, though, of how architecture fits (or doesn’t fit) under the heading of ‘British art’, the rubric which inevitably helps define perceptions of the Network. There has certainly been no expressive prohibition or barrier to researchers and practitioners engaging with architecture in the context of BAN, and there have been times when architecture has been mentioned in the range of relevant topics or media. Place-making and space have certainly been topics within some BAN-supported activities, even if we have not previously sought to address architecture explicitly. But while the Network’s covering statement currently states we address ‘curatorial research, practice and theory in the field of British art’, it makes no direct reference to architecture.

The ways in which ‘architecture’ might be folded in with, but not always wholly identified with, ‘art’, are complex and rather unpredictable. As the academics Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams have charted in their book The Architecture of Art History (2019), ‘architectural history has rarely been regarded as central to what art history departments do and why students want to study in them; architectural history’s very existence in art history departments often baffles students’. 1 Similarly, the provision of architectural training has been divided off from art schools. Architectural history i s not always taught in depth as part of Art History courses in the UK, nor in schools. Within visual studies and museology, architecture is addressed through remediations, or as a cipher for power relations. Among national collections, ‘the national collection of British art’ at Tate has painting and graphic arts, limited historic sculpture and historic and modern architecture feature only in mediated form.

Crucially, ‘art’ is often envisaged as having critical, oppositional potential, whereas architecture (as a complex enterprise involving relatively large amounts of capital) is

1 Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams, The Architecture of Art History: A Historiography (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), 7.

imagined as always compromised. Yet, arguably architecture is always present and social in ways that artworks are not (at least as set up by galleries and aesthetic discourse). As Crinson and Williams observe, ‘Unlike the picture frame, the architectural work is never completely separate from the non-architectural’.2

Pieces appearing here demonstrate architecture as repository of memories, and remark upon the interaction of voices, bodies and experience with spaces, the nonseparation of the architectural and non-architectural, or the possible identification of the interior of a book and a building. These pieces represent architectural engagements involving detours and digressions – in terms of career paths, disciplinary and media-based norms or conventions. These possibilities surface at different points across the short articles and personal reflections provided here. So Roshan Mishra, an alumnus of our Curatorial Forum in 2023, shares the history and current position of the Nepal Architecture Archive, while Anthony Tino, our colleague within the BAN team, explores the disruptive potential in the alignment of liberatory theories around books and buildings. Carine Harmand, a curator at Tate, shares the redistributive potential of a project organised by a creative collective and

2 Crinson and Williams, The Architecture of Art History, 1.

BAN Curatorial Forum 2023. Photo by Emile Holba

located between, in the crossing of, Tate Liverpool and RIBA North, and Rían Kearney (Emerging Curators Group 2021) considers the threats to collective memory poised by architectural and cultural redevelopment. The shorter Member statements included here point to the sliding disciplinary and curatorial alignments which might lead to architectural research, curation and criticism.

If these various pieces seem to point to possible futures for our field, they might also point us back to earlier histories. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, architectural criticism and history were not separated out from art history, and art history was not, perhaps, so distinguished from curating or criticism (think Ruskin, or closer to our own time the curator-scholar Michael Baxandall). Meanwhile, curators and arts administrators were usually trained as artists or architects.

The disciplinary stability (or appearance of stability) around ‘art history’, which largely excludes or minimalises architecture, emerged only in the mid-twentieth century, and the atempt to fix a relationship between that discipline and the practice of curation has a still more recent vintage, dating surely only to the expansion of university teaching of art history in the 1960s. It may be, given the sense of crisis around university teaching of the discipline of art history and its virtual extinction in schools, that we are already approaching the other side of that moment of disciplinary stability.

The evidence presented by our members here suggests that the ‘British art’ of our organisational title (commonly hidden within our acronym BAN rather than stated out loud) is expansive enough or vague enough to quite readily include architectural thinking and engagement. Whether the ‘curating’ we adhere to in our mission statements is similarly accommodating, and how else we might set some sort of boundary or give definition to the aggregation of activities that our members engage in – whether research, activism, conservation, learning practice, criticism, curation or creative work – remains an open question.

Martin Myrone BAN Convenor

ABOUT THE COVER IMAGE & ANNOUNCING NEW BRITISH ART

UNCANON ARTICLES

The cover image features a photograph taken by curator Kirsty Ogg on the 1997 opening of EASTinternational, an open-submission exhibition which took place annually from 1991 to 2009. The exhibition is the focus of an article by Jonathan P. Watts, written as part of a new series of articles for the British Art UnCanon, BAN’s ‘virtual collection’ of images collectively curated by BAN members.

The new British Art UnCanon articles include:

“a thing of beauty” by Charmaine Beneyto

“the curious question of Chineseness: The Royal Pavilion” by Clare Chun-yu Liu

‘The Unknowns’ by Lindsey Cox

“indelicate process” by Kirsty Jukes

“not a still life but a rebus” by Rhian Addison McCreanor

“the power of restraint” by Debbie Meniru

“beyond surface resemblances” by Samuel Shaw

“centering practice” by Jonathan P. Watts

Read the new series of UnCanon articles on the BAN website.

NEW TEAM MEMBER

Introducing a member of the British Art Network team from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Rosie Jennings, Network Membership and Communication Assistant

I am delighted to be joining the BAN team as Networks Membership and Communications Assistant, based at the Paul Mellon Centre. In this role, I will be assisting with membership administration, including maintaining the membership database and membership directory, in addition to sending you communications and maintaining the BAN website.

Prior to taking up this role, I studied History of Art (BA) at the University of Birmingham and worked at the London Symphony Orchestra and Katherine Ara Studio.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the exciting work that BAN members do, and to meeting many of you at future events.

Rosie Jennings

ROSHAN MISHRA

NEPAL’S ARCHITECTURAL REPOSITORY

Established in 2016, the Nepal Architecture Archive (NAA) houses studies by scholars and practitioners, both local and international, concentrating on Nepal’s architectural evolution over time.

The collection of NAA began to develop when the Saraf Foundation, the umbrella organisation, aimed to renovate and preserve the Taragaon Hotel (previously Taragaon Museum/now Taragaon Next) in 2009 and transform it into a Documentation Centre. The goal was to document the contributions of artists, photographers, architects, anthropologists and Sanskritists from abroad in the second half of the twentieth century to identify, highlight and preserve the cultural heritage of the Kathmandu Valley.

Nepal’s recent history began in 1950, when Nepal was formally opened for exploration. Before this time, this landlocked kingdom was not widely explored. Therefore, the archive aimed to document the architectural history of Nepal, mainly focusing on the Kathmandu Valley. Once the Nepal Architecture Archive was established, the foundation began connecting with architects and scholars who

Wolfgang Korn, Kasthamandap, courtesy of Nepal Architecture Archive worked and lived in Nepal. This was important to understand and preserve the architectural history of the Kathmandu Valley and beyond.

Many architectural initiatives began with foreign involvement, exemplified by projects like the Bungamati survey conducted by Danish students in 1967, the Pujarimath Renovation in 1971, the Bhaktapur Development Project in 1974, and the Restoration of Cyasilin Mandap in 1987. These initiatives extensively documented various architectural elements, encompassing vernacular settlements, palace squares and surrounding monuments. In contrast, scholars and historians such as Mary Slusser, Niels Gutschow and Wolfgang Korn contributed to the field through published books focused on architecture and heritage research. However, the materials from these works, comprising research, photographs, drawings and plans, remained dispersed among different individuals. Documenting the recent history of Nepal had never been attempted before. Therefore, the foundation initiated NAA so that this transitional history could be captured and preserved, foreseeing the risk of losing scattered documents. Since many individuals and

scholars were still working in Nepal, it was easier for the foundation to connect with them and acquire materials that might have otherwise been lost or discarded.

When the Taragaon Museum was opened in 2014, it displayed around 150 works acquired from scholars and individuals, and since the establishment of the Nepal Architecture Archive, the collection has grown from 150 to almost 100,000 items. This collection has now become one of Nepal’s most important architectural collections. The importance of the collection was further realised after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Many heritage sites were damaged or collapsed, and there were no blueprints for many buildings and monuments to reconstruct and renovate. In Kathmandu, the most important fifth-century rest house, ‘Kasthamandap’, completely collapsed. It was one of the important buildings in the valley from which Kathmandu derives its name. In the 1970s, the rest house was measured by German draftsman Wolfgang Korn, who donated his drawing to the archive. This drawing was the only existing scaled drawing available for use as a reference for rebuilding. The foundation was able to collaborate with UNESCO and provide the drawing to the reconstruction team. The new structure of Kasthamandap was then built, based on the drawing from the archive. This is just one example; the archive has extensive documentation of places like Bungamati, Kirtipur, Bhaktapur, Patan, Kathmandu, Swayambhu and other many sites. These locations carry significant historical and architectural importance. The archive

Niels Gutschow, Götz Hagmüller, Surendra Joshi, Cyalisin also conducts surveys, Mandap, courtesy of Nepal Architecture Archive

collaborations and documents other historically important sites. Currently, the foundation is working with Heidelberg University to document monument sites in the Kathmandu Valley. The archive was envisioned to begin collecting architectural documentation. When NAA started receiving materials, all types of materials came with it. Currently, NAA consists of a comprehensive collection of sketches, photographs, architectural drawings, slides, negatives, films, handwritten documents, reference materials and rare books. Until now, the archive has been accessible on a request basis. This year, the archive plans to migrate its collection to a collection management system to make it accessible to local and global audiences. Currently, the Nepal Architecture Archive displays its selected and curated collection in the Taragaon Museum, which is within Taragaon Next. The current curated show, Archiving for the Future, is open to the public every day, showcasing the architectural history of Nepal.

Leonhard Stramitz, Swayambhu, courtesy of Nepal Architecture Archive

The Nepal Architecture Archive is open to collaboration and research with institutions around the world that wish to conduct work on Nepal’s history, culture, tradition and heritage.

RÍAN KEARNEY

THOUGHTS ON THE ACCESSIBILITY AND PERMANENCY OF EXHIBITIONS AND ARCHIVES OF DISPLACEMENT

At the time of writing, I am working my way through the hours of interview recordings that I have been putting off transcribing for weeks. As part of my ongoing research on the history of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ venues, I have been asking those who atended these spaces from the 1960s to the 1980s to draw them from memory. While sketching, interviewees describe just about anything that comes to mind: the colour and texture of the furniture, the pulsating vibrations of Hi-NRG, and the sex behind a thick, black curtain dividing the dancefloor. Few photographs of these venues exist, and many have long since been demolished due to redevelopment.

Birmingham’s Gay Village came into existence in the late 1980s thanks to the availability of large industrial premises and cheaper rents south of the city centre.3 In recent years, however, residential developments have been built on many of the now-derelict industrial sites and car parks that were once scatered across the Village. Since 2019, a quarter of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ venues have closed or were forced to move.4 Now is as good a time as any to share histories of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ venues and their ongoing fight for space, but I find myself oscillating between issues of exhibition efficacy and archival permanence.

Exhibitions are a format I have worked with previously. In 2019, I interviewed those who atended Birmingham’s longest-running LGBTQ+ venue, The Nightingale Club, and tasked them with drawing its previous venues from memory. These drawings were displayed alongside excerpts from the interviews and 3D renderings produced by Intervention Architecture in an exhibition titled The Club’s Conception (or, How the Egg Was Cracked) at Recent Activity, a project space in Digbeth in May 2019. A second iteration of the exhibition was presented at Birmingham Hippodrome in November 2019 on the site where the club previously stood.

3 Alan Collins, ‘Sexual Dissidence, Enterprise and Assimilation: Bedfellows in Urban Regeneration’, Urban Studies 41, no 9 (2004): 1719, htps://doi.org/10.1080/0042098042000243156.

4 Rían Kearney, ‘Museums, Galleries, and Archives of LGBTQ+ Displacement’, in Queer Exhibition Histories, ed. Bas Hendrikx (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023), 67.

A couple of years have passed, and exhibitions seem to be becoming a difficult medium for information sharing, particularly in the Midlands where galleries have been faced with temporary closures and cuts to funding. The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has been shut since 2020 due to essential maintenance work and, in February 2024, the now-bankrupt Birmingham City Council announced a 100 per cent cut to arts funding by 2026.5 Though this funding gap has now been plugged by a government grant, these cuts told the people of Birmingham that its arts and culture were non-essential.6 Exhibition-making is in an increasingly precarious position.

Public archives are an alternative to exhibitions, but these are not without issues of accessibility. Unlike displays in galleries and museums, archives require visitors to register, pre-select the materials they would like to see and reserve and make an appointment. This is a process that many of us as researchers have grown accustomed to, but it is a barrier for many.

Web archives offer a means for accessing information from home, negating the bureaucracy of the archive. As data scholar Cassie Findlay puts it:

We need to shake off the vision of the impartial archivist safe in her fortress (and her cardigan) and look to the coder/recordkeeper making truly alternative systems of memory available to the marginalised, the vulnerable, and to the journalist/archivist releasing records with the power to shift the course of global affairs, and making sure they remain available and usable forever.7

The activist’s archive is digital, distanced from the traditional, often-times stuffy origins of record-keeping. Writing on the displacement and redevelopment of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, urban scholar Susan Pell refers to the 2016 Opposite: installation view, ‘If Memory Serves’, Birmingham Hippodrome, November 2019. Photo: John Fallon.

5 Cathy Wade, ‘What’s Next for Birmingham’s Cultural Institutions and Galleries?’ Frieze, 2023, htps://www.frieze.com/article/whats-next-birminghams-cultural-institutions-and-galleries; and Gareth Harris, ‘“Cease Funding for Cultural Projects”: Arts Institutions in Birmingham, UK, Face 100% Cuts’, The Art Newspaper, 21 February 2024, htps://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/02/21/cease-funding-for-cultural-projects-arts-institutionsin-the-uks-birmingham-face-100-cuts.

6 Simon Gilbert, ‘Arts Funding Boost for West Midlands after Council Cuts’, BBC News, 7 March 2024, section Birmingham & Black Country, htps://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxeznd7pkl6o.

7 Cassie Findlay, ‘Archival Activism’, Archives and Manuscripts 44, no. 3 (2016): 158, htps://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2016.1263964 .

website Heygate Was Home (www.heygatewashome.org), which shares interviews with displaced residents.8 Heygate Was Home is an online resource for those who lived on the estate or who are experiencing a similar form of displacement at the hands of local councils and developers.9 At the time of writing, however, this website is no longer accessible, nor are the interviews and resources it once held. This is not a criticism of Heygate Was Here, but it evidences the issues of permanency that digital resources face. There are costs associated with maintaining an online presence and a single missed payment or expiration of a domain name can render information inaccessible. This is not necessarily a concern for an organisation with means, but for a community-run ini�ative, it can be difficult to meet the burden of indefinite costs and administration.

An understanding of the history and efforts of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ people is essential for overcoming ongoing threats of redevelopment and venue closure. We deserve the opportunity to access history with ease and on our own terms. Whatever form this might take, I would like to ensure it is an accessible and permanent means.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, Alan. ‘Sexual Dissidence, Enterprise and Assimila�on: Bedfellows in Urban Regenera�on’. Urban Studies 41, no. 9 (2004): 1789–1806. htps://doi.org/10.1080/0042098042000243156.

Findlay, Cassie. ‘Archival Ac�vism’. Archives and Manuscripts 44, no. 3 (2016): 155–59. htps://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2016.1263964.

Gilbert, Simon. ‘Arts Funding Boost for West Midlands a�er Council Cuts’. BBC News, 7 March 2024, sec�on Birmingham & Black Country. htps://www.bbc.com/news/ar�cles/cxeznd7pkl6o.

Harris, Gareth. ‘“Cease Funding for Cultural Projects”: Arts Ins�tu�ons in Birmingham, UK, Face 100% Cuts’. The Art Newspaper, 21 February 2024.

8 Susan Pell, ‘Documenting the Fight for the City: The Impact of Activist Archives on Anti-Gentrification Campaigns’, in Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice, ed. David A. Wallace, Wendy M Duff, Renée Saucier and Andrew Flinn (London: Routledge, 2020), 179.

9 Pell, ‘Documenting the Fight for the City’ , 179.

htps://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/02/21/cease-funding-for-culturalprojects-arts-ins�tu�ons-in-the-uks-birmingham-face-100-cuts .

Kearney, Rían. ‘Museums, Galleries, and Archives of LGBTQ+ Displacement’. In Queer Exhibition Histories, edited by Bas Hendrikx. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2023, 67–76.

Pell, Susan. ‘Documen�ng the Fight for the City: The Impact of Ac�vist Archives on An�-Gentrifica�on Campaigns’. In Archives, Recordkeeping, and Social Justice, edited by David A. Wallace, Wendy M. Duff, Renée Saucier and Andrew Finn. London: Routledge, 2020, 169–82

Wade, Cathy. ‘What’s Next for Birmingham’s Cultural Ins�tu�ons and Galleries?’ Frieze, 2023. htps://www.frieze.com/ar�cle/whats-next-birminghamscultural-ins�tu�ons-and-galleries.

CARINE HARMAND

YOU GET A CAR [EVERYBODY GETS A CAR]: RESOLVE COLLECTIVE AT TATE LIVERPOOL X RIBA NORTH: TRIALLING A MODEL FOR REDISTRIBUTION OF RESOURCES

Tate Liverpool closed its doors in October 2023 for a major redevelopment. However, only its building has closed; during the planned two years of closure, Tate Liverpool has moved into RIBA North’s space, collaborating with the architecture organisation on delivering a programme of exhibitions and events which explore the themes of Art, Architecture and the Environment. Thus, it made sense that for our first project in this new space, we work with RESOLVE Collective, a group of creatives who combine architecture, engineering, technology and art to encourage community empowerment and address urgent societal and environmental challenges.

When a museum shuts its doors for major renovation, we often don’t hear about the amount of material that goes to waste in the process. This was a question we asked

ourselves at Tate Liverpool in advance of the building closing last October. Although some material was redistributed and re-used across Tate’s networks in Liverpool to save them from landfills, we invited RESOLVE Collective to think creatively with us about material redistribution.

Used to working in community empowerment and tackling questions of power redistribution, RESOLVE designed You Get a Car [Everybody Gets a Car]: an experimental process that redistributes materials and knowledge from the currently closed Tate Liverpool building. The project supports creative community-focused endeavours across the city of Liverpool, for an environmentally sustainable, more circular economy.

The title, You Get a Car [Everybody Gets a Car], references a well-known quote from a 2004 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s TV show, in which she surprised her audience by gifting every person a car. Here, the title evokes an ideal of shared resources, at the same time as playing with contradictory capitalist and unsustainable values (everyone should have a car). It also highlights RESOLVE’s intent to honestly and openly address the way institutions may struggle to follow through on promises, acknowledging what is possible, or not, within the constraints of time and budget.

You Get a Car [Everybody Gets a Car]: RESOLVE Collective documentation film by Darren Brady, 2024

The redistribution process RESOLVE conceived functions on different levels. The first one is by engaging with specific community spaces and responding to their needs. This ranges from bringing in furniture from the old Tate building and redesigning layouts, to building shelving and storage units with materials we used to build our exhibitions with. The second level of redistribution is to redistribute furniture and materials that are no longer needed by Tate through a series of free giveaway events. These events are organised with community organisations in different areas of Liverpool, so the material can be shared across their area and networks.

The exhibition currently open at Tate Liverpool x RIBA North is only one part of this wider redistribution project. It documents the redistribution process and brings together stories and objects from some of the organisations that collaborated with RESOLVE. The objects and videos in this space give insight into the work of these organisations. They demonstrate different models of community service and show how these groups share similar visions, values and hopes for a society based on creativity, sustainability, community building, social exchange and mutual support.

The furniture, lockers, plinths and building materials that make the show have all been re-purposed from Tate’s dockside home. In the spirit of redistribution, the public are invited to inhabit and interact with this space, which will be activated through public events and workshops.

RESOLVE’s exhibition You Get a Car [Everybody Gets a Car] at Tate Liverpool + RIBA North is open until 14 July 2024.

Opposite: Press Photography of RESOLVE Collective installation at RIBA North, Tate Liverpool, February 2024 ©Tate 2023 Photo ©Tate 2023 (Joe Humphrys)

ANTHONY TINO

IF A BUILDING IS A BOOK, THEN A NEIGHBOURHOOD IS AN ARCHIVE: CULTURAL POLICY AND SPATIAL PRACTICES 1

The sociologist Kenneth Thompson suggests that culture is not necessarily determined by economic forces, but ‘enjoys some relative autonomy and is the site of struggles over meaning’.2 With architecture, which demands enormous amounts of capital to complete projects, how can culture function beyond the principle of capital? Historically, iconic works of architecture have come to be associated with displays of political, religious and ideological power. Yet these structures, as lavish and ambitious as they were, have gone on to inspire culture far beyond what can easily be quantified within monetary terms.

Architecture plays a unique role within contemporary society in the sense that it is consistently in relation to people who interact with it. Without the presence of a human body, architecture has no meaning. More importantly, the social relationships which are shaped by a building or a community’s design will designate behaviour along power lines, notably that divide inhabitants from visitors. These delineations of power are often expressed architecturally within a building’s design.

How does this dynamic factor into contemporary architecture and design, especially within the public sphere? How is this at play within contemporary heritage and cultural institutions such as museums and public libraries, given efforts to break down these power distinctions? For museums or galleries as an industry, exhibitions which are temporary, rotate and provide new experiences to the visitor each time to build new associations based on entertainment. Exhibitions can serve the purpose of providing hegemonic legibility, inserting a mass-media element to the heritage sector.

The DCMS model of cultural industries would classify mass-media and associated formats as occupying the lowest or ‘least creative’ end of the cultural spectrum. But I would argue that mass media has been essential to maintaining architectural and heritage practices since at least the early twentieth century. From fliers posted in

1 Adapted from Anthony Tino, ‘If a Building is a Book, then a Neighbourhood is an Archive: Cultural Policy and Spatial Practices’, MA Arts Administration & Cultural Policy dissertation, Goldsmiths University, submited fall 2022.

2 Kenneth Thompson, Media and Cultural Regulation (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 11.

public places, cheap photocopies, and low-brow circulars to religious texts, novelty manuscripts and unique artists’ books, printed materials are simultaneously bound to heritage and defy easy categorisation within the cultural industries.

There are some intrinsic aspects of books which make them particularly powerful vehicles of communication. Their circulation as a multiple defies certain spatial constraints that apply to other formats. While the multiple allows for many (even millions of) people to read the same text, those texts must also be consumed privately, creating an intimate relationship between the reader and the text. As with architectural spaces, meaning is manifested through the presence of a person. While the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has theorised on how the public sphere has inverted architecture through the proliferation of the internet stating that ‘social life takes place not in the streets or even the living room, but in the car, the bathroom on the toilet – and above all in

Aleksei Gan and Ivan Leonidov, SA. Sovremennaia Arkhitektura [CA. Contemporary Architecture] 6 (1927). Image courtesy of GetArchive

bed, floating alone without bedroom, house or city’, I would argue that the internet is following a trajectory already established by books and publishing in general.3

Colomina’s theories would suggest that experiencing an architectural space can be accomplished through engaging with its mediation, suggesting that a building’s meaning extends into a much more sensory realm. In this way, the building can be read, like a book, within private spaces, rendering the previously perceived public sphere of architectural space much more metaphysical. Ultimately, the meaning of an architectural structure such as a building is drawn from one’s ability to understand its language, navigate its pages and index its information in a way that makes sense.

from Your House, edited by Olafur

2006, Artist's book, 27.4 x 43 x 10.5 cm,

Bonakdar Gallery, New York 2006, published by the Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, © 2006 Olafur Eliasson

3 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Privacy and Publicity in the Age of Social Media’, in Public Space? Lost and Found, ed. Gediminas

Spread

Eliasson,

Photo: Tanya

Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman (Cambridge, MA: SA+P Press, 2017), 254–61.

Technology has provided opportunities for publications to break away from their physical constraints, further libera�ng the practice of publishing from restrictive definitions. Marian Macken writes that within the practice of book arts, this ‘includes multiple media such as video, performance, e-books etc… it is works that are a bound collection of ideas – bound in the sense of relating closely, rather than referring to a structure of format’.4 If these theories can liberate the book from its codex, then what perforations can be made within the heritage sector? How can we create an architectural literacy that is fluid within cultural analysis that replaces the model which positions the building as a stand-in for power and embrace a community consciousness?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colomina, Beatriz. ‘Privacy and Publicity in the Age of Social Media’. In Public Space? Lost and Found, edited by Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman. Cambridge, MA: SA+P Press, 2017

Macken, Marian. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice. London: Routledge, 2018. Thompson, Kenneth. Media and Cultural Regulation. London: Sage Publica�ons, 1997.

4 Marian Macken, Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice (London: Routledge, 2018), 3.

ARCHITECTURE: PERSPECTIVES FROM BAN MEMBERS

The perspectives below were written by BAN Members in response to an invitation to reflect on their research and curatorial practice in the context of architecture.

VALERIA CARULLO

When I completed my master’s degree in architecture, I was s�ll convinced I was going to become an architect; however, I’ve had a passion from photography since I was a teenager and serendipity (and an EU grant) led me to a work placement at the RIBA Photographs Collec�on. This was the beginning of a career I never imagined for myself, although history of art and architecture had always been among my favourite subjects –knowledge in these areas is of course essen�al in order to work with architectural archives and collections.

I suppose being a curator fits my skills like no other job and I feel privileged to curate such an amazing collection, and lucky to have been able to combine two of my passions, architecture and photography – and what about my love of literature, cinema and all the other visual arts? Developing knowledge of my subject in the context of these disciplines has made me a beter curator, because none of them exists in isolation. Curating an architectural exhibition, for example, presents its own set of challenges, because o�en requires representing in two dimensions what can intrinsically only be understood as volume.

Film, photography and the graphic arts can complement drawings to develop a creative narrative that, of course, cannot replace the experience of visiting a building or an urban environment but can help us interpret both. An interdisciplinary approach is also implicit when it comes to curating architectural photography, which in itself requires knowledge of two disciplines; in addition, architecture and photography have often influenced each other in the course of their history. Finding the time to keep up to date with contemporary architectural developments too is a big challenge, because we collection curators tend to work with historic material, but I believe it is also an important aspect of our job.

Having completed a master’s degree in architecture and worked both as photographer’s assistant and assistant curator, I have now been Photographs Curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects for twelve years. My main area of research is the relationship between modern architecture and modern photography in the interwar years.

CAROLINE DAKERS

I am a cultural historian with a background in English Literature and my approach to architecture almost always involves the construc�on of narra�ve.

Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (Yale University Press, 1993) is a key example. While the design of the Victorian architect Philip Webb was of significance, I was more interested in how his patrons (Percy and Madeline Wyndham) used their ‘power-house’ as a place for social, ar�s�c and poli�cal networking. Henry James was a guest and maybe used it as the model for The Spoils of Poynton (1896–1897).

The Victorian ar�sts’ studio-houses at the centre of The Holland Park Circle (Yale University Press, 1999) were designed by leading architects of the day, Richard Norman Shaw, Philip Webb and George Aitchison. My focus, however, was on their effectiveness as ‘showcases of art’, supporting their owners’ (the artists) ambitions not only to make money but also to be accepted in society as gentlemen. Writen up for public consumption, the houses were also effective in hiding the artists’ private lives.

For several years, I have been creating narratives around the iconic buildings on the Fonthill estate, close to where I live in Wiltshire. Here, the central focus is on the cycle of destruction, since the sixteenth century, followed by re- and new building.

In my forthcoming book, Bohemian or Gentleman (Princeton University Press), I return to the studio and its allure for the general public, continuing the narrative up to the Second World War. I also look at the extraordinary number of art schools built across the whole country in the second half of the nineteenth century. These schools

were the subject of civic pride, along with new libraries, museums and galleries – a sad contrast with the government’s current attitude to art education.

I am pleased my early research has a continuing life. My MA at the Royal College of Art on Victorian country-house collections fed into the Paul Mellon project on Art and the Country House, while Clouds is the starting point for my essay on Webb’s patrons to be included in the catalogue for the forthcoming Webb exhibition at the Bard in New York and at the V&A.

My current research is towards: two books: ‘Bohemian or gentleman? The image of the artist in the popular imagination 1850–1950’ (Princeton University Press); and an edition of essays, ‘Alfred Morrison 1821–1896. Millionaire Shopping’ (UCL Press); two contributions to exhibition catalogues: ‘The Little Holland House Salon’ for Patledom at Watts Gallery; and ‘Webb’s patrons’ for Philip Webb at the Bard NY and V&A; and four essays for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Sigismund Goetze, Laura Alma-Tadema, Helen Thornycroft and Clara Montalba.

ALEXANDRA BANISTER

My research examines women’s voices in the shaping of modernity in the context of Bri�sh architecture of the interwar period. My PhD thesis – ‘Designing the Domes�c: Women's Wri�ng on Architecture and Design’ – forms part of a larger ongoing shift in the way women’s roles in the making of the built environment is understood. It builds on existing work that re-evaluates traditional architectural histories by positing that women played a larger role in the demand for, and the design of, modern ways of living than previously suggested.

Seeing architecture very much as a collaborative and collective endeavour, my work aims to connect the dots between these networks of women in the interwar period: from architects and designers, to planners and policymakers, housewives and professionals, to journalists and social commentators. Key to this is an engagement with what I term ‘architecture on the page’: the premise that architectural history

comprises more than just physical buildings, but also the formulation and dissemination of ideas through the writen word.

An unexplored site for these discussions are the pages of women’s magazines. Through their architectural and design features, such as photospreads of the homes of prominent social and cultural figures and through recommendations for new labour-saving devices, and their international subscription schemes which took these titles to colonised nations, these magazines engaged with a diverse readership of women. In highlighting these previously unheard voices – both in terms of readership and contribution – and by considering architecture through writing, we can expand the architectural canon to reveal women’s contributions.

Alexandra Banister is currently completing her PhD at Oxford Brookes University. She serves as a Trustee of the Design History Society and has previously worked at the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

MOIRA LASCELLES

What is in a discipline? I studied History of Architecture and when I graduated, I worked as a curator looking at ways to engage those beyond the architecture profession in the world of architecture. Because the built environment is vital to all of us but is often shaped by a small handful of individuals.

While working for the London Festival of Architecture and as Deputy Director of the Architecture Foundation I found new and innovative ways of bringing architecture to life – making it relevant to those who may never have thought about what architects do. I worked on events and exhibitions but quickly was taken by the power of working on live projects as a way of bringing ‘architecture’ to life. I activated sites across the city, turning forgoten pockets of the public realm into community gardens, transforming vacant buildings into artist studios or thinking about new ways that architects and designers could bring new life to the high street. These projects saw me working not only with architects but

also with communities who may never have thought about these projects as ‘architecture’ but who, through engagement with them, began to see the power that architects and designers can have.

And then, in 2019, I transitioned to the ‘artworld’ becoming Deputy Director and now Executive Director of UP Projects, a leading public art commissioning organisation that specialises in social practice – meaning we engage communities through the process of creating ambitious public art projects. Although in some ways the two worlds are quite different with their own unique eco systems, in many ways, the work I am doing is the same… just now the creatives I work with often (but not always) define themselves as artists. At UP Projects, I have continued to work to activate sites across cities through performance, new commissions and meanwhile projects that have allowed people to feel more empowered to have a say in what their neighbourhoods or public spaces should look like.

And though these projects are now defined as public art, they are not far off what I was doing when I was situated within the world of architecture. I work often as part of wider design teams with architects, planners, landscape designers, projects managers and others to bring places to life through the integration of artist-led work. Because ultimately the goal is the same – to ensure our built environment reflects the diversity of the communities it serves and that creative practice (be that architectural or artistic) is harnessed as an agent for social change.

Moira Lascelles is Executive Director of UP Projects, the UK’s leading public art commissioning organisation specialised in social practice. Moira’s curatorial practice is firmly situated within public contexts, working beyond the walls of the gallery to engage communities and the broader public in artist-led live projects, commissions and events. Past clients and partners include the British Council, the GLA, the London Legacy Development Corporation, the V&A, the Barbican and the Royal Academy of Art. She is an Arts Emergency Mentor and a member of the Curatorial Panel for the London Festival of Architecture 2024. Moira holds a first-class master’s degree in History of Architecture and German from the University of Edinburgh.

CONTACTING BAN

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You can also contact the British Art Network team directly: for contact details, see here. For more information on the British Art Network and all the Research Groups, including their contact details, visit the BAN website.

The British Art Network is supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Cover image: photograph taken by curator Kirsty Ogg on the 1997 opening of EASTinternational