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Redrawing the boundaries: questioning the geographies of Britishness at Tate-Britain

2003; University of Leicester; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.29311/mas.v1i3.42

1479-8360

Andy Conway Morris,

Photography and Visual Culture

In the mid to late 1990s the matter of Britishness was, it seemed, everywhere; from the reappropriation of the Bonzo Dog Doo Daa Band’s term Cool Britannia to Britpop, Britart, New Labour, New Britain and the process of political devolution. It seemed that discussion of what exactly this term meant was ubiquitous. Much of this emerged from the rhetoric of Blairite politics, as is implied by the above examples. The institutionalization of this ‘Rebranded Britain’ manifested itself explicitly in spaces such as the much-maligned Millennium Dome in North Greenwich. Here we were invited to consume a Britishness that rejects the dusty conservation of heritage and projects itself as innovation for the future. It is this allusion to the temporal concerns of Britishness which is of interest, for the very name Millennium Dome facilitates, albeit in rather crude terms, an understanding of Britain as simultaneously pertaining to time and space, or time-space. By drawing together both the temporal and the spatial in this way, it is possible not only to re-think Britishness, but also to take things further by reflecting on how time and space inform the ways in which we ‘think’ of Britishness. Just as we might consider whether the Millennium was something which was more completely realized at a reclaimed industrial site on the Greenwich peninsula than in, for example, the West Country or the North West, so too we might also think about what Britishness means under New Labour as compared to the time of Charles II during the Restoration. Through thinking of time and space as not only co-related but as co-present, we might also want to consider ‘where’ Britishness is. So, what I want to consider here is a notion of British identity which links and ‘cuts across’ different spaces, moving beyond the confines of the bounded nation state. As Brandon Taylor has argued, ‘art institutions termed ‘national’ are highly complex objects, whose histories can be told in many ways’ (Taylor 1999: xiii); it is the multiple spatial and temporal dimensions contained within the notion of Britishness that constitute these complexities. This paper uses the case of Tate Britain to explore the social construction of national identity in its relationship to the museum’s culture of time-space. My argument is that the identity which is projected by a museum is not a fixed attribute which is generated from within the nation and unproblematically realized as a national collection. Rather, as I show in the case of Tate Britain, the times and spaces which have emerged within the British nation state can be seen as arrivals and departures which are themselves informed by ‘other’ times and ‘other’ spaces. The problem of confronting the complexities of Britishness is not a new one for the Tate which was founded as the National Gallery of British Art in 1897. In its early days the questions, ‘when and where were British artists?’ (Fyfe 1996: 221) became a major concern in respect of the management of the gallery’s purchasing fund viz. the Chantrey Bequest. Whilst the Bequest was to be used for the acquisition and display of ‘British Fine Art’, as Fyfe asserts, this led to a problem for the Tate in that it became ‘a contested site at which the significance of nation and the meaning of British art were determined’ (ibid). A century later, in the late1990s, it is arguable that the problem of determining the meaning of a national collection at the Tate Gallery re-emerged. However, late-twentieth-century changes in curatorial style meant that the contested character of British art was no longer something that was to be settled by the curator as didact. Rather, uncertainty was to be exhibited as a guiding principle of display. As the Tate’s director stated: ‘our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery […] rather than find themselves on the conveyor belt of history’ (Serota 2000: 55). The principle behind this curatorial practice is that priority is given to the visitor’s ‘experience’ of a more direct relationship to art works as opposed to the ‘interpretation’ of the curator (Serota 2000). Questioning Britishness can, therefore, be seen as a favoured aspect of the visitor’s experience rather than as a mere curatorial inconvenience. But questioning Britishness in the latter part of the twentieth century reflected wider social and