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

在20世纪70年代和80年代，在英国工作的艺术家网络开发了一种抽象艺术生产模式，而不是强调艺术与世界的自治，而是参与了一些紧迫的社会政治问题。这些冲突包括北爱尔兰的冲突以及相关的主权和殖民主义问题，去工业化以及有组织的劳工与玛格丽特•撒切尔（Margaret Thatcher）保守党政府之间的冲突。在一个看似矛盾但意义重大的举动中，Prunella Clough、Rasheed Araeen、Veronica Ryan和Rita Donagh等艺术家转向抽象，正是因为它可以在多种社会政治立场之间进行调解。它还提供了一种特别共鸣的艺术表达方式，用于探索在新兴全球化的压力下日益原子化的地点、空间和身份之间的关系，大众媒体传播的扩散，以及“联合王国”的多种相互冲突的概念。在这种背景下，抽象作为一种强大的工具出现，它融合了艺术和政治问题，使现代主义遗产得以参与，同时也使它们重新形成和焕发活力。我对抽象的强调为英国战后时期的艺术和文化政治提供了一个新的视角，因为它允许在不同媒体范围内工作的艺术家之间建立联系-雕塑，绘画，摄影和表演-以及从女权主义到反种族主义的批判观点。现有的研究倾向于把重点放在20世纪70年代，而不是接下来的十年，但许多艺术家的作品是在这些年来充满活力的政治背景下形成的，他们继续创作并抵制到20世纪80年代。可以理解的是，学者们经常把注意力集中在明确划分艺术家和媒体群体上，无论是行为艺术、女权主义艺术作品还是有色人种艺术家的作品。在这些重要干预的基础上，“绿色不愉快的土地”项目旨在展示艺术家如何跨越不同的媒体和社会政治背景，在抽象中找到一种引人注目的方式来参与当代问题和关注。为了展示抽象是如何在20世纪70年代和80年代成为探索英国地域政治的重要工具，我的研究将这四位重要艺术家的作品置于他们更广泛的视觉文化背景中。我将展示他们在绘画、雕塑和表演方面的实验是如何受到新闻摄影、实验电影、纪录片实践以及激进主义出版物和通信的同时代发展的密切影响的。特别是，本书将论证，抽象和现实主义的概念在这一时期是紧密交织在一起的，而不是像它们经常被对待的那样是分开的、对立的实体。艺术家们试图以新的政治化方式发展现代主义与材料和媒介的接触，并重振日益被视为过时的纪录片传统。与Kirsten Lloyd博士（爱丁堡大学）共同策划的联合展览“社会契约”将提供一个宝贵的机会，探索更广泛的社会政治和艺术背景，从这本书的研究中出现，特别关注纪录片实践的修订，表演摄影的使用，以及政治参与与这一时期电影和摄影等技术的抽象效果的结合。虽然书籍和展览将探讨抽象、文献和地理位置政治之间的关系，但“社会契约”将特别关注通过这些配置形成的社会关系的可能性，以及作为文件的艺术作品的表述方式为他们的谈判提供了越来越重要的场所。

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.