Jennifer Way

‘Imaginings’ of Geography:

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE_A_159019.sgm 10.1080/09528820600590363 hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/147 -5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 06 & Francis 000Ma ch 2006 Jenn ferWay jway@u t.edu ‘Can the art of the twentieth century usefully be treated geographically?’2 Thus began Lawrence Alloway’s ‘What Happened to the Frontier?’, an essay in which he outlined a geographical approach to art. It consists of ranking art ‘in terms of diminishing area: (1) international art, global, pervasive, and encompassing; (2) continental or national art, the limits of which coincide with tariff boundaries and rights of citizenship; and (3) local and regional styles, within countries’.3 That such geography afforded Alloway a means of estimating the value of art and of privileging features such as expansiveness in scope (‘pervasive and encompassing’) is especially interesting, considering that in 1963, the year he published his essay, geography held tremendous importance for his homeland, Britain. Although Alloway did not discuss it in his essay, by the mid-twentieth century the devolution of the British Empire was accelerating rapidly. Let us recall the independence of India, 1947; Burma and Ceylon, 1948; the Republic of Ireland, 1949; Malaysia and Ghana, 1957; Cyprus, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, 1960; Tanganyika, 1961; Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, 1962; and Kenya and Zanzibar, 1963. If, as Edward Said suggested, ‘the actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about’,4 certainly, devolution was rendering the defining feature of the British Empire vulnerable. Indeed, processes of devolution were necessitating a redrawing of the imperial map to record the fast-diminishing size of the empire and acknowledge the development of political uncertainties that arose as territory changed hands. After all, as Harry Goulbourne observes, the horizons and boundaries of Britain were contracting from empire to nation ‘in the sense that [Britain] has steadily relinquished, or has had wrenched from her, what was once the world’s largest colonial empire spreading over more than a quarter of the earth’s surface’.5 I will argue that Britain’s shrinking geography, and the challenge posed to its empire by the United States in the late 1940s and 1950s, had a formative impact on British art writing and practice of the time.6 As Edward Said has observed, the imperial possession of land was 1 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, New York, 1994, p 7. I would like to thank Dr Nancy Jachec for her sagacious comments on an earlier draft and dedication to making this issue possible, and Eva White for facilitating my study of the art of Eduardo Paolozzi in the Archive of Art and Design, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Reterritorialization and Whispers From the Walls

According to Kellie Jones, reterritorialization involves ‘recapturing one’s (combined and various) history, much of which has been dismissed as an insignificant footnote to the dominant culture’. In this essay, I bring artist and photography scholar Deborah Willis’s use of Jones’s concept of reterritorialization to bear on Whispers from the Walls, an installation that Whitfield Lovell created at the University of North Texas Art Gallery in 1999. Chiefly, I explore what kinds and whose histories Whispers from the Walls engaged. In particular, I emphasize contributions that the photographs Lovell studied to create the installation and the objects he included therein made to recovering histories.

in due course themselves advertisements? Painterly Abstract Painting and Discourses of Consumer Culture in the 1950s

This essay reconstitutes the sense artists and intellectuals made of vanguard painting in relation to a consumer culture they observed burgeoning in the United States during the 1950s. In analyzing how painterly abstract painting approximated its forms and practices, they surmised consumer culture was becoming hegemonic and tending to frustrate redress thereof. However, the essay identifies an alternative to the inevitable course of culture commentators espied and disparaged. In his early sculpture Claes Oldenburg wittily engaged to revalorize the very painterliness affording commodification in the first place.