Reflections on National Identity National identity is propped up by a false yet reassuring sense of the continuity of tradition. Our traditions are rarely as old or as ethnically harmonious as ‘tradition’ might imply. With terms such as Frog, Kraut, Macaronis and Roast Beef, we see food used as  derogatory nicknames for stereotypes of national identity and even of regionally identity, as in terms such as Scouse. Food is central to our understanding of National Identity, as with the ‘national […]

It’s a Joke As a title ‘It’s a Joke‘ has the capacity to subvert the meaning of any image. ‘It’s a Joke’ is ambivalent, it is contradictory as a statement. It can be taken at face value but the reading is more evidently ironic. Take any image, a still life, a photo of Margret Thatcher or the Queen, and image of a nuclear bomb, the Houses of Parliament, a map of any country, any image, anything and title it – […]

Style is a frock Dave Hickey.          

The Queen’s Fanny   Henry Moore had a dignified, conservative and down to earth image, and he spoke about his work straightforwardly with measure. For many, his work has an erotic dimension, yet Moore always resisted talking about his sculpture and sexuality, saying only that his work obviously did relate to sex as both were about ‘form‘. In 1978 on an BBC Arena television programme, Henry Moore talked about the Leonardo anatomical drawings in the Queen’s Gallery, part of the […]

To Frame or Not To Frame. The Window on the World and the Object.   “Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.” Claude Debussy   Conventions are too readily observed without question and also discarded without understanding what they do or why they were employed in the first place. There is nothing wrong with breaking the rules but you need to know what the rules are before you break them and you also need to be […]

An Alternative Art and Art History. In the 1980s I put forward on an alternative art history. This was alternative to an academic/Courtaulds or a Kenneth Clarke art history which tends to see art history as purely the history of styles and forms. We see in Alfred Barrs flow chart of MoMA a similar linear attitude, art exclusively coming from art. However, history is not linear. With Barrs there is no reference to the First World War or the Russian […]

Boy Revolutionary   In painting, warm colours come forward and cold colours recede. Putting red in the foreground, green in the middle and blue in the distance was Joshua Reynolds’ rules for creating illusionistic space in painting. Essentially a crude and simplified form of aerial perspective. Gainsborough painted the Blue Boy in part as a snub to Reynolds. By putting blue in the foreground Gainsborough broke these academic rules. This brush-off to Reynolds showed that it could be done and […]

    Take an object, Do something to it, Do something else to it, Do something else to it.   Jasper Johns 1964