PMC Notes No. 19
Permindar Kaur at Ikon Gallery Page 23
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity committed to promoting original research into the history of British art and architecture. It is a part of Yale University and its activities and resources include research events, public lectures, publications, fellowships, grants programmes, and a library and archival collection. PMC Notes, the Centre’s newsletter, is published three times per year.
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Sculpting in Sound 17
Cold Comfort and Cultural Identity 23
The Chaney of St. Croix 31
Director’s Note 3
New Books 5
PMC Notes No. 19
Encountering Colonial Photography
Welcome to this issue of PMC Notes. There is much news to report. First of all, this autumn will see the launch of the Paul Mellon Centre’s online photographic archive. Producing, collecting and cataloguing reference photographs of works of British art was, for many years, a central strand of the Centre’s activity. Our photographic archive, consisting of more than 100,000 works, has now been scanned, catalogued and optimised for a new digital collections platform. Users will be able to search, compare, study and download high-quality images in ways that have never previously been possible. Our platform will also include a series of newly commissioned scholarly texts that highlight the archive’s interest and relevance for contemporary researchers, while a set of short films will explore the archive from the points of view of an artist, curator, art historian, dealer, archivist and photographer. This resource will open up a new world of research possibilities, and I urge you to explore it when it goes live in November. I would also like to alert you to the packed research and learning events programme we have in store for the coming months, which testifies to the kinds of scholarly collaboration that are at the heart of the Centre’s work. The programme includes a new series of Paul Mellon lectures, organised with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art, in which a group of leading museum directors will address the state of the museum and gallery today. We will also be hosting an
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Mark Hallett Director of Studies
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Director’s Note
online conference exploring the dynamics of collage in modern British art, and a series of webinars looking at landscape print series in late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. These initiatives have been developed with colleagues from Tate Britain and the British Library respectively. In a similar spirit, and on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, we have worked with The Photographer’s Gallery to organise a set of events exploring networks of photographic practice, display and exhibition in modern Britain. Finally, the autumn will see us hosting numerous lunchtime research seminars, and running a Public Lecture Course with the title “Black British Art and Political Activism”, convened by Elizabeth Robles of the University of Bristol. I hope you will join us for at least some of these events. I also want to use this opportunity to mark an important moment in the development of the British Art Network, which we are so delighted to support. The network, which promotes curatorial research, practice and theory in the field of British art, now has its own website, which you can access at britishartnetwork.org.uk. I encourage you to visit the website to find out more about the network and its many activities. Above all, however, I invite you to enjoy the essays that make up this issue of PMC Notes. As always, they provide an insight into new kinds of research being undertaken on British art, which we are now communicating through an ever-expanding range of outlets, from the monograph and the journal to the podcast and the film.
This biographical dictionary of engravers working on copper encompasses both those who produced fine art prints, and those who engraved book illustrations for medical, technical and literary works. Some 4,000 biographical entries draw on much unpublished information, researched over four decades, notably records of apprenticeship, genealogy, insurance and bankruptcy as well as newspaper advertisements and contemporary accounts. Many biographical entries describe celebrated engravers producing ‘fine art’ prints of paintings. However, this book also builds up a more complex picture of the occupation of printmaking and includes engravers, many previously unresearched, who engraved ephemeral material, such as trade cards, bank notes, and satirical prints as well as the images that spread knowledge across all fields: literary, geographical, historical, topographical, medical and technical.
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A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820 David Alexander
Publication date November 2021 Dimensions 235 x 156 mm Pages 1120 Illustrations no illus.
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A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640 Mark Girouard
Publication date October 2021 Dimensions 235 x 156 mm Pages 360 Illustrations no illus.
New Books
This long-awaited work of scholarship provides a comprehensive dictionary of everyone of importance in the creation of English architecture in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. Mark Girouard draws on a lifetime of experience in the study of architectural history to assess the impact of some six hundred master craftsmen, surveyors, designers and patrons at work between 1540 and 1640. Surveying a period not covered by other dictionaries, this book is a key text for students and scholars of British architecture and its allied arts between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mark Girouard’s lively comments also make it an enjoyable read for anyone interested in the magnificent buildings that formed the background to the music of Dowland, Wilbye and Byrd; the political intrigues of the Tudor court; and the writings of Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Campion and Jonson.
This book reconstructs the so-called ‘Strand palaces’ – eleven great houses that once stood along the Strand in London. Between 1550 and 1650, this was the capital’s ‘Golden Mile’: home to a unique concentration of patrons and artists, and where England’s earlymodern and post-Reformation elites jostled to establish themselves by building and furnishing new, secular cathedrals. Their inventive, eclectic, and yet carefully-crafted mix of vernacular and continental features not only shaped some of the greatest houses of the day, but also the image of English power on the world stage. The product of almost two decades of research, and benefitting from close archival investigation, this book brings together an incredible array of unpublished sources that sheds new light on one of the most important chapters in London’s architectural history, and on English architecture more broadly.
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London’s ‘Golden Mile’: The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650 Manolo Guerci
Publication date October 2021 Dimensions 286 x 244mm Pages 336 Illustrations 220 colour
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Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty, and Violence in the British Empire, c.1851-1900 Sean Willcock
Publication date November 2021 Dimensions 270 x 216mm Pages 256 Illustrations 106 colour
New Books
In an era that saw the birth of photography (c. 1839) and the rise of the illustrated press (c. 1842), the British experience of their empire became increasingly defined by the processes and products of imagemaking. Examining moments of military and diplomatic crisis, this book considers how artists and photographers operating ‘in the field’ helped to define British visions of war and peace. The Victorians increasingly turned to visual spectacle to help them compose imperial sovereignty. The British Empire was thus rendered into a spectacle of ‘peace,’ from world’s fairs to staged diplomatic rituals. Yet this occurred against a backdrop of incessant colonial war – campaigns which, far from being ignored, were in fact unprecedentedly visible within the cultural forms of Victorian society. Visual media shaped the contours of imperial statecraft and established many of the aesthetic and ethical frames within which colonial violence was confronted.
Paul Mellon Centre Photo Archive A New Online Resource Explore more than 100,000 digitised photographs of British art and architecture November 2021
Encountering Colonial Photography
This text is a revised extract from the book Victorian Visions of War & Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty & Violence in the British Empire, c. 1851–1900, by Sean Willcock, an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow in the Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London. The book will be published by the PMC this November. It is a study of how artists and photographers operating in Britain’s colonies in Asia, especially India, shaped imperial visions of war and peace through new international networks of massproduced imagery. The passage here is from the opening of Chapter 6, ‘Encountering Colonial Photography “in the field” in Burma, China and Tibet, 1855–1904’, which shows how sketching and photography mediated in-person colonial encounters. A photograph taken by John Claude White (1853–1918) in Tibet in the summer of 1904 shows the triumphant Younghusband Mission marching through the streets of Lhasa. ‘Every detail both for effect and for defence were regarded’, wrote Colonel Francis Younghusband of his long-awaited entry into the ‘forbidden city’. The grave significance of this imperial parade to the denizens of Lhasa can be gauged by the fact that Tibetan emissaries had earlier pleaded with the encroaching British embassy to turn back, claiming that their presence in the capital would ‘spoil their religion and that the Dalai Lama might die’. Lhasa was marched on nevertheless, ‘unveiled’ for the colonial camera on 3 August, much to the excitement of the metropolitan public. White, the official photographer of the mission, brought with him six cameras and ‘innumerable plates’ that required three mules and a team of ‘coolies’ who were ‘experts in the art of carrying and setting up this cumbersome equipment.’ He used his large and heavy panoramic camera with glass-plate negatives to capture this scene, an eye-catching apparatus positioned to
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document the imperial parade from the perspective of the Tibetans. Yet those spectators appear less struck by the procession than by this act of photography. The harsh stares of the local congregation make for a tense scene in which the viewer is positioned as one among many in a crowd but without enjoying the anonymity that a crowd usually provides. There is a palpable sense here of the conspicuousness of colonial photography ‘in the field’ and its role as a fraught space of political encounter. The camera and its procedures were just as much a part of such invasive spectacles as the parading soldiers and envoys. It had a clear imperial symbolism in the minds of the British. The popular commercial photographer Samuel Bourne was emphatic about the camera’s techno-material impact: As there is now scarcely a nook or corner, a glen, a valley, or mountain, much less a country, on the face of the globe which the penetrating eye of the camera has not searched, or where the perfumes of poor Archer’s collodion have not risen through the hot or freezing atmosphere, photography in India is, least of all, a new thing. From the earliest days of the calotype, the curious tripod, with its mysterious chamber and mouth of brass, taught the natives of this country that their conquerors were the inventors of other instruments beside the formidable guns of their artillery, which, though as suspicious perhaps in appearance, attained their object with less noise and smoke. Drawing on the commonplace Victorian equation of the camera with the cannon, Bourne posits the photographic apparatus as a form of imperial pedagogy, demonstrating the broader militarytechnological complex that underpinned British sovereignty in India. The intended audience of such photographic theatre was not merely the British consumers who might buy Bourne’s prints but the native inhabitants of the ‘glens’ and ‘valleys’ who would probably never see such photographs yet who were nevertheless exposed to the camera and its chemical mists. Exactly what this meant to those spectators would depend on the local politics, epistemologies and histories of those regions. There are significant problems with recuperating such perspectives at all, due to the silencing effects of the imperial archive. Such issues notwithstanding, I draw on examples of cross-cultural encounters in nineteenth-century Burma, China and Tibet, in order to speculate
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on what colonial photography meant to those who encountered its ‘curious tripods’ and collodion ‘perfumes’ – not to mention the glass plates, dark-room tents and bottles of chemicals – and who, under varying conditions of consent and duress, participated in the ‘event of photography’ as spectators, sitters and protesters. The photographs that were produced in the field were ultimately circulated as positive prints in museums, archives and publications – contexts that have been subject to important and influential studies in the historiography of photography. Yet the ‘negative’ history of colonial photography – how it signified before development, printing and circulation – has received comparatively limited attention. In her contribution to an edited collection of essays accompanying the 2003 exhibition Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936–1947, Elizabeth Edwards writes of the negative as ‘perhaps the primary document’ of photography, for it is ‘the negative which captures the light reflected off an object, passing through the aperture of a camera to be held and stilled on light sensitive chemicals spread across a support of glass or film.’ Yet ultimately this primary document is afforded little aesthetic resonance or semantic substance: ‘While the moment of inscription or exposure on the negative carries with it the authenticity of the moment, the sense of meaning created through the use of photographs emerges from the moment those negatives are first printed.’
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Negatives, then, are what Geoffrey Batchen has recently termed the ‘repressed’ side of photography’s history. The only extended study of Victorian negatives has focused on their representation and metaphorical status in literary fiction and deals only summarily with the defining photographic form of the era, the collodion glass-plate. Yet the negative has its own history of spectatorship in the field that is separate from the positive. John Thomson claimed he had to lock his box of negatives to stop curious locals sneaking a peek and leaving their smudged fingerprints on the glass, which would then come out in his prints; yet other colonials made a point of showing off their negatives to the peoples whose lands were being surveyed, seeing the practice as a kind of litmus test of a population’s visual literacy. The phenomenology of colonial photography was thus not all about indexical clarity and albumen sheen. Consider, for instance, ‘“Fixing” the Negative’, the front-page illustration run by The Graphic in 1879, showing the Emir of Afghanistan watching as liquid washed over his collodion-glass portrait. This, I suggest, was how Victorian Orientalist photography was often witnessed by those Others who found
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themselves sitting for, or witness to, the imperial lens: as a spectacle of image-making, a series of technical, chemical and corporeal processes whose intended final product – the stable and captioned positive print – remained absent. I consider the negative here as a visually distinctive material artefact but also as a metaphor for how the political significance of the colonial encounter – its conditions of sovereignty and subjecthood – was by no means ‘fixed’, much less overdetermined, at the moment of image-making, even if subsequent photographic prints were indeed submitted to what Ali Behdad describes as the ‘excessive textual anchorage’ of Orientalist discourse. The significance of the imagemaking encounter was instead fluid, underdeveloped and contingent. ‘Photography’ here is encountered not in terms of the detail which the Victorians prized about the medium but through the haziness of latency; not in terms of the various discursive and archival contexts that comprise the ‘social biography’ of the print but via the singular materiality of a negative encountered at the time of its own making; and not in terms of the stasis and instantaneity often associated with photography but through the ‘durations’ that inhered in the contingent processes of preparing, loading, exposing, ‘fixing’ and rinsing negatives.
Page 11 John Claude White, detail of The Younghusband Mission entering Lhasa, 1904. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 5.1 x 17.1 cm. © Royal Geographical Society, London. Page 14 John Claude White, The Younghusband Mission entering Lhasa, 1904. Albumen silver print from glass negative, 5.1 x 17.1 cm. © Royal Geographical Society, London. Page 15 Frederic Villiers, ‘“Fixing” the Negative’, The Graphic, 12 July 1879, detail of the cover design. © Mary Evans Picture Library.
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Sculpting in Sound: Making Sculpting Lives
Sarah Victoria Turner, the PMC’s Deputy Director, writes about podcasting as a medium that presents new opportunities for capturing the soundscapes of art, sculpture, their materials and their sonic environments, as well as for sharing new research. The first series of the podcast Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture was launched in March 2020, just as the UK went into lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-written and hosted by myself and Jo Baring (Director of the Ingram Collection), its five episodes each focused on the career of an individual sculptor, spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, Kim Lim, Phyllida Barlow and Rana Begum. Over the course of the previous year, we had travelled across the UK, making recordings on our Zoom H4 recorder in places significant for these artists – their studios; museums and galleries where their work is on display; libraries and archives that hold information about them – and interviewing curators, friends, family, as well as some of the artists themselves. In audience feedback, listeners responded positively to the soundscapes of sculpture and sculptural practice and the aural textures of particular places we had created in these episodes. These included the sound of screeching seagulls and the bells of St Ives parish church as we discussed, with the curator
Sarah Matson, how Barbara Hepworth had worked outdoors in all weathers in her garden. We also remember having to almost shout at Phyllida Barlow to make our interview questions heard over the noise of some lifting machinery grinding into action in her busy studio. Sound is a travelling medium; it is heard when vibrations, which propagate acoustic waves, travel through the air and reach the ear. It can also help us – as listeners – to travel imaginatively, to conjure up a particular place, person or material when we hear associated sounds. This transportive ability of sound was perhaps heightened further when our lives became very localised during the pandemic, a time when actual travel was impossible for many. It is also a medium suited to conveying the spirit of collaboration and conversation which has shaped Sculpting Lives, and the conversational back-and-forth of ideas and dialogue taking shape. But what does it mean to speak of (and hear) art? And to present research and ideas about visual art forms in sound and through a medium which, conventionally, does not include images? Does art history have a soundscape? And what can thinking through the medium of sound bring to the visual world of art history? What happens to the sculptural, an inherently tactile and physical medium, when described in speech? What does sculpture sound like? What can sound bring to the histories of sculpture? These are questions which Jo and I have been considering as we make the second series of Sculpting Lives, and which
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also inspired a panel discussion, held this March at the PMC, titled Speaking of Art: Art, Histories and the Podcast (which you can listen to and watch on the PMC’s website). The event was a collaboration with Anna Reid, who was Head of Research at the PMC in 2020 and who developed the new British Art Talks podcast series when in-person research events were not possible due to COVID-19 restrictions. One of our panellists, the historian of sound James Mansell, had called in his book The Age of Noise in Britain (2017) for cultural historians to open up ‘new sensory histories of modernity’, challenging the ocularcentrism that has dominated historical analysis. Making Sculpting Lives has prompted me to think even further about the words we use to describe an artwork and the relationship between art, art history, the voice and sound. We now often begin an interview, especially if it takes place in a studio, gallery or museum, by asking our interviewees to describe an object in front of them. Veronica Ryan, one of the artists featured in the second series of Sculpting Lives, took us to look at the pyramid-shaped teabags that featured in her recent exhibition at Spike Island in Bristol, connecting them with the history of the gallery’s former life as a tea warehouse in the city’s docklands. More than an exercise in formal analysis, these descriptive passages often open up discussions about the emotional registers of materials and making. Through these conversations about materials, we learn about lives: those of the sculptures and the locations they
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inhabit, and of the sculptors and the workers involved in a material’s life story. I’ve also found a new joy in descriptive language, and will never forget Cathie Pilkington looking at Frink’s Horse and Rider sculpture in Mayfair and describing the cascading rivulets of bronze along the horse’s mane as ‘melting like an ice cream on a hot day’. It felt perfect as we looked together and thought about the playful effects (and affects) of that sculpture’s materials. Research is certainly finding new ears: collecting institutions are looking to attract new audiences, and objects are entering into new relations with words, as artworks are described for listeners through the podcast medium. Podcasts focusing on art and visual culture are now numerous. Some of 21
the most popular include The Great Women Artists, Art Talks, Meet Me at the Museum, Bow Down and many more besides. For me, this form of audio communication has prompted different, and often surprising, ways of describing objects and artistic practices, encouraging an intimacy that is often absent from the other kinds of academic research and writing that I do. When hosting, I actively imagine someone (often a friend or family member) listening, and I speak as if I am talking directly to them. One friend told me that he had listened to the first series of Sculpting Lives while doing his weekly supermarket shop, and that image of accompanying someone as they go about their daily life has stuck with me. The podcast has also created new points
of encounter and feedback through the Sculpting Lives Instagram page (@SculptingLives) where listeners leave feedback and ideas about the episodes (something that rarely happens when I publish an article or essay!). In her recent article for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Kate Langrish observes the boom in researchfocused podcasting. Podcasts began to be widely consumed in 2005, when Apple introduced support for them in iTunes. However, it is in the last few years that their popularity has exploded. According to Langrish, in 2019, one in eight people in the UK listened to at least one podcast a week (up 24 per cent from the previous year), and the figure is even bigger in the US where just over one in five listen weekly. As the PMC continues to think about ways of connecting with audiences beyond its physical walls, this industry data suggests that podcasts are an important channel for sharing research. This autumn, the Centre’s Drawing Room Display will feature material from the PMC’s Library and Archive collections that we have used to support our research for Sculpting Lives. The display coincides with the release of Series Two, which will feature episodes on Veronica Ryan, Gertrude Hermes, Dora Gordine, Alison Wilding and Cathie Pilkington, and a thematic episode on public sculpture and display. There is a growing literature on women sculptors, but many of the artists and their practices featured in Sculpting Lives – with a few notable exceptions – have had limited scholarly attention paid to 22
their work. The PMC has been actively building its collection to support the podcast, acquiring material about these sculptors, and women artists more generally, who were previously not well represented in our research collections. These acquisitions build on an earlier initiative at the PMC in October 2019, in collaboration with Art UK, Art + Feminism and Wikipedia, when we hosted an ‘edit-a-thon’ at which participants were trained how to edit Wikipedia in order to extend and improve the visibility of information about women sculptors online. Sculpting Lives is envisaged not only as a contribution to new research on women sculptors, exploring the artworks, networks, connections and relationships of these artists, but also as a contribution to experimenting with sharing research through the medium of the podcast.
Page 18 Cathie Pilkington and Jo Baring in front of Elisabeth Frink’s Horse and Rider (1974), New Bond Street, London. Photo courtesy of Sarah Victoria Turner. Page 20 Veronica Ryan. Courtesy: Alison Jacques, London, and Create, London. Photo: Lisa Whiting. Veronica Ryan, detail of Multiple Conversations, 2019-21, clay, seeds, pillow case and other materials, dimensions variable, exhibited at Veronica Ryan: Along a Spectrum, Spike Island, Bristol, 2021. © Veronica Ryan. Photo courtesy of Spike Island, Bristol. Page 21 Elisabeth Frink, detail of Horse and Rider, 1974, New Bond Street, London. Photo courtesy of Sarah Victoria Turner. Jo Baring and Sarah Victoria Turner recording Sculpting Lives. Photo courtesy of Sarah Victoria Turner.
Cold Comfort and Cultural Identity
Roo Dhissou, an artist and research assistant for the exhibition A Very Special Place: Ikon in the 1990s, reflects on how her research into Ikon Gallery’s displays of work by Global Majority artists in the 1990s has offered new perspectives on her own practice. Her work at Ikon has been supported by a research continuity grant from the PMC, awarded in 2020. The exhibition Cold Comfort, held in 1996, presented new work by Permindar Kaur and was the result of a commission from Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. The preface to the exhibition catalogue stated that ‘Kaur removes the domestic and the familiar from their everyday surroundings and transforms them to produce disquieting results’. This is evident across Kaur’s practice: she pushes the boundaries of materiality and scale to interrogate what it means to be truly comfortable. In July 2021, on the show’s 25th anniversary, I had the pleasure of inviting her to talk with me for a live-streamed public event. My research supports a series of exhibitions at Ikon that reexamine and celebrate the gallery’s programming from the 1990s, and includes the privilege of researching the gallery’s archives, conducting interviews and meeting with artists returning to Ikon as they install works for display. Here, I reflect on how ‘cold comfort’ as a concept might help us to articulate issues faced by Global Majority artists in the contemporary art world today, particularly in Britain.
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As part of the recent exhibition A Very Special Place: Ikon in the 1990s (June–August 2021), Kaur’s work Falling (1996) – first shown in Cold Comfort – was reinstalled at Ikon. As an artist myself, when I reflect on this work I cannot help but think about a falling art world. I would hate to be all doom and gloom, but with news of cuts to higher education for art and design courses; the government-backed advertisement last year that told creatives to retrain (showing a ballerina next to the words: ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber’); and the pandemic diminishing production time for artists and graduates, I find myself romanticising the 1990s. It’s an era I can only ever imagine, having only just been born then. But over the last six months at Ikon, I’ve felt like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, wandering about the city in the 1920s with his artistic and literary heroes. Whereas Wilson spent his time in bars and at parties, I vicariously experienced the arts scene in 1990s Britain through my research for A Very Special Place. Speaking to Kaur about what it meant to her to be an artist practising during that time was especially meaningful. She told me humbly about her luck as a graduate in the 1990s, and described Eddie Chambers as a key supporter. Chambers was a member of the BLK Art Group in the 1980s, and after leaving the group he continued to champion other artists of the Global Majority. This leads me to question where we might look today for those key supporters, or, better yet, to ask, what does support look like today? In a falling art world where resources are thinning, how can we best imagine support systems? Reflecting upon my own journey, my support has been in the form of collectivising through groups such as SAAC (South Asian Arts Collective) and through mentoring support, artist-run spaces and Instagram. Most of this support is self-initiated and often comes at a cost, such as free labour, intense networking, managing multiple roles (photographer, marketer and personal assistant) within an artistrun space and endless hours applying for funding. Although none of this is new to most artists, the equality gap for artists of the Global Majority is ever-increasing, as the hierarchical and often competitive systems that underpin galleries and arts funding perpetuate a culture of token representation. In the wake of George Floyd’s death last year, and the focus on the Black Lives Matter movement during the pandemic, there has been a shift towards representation of ‘BAME’ artists – members of the Global Majority – with open calls and retrospective exhibitions appearing around the world, and an
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increased focus on Global Majority artists on social media, resulting in performative gestures. While new opportunities are appearing everywhere, supposed support systems could be cold comforts in disguise. Larger representational gaps are being perpetuated through this action: the system still exists – it is just being fed repeatedly. As Audre Lorde wrote: ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. Representation is annexed to a number of exhibitions, talks, workshops and HR meetings rather than the prevailing system being axed. I call them cold comforts because they only provide temporary relief, and it is yet to be seen whether these actions are sustainable. Much like Kaur’s work Tall Beds (1996), also exhibited in Cold Comforts and consisting of three elevated beds each over three metres high, it is incredibly tempting to climb their ladders, yet when arriving at the top, it is just as terrifying to look down from the unprotected edge. When interviewing Kaur, we spoke of the audiences that were present during the 1990s. She stated that they were not as large or as diverse as today, so when she used certain symbols within her work, such as the dissected Khanda within Glass Houses (1991), or the Khalsa orange within Innocence (1993), they were less likely to be instantly understood. This made me wonder how the cultural connotations of works by Global Majority artists were read during that time, and how norms among audiences opened or closed their interpretive possibilities. Yet what I found most refreshing and perhaps consoling was the openness of Kaur’s approach to meanings within her work. Her reflections on creating Innocence while living in Barcelona are a prime example of this: ‘it drastically altered the way in which I thought about making work, because the context was completely different. Exploring ideas about being an Indian artist in Britain became no longer relevant’. Innocence consists of a black frame containing a traditional Sikh dress with a Kirpan (Sikh sword), both of which have been made for a child. Whilst the work draws on cultural identity, the piece is not limited in its interpretation, thanks to the visual and aesthetic properties within the work. Without knowing its cultural or religious references, viewers are still able to see the harsh juxtapositions both of its materials and of placing armoury upon a child’s dress. Kaur states that the work has multiple readings. Innocence highlights how cultural identity is a limited framework even when cultural referents jump out at audiences.
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The fact that Kaur was able to objectively reassess her art and reevaluate its themes in a new context is something I find incredibly freeing. As emerging Global Majority artists, perhaps we could use some of this openness to understand what it means to make work about cultural identity. Of course, we have an impetus as artists, curators, researchers and audience members to know the conceptual or cultural meanings of works. The growing sense of urgency around dismantling white supremacy in the arts encourages us to research other peoples’ cultures, but whilst this is important, it belies and belittles an idea of not knowing. There is something beautiful and empathic in the intrigue that Permindar Kaur happily allows. Moreover, even without such interpretations, Kaur’s work sits boldly within the context of sculptural and material art making. As Eddie Chambers writes, using identity to understand Kaur’s work ‘would leave us distinctly short-changed because such symbolism takes its place alongside but not above, or ahead of other equally dramatic devices and elements central to Kaur’s sculpture’.
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For emerging artists of the Global Majority, there are yet again cold comforts to be found in making art about cultural identity. It is absolutely important for work to be made that celebrates cultural identities; allows people to confront and reclaim their cultural heritage; provides relief; and aids both accurate and sensitive representation in contemporary art. But the cold comfort is the inherent exhaustion in having to continually educate and explain the context of artworks and unpick the cultural elements that may be present. Artists, researchers and curators have been calling, instead, for multiplicity in interpretation for a long time. Reflecting on my own journey as a practitioner, this freedom is perhaps what I lacked in art school. Now, my practice is led by ideas of multiplicities. For a show with Niru Ratnam Gallery, I produced a series of sculptures that interrogate and explore cultural identity through ambiguity, materiality and context. They feature religious objects associated with Hinduism and Sikhism that are sometimes massproduced, sometimes unique and, in one case, Shiva Lingam (2021), made following instructions from YouTube. As the curator of the show
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Niru Ratnam wrote: ‘Dhissou made the latter despite the traditional Hindu stricture that as an unmarried woman she is not supposed to touch a shiva lingam... What is at stake when cultural traditions can be warped using an internet tutorial? The cluster of small objects, placed low to the floor on wooden blocks, subtly question the notion of cultural authenticity as traditions get translated, half-forgotten and improvised in diasporas’. This approach, where cultural elements appear in artworks without being the whole focus of the work, has allowed me to be free of stereotypes and pigeonholing, and to exist outside of a myopic rhetoric of ‘identity art’ as I pursue interests that may lie both within and beyond my cultural heritage. While it seems that we may not be free of cold comforts for some time, I will carry forward the freedoms I have learnt from Kaur and continue an approach to my practice that allows for multiple interpretations.
Page 23 Permindar Kaur, detail of Tall Beds, 1996, three steel fabricated beds with ladders, each approx. 320 x 188 x 90 cm. Work commissioned for the exhibition Cold Comfort, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Photo: Gary Kirkham. © Permindar Kaur. Page 26 (clockwise) Permindar Kaur, Falling, 1995, polar fleece and arctic fur, 120 figures, display dimensions variable. Installation view, A Very Special Place: Ikon in the 1990s at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2021. © Courtesy Permindar Kaur. Photo: Stuart Whipps / Ikon Gallery. Permindar Kaur, detail of Innocence, 1993, iron and fabric, 60 x 72 cm. © Permindar Kaur. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo: Peter Lundh. Permindar Kaur, detail of Glasshouses, 1991, glass terracotta and steel, 180 x 150 x 150 cm. © Permindar Kaur. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Page 28 Permindar Kaur, Tall Beds, 1996, three steel fabricated beds with ladders, each approx. 320 x 188 x 90 cm. Work commissioned for the exhibition Cold Comfort, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Photo: Gary Kirkham. © Permindar Kaur. Page 29 Roo Dhissou, installation photograph of works exhibited at Jan Agha & Roo Kaur Dhissou, Niru Ratnam Gallery, 15th July – 7th August 2021. Courtesy of the artist © Roo Dhissou.
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The Chaney of St. Croix
The Chaney of St. Croix 31
Jessica Priebe, a lecturer in art history and theory at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia, shares a preview of her longer article in the next issue of British Art Studies, the PMC’s online journal. That issue has the special theme ‘Redefining the British Decorative Arts’ and is guest-edited by Iris Moon, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be published in autumn/winter 2021. With its white sandy beaches, crystal-clear blue waters and secluded coves, the U.S. Virgin Island of St. Croix in the Caribbean Sea is a tropical paradise. Once a wealthy shipping port, St. Croix played a pivotal role in the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The old sugar mills, estate houses and slave villages attest to the island’s history of colonialism. However, there is also a less familiar colonial relic known as ‘chaney’, the historic pottery shards buried in the soil and along the coastline of St. Croix. Found in abundant supply on the island, chaney refers to the remnants of European ceramics brought to St. Croix by its former colonisers: England, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Thrown overboard by sailors to avoid port taxes, broken by settlers in celebration of Danish customs, cast out as plantation garbage, and ground into the earth during labour riots in the nineteenth century, chaney is a symbol of colonial entanglement, possession and resistance. While these terms are rightly suggestive of the island’s 32
legacy of colonialism and slavery, recent responses to chaney have sought to restage the historical narrative of these fragments by incorporating them into new works of fine and decorative art that have enhanced its material value and produced a meaningful dialogue about present-day Caribbean communities. European intervention in the Caribbean has resulted in the dispersal of ceramics fragments throughout the region. However, the chaney of St. Croix is unique in that a Crucian name is used to describe it. A Creolism that merges the words for ‘china’ and ’money’, the name chaney invokes its colonial function as imported ceramics, along with its afterlife as island refuse. The term ‘money’ relates to chaney’s historic use by Crucian children, who after finding fragments on the island rounded the edges to create tokens to trade or play with in games. By contrast, the word ‘china’ refers to the caseloads of household ceramics brought to St. Croix during the European colonial era. The wealth of sugar, which drove consumer markets in the Caribbean, America and Europe, created an affluent planter class on St. Croix, who filled their houses with the finest crystal, silver and china. Chaney connects St. Croix to the global cultures and economies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fragments also reveal the changes to ceramic production during this period. For instance, the establishment of Royal Copenhagen in 1775 led to an influx of new Danish wares on the island, the remnants of which are found today. Another common type of chaney is blue willow, an English chinoiserie pattern developed by Josiah Spode in the 1780s. Massproduced through the invention of transfer earthenware in the 1780s, the willow pattern represents a hallmark of British domesticity. The prevalence of blue willow on St. Croix attests to its iconic status and the cultural hegemony maintained by the English planters on St. Croix during the Danish occupation. Blue and white china can be seen in the great house at the Estate Whim Museum. The recreation of plantation life shows how imported ceramics symbolise the ideology of colonial possession on St. Croix. However, it does not consider the use of these objects by enslaved populations, who were also consumers of European ceramics. A common misconception is that household ceramics were passed down from the great house to the slave village. Such acts of paternalism are evident in the American colonies, where the distribution of the master’s possessions operated as an act of
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dominance and control. By contrast, this system is largely absent in the Danish West Indies, where enslaved individuals purchased European ceramics at local markets using money made from selling crops farmed on allocated plots on the outskirts of the estates. The consumption of imported ceramics by enslaved communities on St. Croix was part of the Danish system of slave provisioning. However, it also played a role in the storied history of emancipation. Ceramics are among the most frequently cited items listed in the household inventories of damaged goods compiled in the wake of the Emancipation and Fireburn revolts in 1848 and 1878 respectively. These destructive acts of resistance and anger can be compared to another form of symbolic destruction. The Danish New Year’s custom of smashing plates against the doors of neighbours as a gesture of good luck resulted in vast quantities of china being broken on the island every year for nearly two hundred years of Danish occupation. European colonial rule ended in 1917, when the Danish West Indies were sold to the United States. Upon transfer, the island’s records were divided between the former and new owners, effectively stripping St. Croix of its archive. While much of St. Croix’s historical documentation was digitised and made available by the Danish
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National Archives in 2017, the centennial year of the sale, significant barriers to access remain for the predominantly English- and Creole-speaking residents of St. Croix. Consequently, they rely on alternative knowledge systems such as oral histories and artifacts to serve as evidence of the island’s fragmented past. To this end, chaney presents a reliable diagnostic tool that reveals valuable information about the location and date of the manufacturer, as well as the cultural traditions it produced and its afterlife on St. Croix. Often unearthed after heavy rain, chaney is hunted for by local artisans who repurpose the shards into jewellery. This process has contributed to a reassessment of chaney’s material status as items of memory and identity. While these fragments still stand as evidence of their colonial context, their transformation from imported ceramic ware to locally produced jewellery crafted from found objects is seen by some as a symbol of resistance that speaks to an alternative narrative of the island’s history of colonisation. As the owner of Crucian Gold jewellery studio, Nathan Bishop, explains: ‘Some people look at the things from the colonial period with resentment and see it as a symbol of oppression, whereas other people want to reclaim what was once lost. They want to take back the negative parts of history’. The recovery and material alteration of these fragments mean that chaney is no longer the refuse of St. Croix. When used in conjunction with locally smelted metals, chaney becomes a mode of economic, artistic and cultural production for Virgin Islanders. 35
Other aesthetic interpretations of chaney invoke similar decolonial practices. St. Croix-based artist La Vaughn Belle’s appropriation of chaney sees her paint different ceramic motifs on wood panels. Familiar European patterns are interwoven with expanded geometric and vegetal forms, evoking the lush gardens of an imaginary paradise. This interplay of motifs references the Eurocentric vision of the Virgin Islands as a landscape untarnished by the stain of colonialism. The paintings respond to the Danish narrative of colonial innocence as a tonic to appease the guilt and shame attached to the country’s long history of colonialism throughout the world. As Belle has stated, her experiences in Denmark have revealed little awareness of the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Danish society, while the Danish imprint remains ever present in the minds of Virgin Islanders. In 2017, Belle’s Chaney paintings inspired a new line of twelve blue and white porcelain plates produced in partnership with Royal Copenhagen. Exhibited alongside recovered fragments at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, the plates mark a conceptual reuniting of chaney with its ceramic body. While the floral designs and blue and white colour scheme are in keeping with the decorative traditions of Royal Copenhagen, the Chaney plates are inscribed with the shared histories of St. Croix. Reinforcing this idea is Belle’s handpainted signature on the back of the plates underneath the Royal Copenhagen stamp. The design of the plates, together with their royal display, show how Belle’s practice brings historic and present-day arguments about colonialism, consumption and commodification into dynamic conversation. Moreover, she proposes a brand-new way to approach the decorative arts, one that brings fragmented bodies – both ceramic and human – together as a lesson for a different future.
Page 31 Denise Fashaw & Elizabeth Smith, Chaney, St. Croix, September 23, 2018. Photo courtesy of Chaney Chicks & Island Gifts http://www.chaneychicks.com. Page 34 The Great House at Estate Whim, St. Croix, January 30, 2012. Photo by Bob Downing/ Akron Beacon Journal/MCT/Sipa USA / Alamy Stock Photo. Page 35 Nicole Canegata, Chaney Jewellery by ib Designs, St. Croix. Photo by Nicole Canegata. Page 36 La Vaughn Belle, detail of Chaney series_003 (we live in the fragments), 2015, oil on wood, 152.4 x 121.9 cm. Photo by William Stelzer, courtesy of La Vaughn Belle.
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