This book is a very clear and comprehensively written historiographical overview of the production and consumption of contemporary visual arts in the North of England in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The study is divided in three chronological parts, each focusing on a particular decade. The historical starting point is the election of the leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, as prime minister in 1979. It ends with the global financial crisis of 2008.
The author intertwines a theoretical art historical methodology with a specific socio-political historical context in a clearly defined geographic region. The relationship between political, social and economic changes, such as massive deindustrialization, the decline of working-class communities and the search for urban regeneration and reconstruction, and artistic developments — ‘aesthetic thought and modes of visual expression’ — is thoroughly analyzed. This study is published in the British art: histories and interpretations since 1700 series, which wants to further art-historical debates embedded in international or comparative cultural perspectives and grounded in a firm methodological or historiographical approach.
The study focuses on ‘the main northern conurbations of Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Newcastle’, with references to persons and events in cities such as Hull, York and Halifax. The common thread is the interaction between artistic practices and the urban environment in a period of major and often disruptive changes. Although these changes are global, they have a different impact from region to region.
The North of England was an highly industrialized area. Due to the rise of liberal government policies with their priority given to economics, entrepreneurial ethos, profound profit thinking and a dismantling of the welfare state, this industry disappeared to low-wage countries, the trade unions’ backbone were broken and the region was faced with the disintegration of its former identity and the search for a new one. One of the instruments in this search was the emergence of the cultural economy as an engine of urban regeneration, with its shift from production to consumption. Also, capital investment created new art institutions in the North in the 1990s (such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Tate Liverpool), which themselves influenced local artistic production.
‘There is a strategic hypothesis behind this study: the socio-political turmoil that Britain entered in the 1980s, and the specific conditions that northern cities found themselves in, triggered a radical aesthetic development in the northern regions, which itself broke from past regional practices to engage critically with the present’. The region saw a diversification of art practices allied to central and common aesthetic preoccupations and engagements. A lot of attention is paid to forms of creative resistance and alternative artistic voices to the normative discourse in these decades— ‘forms of interstitial aesthetics and interstitial heritage’ and transient interventions in the urban fabric with its ‘spaces that had lost their original functions and that stood in an in-between’. These artistic endeavours were focused against sanctioned national and regional cultural policies, regarding contemporary art as ‘a practical economic tool and uninhibited asset of cultural distinction’, and against the role of the cultural economy in the commodification of artistic practices and of contemporary art, especially during the New Labour governments, whereby artists were seen as part of a new class working in the creative industries, a means to an economic end in the transition from heavy industries to a service industry.
The author relied not only on previously published sources, but also archival records, hard-to-find ephemera and extensive interviews with key figures of the period. This is also reflected in the detailed end notes to each chapter and the bibliography at the end of the book. This can be used as a springboard for further research.
Although the focus is on the past three decades, the author does not hesitate to recapture local events and developments in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, if necessary for a clear contextualization of a recent event, trend or other fact. They are sometimes the roots, a prelude or in fact, the opposite of a current development. This broader contextualization, which deepens insight into developments, is a strength of this publication.
Another strength is the seemingly effortless embedding of this publication in a theoretical art historical context. The author refers to several seminal studies and art historical concepts (Augé, Baudrillard, Baxandall, Bourdieu, De Certeau, De Chassey, Florida, Foucault, Francastel, Ginzburg, Harvey, Lefebvre, Lyotard, Rancière, Laurajane Smith). He applies these concepts only when it appears necessary to place his argument in a broader context. It does not feel extraneous, and the artistic jargon used is always explained clearly.
The author also examines the relationship between regional, national and international artistic developments, practices and identities, including phenomena such as ‘a locally inscribed political activism and engagement’ and grassroots artistic practices. Ideas about artistic connectivity and networking within a political realm, the local-international dialectic and the double periphery, inclusion of multiple points of view within artistic practice, diversification of the artistic output, negotiation with the system to generate social change and critical reflexivity are developed in several case studies.
These case studies are often presented as alternative, non-commercial, sometimes oppositional paths to the dominant trajectory. They foment democratic dialogues and participation, and place the focus on personal and collective histories of formerly working-class communities, rooted in a regional past with a distinctive industrial heritage. In this way, new Northern artistic imaginaries can develop.
One of the key concepts is transindustriality. It is ‘a dialectical resolution of the industrial/post-industrial binary’ placing ‘the emphasis on the processes through which our contemporary societies are moving from one state to the other, and the ongoing nature of this shift’ whereby one ‘looks at the connections between past and present forms of industriousness’. This study ‘probes the role played by the arts and culture in this transitional condition’.
The work is illustrated rather sparingly, and that is a pity. Specific artworks are often discussed at some length with no accompanying image. One does not always have access to the internet to quickly find an image. For the sake of fairness, it must be said that it sometimes concerns landscape art, soundscapes, performance art, mixed-media installations or other forms of temporary site-specific interventions. But certainly in the chapters that focus on (documentary) photography, the lack of illustrations feels like a failure and hampers the ability to follow the author's argument: extensive ekphrasis cannot catch everything.
