Zoë Hendon 'Working at the Intersection of Archives and Practice’

Next week TVAD is hosting a TVAD Talk research seminar by external speaker Zoë Hendon, Head of Collections and Associate Professor, Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), Middlesex University. Her TVAD Talk, entitled ‘Working at the Intersection of Archives and Practice’ will showcase her doctoral research in the context of her professional work at MoDA. Zoë’s talk will examine her approach to both:

the museum's collections from a design-historical perspective, and on the ways in which these collections inspire creative practice in the present. 

In this talk she will refer to various projects she has worked on in recent years, and reflect on where these different strands of thought are currently taking her. Zoë’s PhD ‘Looking Back and Looking Forward, the The Silver Studio Collection as heritage asset and educational resource, 1968-2018’ is registered with Middlesex University and is due for completion by end of 2019. The Silver Studio Collection

was a commercial design practice, which between 1880 and 1963 completed more than 20,000 schemes for items such as furnishing fabrics, wallpapers, tablecovers, rugs and carpets. The Studio answered the needs of its customers, who were retailers and manufacturers at all levels of the market. Many of its clients were mass producers and Silver Studio designs therefore found their way into numerous British homes.

Zoë’s recent publications arising from this project include:

• ‘The Silver Studio art reference collection’ Decorative Arts Society Journal 36 (2012): 65–81;
• The Silver Studio and the Art of Japan, Middlesex University: Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture (2014);
• ‘Behind the Scenes at the Silver Studio : Rex Silver and the Hidden Mechanisms of Interwar Textile Design’ Architecture and Culture 6, 1 (2018): 61–80;
• and, with Dr Linda Sandino ‘Inspiration Examined:Towards a methodology’ Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education 17, 2 (2018): 135–50.
  
  
  
  
  
  The talk will be filmed by Mikayla Laird and will be published on the University of Hertfordshire’s YouTube channel in due course. Further TVAD Talks are listed on the TVAD Talks webpage and on the TVAD blog.

Research in the School of Creative Arts

The TVAD Research Group is just one of several research groups in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Staff move freely between groups examining Contemporary Arts Practice, Design Research, Media Research and the Digital Hack Lab as well as TVAD. Read more about the groups on our website here: https://www.herts.ac.uk/apply/schools-of-study/creative-arts/creative-arts-research

Some of our researchers were interviewed last year about their work and its significance for a film made by Freddie Gerrard-Abbott with Jak Kimsey and Antoine Proust. This film introduces the research of Dr Dan Goodbrey, Dr Pat Simpson, Dr Silvio Carta, Kim Akass, Prof Marty St James, Dr Steven Adams, Prof Simeon Nelson and Prof Grace Lees-Maffei. Hear them talking about their research in this film:

Research in the School of Creative Arts: An Overview from School of Creative Arts on Vimeo.

Find out more about TVAD's researchers, including Dan Goodbrey, Pat Simpson, Silvio Carta, Steven Adams and Grace Lees-Maffei on the TVAD researcher profile pages here: Link

Grunts & Grapples Exhibition

Grunts & Grapples Exhibition      

Tunbridge Wells Museum & Art Gallery (15 September 2016 – 14 January 2017)

‘Greetings Grapple Fans!’ Kent Walton

For those of a certain age (and one could argue class), Kent Walton’s welcome will evoke the routine of Saturday tea-time’s in front of the TV, anticipating an exciting 45mins of grapples, grunts, and the ubiquitous incensed Granny scolding a wrestler. While wrestling was first broadcast on newly launched ITV station in 1955, its established slot (just before the football scores) came about with the launch of World of Sport a decade later in 1965, and would last for 24 years before being axed by the then Director of Programmes, Greg Dyke, in 1989. The magazine format sports show was originally intended as a direct response to BBC’s Grandstand, and ‘The Wrestling’ became a central feature of its programming. Part sport, part entertainment, at its peak wrestling garnered audiences of over 12 million, and the new commercial station seemed like a fitting home for a pastime that had emerged from the traditions of the music hall. Yet, in many ways, the balance between these two areas was always an uncertain one, and the pull towards celebrity and spectacle that the commercial element of the sport demanded, would eventually be wrestling’s downfall (at least in the UK).

Grunts & Grapples seeks to explore this much neglected area of social and cultural history. It is drawn primarily from my own personal collection of posters, photographs, programmes, and a handful of wrestling outfits. The aim of the exhibition is very much one of capturing how central the sport was to British life for most of the second half of the twentieth century and how it drew on earlier traditions of public entertainment. For example, in terms of design, there are various billposters, which in style reveal wrestling’s origins in the aforementioned music hall tradition, but also to those of the circus. The influence of these two forms of popular culture ran throughout the sport, from the portrayal of the wrestlers as baddies (‘heals’) or goodies (‘blue eyes’), to the widespread encouragement of audience participation. In terms of the wrestlers themselves, prevailing narratives of Otherness and racial stereotypes would commonly be utilised in the creation of personalities. Hence, you would have Johnny Kincaid and Dave Bond wrestling under the name the ‘Caribbean Sunshine Boys’, although as Kincaid noted in a recent BBC documentary, he had never been further than Wandsworth! Other such figures included the supposed Native American ‘Billy Two Rivers’ who would perform an “Indian” dance before each bout. And most famously, Kendo Nagasaki, who drew on popular imagery of ‘Japan’, in his use of Samurai swords and distinctive masks, all of which were frequently embellished by Kent Walton’s commentary on Nagasaki’s ‘mysterious origins’. This Otherness served as a uncomplicated signifier of badness, while in this crude worldview, ‘whiteness’ functioned as shorthand for decency and righteousness. Not that this binary was fixed, as there were many wrestlers who throughout their career switched from a ‘heal’ to a ‘blue-eye’ and back again. This play of characters across the hundreds of venues that hosted the wrestling during the week, and on the TV screens on a Saturday afternoon, was a carefully choreographed storyline, with long running grudges, feuds, and resentments. All of which were stage managed by the wrestling promoter Joint Promotions, who held a near monopoly on the sport during the period Grunts & Grapples explores (1955 – 1990).

When ITV’s broadcasting of wrestling was cancelled in 1989, one of the arguments appeared to be that the contrived storylines, larger than life characters, and manufactured bouts – the entertainment side of wrestling’s heritage - had overshadowed the sporting aspect. For many, the protracted battle between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks throughout the 1980s served as prima facie evidence in the case for the prosecution. Judged as a mockery of ‘real’ wrestling – with the notorious 1981 Wembley clash contest lasting just 2mins 30secs – many fans and wrestlers alike considered the absence of skill and technique a step too far. With the arrival of Sky TV and the import of World Wrestling Federation (WWF) from America, it appeared such opinions were shared by Greg Dyke. Following its cancellation, wrestling continued in town halls and seaside piers well into the 1990s, but it never loomed as large in the public consciousness as it had throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s.  

   

TVAD talk on the Heritage of TV news

As a second year student on the DHeritage programme, I am still far from clear about my research question. So, when I was invited to give a TVAD talk, it was a good opportunity to think about where I was in the process, and how my research so far is beginning to collect around topics of interest.

As a professional doctoral student, my research is closely aligned to my practice as a corporate film-maker and broadcast journalist, so I tried to bring the two things together as a starting point, by looking at the heritage of radio and TV news.

From an outsider’s perspective, I would suggest that the heritage of TV news is its archive: the news broadcasts, on the spot reports and coverage of historic events, and this archive most definitely has a value. Every broadcaster has a department dedicated to selling the reuse of these assets.

But from my point of view, there is something just as important behind the scenes that is less obvious as ‘heritage’. The stories that have made up my career have come from production in the newsroom, using the most up-to-date technology available (and affordable) to bring the news to the radio waves and TV screen.

So, I started to look at the machines I used to work with every day.

What is interesting about looking again at these machines is that they sparked off memories about the way we used to make the news, and I started to think about the things that have changed, and the things that haven’t.

I remembered what it was like to edit using razor blades and splicing tape, and how everyone who has ever cut tape has the same semi-circular scar on their thumb from the time when they were in a rush, decided not to put the tape into the editing block, and ended up embedding the razor blade in their thumb, which resulted in even more panic as they tried to get their report on air without bleeding on it.

Or the time when the beta-cart machine chewed up a report on tape, leaving me with a minute-long black hole in my bulletin. To add to that, the autocue also failed while we were on-air. When the presenter tried to read the ‘spare’ stories from the printed scripts to make up the lost time due to the tape being chewed, he found that the printer was short on ink and had not printed them legibly. So, he had nowhere to go, and wrapped up the bulletin, leaving us sitting on the ‘end slate’ of the weather for a full minute – the longest minute of my professional career.

Those memories were attached to these obsolete machines, that are in themselves not valued in any way except by collectors of niche technology, and rarely exhibited as heritage objects. But to me, those machines are a vital element of the heritage story of me and my colleagues, as the technology we used shaped and affected the way we brought the news to the listener or viewer.

Because these machines are obsolete, my own heritage - news programmes I have worked on and reports I have done - are inaccessible, because they are stored on reel-to-reel tape, Beta SP and video tape, none of which I can access without seeking out someone who keeps and uses these technical relics of newsrooms past.

This led me to think that this will probably soon be true of CDs, and perhaps even USB sticks and hard drives. So, thinking about technology from a perspective of heritage collections, could it be that museums and archives are better off with pre-digital systems such as card catalogues, because these have remained accessible for many years without becoming obsolete, since we can simply copy the information onto new cards when they get old and hard to read. Is technology really helpful at all for holding and accessing data in the heritage sector?

And, thinking about the old technologies that are now considered obsolete, what formerly vital machines and technologies are mouldering away in the back rooms of museums and archives, no longer considered of any value? What heritage stories might be attached to these?

My research question centres around digitisation, looking at how putting collections online may have altered the work of the heritage professional, and the way they communicate with the outside world. I would like to look at the way technology has both helped and hindered heritage professionals with their work, and will ask them to reflect on how the rapid rise of the internet has changed their practice, and the way they present their collections.