This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 06 November 2014, At: 06:07Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Visual Art PracticePublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjvp20

Beautiful impurity: Britishcontextualism as processualpostmodern practiceSally J. MorganPublished online: 06 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Sally J. Morgan (2003) Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processualpostmodern practice, Journal of Visual Art Practice, 2:3, 135-144

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jvap.2.3.135/0

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Beautiful impurity: British contextualismas processual postmodern practice

Sally J. Morgan

AbstractThe term ‘contextual art practice’ has been used in recent years as an overarching termto cover categories such as ‘public art’, ‘environmental art’ and ‘community art’. Thisarticle contends that such categorizations may obscure rather than illuminate ourunderstanding of these practices. It draws on historical narratives of British contextualart, particularly community and performance art, to illustrate that the inability of Britishart professionals, such as critics, funders and administrators, to comprehend theprocessual nature of what became known as postmodernism meant that they imposedan essentially modernist, discipline-based value system on its manifestations. Theresultant search for modernist sets of reference, and the resistance this provoked inpractitioners, resulted in fragmentation, as illusory specialisms were constantly definedonly to be endlessly subverted by disgruntled artists. This confusion arose from a profoundparadigm shift where high-modernism, wedded to the art-object as a manifestation ofspecialist discourse, was confronted by postmodernism, working with the concept of theart-object dematerialized into art-process.

PrefaceIn 1967 I was a first-year Art Foundation student in Sutton Coldfield in England. Inthat same year John Latham, a part-time lecturer at St. Martin’s School of Art inLondon, staged an ‘event’ called ‘Spit and Chew’. Participants in the event wereeach asked to tear out a page from a library copy of Art and Culture, by ClementGreenberg. Then they were invited to chew the pages, and to spit the resultantresidue into a container. This matter was then fermented until liquefied, andreturned to the library in a glass jar. I was, and still am, astounded and seduced bythe audacity and the beautiful impurity of that moment.

IntroductionSince the 1970s certain arts practices in Britain have come together to try and formalliances, aware that they have something in common, but struggling to define whatthat is. The banner ‘contextual art practice’ has been used consistently in recentyears to incorporate earlier identifications such as ‘public art’, ‘environmental art’,‘community art’ and ‘site-specific art’ and so on ad infinitum. Definitions ofcontextualism have been elusive and continue to shift like the shape of clouds.Recently Carson and Silver defined it as ‘artist’s practices engaged with socialissues’,1 whilst Jane Calow reappraised and theorized an earlier position,2 speakingof contextualism as art-as-practice as against art-as-product.3 I, in turn, had arguedthat it was the quintessential postmodern art practice.4

In this present piece I intend to take this discussion further and propose thateven the epithet ‘contextualism’ obscures, rather than illuminates our

1 John Carson andSusannah Silver (eds.),Out of the Bubble:Approaches toContextual Practicewithin Fine ArtEducation, London: theLondon Institute,Central St. Martin’sCollege of Art andDesign and LondonArts Board, 2000, p. 4.

2 Dermott Killip, ofMedium WaveCommunity Arts, wrotethe following in late1979: ‘Our alternativeview is that art shouldno longer be seen asthe production of anobject or series ofobjects forconsumption. Insteadit should be seen as apractice,’ (‘Biting theHand that Feeds Us? A

135JVAP 2 (3) 135–144 ©Intellect Ltd 2003

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

understanding of the nature of the shift of paradigm that the American critic LucyLippard described as the ‘dematerialization of the art object’.5

Drawing on historical narratives of British contextual practice, particularlyperformance and community art, I intend to show that, from the early 1970s, theBritish art establishment’s inability to comprehend the processual nature of what wenow understand as postmodernism, meant that it imposed an essentiallymodernist, discipline-based view on it, emphasizing ‘art product’ or ‘outcome’ as astand-in for the art object. The notion of art as ‘practice’, or as ‘process’,6 is beyondcomprehension within a modernist paradigm where the valourization of the productas a substitute for object is predicated on the notion that the artwork exists at afixed point. The constant search for these fixed points resulted in continuousfragmentation in a quest to find discrete disciplines where none actually existed.The only real points of difference were between two different notions of the natureand location of art. One was modernist, wedded to the object or product as amanifestation of specialist discourse, and the other was postmodernist, workingwith the concept of the art object dematerialized into art process.

British postmodernism in all its manifestations utterly embraced the‘dematerialization’ of the art object, which Latham described as the ‘conversion of astate of matter into radiant energy’.7 In order to fully understand this paradigm shift,it is important to comprehend that for the artist who has embraced ‘process’, thedematerialized object is no longer there [not even in spirit] and cannot berematerialized. The dematerialized object becomes energy, and that energy is neverstill. Art turns from ‘object’ into what I have described as an unpredictable,transforming process that is, by its very nature, a challenge to established order. Thecreative act remodels and reorganizes existing elements, conditions or ideas. Thatwhich exists now, through human intervention becomes transformed intosomething else.8

The process of transformation became, in itself, the art. It became a continuous‘event’, rather than a fixed and static culmination. However, for the modernistmindset, art must be fixed, located and concluded within an identifiable product. Itmust begin and finish, be framed and finite.

It might be argued that while it was eventually possible for those with thispredisposition to embrace the notion of context, if only as a framing device, the ideaof the processual was a far more difficult concept to accommodate, for, if narrativemust culminate in ‘closure’,9 so the modernist artwork should achieve stasis.Taxonomies, such as ‘conceptualist’, ‘contextualist’, ‘time-based’, ‘performance art’,etc. are an attempt to find points of difference and stasis in the terms describedabove. They are illuminating in as much as they help us to identify the symptoms ofan absolutely ‘other’ way of conceiving art, but they continue to propagate a notionof knowledge and culture as an evolution of typologies. The processual is not,therefore a further subdivision or genus of twentieth-century art. It is simply anothersymptom of that immense shift of paradigm that we call (rather unsatisfactorily)‘postmodernism’. In order to understand its significance it is necessary to backtrackand review the circumstance in which this shift of paradigm occurred.

From instance to circumstanceThe American critic Clement Greenberg, the guru of American and BritishModernist art in the late 1950s and 1960s, in his famous and influential piece,‘Modernist Painting’ (first published in 1961), had advocated a version of

Community Artistwrites to Sir Roy Shaw’,Another Standard,London: Shelton Trust,1980, p. l7).

3 Jane Calow, in JohnCarson and SusannahSilver (eds.), Out of theBubble: Approaches toContextual Practicewithin Fine ArtEducation, 2000, p.108.

4 Sally J Morgan, ‘TheBorder-guards havelost interest: The“Problem” of Public Artand the rise ofContextual Practice’,Drawing Fire, Bristol:NAFAE, 2: 4 (1999), p.26.

5 Lucy Lippard, Six Years- The Dematerialisationof the Art Object, NewYork: Studio Vista,1973.

6 Sally Morgan, ‘LookingBack over 25 Years’, inMalcolm Dickson (ed.),Art With People,Sunderland: AN,(1995), pp. 16-26.

7 John Latham, Report ofa Surveyor, London:Tate Gallery, 1986, p.43.

8 Sally J Morgan, unpub-lished lecture,Dartington, 1986.

9 Hayden White, TheContent of the Form:Narrative, Discourse andHistoricalRepresentation,Baltimore: JohnsHopkins UniversityPress, 1987, p. 16.

136 Sally J. Morgan

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

modernism that, in an somewhat eccentric reading of Kantian aesthetics, hadenjoined us to look for ‘disinterested purity’ in art. Greenberg’s version ofmodernism was simplistic, reductive and, for some reason, enormously seductive.As Stanley Aronowitz put it, Greenberg’s ‘writing is certainly unremarkable,’ but his‘power in the ... art world in the decades following World War II was awesome’.10

Whatever other versions of modernism existed in literature, or had been posited byearlier visual artists and critics, Greenberg’s version swept through art schools,studios and galleries and formed the basis for art criticism during that period. In themid-1960s, young lecturers in Britain’s newly restructured art schools arrived freshfrom the Royal College of Art with copies of ‘Modernist Painting’ sticking out oftheir pockets. As students at that time we were enjoined to ‘reduce’, to ‘simplify’, to‘purify’ and to understand that the strict confines of media were where we operated.As a painter I was to be concerned with ‘flatness’, and my colleagues who weresculptors were to concern themselves with ‘objectness’.

Greenberg demanded an art that was pared down to a point where it recognizedno audience, refused ‘place’, and acknowledged no diversity of process. Heinstructed that the arts should strive for the purity that he required by, ‘confiningthemselves strictly to that which is most palpable in them, namely their mediums,and by refraining from treating or imitating what lies outside the province of theirexclusive effects’.11

They should, he maintained, strip away everything that was not essential inthem, reducing ‘themselves to the means whereby they attain virtuality as art, to theliteral essence of their mediums’.12

Greenberg’s close associate, Michael Fried, had gone further and haddemanded that art attain perfect detachment and disinterest. To achieve this it wasvital that it acknowledged no relationship with its audience, for to do so was, in hiswords, ‘to reduce art to theatre’.13 To engage in the acknowledgement of audience,of place, of context was, according to this philosophy, to fall from purity intodefilement.

In the face of such a closely defined, perhaps claustrophobic, code of practice, itis probably not surprising that it was closely followed by vigorous reaction. Theacademic and writer, Rosalind Krauss, who was originally one of Greenberg’s mostvociferous disciples, described the high modernist rejection of the world beyondthose neutralized white cubes called galleries as an ‘absolute loss of place’, a kind ofnomadism in which art becomes free to ‘depict its own autonomy’.14 Later still shewent on to propose that, at some point in the late 1960s or early 1970s, modernismhad ‘ruptured’ into what she described as an ‘expanded field’, where one practicewas not defined in terms of medium, e.g. as ‘sculpture’, but in terms of ‘logicaloperations on a set of cultural terms for which any medium ... might be used’.15

In this, the expanded field of postmodernist practices, an active rejection ofGreenberg’s ‘purity’ occurred. The blending and juxtapositioning of ‘impurities’became an indispensable part of its project. It rejected media-focused self-reference, and exploded into seeming chaos through the tight, white claustrophobicwalls of his increasingly solipsistic aesthetic philosophy. As Stephen Connor has putit, ‘where a modernist aesthetic would stress the instance of art, we may say, apostmodernist one stresses its circumstance.’16

Further, and significantly, as Henry Sayre has suggested, an important outcomeof this postmodern ‘rupture’ of the borders of form and meaning in art was that itmoved ‘the accepted site of presence ... from object to audience’.17 In this new site

10 Stanley Aronowitz,Dead Artists LiveTheories, London:Routledge, 1994, p. 35.

11 Clement Greenberg,‘The New Sculpture’ inJohn O’Brian (ed.),Clement Greenberg: TheCollected Essays andCriticism. Volume 2,Chicago and London:University of ChicagoPress, 1986, p. 314.

12 Greenberg, 1986, p.314.

13 Michael Fried, Art andObjecthood, Chicago:University of ChicagoPress, 1998, pp. 148-72.

14 Rosalind Krauss, TheOriginality of the Avant-Garde and OtherModernist Myths,Cambridge, MA andLondon: MIT Press,1986, p. 280.

15 Krauss, 1986, p. 280.

16 Steven Connor, inDavid Cooper (ed.), ACompanion toAesthetics, Oxford:Blackwell, 1995, p. 289.

17 Henry M Sayre, TheObject of Performance,Chicago and London:University of ChicagoPress, 1989 p. 7. Thisevent, whichculminated in theauthorities re-claimingthe building in July1968, was documentedin a co-authored book,Students and Staff ofHornsey College of Art,The Hornsey Affair,London: Penguin,1969. A collection of‘essays’ by staff andstudents, it is afascinatingcombination ofidealism: ‘Understandus, we are part of oneanother’ (frontispiece),

137Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processual postmodern practice

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

of presence, postmodern aesthetic merges instance with circumstance to include theprocess (of both production and reception) as an ontological continuum of locating,and relocating, significance.

John Latham’s ‘Spit and Chew’ stood as a metonymic distillation of thispostmodern sensibility. It signalled a completely different proposition concerningthe nature of art. It was conceptual, it was theatrical, it was durational and above allit was impure. This was one of British postmodernism’s defining moments.

Art as processIn the UK, in the mid to late 1960s, art was doing things that Greenberg said itshouldn’t, crossing boundaries, courting chaos, flicking a finger-gesture at all andsundry. The challenging of existing orders and hierarchies was de rigueur across thesocial spectrum at this time. Longhaired baby-boomers, born into food-rationed,shorthaired, post-war austerity, appalled their be-medalled fathers [real andallegorical] by seeming to insist on pleasure, untidiness, and incomprehensibility asa right and a way of life. Standing in opposition to the timeless, placeless, audience-less art of Greenberg’s high modernism, Stuart Brisley immersed himself in a bathof animal innards, Keith Arnett exhibited a picture of himself bearing the placard‘Keith Arnett is a Real Artist’, and John Latham burned book-sculptures in publicplaces.

In London in May 1968, as the students of Paris took control of their streets, thestudents at Hornsey College of Art took control of their institution(, ejecting thePrincipal and unsympathetic staff, and managing their own alternative syllabus.Student representatives from most of Britain’s art schools were sent to attendHornsey’s student-run seminars, which culminated in a conference on therelationship of Art to Society. They were ‘against the art object’,18 against the idea ofthe genius19 and specialization,20 for ‘collectivity’21 and ‘creative processes’.22

Twenty-eight students were expelled as a result of the occupation, and some ofthem went on to work for the Poster Workshop in Camden Road, where theycontributed to the burgeoning community arts movement by printing posters forstrikers, tenants groups and anti-war protesters.23

Meanwhile, in the North, Albert Hunt mixed ‘Happenings’ with community artin Bradford, John Fox’s Welfare State mixed art with anarchic theatre in Leeds, whileat Coventry School of Art, Art and Language taught art without the art object.

What British artists were to come to term ‘contextual’ art practices arose, as wehave seen, from a rejection of Greenbergian modernism, coupled with apostmodernist view of culture incorporating decentred notions of power andideological concerns for the social, or collective, rather than the individual. Similarlythey placed emphasis on process and ‘experience’ as opposed to product and‘knowledge’, and were influenced by thinkers such as Freire, Dewey, Williams andCroce.

In the early 1970s the Arts Council of Great Britain (a government organizationset up in the 1940s that took on the responsibility to fund and promote the arts) setup an enquiry into what it perceived to be new art forms. They did this in responseto what they saw as a growing range of what were then characterized as‘oppositional practices’. As a result of its enquiries it reviewed the way that it fundedartists and arts projects, and it set up new specialist panels in order to find ways ofaccommodating them within its funding remit. The function of these panels, whichincluded one for ‘performance art’ and one for ‘community art’, was to identify and

revolutionary polemic:‘for then the culture ofthe people will be theculture of the people,and not the culture ofthe decadent bourgeoiselite’ (p. 72), and anEnid Blyton boarding-school story, wherethey breakfasted on‘delicious porridge withfresh strawberries,toast and jam’ and ‘thecanteen was the vibrat-ing heart of therevolution’ (p. 42).

18 Students and Staff ofHornsey College of Art,The Hornsey Affair,London: Penguin,1969, p. 69.

19 Hornsey, p. 94.

20 Hornsey, p. 116.

21 Hornsey, p. 66.

22 Hornsey, p. 126.

23 See David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of theBarricades, London:Paladin, 1988, p. 310.

138 Sally J. Morgan

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

give government grants to support the growth of these new ‘specialisms’. In doingso they made what I would contend was a false distinction between practices thatwere linked by a postmodern attention to process and experience, and a shift of thelocus of art ‘presence’ (to paraphrase Sayre once again) from object to audience.What all these areas of practice had in common, in their most dynamic forms, wasa shifting of emphasis away from the notion of eternal, fixed truth as embodied inthe singular art object. For the performance artist, the community artist and themakers of site-specific art, happenings and environments, art could not be‘disinterested’, nor could it be an expression of sublime and supra-human truth.Most importantly, meaning was not fixed in hermetically sealed art objects.

Raymond Williams, the Welsh theorist who was to be so influential on‘contextual’ arts practices and theories, helped to expand the understanding of‘culture’ by going beyond the finite ‘object’. Positing the notion of culture ascontinuous action, he told us that, ‘a culture, while it is being lived, is always in partunknown, in part unrealised’,24 and can ‘never be reduced to its artefacts while it isbeing lived’,25 thus alerting us to the possibility that culture was not a fixed valuesystem but a process of natural growth based on active social engagement.26 Henceart, in this philosophy, became redefined not as an object, but as a culturally locatedprocess in which all participated whether they were conscious of the fact or not.Importantly, however, the location of the ‘subject’ in this process shifted towardsthose who had previously conceived of themselves as being passive, or ‘acted upon’rather than acting. In this many artists were influenced by the Brazilian philosopher,Paulo Freire, who had emphasized the notion of culture as the ‘the action-objectwhole’27 in which: ‘Consciousness of and action upon reality are [...] inseparableconstituents of the transforming act by which men become creatures of relation’.28

He emphasized the notion of culture as reflective activity, as praxis,29 and heconceived of cultural action as having the possibility of being: ‘A true revolutionaryproject [...] a process in which the people assume the role of subject in theprecarious adventure of transforming and recreating the world’.30 This shifting ofsignificance away from the art object, away from the individual ‘subjecthood’ of theartist, and into the notion of art as a dynamic process of theorized action, or praxis,was such a revolutionary notion as to be almost incomprehensible to the artestablishment of the day. This profound conceptual change could not beassimilated overnight, and 40 years later it is still being contested.

Craig Owens’ six categories characterizing postmodern art, i.e. appropriation,site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation discursivity and hybridization,31 whentaken as a whole, may be seen to describe this notion of art as praxis or continualcultural process. In the postmodern turn, art becomes ‘processual’ regardless ofwhether or not an identifiable art object plays a part in this process. In short, artdoes not begin and end with the art object, but extends in both temporal directionsbeyond it, and is inextricably linked with the layers of context around it. Manyapparently different practices become related when the notion of art as continuouscultural process is recognized as the common factor. In some of these practices -‘community arts’ or ‘new genre public art’, for example - those who had once beengiven the role of passive audience, engaged in the art making process itself, andwhat had once been the solitary domain of the artist/genius became a process ofcollective cultural action. In other practices, such as site-specific installation orperformance, the processual nature of the work becomes realized as an open-ended

24 Raymond Williams,Culture and Society:Coleridge to Orwell,London: HogarthPress, 1987 p. 334.

25 Williams, 1987, p. 323.

26 Williams, 1987 p. 338.

27 Paulo Freire, CulturalAction for Freedom,London: Penguin, 1972,p. 52.

28 Freire, Cultural Actionfor Freedom, 1972, p.30.

29 Paulo Freire, ThePedagogy of theOppressed, London:Penguin, 1972, p. 96.

30 Freire, Cultural Actionfor Freedom, 1972, p.72.

31 Craig Owens, referredto in Nigel Wheale,Postmodern Arts,London: Routledge,1995, p. 119.

139Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processual postmodern practice

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

exploration of meaning located between artist, artwork, context and an imaginativelyand intellectually active audience.

RetrenchmentHow then is this paradigm illustrated through the history of community art? Edgy,argumentative and intensely political, the British Community Arts Movement sawart as a form of revolutionary cultural action employing co-authorship andindividual and collective ‘empowerment’ through active participation in creativeprocesses. Philosophically it existed somewhere between Joseph Beuy’s propositionthat art and life had no edges, the Situationist position of Guy Debord, which sawcreative action as ‘a temporary field of activity favourable to [...] desires’,32 and PauloFreire’s notion of cultural action as political action.

As Nicholas Green and Frank Mort noted in 1982,33 it had developed parallelwith feminism in the preceding decade, and shared the same rejection of culturalhierarchies as was to be expostulated in postcolonialism by writers such as belhooks and Edward Said.

Owen Kelly, in Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, spoke of thethree strands that came together to form community arts: the experimental, inter-media approach that arose in the Arts Labs of Birmingham and London; the finearts rejection of the gallery; and the political/cultural activism that had held swayduring this era.34

However, his description was just as true of performance art. Richard Layzellidentified a late-1960s milieu fuelling the development of performance art that wastypified by ‘a profound dissatisfaction with the commercial gallery system’.35 The‘events’ of people like John Latham and Stuart Brisley, at non-gallery venues such asthe progressive music mecca, Middle Earth, were at its beginning, as were theirpolitically focused works that ‘question[ed] social institutions’.36 Community artsand performance art were products of the same parents, unlikely as that mightseem now, and if they were twins, they were Siamese twins. They were practicesdone by the same people as though they were the same thing. John Latham, RichardLayzell, Albert Hunt and John Fox didn’t differentiate and didn’t allocate differentnames to the various parts of their practice. From this distance in time thesimilarities between these two symptoms of postmodernism are more visible thantheir differences, but at the time finding difference between ‘forms’ was anobsession that was occurring right across the board. Without these divisions thepatron and the critic found themselves at a loss.

In 1969 Edward Lucie-Smith had found himself trying to describe the thencurrent art practices in Movements in Art Since 1945. In the final chapter, ‘Conceptualart, Environments and Happenings’,37 he struggles to find the object, the stasis; theproduct of what was a tendency rather than a set of ‘movements’. After describing ashift from art as object to art as idea, the product he finally settles on is the artist hisor herself, thus missing the point entirely. He notes the symptoms of a bewilderingrupture with past understandings of the nature of art: He notes ‘process’, ‘concept’,‘performance’, he comments on ‘politics’ and ‘time-based’, but he can’t really bringhimself to believe that the art object has really dematerialized. He thinks it’s justhiding. At one moment, when discussing Claus Rinke’s ‘Water-circulation’ [1969-70]he says: ‘The art object was therefore ungraspable, in the literal sense, and what ithad to offer was simply the experience of coming for a moment into its presence.’38

If the dematerialized art object is simply in hiding, then one only has to look for

32 Guy Debord,‘Preliminary Problemsin Constructing aSituation’, SituationistAnthology, Bureau ofPublic Secrets, 1981, p.43.

33 Nicholas Green andFrank Mort, ‘ArtHistory, Pleasure andPolitics’, AnotherStandard, London:Shelton Trust, Autumn1982, p. 15.

34 Owen Kelly, Community,Art and the State:Storming the Citadels,London: Comedia,1984.

35 Richard Layzell,‘Beginnings in Britain’,in Robert Ayers andDavid Butler (eds.),Live Art, Sunderland:AN, 1991, p. 26.

36 Michael Archer, Artsince 1960, London:Thames and Hudson,1997, p. 106.

37 Edward Lucie-Smith,Movements in Art Since1945, London: Thamesand Hudson, 1969 and1975, pp. 261-77.

38 Lucie-Smith, 1969 and1975, p. 263.

140 Sally J. Morgan

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

its presence in the places it seeks to conceal itself, which is precisely what criticsand patrons did as they sought to define separate ‘disciplines’ such as ‘time-based’,‘community’ and ‘performance’ art.

As early as 1975 Lucie-Smith noted that, in rejecting the art market and itsobjects of transaction, artists found themselves in need of subsidy simply to exist,thus leaving them at the ‘mercy of cultural bureaucracy’.39 As Michael Archerobserved later, this now necessary governmental subsidy did not mean autonomyfrom the art market, but simply that its power relations moved into the realm ofpublic institutions.40

The Arts Council’s determination to separate and define postmodern artspractice into discrete subsections, as though they were media-driven forms, was aconservative move that contained, rather than supported, radical British art throughthe 1970s and 1980s. Funding parameters became more and more proscriptive andthe panels were increasingly fixated on finding points of separation through theestablishment of strict funding criteria. This was to obscure what should have beenmost obvious; that these were not separate art forms; they were simply symptomsof a radical reappraisal of the notion of art itself. The difficulty that was inherent indisentangling something so pervasive as a new paradigm sent arts funders in theUK into ever-decreasing circles of definition.

In 1984 the Yorkshire Arts Association, a regional arm of the British ArtsCouncil, proclaimed that, in order to be recognized as legitimate community arts(rather than simply being ‘art in the community’) such work should match anumber of criteria, including the following:

Community Art should:* Be of the highest artistic quality,* Emphasize a good process as well as the product,* Be done by a group of people collectively, * Contribute to the efforts of the community and self-help groups to effect social

and environmental changes, * Take into account the social, economic, political and cultural context of the

area/environment in which the work is being done.41

This was one of a number of policy declarations made by community artists andtheir funders during this period. Most were based on a set of criteria put together byGraham Woodruff, of Telford Community Arts, on behalf of the National Associationof Community Artists. These in turn were a distillation of discussion and debate thathad taken place since the early 1970s, best documented through a series of nationalconferences, beginning in Newcastle in January 1979. However, all these sets ofdefinitions included at least one criterion that had not come from the practitionersthemselves. This criterion was usually to do with ‘artistic quality’, and this wasalways seen to be residing in the ‘finished product’. ‘Artistic quality’ has always beenthe ‘Catch 22’ in the community and performance arts equation. Aesthetic qualitybased on the static art object is at odds with the lionization of ‘process’ and‘practice’ as aesthetic experience in itself. The best analogy that I can think of is thata council sets up and funds a collective to create a new sport for non-sportsmen,the only proviso being that they invent soccer and then play it well enough to winthe World Cup. The contradictions within the criteria meant that the position of the

39 Lucie-Smith, 1969 and1975, p. 276.

40 Michael Archer, Artsince 1960, London:Thames and Hudson,1997, p. l38.

41 Yorkshire Arts Policydocument, collectionof the author, 1994.

141Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processual postmodern practice

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

processual artist/practitioner was ultimately untenable within a system of publicpatronage.

Dependency on state funding also served to focus practitioners more and moreon the politics of funding and away from the integrity of the work itself. TheAssociation of Community Artists [ACA] was set up in the mid 1970s to

act as a pressure group to further the knowledge of the community arts

movement, to increase its status and increase the grants available to it in the

field, to liase with all arts funding bodies involved in administering or financing

community arts work, to encourage sharing of information and resources

among community artists and to act as an information source for organizations

wanting to find out about community arts.42

When the ACA, after much acrimonious argument, was disbanded in 1980 in orderto form the more widely based Association for Community Arts [AfCA], GerriMoriarty, of High Peak Community Arts, contrasted the single aim of the new AfCA,which was ‘to participate in the democratization of funding and funding structuresat national, regional and local level’, with the original aims of ACA. She wonderedaloud whether ‘the contrast reflected the achievements and changingpreoccupations of the community arts movement?’43

ConclusionWhen Greenberg demanded that the arts should strive for purity by ‘confiningthemselves strictly to that which is most palpable in them, refraining from treatingor imitating what lies outside the province of their exclusive effects’,44 he demandedthe ‘differànce’ of Derrida, in which we imagine we know what something is bydeferring to what it is not. He also described a perfect Foucauldian discourse inwhich the object of the discourse is constructed by the discourse itself.

His influential stance was predicated, as Mark Cheetam has pointed out,45 on‘purity’ as a kind of ‘essence’ that guaranteed quality through ‘the willing acceptanceof the limitations of the specific art’. Apart from arguing with the apparentessentialism of this position, it is possible to see how critics, patrons andadministrators and even some artists themselves could unconsciously impose itstenets on the new paradigm of postmodernism. If the dematerialized object has notdisappeared, but is merely in hiding, as is suggested by Lucie-Smith’s discussion in1975, it might be interpreted as a kind of Greenbergian ‘essence’. In defining the‘limitations’ of new ‘specific’ art forms the hope may be that the object may be re-materialized as ‘product’, and its quality defined and guaranteed. Anyunderstanding of art that goes beyond Greenberg’s ‘limitations’ through anemphasis on process, and which incorporates impurity and hybridity, constantlyresists this kind of stasis, or closure.

The consequence of this tension can be seen in the ever-increasing sets ofdefinitions, or taxonomies, that these ‘specialist forms’ evolved through in the yearsafter 1974, either as critical categories or Arts Council panels. This is apparent, forexample, in Archer’s bewildering list of post-1950s ‘isms’ in Art since 1960. The ArtsCouncil and the Regional Arts Boards [now defunct] could also find no stabledefinition for any of the art forms they sought to control. Performance arttransformed and slipped through many specialist panels: through time-based, to

42 ACA manifesto 1974, inGerri Moriarty, ‘TheAssociation ofCommunity Artists -not a history, more apoint of view’, inBernard Ross, SallyBrown and SueKennedy (eds.),Community ArtsPrinciples and Practices,Gateshead: SouthTyneside CommunityArts, 1980, p. 4.

43 Gerri Moriarty, 1980, p.4.

44 Clement Greenberg,‘The New Sculpture’, inJohn O’Brian (ed.),Clement Greenberg: TheCollected Essays andCriticism, Volume 2,Chicago and London:University of ChicagoPress, 1986, p. 314.

45 Mark A Cheetam, TheRhetoric of Purity,Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994,p. 117.

142 Sally J. Morgan

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

live art to ‘new collaborations’. Community art made similar shifts through art-outreach, youth arts, artists’ residencies and public art.

This bewildering apparent fragmentation is, I would argue, not fragmentation atall, but a result of a modernist desire to re-materialize the dematerialized object as aseries of specialist ‘products’. This is, in turn, constantly undercut by the refusal ofpostmodern practices to find stasis in singular objects or products. Where aspecialist discipline appears to emerge, and stays long enough to be named, thisturns out, more often than not, to be a transitory ‘symptom’ rather than a fixedform. Hence, the underlying paradigm is not fragmented. The fragmentation is aperception brought about by an essentially modernist mindset for which an art-object has become an art-product. For them the art object has splintered rather thandematerialized, and has hidden itself in a myriad of separate specialist art forms.This obscures the unifying trends beneath the symptoms, which are Owens’characterizing qualities of postmodernism in art, alluded to earlier: appropriation,site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity and hybridization, i.e. artas continual cultural process.

The British art establishment’s inability to fully grasp this new paradigm, and itsfailure to recognize the processual character of postmodernism, meant that it wasbound to impose a high-modernist framework on it, emphasizing product as asubstitute for object. The resultant search for fixed points of reference, and theresistance this engendered in artists, resulted in continuous, unnecessaryfragmentation, as imagined disciplines, or ‘movements’ are proclaimed like newlyconquered countries, and then renounced by the reluctant practitioners who aresupposed to own them.

When viewed in this light, the failure to find stable definitions for discretepractices arising from a celebration of the dematerialized art object was inevitable.However, the greater failure is, perhaps, one of conception, in believing thatcompromise between paradigms is possible, and in attempting to overlay the valuesand structures of a given ideological system on one that has arisen in opposition toits own most dearly held tenets.

AcknowledgementsMy thanks go to Kristine Keir, and to my colleague, Dr Julie Roberts, of MasseyUniversity, Wellington, NZ, for constructive critiques of earlier drafts.

Bibliography Archer, Michael, Art since 1960, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997.

Aronowitz, Stanley, Dead Artists Live Theories, London: Routledge, 1994, p. 35.

Calow, Jane, ‘New Territories for Art Education’, in John Carson and Susannah

Silver (eds.), Out of the Bubble: Approaches to Contextual Practice within Fine Art

Education, London: London Institute/Central St. Martin’s College of Art and

Design and London Arts Board, 2000, pp. 105-112.

Carson, John and Silver, Susannah (eds.), Out of the Bubble: Approaches to

Contextual Practice within Fine Art Education, London: the London

Institute/Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design and London Arts Board,

2000.

Caute, David, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades, London: Paladin, 1988.

Cheetam, Mark A., The Rhetoric of Purity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1994.

143Beautiful impurity: British contextualism as processual postmodern practice

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14

Connor, Steven, ‘Modernism and Postmodernism’, in David Cooper (ed.), A

Companion to Aesthetics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, pp 289-293.

Debord, Guy, ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, Situationist

Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.

Freire, Paulo, Cultural Action for Freedom, London: Penguin, 1972.

Freire, Paulo, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Penguin, 1972.

Fried, Michael, Art and Objecthood, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Green, Nicholas and Mort, Frank, ‘Art History, Pleasure and Politics’, Another

Standard, London: Shelton Trust, Autumn 1982.

Greenberg, Clement, ‘The New Sculpture’, in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement

Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 2, Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Kelly, Owen, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, London: Comedia,

1984.

Killip, Dermott, ‘Biting the Hand that Feeds Us? A Community Artist writes to Sir

Roy Shaw’, Another Standard, London: Shelton Trust, 1980.

Krauss, Rosalind, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,

Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press, 1986.

Latham, John, Report of a Surveyor, London: Tate Gallery, 1986.

Layzell, Richard, ‘Beginnings in Britain’, in Robert Ayers and David Butler (eds.),

Live Art, Sunderland: AN, 1991.

Lippard, Lucy, Six Years-The Dematerialisation of the Art Object, New York: Studio

Vista, 1973.

Lucie-Smith, Edward, Movements in Art Since 1945, London: Thames and Hudson,

1969 and 1975.

Moriarty, Gerri, ‘The Association of Community Artists - not a history, more a point

of view’, in Bernard Ross, Sally Brown, and Sue Kennedy (eds.), Community Arts

Principles and Practices, Gateshead: South Tyneside Community Arts, 1980.

Morgan, Sally J., ‘The Border-guards have lost interest: The “Problem” of Public Art

and the rise of Contextual Practice’, Drawing Fire, 2: 4 (1999), Bristol: NAFAE.

Morgan, Sally J., ‘Looking Back over 25 Years’, in Malcolm Dickson (ed.), Art With

People, Sunderland, AN, 1995, pp. 16-26.

Morgan, Sally J., unpublished lecture, Dartington, 1986.

Sayre, Henry M., The Object of Performance, Chicago and London: University of

Chicago Press, 1989.

Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art, The Hornsey Affair, London: Penguin,

1969.

White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical

Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Wheale, Nigel, Postmodern Arts, London: Routledge, 1995.

Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell, London: Hogarth

Press, 1987.

Yorkshire Arts, policy document, collection of the author, 1994.

144 Sally J. Morgan

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

The

Uni

vers

ity o

f M

anch

este

r L

ibra

ry]

at 0

6:07

06

Nov

embe

r 20

14