Ysanne Holt

Performing the Anglo-Scottish Border: Cultural Landscapes, Heritage and Borderland Identities

ABSTRACT Recent times have seen much reflection on the nature of the Anglo-Scottish border region; its past, present and potential future. Political concerns have rightly absorbed much of the attention, but at the same time important light has been shed on the legacy of cultural engagements and forms of interaction that might be said to perform and produce this border over time and render it particularly distinctive. A soft, internal border, the territory considered in this article is one with an ancient feudal past and a heavily conserved, preserved and, in parts, still militarized present. It is predominantly rural and characterized by large swathes of forestry, agriculture, and moorland, all of which raise issues of aesthetic and environmental, as well as social and economic sustainability. The concern in the case studies presented in this article is how, through the relational and processual perspectives of border studies and cultural landscapes, we might comprehend the over layered and sedimented histories, the nature of identities, heritage and experience of place here. I consider too the ways in which recent forms of creative practice are contributing to a wider investigation of this region and re-conceptualizing the cultural significance of the border.

New York, London, Ireland: Collector John Quinn's Transatlantic Network, c. 1900–1917

In the early 1900s John Quinn (1879–1924), Ohio-born son of Irish Catholic immigrants, was establishing a successful financial law career in Manhattan and had begun what became an all-consuming passion, collecting. At first he collected literature, especially Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, William Morris and George Meredith, autograph manuscripts where possible, and then fine art, initially prints and drawings. Quinn himself was to be a key driver behind the 1913 Armory Show in New York and, in the years around the First World War, an increasingly prodigious collector of French modernism in particular, a process made all the easier by his own success that year in driving through anti-tariff legislation on the import to America of original works of art. The later development of Quinns art collecting has been widely discussed, most notably in 1978 by the art historian and museum curator Judith Zilczer, and his life as a whole very closely detailed a decade earlier in Benjamin L. Reids 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Man from New York. My focus in this article is on the shifts and transformations of Quinns earlier patterns of collecting from the turn of the century up to and including his interests in Vorticism, on his Irish collection in particular and on exploring Quinns practices in relation to some recent studies of transnationalism, transculturation and the nature and operation of transatlantic networks in the market for art.

Visual culture in the northern British archipelago: imagining islands

This edited collection, including contributors from the disciplines of art history, film studies, cultural geography and cultural anthropology, explores ways in which islands in the north of England and Scotland have provided space for a variety of visual-cultural practices and forms of creative expression which have informed our understanding of the world. Simultaneously the chapters reflect upon the importance of these islands as a space in which, and with which, to contemplate the pressures and the possibilities within contemporary society. This book makes a timely and original contribution to the developing field of island studies, and will be of interest to scholars studying issues of place, community and the peripheries.

A hut on Holy Island: reframing northern landscape

This essay explores the evolution and significance of a shelter constructed in 2002 by the artist Sally Madge on a remote beach on Holy Island, off the north-east coast of Northumberland. In the context of a legacy of cultural interactions with and representations of this island – a popular tourist destination – the concern is with how the simple structure might be understood in terms of a potential refiguring of a heavily prefigured location, enabling an alternative, even transgressive notion of place, disturbing preconceived boundaries between artists, community, insiders and outsiders and so engendering a new way of thinking about northern peripheries. In the process the essay considers recent examples of public art; from the increasingly design-practice led, spectacular structures at Kielder Reservoir Sculpture Trail, to Charles Jencks’ monumental earth sculpture, Northumberlandia constructed out of the top-soil excavated from an open-cast coal mine at Shotton. By contrast, the specific character of the Holy Island shelter and the nature of the practices associated with it unsettle some of our assumptions about place and the rhetoric underpinning art and creativity.

Bacon Reframed: A themed issue on Francis Bacon

This is the first time Visual Culture in Britain has devoted a themed issue to an individual. It seems particularly appropriate, then, that this first single-artist issue should focus on new readings of the work of Francis Bacon, whose art continually responded to a wide range of visual cultural sources: to newspaper and magazine images, personal and professional photography, cinema and documentary, fashionable dress, the forms and spaces of architectural design and interiors, as well as old master and modernist traditions within fine art. The study of Bacon’s uses of these varied resources continues to yield important and productive insights into the working practices and mindset of an artist who was acutely attuned to the shifting social, cultural and historical experience of twentieth-century life. Bacon exhibited widely and was accorded international status in his lifetime in North America and Europe – not so typical an experience for that earlier generation of twentieth-century British artists. He has consistently attracted widespread critical attention – appreciative and adulatory, at times dismissive, even rancorous. Nevertheless, for writer Andrew Brighton in 2001, ‘Bacon scholarship is still raw’; furthermore, the artist himself ‘deliberately undermined the possibility of a definitive account of the meanings and motives of his work’. Bacon’s consistent self-management of his reputation, of the access to knowledge and potential understandings of his practice, is a fact widely recognized – indeed, various effects and implications of his strategies in this respect are considered in this issue. Certain mythologies or habitual frames of reference have clearly come to dominate perceptions of the artist, variously nuanced by changing critical tendencies and historical circumstances, following on from his landmark showing at the Lefevre Gallery in 1945. Since Bacon’s death in 1992, with the subsequent access to studio and archive, and, most notably, at the last major showing of his work, the centenary exhibition at Tate Britain in Autumn 2008, a range of new interests in and understandings of the artist has begun to emerge. The Invisible Histories symposium, which accompanied the Tate retrospective, brought together curators, conservators and writers to consider the scholarship that has resulted from newly available information, and it is from papers delivered and discussions aired at that event that this themed issue arises. The aim here is to set out some of the new perspectives on