Between ‘Revere’ and ‘Remove’

Students on the DHeritage programme at University of Hertfordshire met for one of the regular programme of workshops on 14th May 2018. Convened by Professor Sarah Lloyd, the programme for the day focussed on the concepts of ‘Remembering and Forgetting’.  It brought together students and staff at UH involved in the DHeritage with several external speakers addressing issues of ‘memory’ within their research. The day covered issues of migration (Dr Eureka Henrich), slavery (Dr Jessica Moody) and the heritage of tomorrow (Dr Esther Breithoff) in addition to contributions from students dealing with these questions in professional practice.

By chance, the workshop coincided with one of a series of evening debates organised by Intelligence² and Historic England and held in Westminster Revere or Remove? The Battle Over Statues Heritage and History’. This discussion, led by historians and journalists, addressed the subject of memory, and how such a contested concept is dealt with publicly, particularly in the multicultural and multi voiced 21st century context.

Managed by Jonathan Freedland, Guardian columnist and author, the Panel comprised Peter Frankopan, Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford; writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch; author Tiffany Jenkins, Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh; and David Olusoga, Historian and Broadcaster.  Each presented a position statement generated initially in response to the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign (https://rmfoxford.wordpress.com), which has recently campaigned to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College in Oxford, and the decision to remove a statue of confederate general Robert E Lee from a park in Charlottesville, USA.  In many ways the responses and positions described were personal and reflected the experiences of the speakers.  Olusoga spoke with passion about the statue of merchant and slaver Edward Colston in Bristol, contrasting his own confidence in dealing with such memorials with that of others without his depth of historical knowledge.  He deconstructed the purpose of such statues and demonstrated both their erroneous portrayal of history and the changing nature of their meaning in contemporary society.  He urged the removing of Colston to a different site where his legacy could be debated in a context based on learning, not on the reverence that is hard to avoid when a viewer is physically required to ‘look up’ to a statue.  Jenkins took the position that relocation of statues simply relocated the issues. She noted the poor aesthetic quality of many such memorials and invoked the concepts of current relevance and the passing of time as determinants of the appropriate actions and responses to memorials.  As the contested statues are primarily in public places, her position was to leave responsibility with the public.  Where memorials are wanted they will be cared for, where no longer relevant they will be neglected and decline.  This approach reflects an emerging debate within the museum and heritage world regarding the potential for ‘managed decline’ of objects and places which are difficult to maintain for a range of reasons.  The need to forget as well as to remember was referenced although in a situation where the issues which some statues symbolise clearly continue to remain unaddressed, it seemed premature to move directly from ‘revere’ to ‘remove’ without further consideration.

All of the panellists at some point found themselves at risk of entanglement with the intricacies of this debate.  Hirsch urged the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes but also described the importance of monuments as part of the relationship of the present with the past.  Frankopan offered the view that the ‘winds of history’ mean that all statues will eventually fall, and that indeed, it is their ultimate function.  All felt that there should be some critique of each circumstance and a greater understanding of the history that each monument represents.  While an obvious response to the situation under discussion, this led inevitably to a discussion of the limitations of history teaching and public knowledge and to the fact that many statues are symbolic reductions of complex situations.  Their original meanings may have been lost and may be of limited relevance for the majority of those who view them today.  While some statues have little meaning at any one time, some have disproportionality significant meaning, becoming symbols of contemporary concerns. Olusoga pointed out that the Bristol statue of Colston was erected two hundred years after his death.  In this situation is the statue more realistically considered as something of the 19th rather than the 17th or 18th century?  Jenkins in particular cautioned about the dangers of being ‘enslaved to the past’.  If Bristol was provided with a statue of Colston in the 1890’s as part of a battle for power within the city’s merchant class, then it seemed entirely possible by the end of the debate that by removing it, Bristol could be signifying a sense of itself for the future, not seeking to remove an unpleasant figure and an unpalatable sense of its past.

Edward Colston, Bristol ©Barbara Wood

Reflecting on the workshop and the evening debate it seems as if the issues of both were less concerned with the meaning of statues and memorials at the time of erection and more about their function in establishing new identities for places and for society for the future.  A contributor from the audience, part of a campaign group aiming to remove the Colston statue spoke about the fundraising to establish a memorial to the 32000 people who died because of Colston’s’ activities and a museum of slavery in Bristol.  Meaning changes and develops even within living memory. Centuries after they were established, many of the remains under discussion seem inconsequential in themselves. It was their currency in the present that was important. It is surely our opportunity and responsibility to erect statues and memorials to what is important today, if - as Frankopan pointed out - anybody is interested enough to do that. 

Barbara Wood

Doctoral Candidate (DHeritage Programme)

@CuratorSW 

References

DeSilvey, C. (2017) Curated Decay Heritage Beyond Saving. University of Minnesota Press.

Jenkins, T. (2016) Keeping their marbles How the treasures of the past ended up in museums and why they should stay there. Oxford University Press. 

Exploring radical architectural group NATØ

Earlier this year, Routledge published my monograph on the last radical architectural group of the 20^th century – NATØ, Narrative Architecture Today. My book, titled NATØ: Narrative Architecture in Postmodern London, sets out a detailed, contextual history of the group, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera. NATØ never built together, so this is an architectural history without buildings – and I argue that architectural production is constituted as much by the drawings, texts, models and exhibitions by architects as it is by built works.

NATØ portrait by Sheila Rock, 1985. L to R: Peter Fleissig, Melanie Sainsbury, Catrina Beevor, Mark Prizeman, 
Christina Norton, Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Martin Benson, Nigel Coates, Robert Mull

NATØ emerged from the Architectural Association, where they studied under Nigel Coates. Coates and his students developed an approach to architecture that drew on fashion, television, music, video and nightclubs – very much in opposition to the more serious and inward-looking work happening elsewhere in the school. Indeed, they formed following the dramatic failure of the cohort by AA external examiners James Stirling and Ed Jones in 1983, who deemed their work little more than a ‘bunch of cartoons’. Initially conceived around the production of a magazine, NATØ went on to produce several exhibitions together, alongside three issues of NATØ, disbanding in 1987 following a major installation at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art. Their approach was emphatically against the professional mainstream of architecture, both in discourse and in terms of practice. They sought an audience in the fields of fashion and design more broadly, aligning themselves with magazines such as The Face and iD. Indeed, NATØ aimed to ‘destroy the notion of the profession’ and ‘travel over the frontier and join the rest outside architecture’ – envisioning a city made by its inhabitants, without the top-down imposition of design by professionals. In their ‘apprentice’ character NATØ described an individual who somewhat ambiguously both discredits and becomes the professional: ‘From now on none of us, and yet all of us, will be professionals’. They imagined a street-savvy, creative individual who can make or alter their surroundings in the same way they would modify or customise their clothing, self-publish or record their fanzine or punk demo, and weld furniture from found materials.

Invitation to the first NATØ meeting, from Nigel Coates to Mark Prizeman (1983)

NATØ issues 1-3, magazine covers (1983-85)

Tracing the formation of the group at the AA, my book examines the evolution of Coates's unit, including his formative years alongside Bernard Tschumi between 1974-80, before investigating NATØ's short period of activity between 1983-87 across the media of drawing, publishing and exhibiting. I had access to a fascinating body of archival material from the period, held primarily in the private collections of the NATØ members, which is published for the first time in my book. The book is structured around these three core outputs – examining first the drawings, then the magazines and finally the installations. Through the analysis of these archival materials, the book explores NATØ’s preoccupation with narrative, drawing terms and definitions from narratology into architectural discourse for the first time to develop a new vocabulary of architectural narrativity.

NATØ, Gamma City exhibition at the Air Gallery (1985)

Objects from NATØ's Gamma City, left: 'Soft Chandeliers' by Catrina Beevor; right: 'Totem' by Carlos Villanueva Brandt (1985)

Catrina Beevor, ‘Terminal Culture (an english landscape)’ from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987)    

Carlos Villanueva Brandt, 'Heathrow' from Heathrow exhibition, ICA Boston (1987)        

Part of the importance in telling the story of NATØ is the restoration of a more complete account of postmodernism, with the book reinstating one of the many contours of the inherently multifaceted field. The book contributes to the growing body of literature that is recuperating postmodernism from the often-reductive discourses that pervade writing on architecture. My contemporary re-reading of postmodernism through NATØ's work avoids the simplifying definitions of architectural postmodernism that have focused on the stylised, two-dimensional modes of pastiche historicism. Instead, NATØ’s provides a case study of architectural postmodernism that prioritised the pleasure and creative potential of the complex and chaotic, avoiding reduction to surface decoration in favour of rich, narrativised experience.

Finally, the book also describes a specific urban milieu: 1980s London. Contextualising NATØ’s work from a spatial, social, political and cultural perspective, I align the group with the street subcultures of the period, discovering parallels between their approach and the work of contemporaneous filmmakers, graphic designers, product designers and fashion designers working in London. Indeed, the specific state of post-industrialising London and its urban decay forms an integral part of understanding the work of both NATØ and their contemporaries – an idea I expand upon in the book.

I will be building on some of the ideas developed in the book in my paper ‘DIY and disorder: NATØ’s approach to making and materiality’ for the Design History Society Conference at the University of Oslo in September 2017. In March 2018, my TVAD Talk will explore the work of product designers including Ron Arad, Tom Dixon’s Creative Salvage group and Daniel Weil whose work echoes many of NATØ’s preoccupations.


Dr. Claire Jamieson is lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies for BA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture and Design at University of Hertfordshire.

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