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 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

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

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 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.

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

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