Visualise: Making Art in Context
by Bronac Ferran, Editor
Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, 2013
80 pp. Paper, £6.99
ISBN: 978-0-9565608-6-5.
Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
Associate Research Scholar
Department of Transtechnology, University of Plymouth
Bronac
Ferran’s recent edited book Visualise: Making Art
in Context provides a record of events that took place during the program
by this name held at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge School of Art in 2011 and
2012. [1] For the Cambridge community itself, both for the university and
beyond, the book provides a fascinating and highly readable record of a chapter
in the city’s most recent history. It bridges its past
and its future as it concerns art, science, engineering and technology. It
returns us to John Ruskin and invites a consideration of where these contemporary
artists fit into the canonical trajectory of British Art History.
There is no statue or bust dedicated to Ruskin in front of the Cambridge School
of Art. In fact, as Chris Owen draws from Ruskin in his introduction “Visualising Cambridge,” what endures is more a matter of word and
idea than image, that students must above all be enabled to see, that “to be
taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true” (John Ruskin,
Inaugural Address, October 1858, in Visualise, p. 8). The project was
then about putting legacy into action towards the future rather than to create
and leave a painting on a wall in a museum or a sculpture in front of a
building. As the outcome of a percent art scheme with the funds provided through
the construction of the new business school it was an exercise in
anti-monumentality in which artists were invited to engage the city and the
public in innovative ways.
In the typical percent scheme, one percent of the cost of a new building is
set aside for permanent works of public art. However, in the case of the Visualise program, the decision was made to break with that long
tradition, the commission of monuments. Ferran’s
book, with its contributions by the artists’ themselves,
in order, Bettina Furnee, Eduardo Kac, Rob Toulson, Giles Lane and David
Walker, Liliane Lijn, William Latham, Alan Sutcliffe, Tom Hall, Ernst Edmonds
and Duncan Speakman, should be read in the context of a philosophy of anti-monumentality
in contrast to conventional British art history as given in Margaret Garlake’s
New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (1998) and James Hyman’s
The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War
1945-1960 (2001) all important studies. There one might notice that the
only artist from Visualise included, naturally enough either for reasons
of age and prominence, is Gustav Metzger (Garlake pp. 146-148). Accordingly,
Ferran concludes that Metzger’s presence
at some of the Visualise events “remains an honor far greater than a monument” and
a handwritten text by Metzger, torn from spiral notebook, is illustrated on the
back of the last page, giving him the last word as it were.
In the history of the reception of government supported percent arts in the UK
projects that focused on the commissioning of monuments in the post-war period
and the propaganda potential of art, critics, and adjudicators vociferously
disagreed with each other over the awards. There was often a stark gap between
the art critics’ positive appraisal of the value and aesthetic
importance of the works and the publics’ initial
objections. The iconic instance was the disastrous case of Reg Butler’s
“Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner” (1955-1956), the winner of the ICA
international competition announced by Henry Moore in 1952. [2] I find Butler’s
unrealized sculpture useful for the issue of anti-monumentality in British Art
History as it speaks directly to key themes of Visualise, about the
relationship between humanity and technology.
Though Butler’s model resulted in such controversy that it was never made into a monument, it calls for renewed attention in the
context of Visualise, for example with Liliane Lijn's Art Industry manifesto that figured large in the
Future Fluxus event during the program. Why? Butler’s
unrealized sculpture was about technology and the future of man as it was in
the 1950’s. Though Butler’s
iconic work was, perhaps, too far ahead of its time, it certainly speaks to
those who might be interested in looking back at the Cambridge show. The
difference seems to be that the bleak view of the future, the profound sense of
alienation in Butler’s model, is replaced
by a romance with technology that allows us to extend art from the purely
visual domain into the interactive and socially productive.
Considering there is no chapter on the type of art shown at Visualise in Elizabeth Mansfield’s
Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions (2007), a
relatively recent and signal text for 21st Century canonical art
history in the United States, how might artists
like Eduardo Kac, Liliane Lijn and William Latham fit into an expanded canon?
Because of the explicit link to Ruskin and the exercise in anti-monumentality,
how might we best situate the Visualise projects in relation to the larger history of British art? How do they return us
to Ruskin and his unprecedented success in engaging an expanded public in the
appreciation of the arts and for their importance to building more socially
conscious and humane industrial societies? That is an important question future
canon building texts might ask.
Notes:
[1]. Details of the Visualise Programme can be
accessed at www.visualisecambridge.org and at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw8gpfmp6ps. For a
review of the art and artists in the Visualise show, see:
http://www.caldaria.org/2014/06/visualise-making-art-in-context-review.html.
[2]. For a photograph of Butler’s model (see Garlake 1998, pp. 225-227 and
Hyman 2001, pp. 158-160).
