Green Unpleasant Land: Art, Abstraction and the Politics of Location

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During the 1970s and 1980s, a network of artists working in Britain developed a mode of abstract artistic production which, rather than underscoring art's autonomy from the world, engaged with a number of pressing socio-political issues. These ranged from conflict in Northern Ireland and related questions of sovereignty and colonialism, to de-industrialisation and clashes between organised labour and Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government. In an apparently paradoxical but highly significant move, artists such as Prunella Clough, Rasheed Araeen, Veronica Ryan and Rita Donagh turned to abstraction precisely because it could mediate between multiple socio-political positions. It also provided a particularly resonant mode of artistic expression for exploring the increasingly atomised relationships between place, space and identity under the pressures of emerging globalisation, the proliferation of mass media communications, and multiple conflicting conceptualisations of the 'United Kingdom'. Abstraction emerges in this context as a powerful tool which fuses artistic and political concerns, enabling an engagement with modernist legacies, but also their reformulation and reinvigoration. My emphasis on abstraction provides a new perspective on art and cultural politics of the post-war period in Britain, in that it allows connections to be made between artists working in a diverse range of media - sculpture, painting, photography and performance - and across critical perspectives from feminism to antiracism. Existing studies tend to focus on the 1970s in isolation from the following decade, but many artists whose work had been forged in the vibrant political context of these years continued to create and to resist into the 1980s. Scholars also understandably often concentrate on clearly demarcating groups of artists and media, whether performance art, feminist art production, or the work of artists of colour. Building on these important interventions, the project 'Green Unpleasant Land' aims to show how artists working across different media and socio-political contexts all found in abstraction a compelling mode for engaging with contemporary issues and concerns. In demonstrating how abstraction became a vital tool for exploring the locational politics of Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, my study situates the work of these four significant artists within their wider visual cultural context. I will show how their experiments in painting, sculpture and performance were closely informed by contemporaneous developments in photojournalism, experimental film, documentary practices, and activist publications and communications. In particular, the book will argue that, rather than being separate, oppositional entities, as they are often treated, concepts of abstraction and realism were closely intertwined during this period. Artists sought to develop modernism's engagement with materials and medium in newly politicised ways, and to reinvigorate documentary traditions that were increasingly seen as outmoded. The associated exhibition 'Social Contracts,' co-curated with Dr Kirsten Lloyd (University of Edinburgh), will provide a valuable opportunity to explore the wider socio-political and artistic context from which the book research emerges, focusing in particular on revisions of documentary practice, the use of performative photography, and the combination of political engagement with the abstracting effects of technologies such as film and photography during this period. While book and exhibition will address the relationship between abstraction, documentary and the politics of location, 'Social Contracts' will look in particular at the possibilities for social relations forged through these configurations, and the way in which formulations of the artwork as document provided an increasingly important site for their negotiation.