Paul Gough
Paul Gough is Vice-Chancellor of the Arts University Bournemouth, UK.
He took up the role at Bournemouth in January 2020 after six years as Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President at RMIT University, Melbourne, heading the College of Design and Social Context.
He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UWE, Bristol; and prior to that, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts, Design and Media. As an elected artist member and former chair of the board, he retains the title Royal West of England Academy Professor of Fine Arts.
During his six-year tenure at RMIT, Professor Gough led a major expansion of the College of Design and Social Context to over 26,000 students, and established major strategic collaborations across the creative industries, media and cultural sector and with public and private sector organisations across Australia. The College also significantly enhanced its educational partnerships with institutions across Asia. Whilst at UWE, he also held roles with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and HEFCE (including chairing the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) sub-panel for Art and Design) and he led research assessment internationally both in Europe and Asia. He was chair of the 2014 RAE panel in Hong Kong.
A painter, broadcaster and writer, Professor Gough has exhibited internationally and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. Recent exhibitions in Australia were supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2017-19.
His research interests lie in the iconography of commemoration, the cultural geographies of battlefields, and the representation of peace and conflict. Amongst his recent publications on war art and war artists is a monograph 'Journey to Burghclere' about the British artist Stanley Spencer (2006), A Terrible Beauty, an extensive study of British art of the Great War (2010), and 'Your Loving Friend', the edited correspondence between Desmond Chute and Stanley Spencer, published in 2011. A further study about Spencer's memorial chapel in Burghclere was published as 'The Holy Box' in collaboration with the National Trust in 2017.
A book on the street artist Banksy - Banksy: A Bristol Legacy - was published in 2012, as part of a suite of talks, papers and media productions about the unknown artist. Gough's book – ‘Brothers in Arms’ – about the post-war paintings, prints and drawings of Paul and John Nash was published in summer 2014 alongside a curated exhibition of the brother's paintings. As part of a broad portfolio of activity linked to the centenary of the Great War, he curated five funded exhibitions – in London and Bristol – in 2014, and advised the Royal Mint in the UK on the design principles, iconography and potential artists for their commemorative coinage linked to the centenary of the war, 2014-2019. Gough's most recent book 'Dead Ground: A Cultural Reading of Memoryscapes, 1914-1918' was published in UK and Australia in 2019.
During ten years work as a television presenter, researcher and associate producer Paul worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on a range of creative arts programmes from dance to drama, poetry to painting, including the award-winning documentary Redundant Warrior, about the photographer Don McCullin, and ‘Drawing Fire’ a documentary on military sketching and panorama drawing. In addition to occasional work on BBC and Australian radio, he has a credit for ‘design research’ in the animated Aardman animation feature film, Chicken Run.
Address: College of Design and Social Context, RMIT
Level 10, Building 101
171, La Trobe Street
Melbourne, VIC
He took up the role at Bournemouth in January 2020 after six years as Pro Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President at RMIT University, Melbourne, heading the College of Design and Social Context.
He was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UWE, Bristol; and prior to that, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Creative Arts, Design and Media. As an elected artist member and former chair of the board, he retains the title Royal West of England Academy Professor of Fine Arts.
During his six-year tenure at RMIT, Professor Gough led a major expansion of the College of Design and Social Context to over 26,000 students, and established major strategic collaborations across the creative industries, media and cultural sector and with public and private sector organisations across Australia. The College also significantly enhanced its educational partnerships with institutions across Asia. Whilst at UWE, he also held roles with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and HEFCE (including chairing the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) sub-panel for Art and Design) and he led research assessment internationally both in Europe and Asia. He was chair of the 2014 RAE panel in Hong Kong.
A painter, broadcaster and writer, Professor Gough has exhibited internationally and is represented in the permanent collection of the Imperial War Museum, London, the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, and the National War Memorial, New Zealand. Recent exhibitions in Australia were supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, 2017-19.
His research interests lie in the iconography of commemoration, the cultural geographies of battlefields, and the representation of peace and conflict. Amongst his recent publications on war art and war artists is a monograph 'Journey to Burghclere' about the British artist Stanley Spencer (2006), A Terrible Beauty, an extensive study of British art of the Great War (2010), and 'Your Loving Friend', the edited correspondence between Desmond Chute and Stanley Spencer, published in 2011. A further study about Spencer's memorial chapel in Burghclere was published as 'The Holy Box' in collaboration with the National Trust in 2017.
A book on the street artist Banksy - Banksy: A Bristol Legacy - was published in 2012, as part of a suite of talks, papers and media productions about the unknown artist. Gough's book – ‘Brothers in Arms’ – about the post-war paintings, prints and drawings of Paul and John Nash was published in summer 2014 alongside a curated exhibition of the brother's paintings. As part of a broad portfolio of activity linked to the centenary of the Great War, he curated five funded exhibitions – in London and Bristol – in 2014, and advised the Royal Mint in the UK on the design principles, iconography and potential artists for their commemorative coinage linked to the centenary of the war, 2014-2019. Gough's most recent book 'Dead Ground: A Cultural Reading of Memoryscapes, 1914-1918' was published in UK and Australia in 2019.
During ten years work as a television presenter, researcher and associate producer Paul worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on a range of creative arts programmes from dance to drama, poetry to painting, including the award-winning documentary Redundant Warrior, about the photographer Don McCullin, and ‘Drawing Fire’ a documentary on military sketching and panorama drawing. In addition to occasional work on BBC and Australian radio, he has a credit for ‘design research’ in the animated Aardman animation feature film, Chicken Run.
Address: College of Design and Social Context, RMIT
Level 10, Building 101
171, La Trobe Street
Melbourne, VIC
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Books by Paul Gough
Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet Spencer’s fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.
Drawing on a newly discovered archive of personal letters, notebooks, and diaries, this illustrated biography tells Spencer’s story for the first time. Bringing together his major paintings, drawings, and illustrations, many never before seen, the book greatly expands our understanding of Spencer. It reassesses his status within twentieth-century British modernism and the revival of the landscape tradition, as well as the important role he played in the reinvigoration of public mural painting. Spencer is also reappraised as one of the most successful art teachers of his time, and his extensive influence on the lives and careers of many twentieth-century artists is explored in detail.
Politically, these have been intense years. A tortuous and messy divorce from Europe is being tested daily at customs posts on the land and across invisible lines on the high seas. Once a totem of English authority, the White Cliffs of Dover have become irreversibly politicised. One faction regards them as unassailable battlements, while a rival party deploys their sheer white slopes as a vast projection screen to beam forlorn messages of loss to our European neighbours. North and south along the coastline, our Channel beaches have become the landing sites for waves of refugees seeking solace and security after perilous voyages from war-ravaged homelands.
Here is the exhibition’s and the symposium’s rationale in abbreviated form. The symposium and exhibition explores the way in which:
Plants have figured as talismans of home, as memory-triggers, as souvenirs, as medicines and, now, as harbingers of conflict-driven climate change.
Gardens and plants, within the long, panoramic perspective of a century of war and conflict, have had unexpected but entwined relationships with times of great storm and turbulence.
Across the last one hundred years of wars and humanitarian disasters, gardens have figured as refuges. At the same time, a wide variety of landscapes, from desolate wastes to Australian bush valleys, have been re-imagined as gardens.
Gardens and plants have held a place within the movements of human beings embedded in turbulent flows, within vast, involuntary refugee and asylum seeker displacements, and within conflicts and humanitarian crises.
The special authority invested in the war artist and the image had become denuded by the mid-1980s. Although an independent artist working to commission, Peter Howson’s work in the Balkans was considered to have crossed the line that distinguished between impersonal witness and overzealous artist. Unlike William Orpen’s impartial rendition of gross personal violation, Howson was deemed to have become both judge and jury, an advocate not an artist, corrupted by circumstantial evidence rather than remaining vigilant as an uncorruptible viewer. For his part, Howson was clear that the terms of engagement had fundamentally changed since the Great War: it was no longer simply about what could be seen or not seen, but also what was known and could not be denied.
In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.
Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.
'Sojourns in the edgeland.'
It was the writer Marion Shoard who seems to have been the first to coin the term ‘Edgelands’. Like many a fellow flaneur, she had wandered into those unseen and unloved spaces that lie between the boundaries of our cities, and she became the first to lend literary shape to this liminal zone of rubbish tips and sewage farms, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance, and rogue plants. In plotting this unchartered terrain she treads the same ground that has become the seen and imagined landscapes in Paul Gough’s drawings of the last decade.
Thirty years earlier, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had opened our eyes to the vitality and worth of these unkempt places. However, he found much less to wonder at, little to cherish and celebrate in their wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, noting its hardiness as he botanized on some grim dump or sought out the hidden urban wildlife in one his familiar never-quite-identified non-places.
Mabey’s astonishment at the hardiness of nature is a reminder of another astute observer of the English scene, the painter Paul Nash. Before the Great War a modest painter of fluffy elms and vapid sunsets, Nash was transformed by his experiences while serving as a British officer on the Western Front in 1916.
In 1916, in a letter home he wrote of walking through a wood (or at least what remained of it after recent shelling) when it was little more than ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. A few days later, to his great surprise, that ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’, bristling with buds and fresh leaf growth:
‘The most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’
Nash’s ecstatic vision permeates Gough’s recent oeuvre. Over the past decade his drawings and paintings have captured a dread fascination with poetic dereliction and the quasi-industrial sublime, borne of long sojourns in and around the No-Man’s-Land.
More recently, two young British poets have also wandered in (and wondered of) the hinterlands that make up the British banlieue. To Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts the wilderness is much closer than any of us think. ‘Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged’, they describe the English edgeland as a set of familiar yet ignored spaces which have become the wild places on our own doorsteps. Theirs is a compelling vision, shared in Gough’s many images of former sites of battle, abandoned workings and ancient slagheaps, a land riddled with trenches and troughs, adits and mineholes, ivoried elm and wild buddleia.
However, Gough’s drawings are not representations of any one particular scene. Instead they are accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons collaged on to a single surface; they are sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dis-membered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the act of drawing.
They are, those very same ‘somewheres’ that Farley and Roberts Simmons have described, full of hollows and protuberance, margins and edges, ‘where an overlooked England still exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets have retreated [and yet] have found a way to live…where successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with another.’
In his drawings, created over decades of measured practice, Gough has laid vision to his own complicated, unkempt and unexamined edgeland. He has made tangible those places that have long thrived on disregard. In his work he meets the challenge that we should ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh’.
M.R.H.
Paul Farley and Michael Symmonds Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, 2011.
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, 1973.
Marion Shoard, Edgelands: an essay, 2002.
Head:Land
“In those early days before I left home for art school, I thought of myself as an artist. One of my pursuits was to leave the house with a sketchbook and a bag of pencils and paints and spend the days exiled on the outskirts of [the town] drawing fields and trees, paths and skies. It was an excuse for being alone I suppose, but it was also the beginning of looking for something, of the attempt to find outside of yourself that thing you knew was inside yourself.” (1)
An artist’s subject matter can be an elusive quarry. The painter Graham Sutherland described how he would roam his beloved Pembrokeshire casting around for potential ideas, not knowing quite what he was looking for but recognizing it when he saw it. Usually glimpsed from the corner of his eye, he would revive the essence of the image from memory later in this studio, the imagination ripened by the act of walking, registering and absorbing the facts of the landscape. This transition from fact to fiction is an elusive process. In the same spirit Martin Amis has described how:
Imaginative writing is understood to be slightly mysterious. In fact it is very mysterious. A great deal of the work gets done beneath the threshold of consciousness, and without the intercession of reason. (2)
The serrated coastline between Land’s End and Zennor in west Cornwall presents thousands of opportunities for any artist, a hundred possible drawings or paintings. And yet it is often the least obviously pictorial that will arrest Paul Gough’s eye; the vertiginous drop from a stone ledge overlooking Cot Valley, a fall of scree from an ancient mine working, or the set of strangely isolated granite steps that dominate the level ground at Carn Glooze. In one of Gough’s favourite books ‘Permanent Red’, John Berger describes wandering a city in the company of an artist and constantly surprised by the motifs and sights that attract the artist’s attention - a blank white wall, a pile of stacked folding chairs, the fall of light on a fragment of twisted metal. Little here that is obviously picturesque. (3)
Despite its obscurity West Penwith is a much-trampled place: this remote triangular peninsula of hard angular rock interspersed with sandy coves and implausibly clear pools of jasper water. Its myriad sites have been captured by generations of painters who did not mind battling against unrelenting winds or squalls of horizontal rain. Most were attracted to the natural light, exposed as is the land on three sides by open sea, but others see little more than its tough recent past: the remorseless struggle to eke a living from the land and the ocean.
Around St Just, where Gough walks, looks and sometimes stops to draw, the fields and valleys sides are still littered with the debris of a bustling industrial past: ruin-strewn, broken pit-heads, derelict blowing houses, the partially healed scars of open mining, lopped chimney stacks, the husks of beam engine housing, bizarre streaks of colour on sea cliffs where liquids have leached from the heavy metal workings. It is an enchanting place: a quite riveting blend of ancient megalithic and contemporary industrial sublime: the leftovers of a forlorn tin mining industry that came to a sudden end in the early 1980s as the global price of tin fell and kept falling. Peter Lanyon, an artist indelibly linked with this furthest reach of Cornwall, felt nothing but shame when treading the silenced workings around St Just. He described it as a cruel place, arguing that ‘these ruins are a monument to a social system which is absolutely criminal [where] the maintenance of the mining machinery could be so vicious and wicked that the men would be killed by its pure rusting out or its pure bad engineering.’ (4) For Lanyon, like D.H.Lawrence, the mine was a reality, a fact of both men’s lives but also a metaphor for a greater darkness that lurked within them.
Is that what makes the blasted landscape of West Penwith so compulsive: that awful subterranean darkness wrestling in dramatic counterpoint with the crystalline light overhead? Commissioned as an Official War Artist in the Second World War, Graham Sutherland worked in the Geevor mines in 1942. The mystique of nature is eloquently expressed in a suite of small studies and larger works that catch the ‘inky gloom’ of the subterranean galleries. The miners, ‘helmeted and crested with acetylene flame, look as if they were made of the ore they were engaged in extracting… We are back amongst the primitive gods.’ (5)
Above ground, on the greensward that masks the grim toil thousands of feet underneath, painters like Paul Gough attend to the complex topography and emotional histories of this deeply mined land. His work captures its rich variety, but also something of its awful beauty.
Albert Camus wrote that a man’s work is ‘nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ Here, in these wind-scoured headlands having trekked far and wide, Gough has opened his senses, and at times his heart, to the genus loci – the ‘spirit of place’ - of this, the final peninsula.
‘P.B.’
1
George Shaw, An Unfinished World, Modern Art, Oxford, 2012.
2
Martin Amis, The Second Plane, p.12.
3
John Berger, Permanent Red,
4
Peter Lanyon,
5
Sutherland
6
Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Vintage New York, 1970)
Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet Spencer’s fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.
Drawing on a newly discovered archive of personal letters, notebooks, and diaries, this illustrated biography tells Spencer’s story for the first time. Bringing together his major paintings, drawings, and illustrations, many never before seen, the book greatly expands our understanding of Spencer. It reassesses his status within twentieth-century British modernism and the revival of the landscape tradition, as well as the important role he played in the reinvigoration of public mural painting. Spencer is also reappraised as one of the most successful art teachers of his time, and his extensive influence on the lives and careers of many twentieth-century artists is explored in detail.
Politically, these have been intense years. A tortuous and messy divorce from Europe is being tested daily at customs posts on the land and across invisible lines on the high seas. Once a totem of English authority, the White Cliffs of Dover have become irreversibly politicised. One faction regards them as unassailable battlements, while a rival party deploys their sheer white slopes as a vast projection screen to beam forlorn messages of loss to our European neighbours. North and south along the coastline, our Channel beaches have become the landing sites for waves of refugees seeking solace and security after perilous voyages from war-ravaged homelands.
Here is the exhibition’s and the symposium’s rationale in abbreviated form. The symposium and exhibition explores the way in which:
Plants have figured as talismans of home, as memory-triggers, as souvenirs, as medicines and, now, as harbingers of conflict-driven climate change.
Gardens and plants, within the long, panoramic perspective of a century of war and conflict, have had unexpected but entwined relationships with times of great storm and turbulence.
Across the last one hundred years of wars and humanitarian disasters, gardens have figured as refuges. At the same time, a wide variety of landscapes, from desolate wastes to Australian bush valleys, have been re-imagined as gardens.
Gardens and plants have held a place within the movements of human beings embedded in turbulent flows, within vast, involuntary refugee and asylum seeker displacements, and within conflicts and humanitarian crises.
The special authority invested in the war artist and the image had become denuded by the mid-1980s. Although an independent artist working to commission, Peter Howson’s work in the Balkans was considered to have crossed the line that distinguished between impersonal witness and overzealous artist. Unlike William Orpen’s impartial rendition of gross personal violation, Howson was deemed to have become both judge and jury, an advocate not an artist, corrupted by circumstantial evidence rather than remaining vigilant as an uncorruptible viewer. For his part, Howson was clear that the terms of engagement had fundamentally changed since the Great War: it was no longer simply about what could be seen or not seen, but also what was known and could not be denied.
In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.
Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.
'Sojourns in the edgeland.'
It was the writer Marion Shoard who seems to have been the first to coin the term ‘Edgelands’. Like many a fellow flaneur, she had wandered into those unseen and unloved spaces that lie between the boundaries of our cities, and she became the first to lend literary shape to this liminal zone of rubbish tips and sewage farms, derelict industrial plant and ragged landfill, forlorn filling stations and scruffy allotments, abandoned ordnance, and rogue plants. In plotting this unchartered terrain she treads the same ground that has become the seen and imagined landscapes in Paul Gough’s drawings of the last decade.
Thirty years earlier, the naturalist Richard Mabey in his book ‘The Unofficial Countryside ‘, had opened our eyes to the vitality and worth of these unkempt places. However, he found much less to wonder at, little to cherish and celebrate in their wasted hinterlands. Instead he marvelled at the resilience of nature in such abject conditions, noting its hardiness as he botanized on some grim dump or sought out the hidden urban wildlife in one his familiar never-quite-identified non-places.
Mabey’s astonishment at the hardiness of nature is a reminder of another astute observer of the English scene, the painter Paul Nash. Before the Great War a modest painter of fluffy elms and vapid sunsets, Nash was transformed by his experiences while serving as a British officer on the Western Front in 1916.
In 1916, in a letter home he wrote of walking through a wood (or at least what remained of it after recent shelling) when it was little more than ‘a place with an evil name, pitted and pocked with shells, the trees torn to shreds, often reeking with poison gas’. A few days later, to his great surprise, that ‘most desolate ruinous place’ was drastically changed. It was now ‘a vivid green’, bristling with buds and fresh leaf growth:
‘The most broken trees even had sprouted somewhere and in the midst, from the depth of the wood’s bruised heart poured out the throbbing song of a nightingale. Ridiculous mad incongruity! One can’t think which is the more absurd, the War or Nature…’
Nash’s ecstatic vision permeates Gough’s recent oeuvre. Over the past decade his drawings and paintings have captured a dread fascination with poetic dereliction and the quasi-industrial sublime, borne of long sojourns in and around the No-Man’s-Land.
More recently, two young British poets have also wandered in (and wondered of) the hinterlands that make up the British banlieue. To Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts the wilderness is much closer than any of us think. ‘Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged’, they describe the English edgeland as a set of familiar yet ignored spaces which have become the wild places on our own doorsteps. Theirs is a compelling vision, shared in Gough’s many images of former sites of battle, abandoned workings and ancient slagheaps, a land riddled with trenches and troughs, adits and mineholes, ivoried elm and wild buddleia.
However, Gough’s drawings are not representations of any one particular scene. Instead they are accretions of places, spaces, times and seasons collaged on to a single surface; they are sites of both legend and anonymity, places emptied and yet full of emptiness, dis-membered topographies that have had their constituent parts re-membered through the act of drawing.
They are, those very same ‘somewheres’ that Farley and Roberts Simmons have described, full of hollows and protuberance, margins and edges, ‘where an overlooked England still exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets have retreated [and yet] have found a way to live…where successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with another.’
In his drawings, created over decades of measured practice, Gough has laid vision to his own complicated, unkempt and unexamined edgeland. He has made tangible those places that have long thrived on disregard. In his work he meets the challenge that we should ‘put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh’.
M.R.H.
Paul Farley and Michael Symmonds Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, 2011.
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, 1973.
Marion Shoard, Edgelands: an essay, 2002.
Head:Land
“In those early days before I left home for art school, I thought of myself as an artist. One of my pursuits was to leave the house with a sketchbook and a bag of pencils and paints and spend the days exiled on the outskirts of [the town] drawing fields and trees, paths and skies. It was an excuse for being alone I suppose, but it was also the beginning of looking for something, of the attempt to find outside of yourself that thing you knew was inside yourself.” (1)
An artist’s subject matter can be an elusive quarry. The painter Graham Sutherland described how he would roam his beloved Pembrokeshire casting around for potential ideas, not knowing quite what he was looking for but recognizing it when he saw it. Usually glimpsed from the corner of his eye, he would revive the essence of the image from memory later in this studio, the imagination ripened by the act of walking, registering and absorbing the facts of the landscape. This transition from fact to fiction is an elusive process. In the same spirit Martin Amis has described how:
Imaginative writing is understood to be slightly mysterious. In fact it is very mysterious. A great deal of the work gets done beneath the threshold of consciousness, and without the intercession of reason. (2)
The serrated coastline between Land’s End and Zennor in west Cornwall presents thousands of opportunities for any artist, a hundred possible drawings or paintings. And yet it is often the least obviously pictorial that will arrest Paul Gough’s eye; the vertiginous drop from a stone ledge overlooking Cot Valley, a fall of scree from an ancient mine working, or the set of strangely isolated granite steps that dominate the level ground at Carn Glooze. In one of Gough’s favourite books ‘Permanent Red’, John Berger describes wandering a city in the company of an artist and constantly surprised by the motifs and sights that attract the artist’s attention - a blank white wall, a pile of stacked folding chairs, the fall of light on a fragment of twisted metal. Little here that is obviously picturesque. (3)
Despite its obscurity West Penwith is a much-trampled place: this remote triangular peninsula of hard angular rock interspersed with sandy coves and implausibly clear pools of jasper water. Its myriad sites have been captured by generations of painters who did not mind battling against unrelenting winds or squalls of horizontal rain. Most were attracted to the natural light, exposed as is the land on three sides by open sea, but others see little more than its tough recent past: the remorseless struggle to eke a living from the land and the ocean.
Around St Just, where Gough walks, looks and sometimes stops to draw, the fields and valleys sides are still littered with the debris of a bustling industrial past: ruin-strewn, broken pit-heads, derelict blowing houses, the partially healed scars of open mining, lopped chimney stacks, the husks of beam engine housing, bizarre streaks of colour on sea cliffs where liquids have leached from the heavy metal workings. It is an enchanting place: a quite riveting blend of ancient megalithic and contemporary industrial sublime: the leftovers of a forlorn tin mining industry that came to a sudden end in the early 1980s as the global price of tin fell and kept falling. Peter Lanyon, an artist indelibly linked with this furthest reach of Cornwall, felt nothing but shame when treading the silenced workings around St Just. He described it as a cruel place, arguing that ‘these ruins are a monument to a social system which is absolutely criminal [where] the maintenance of the mining machinery could be so vicious and wicked that the men would be killed by its pure rusting out or its pure bad engineering.’ (4) For Lanyon, like D.H.Lawrence, the mine was a reality, a fact of both men’s lives but also a metaphor for a greater darkness that lurked within them.
Is that what makes the blasted landscape of West Penwith so compulsive: that awful subterranean darkness wrestling in dramatic counterpoint with the crystalline light overhead? Commissioned as an Official War Artist in the Second World War, Graham Sutherland worked in the Geevor mines in 1942. The mystique of nature is eloquently expressed in a suite of small studies and larger works that catch the ‘inky gloom’ of the subterranean galleries. The miners, ‘helmeted and crested with acetylene flame, look as if they were made of the ore they were engaged in extracting… We are back amongst the primitive gods.’ (5)
Above ground, on the greensward that masks the grim toil thousands of feet underneath, painters like Paul Gough attend to the complex topography and emotional histories of this deeply mined land. His work captures its rich variety, but also something of its awful beauty.
Albert Camus wrote that a man’s work is ‘nothing but a slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ Here, in these wind-scoured headlands having trekked far and wide, Gough has opened his senses, and at times his heart, to the genus loci – the ‘spirit of place’ - of this, the final peninsula.
‘P.B.’
1
George Shaw, An Unfinished World, Modern Art, Oxford, 2012.
2
Martin Amis, The Second Plane, p.12.
3
John Berger, Permanent Red,
4
Peter Lanyon,
5
Sutherland
6
Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, Vintage New York, 1970)
Keywords
Fine art
War artists
War art exhibitions
Commemoration
Museum displays
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Historical retrospective exhibitions at a national scale
3 Regional and thematic exhibitions
4 Public artworks, site specific and specially commissioned art works.
5 Notes and references
6 Citation
The floral tribute might be regarded as the first draft in the process of remembering; not only can flowers speak a thousand words, but flowers are brought to sites of trauma as a way of both marking specific loss, but also as a way of participating in the early stages of grieving.
Swansea, 13 November 2014
A Commission in the Army
Professor Paul Gough
RMIT University, Australia
Why paint war? This paper will address that essential question by looking at a range of British artists from the Great War (and some from more recent conflicts), not only those who were commissioned as official war artists and recorders but a wider range of non-professionals, those who in peacetime worked as surveyors, draughtsmen, architects, scene painters for the theatre, and those who were talented sketchers of the English landscape. Many were called upon to exercise their creative skills in the service of the war, producing an extraordinarily diverse body of material. Much of their ‘trench art’ is to be seen in small, private and personal notebooks, on Mess menus or Divisional Christmas Cards, on irreverent newsletters or Brigade Broadsheets, or as illustrations in letters home from the front. They also formed the cadre of soldiers required to carry out panoramic sketching and surveillance drawings, work which required precision, disciplined draughtsmanship and an ability to unlearn techniques taught in the art school. This illustrated paper will look in detail at their work, and at the negotiation skills that were essential to any successful commission.
Professor Paul Gough
Pro-Vice Chancellor and Vice-President
RMIT University
[email protected]
Abstract, for Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference, August 2014
Congested terrain: contested memories. Visualising the multiple spaces of war and remembrance
‘Stasis’ is widely accepted as the pre-eminent condition of the conflict on the Western Front, a war of congealment, fixity and stagnant immobility fought from earthworks that were designed to be temporary but quickly became permanent. In the battle zones a new spatial order emerged; beyond the superficial safety of the front-line parapet was No Man’s Land a liminal, unknown space, a ‘debateable land’ which could not be owned or controlled. Far beyond lay a green and unspoilt distance, a ‘Promised Land' that was forever locked in an unattainable future; the domain of imperial development and exploitation.
This paper explores the spatiality of conflicts on the Great War battlefield, and draws on the work of artists, cartographers and surveyors who attempted to explore and lend visual form to the chaos. Through the act of mapping and drawing they attempted to systematize the outward devastation, whereby trees became datum points, emptiness was labelled, and the few fixed features of the ravaged land became the immutable co-ordinates of a functional terrain, a strategic field, where maps where predicated as much on time as of place.
The paper concludes by looking at the spatiality of commemoration, at how memoryscapes have been created, preserved and re-presented as a palimpsest of overlapping, polyvocal ‘lieux de memoire’. Across France and Belgium, the flattened emptiness of the former Western Front is now crowded with rhetorical topoi and emblems of regional and national assertion.
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Traumatic and discomforting, modern war ruined some artists but galvanised others. For Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and ‘Richard’ Nevinson, warfare honed their imagination and tested their talents. Spencer made perhaps the most fascinating transition; as a lowly medical orderly his vivid wartime experiences in Bristol and the Balkans resulted in the Chapel at Burghclere, one of the most moving monuments to 20th-century war ever painted.
Through the ‘Gates of Hell’: Stanley Spencer in Bristol, the Balkans and Burghclere; ‘A Crisis of Brilliance, 1908-1922’,Dulwich Picture Gallery symposium, 21st September 2013
Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a several-times commissioned military artist, this paper examines the work of several painters – John Ross, Ken Howard, and Keith Holmes – who have worked intermittently for the British armed services in the past three decades. Their work is compared to artists such as Linda Kitson, John Keane and Xavier Pick who have taken a more transgressive approach to the challenge of working with the Armed Forces. But the paper will takes as its principle case-study the work of painter David Rowlands, commissioned in the 1990s by the Permanent Joint Headquarters (UK) as their official artist to record the British build-up in the Arabian Gulf, and since then fully employed by units in the British army (and some overseas military units) to paint commemorative works related to active service overseas, largely in Iraq and more recently Afghanistan. On occasion, Rowlands has been commissioned to depict units involved in ‘The Troubles’ and to render visible battles from the Great War and other historic conflicts.
Through an examination of Rowlands’ work (and comparisons drawn with ‘Service artists’ in the USA, Australia and New Zealand) this illustrated paper touches upon the language and iconography of military painting, particularly the tensions between illustration and interpretation, between factual and technical accuracy, and examines the issues of authenticity and historical verity. The paper also touches upon issues of agency and reception, and the stresses between the commissioning process, the independence of the artist as interpreter, and broader concerns of testimony and visual authority.
In the summer of 2009 Bristol saw a remarkable phenomenon that made international news. An estimated 300,000 people queued for hours, often in pouring rain, for admission to the city’s museum & art gallery. They had been attracted by the media hype surrounding an exhibition ambiguously entitled ‘Banksy vs the Bristol Museum’.
This illustrated talk will raise a number of questions: Is Banksy a subversive influence or merely a bit of fun? Why is Banksy so important to Bristol? Is he really important? Where does the exhibition leave Bristol as an epicentre of ‘street art’? It looks at the setting up of the show and questions the need – other than to conform to the required Banksy mystique – for secrecy. Paul Gough has compiled a book about the Banksy show; it is the first non-partisan documentation of the Bristol event and an attempt to assess its local and wider impact.
In an illustrated lecture Paul Gough will reflect upon time spent in these memory-scapes, focusing particularly on how New Zealand artists, then and now, have articulated their vision of war and peace.
However, that which is designed to provide a locus of ‘inclusion’ also equally proclaims exclusion; power (as Foucault argued) creates its own points of resistance. Our cities are wrought by political and territorial dispute; the statues, inscriptions, street signs, commemorative plaques and memorials rarely located without complex negotiation, even open dispute because the rivalries for mnemonic space is nearly always fierce and dramatic with political tensions played out vicariously through the siting of civic markers that espouse esteem and status.
Drawing upon memorial landscapes in the UK and overseas, the paper explores the topographies of memory and remembrance, and offer some provocations on why we choose to remember or forget, what we choose to include or leave out, and how we address the ‘anxiety of erasure’ that haunts so many of us.
Drawing on Morgan’s work on memory and identity in the Bristol landscape, and Gough’s research into the vexed history of Bristol’s war memorials, this paper posits the notion that the city is still deeply divided against itself, a schism written on the very memorial landscape of Bristol, whether it be the artless graffiti daubed by the anonymous ‘Baron of Bedminster’ or its counterpart in the stone towers erected by Lord Winterstoke, the other Baron (of Blagdon), or whether it be the painful story of the Bristol Cenotaph, which took some fifteen years before it could be unveiled while only miles away a statue to a solitary eminent general was commissioned, sculpted and unveiled in record time.
Taking these and other examples of mnemonic rivalry, Morgan and Gough will ask whether there is something in the psycho-geographical genetic code of the city that causes, even encourages, this oppositional behaviour. They will explore the ‘versus habit’ which characterises the public recitation of Bristol’s (occasionally) uncomfortable past. The paper concludes by suggesting that street artist Banksy understood the dynamic that typifies Bristol’s sense of itself when he framed his 2009 exhibition ‘Banksy versus Bristol Museum’. Arguably, however, the confrontational logic was largely lost on the hundreds of thousands who queued for hours to wander the galleries to seek out the backpacking rats and animated fish fingers irreverently placed amongst the archaeological remains and the museum’s outstanding collection of Chinese ware.
In 2000, a cement floor was laid along the zig-zag trench lines of the Beaumont Hamel Memorial Park on the Somme, guide ropes were erected, and access to No Man’s Land was restricted by wire, fencing and obtrusive signage. To many English visitors, something radical had happened to the topography of commemoration. Not only had their right to roam been denied, but a pivotal site of ‘English’ memory had been compromised. By comparison, the constituent parts and Dominion countries that made up the British Empire are very easily accessed and well represented across the ‘memory-scape’ of Flanders – there are impressive South African, Indian, Canadian, New Zealand and Australian memorial structures and cemeteries, as well as museums; even the Chinese Labour Corps is commemorated through architectural forms. In addition, the regions of Great Britain are clearly identified in the rhetorical topography of the region – from the ‘Sheffield Memorial Park’ to the trench once occupied by the Accrington Pals. Nearby, in Mametz Wood, there is a large ‘Welsh’ Red Dragon sculpture, statues of Scottish highlanders, an impressive Ulster Tower. Where is ‘England’ in all this?
This paper will explore the crisis of English identity as played out by proxy in the funerary landscape of northern France and Belgium. It will explore the nagging anxiety – fuelled by energetic debates about devolution and amplified by recurrent by-election results – that Britain is inexorably sub-dividing, region by region, undermining the notion of a cohesive Englishness and fragmenting the way that their sites of memory are marked and how their dead are remembered.
A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War
Sansom, 2010
Reviewed by Andrew Kelly, March 2010
Our view of the Great War, despite recent revisionism, remains the one
that started to appear in the late 1920s: boys led by donkeys; a
slaughter that wasted a nation's youth; and where all were destroyed,
even those who had escaped it shells, as Erich Maria Remarque said. The
art of the war is responsible for this: poetry, drama, novels, film and
the visual arts have all played their part in the creation of this
collective memory.
That 'terrible beauty' should result from such horror has always been
the great paradox of the First World War. Though Paul Gough says that
'Britain did not produce much effective anti-war painting' the overall
impact is overwhelmingly anti-war (there are only a few great anti-war
films - J'Accuse, All Quiet on the Western Front, La Grand Illusion and
Paths of Glory - but these are the ones that are regarded as being close
to the truth). And it is all the more remarkable that, for the visual
arts, it should result from state patronage, in a brutal war, when
bloody conflict nurtured the creative arts.
A Terrible Beauty is a scholarly book that wears its learning lightly;
well illustrated, allowing us to look at as well as read about the
paintings; and mercifully free of the artspeak that denies to most today
an understanding of the world of art. The key artists are covered:
William Orpen, Paul Nash and his brother John; Muirhead Bone and Charles
Nevinson; Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. Gough also gives us some of
those less well-known: Paul Maze, Adrian Hill and Sydney Jones.
Artists were involved from the start, some welcoming, briefly, the
cleansing that would result in a defeat of abstraction as well as
Germany. They were free to paint what they saw, though after 1917 were
not allowed to portray the dead (they could do so again after the
Armistice) and even modernism was quietly encouraged. But they had to
put up with appalling conditions even though they were excused the
privations of the battlefield; were seen as spies by some; had trouble
keeping paper dry; and, as the war went on, had to face increasing
censorship - Nevinson exhibited his great work Paths of Glory covered by
brown paper with the word censored plastered over it, a protest which
ended his career as an official war artist.
What resulted was remarkable. Gough looks in detail at some works with
considerable insight: the 'first great painting of the war',
Kennington's The Kensington's at Laventie; Paul Nash's The Menin Road
(he integrates Cormac Macarthy's story of the aftermath of the
apocalypse, The Road, in this discussion), Nevinson's La Mitrailleuse
The Harvest of Battle and Paths of Glory as well as covering the wider
work of the artist and others.
Though only one artist died at the front, all the artists were affected,
many of them badly. Orpen could not forget the 'mangled corpses' in
Flanders; Nevinson, who was only best when 'he painted something he
hated', saw his reputation go into abeyance and he became more famous
for what he said than what he did; Paul Nash complained about being a
'war artist without a war'; Spencer created one of the most moving
monuments to 20th-century war on the painted walls of Burghclere's
Sandham Memorial Chapel; Lewis turned to fascism: he really was mad, bad
and dangerous to know. They may have achieved some financial security
and were able to bear witness and create a record, even fulfil a dream
that some had feared would never come (Wyndham Lewis wrote in the 1930s:
'You must not miss a war, if one is going!') but many questioned its
worth.
Charles Masterman, chief propagandist from the start who commissioned
many of the artists, had asked in The Condition of England published in
1910 'what will the future make of the present'? 100 years on, we look
with horror at the war, and can pass judgement on those that sent men to
fight for such pointless reasons. But we can also look back with some
gratitude that artists portrayed it so honestly. At least some good came
out of it.
Most artists once they had experienced the front, would have agreed with
Paul Nash that their only justification was to help 'rob war of the last
shred of glory the last shine of glamour'. They failed, as the Great War
became only the First World War, but the work they created helps
maintain the fascination that many have for that brutal conflict which
started a brutal century and was responsible for much of its horrors. A
Terrible Beauty shows why.
Professor Paul Gough’s A Terrible Beauty and David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance both look at the British artists of the war, including Muirhead Bone, Christopher Nevinson, Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Paul Nash. They discuss how, in the midst of the madness of the “War to end Wars”, they were able to create great art.
Liffol-le-Grand, Vosges, France, November 2018