The Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship
English Heritage
HISTORY the past considered as a whole / the past events connected with someone or something
ORIGIN Greek historia ‘narrative, history’, from histor ‘learned, wise man’
HERITAGE relating to things of historic or cultural value that are worthy of preservation
ORIGIN Old French, from heriter ‘inherit’
Under the title English Heritage, Morley interweaves themes of national identity, heritage tourism, and the representation of history.
Morley interrogates the representation of Berwick's history, appropriating pictures on a tourist gift - a tea towel - of invaders, conquerors, and religious transformationists. The memento image is blown up a thousand times, scaled up to the dimensions of the 19th century bourgeois history painting - paintings that shaped hierarchical concepts of British identity.
Enlargement gives these images new gravitas, and makes visible the organisation of the scene - the great attacker / defender stands steadfast against a gloaming sky, and what landscape there is in these works relates to territory. Territory means power, ownership, and violence. The winner gets to tell his-story. The winner reads it.
These vignettes create a tableau that represents history as a series of heroic events, a narrative of men fighting; transgressing borders; conquering frontiers; progressing.
Heroes are used as driver of historical narrative, and as an explanation of place - all the more so when the consciousness of that place is shaped by the nearness, significance, and permeability of borders, when the landscape is moulded into a mossy fortress. The politics of precedent - who won or who was here first - appropriates this kind of archaeology and utilises it to shape a dominant historical narrative, producing a sort of collective consciousness that is can be mistaken for memory.
The concept of borders and their transgression as a political and emotional scape is complex, dense and old - a mixture of economics and powerful (national) identities. Within this, the bridge acts as a picturesque device, yet it also shares with the boundary or border a sense of liminality.
If we believe that space, place, and movement through it is increasingly politicised, to the extent that mobility in itself is suspicious, then these works show up an amnesiac denial of historical precedents of shifting and moving peoples for economic and knowledge-based reasons.
Morley mimics this linear metanarrative of history, and suggests an uneasy correlation between the representation of national identity and the practice of tourism.
It could be argued that the representation of historical and cultural identities through tourism and heritage methodologies appear to display relative and multiple positions (eg. 'ethical tourism') however, Morley suspects that in fact such methods reinforce linear knowledge models, and preserve a sense of 'otherness'.
Perhaps post-colonial thought has not yet dismantled socio-structural hierarchies drawn from the days of empire, and in fact these attitudes still shape the relationship between identity and history, between a geographical and cultural sense of ‘self’ and ‘other‘.
Morley sees that the intellectual presuppositions of postmodernism in terms of historical representation do not describe the portrayal of history via the practice of heritage. And through the interrogation of the throwaway tourist item, he finds unexpected evidence of the structures and hierarchies that reify certain historiographical practices.
Morley's fragmentation of surface is a kind of disruption of readability. Fragmentation splits the image, so it becomes simultaneously read as pattern and form. Does it reveal or does it obliterate? Is it an optical device or an emotional one? Or a degenerate anti-Loosian object?
This shattered language points to a post-modern sensibility - that collage and the introduction of chance elements express multiple viewpoints - but also to an earlier 20th century narrative of bodily fragmentation and obliteration.
Optical fragmentation re-occurs headily in work upon work as we move through histories toward our present, our current questions of borders and heroics - disposing of a bomb or winning a trophy.
Image interplays with a facsimile of Royal Stewart Tartan. Tartan here is both symbol and costume. It is a symbolic fabric that has had poured into its inanimate self many mythologies. It functions also as a kind of knowingly picturesque national costume - the tartan of comedy hats and shortbread, a shorthand tribal dress for tourists.
There is a repetitious impulse - taking and enlarging; fracturing; embellishing, technicolouring. Uncertainty and distrust develop within the image, and the apparent truth of any history is refracted through distorted and wilful copies.
This attacks the idea of authenticity, which is crucial to historiographical practices and the understanding of heritage through artefacts and accounts - they have to be authentic, real. To repeat and re-work - where is the real knowledge, where is the truth, and how can we then invest it with cultural significance, with memory? This position interlinks the question of authenticity surrounding the (art) object, with the quest for authenticity in the production of historical representation through the structure of heritage.
“The past can of course be infinitely re-described” 1) and Morley's fragmentation offers shows us this intrinsic slippage in representing history, and in doing this, he himself can’t help but again re-describe it.
Ultimately, Morley uses collage to develop a critique of modern epistemologies and linear thought.
Morley doesn't allow his pretend trajectory of national progress to be read as a smooth glide from the mediaeval to the modern. He sets up a parallel between the historical and contemporary representation of heroism. The contemporary soldiers’ portraits are taken from recruitment brochures produced to persuade people to join up. They are symbolic men, we don't know if they are 'real' soldiers or not. This literature with its imperative be a soldier re-iterates the frontier landscape as a place for heroism and the production of (national) character.
When does something become historical, when does heritage take over the structures of memory and memorialisation? The cycle of winning, conquering, acquiescence is now invested with new pathos through the knowledge that the viewer brings to the image, and the interaction between image and the object, the wax figure - itself a museum artefact which represents a (archaeological) body which is both real and symbolic - it stands for the many, it stands for the one, it also embodies a set of processes which belong to cultural heritage systems.
1) Jenkins; 1991; Re-thinking History.
Text by Alison Hand
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