Reflections on National Identity – 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reflections on National Identity

A Talk delivered by John Yeadon at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, 3rd February 2015. 

[Please note that some of the text is in note form and some words cue ‘slides’ or are memory devices.]

Personifications of Englishness and Britishness, would be John Bull – stout, country dwelling, jolly, matter of fact man, stubborn, honest, a good fellow and good humoured, and what about Everyman characters such as Bunyan’s hapless Christian or Defoe’s Protestant Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero? Crusoe is a self-made man, who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology and if need be racism and imperialism.

There is no such thing as the national character as if it is permanently fixed in the fabric our cultural DNA. National characteristics are invented and can change.

In Cyprus today the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots have more in common, genetically, with each other than the Greeks or Turks on the main land. The political cultural and national differences are a construct, an invention, a belief, even one might say a myth.

In the 18th century the English were known on the continent as the weepy ones of Europe, as slaves to their emotions, passionate like the Russians or Latinos are characterised these days. It was exuberance not reserve that characterised the British, it was about showing feelings, the sentimental was fashionable, this was the Cult of Sensibility.

A far cry from the stiff upper lip, which was a middle class construct of the public schools,

(The shadow is always portrayed from the left. Drawing). “Little Boys Do Not Cry”, heralded the development of the officer class where Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. E M Foster said of the educational system that the Public School produces boys with bottled up emotions. “They go forth with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts.”

The transformation from the display of feelings to emotional restraint is the difference between Trafalgar and Waterloo, between the passionate and Romantic hero of the ‘kiss me Hardy” Nelson to ‘the ice of character’ of Wellington.

Goya, National Gallery. Surly arrogant, public school boy.

Wellington’s national characteristics become a treatise on patriotism, epitomising British understated resilience, stoicism, calmness, restraint and determination. He even burnt his violin, for him feelings were not appropriate for winning battles. He also referred to the rank and file soldier of his army as “scum of the earth“. The Empire was built on this, the stiff upper lip with a little help from the scum of the earth and not the lachrymose (weepy) Romantic of the 18th century.

British understatement is the stuff of legend, we have, Raleigh finishing off his game of bowls in face of the Spanish Armada or when struck by a cannonball, Lord Uxbridge said, “By God sir, I’ve lost my leg!” Wellington retorted, “By God sir, so you have!” Or the famous Captain Oates quote of self-sacrifice on Scott’s fated Polar expedition – “I am just going outside and may be some time“. All jolly good Boys Own fun, the Empire was theatre, a show of ‘derring do’ and British ‘pluck’.

The defiant call of the British newsreel during WW11, “Britain can take it” – the ‘Blitz spirit’, was government propaganda, where the national identity and the Blitz Spirit became the same as patriotism. In fact, the Blitz spirit is something of a myth, with rationing, we had looting, the Black Market and profiteering, where prostitution was rife in London, police numbers were restricted and the black out meant it was difficult to police the streets. By 1942, 20,000 had been killed during bombing but the same number had died because of accidents due to the black out. There was much to be demoralised about. Up to 35% had left London by 1940 and in Coventry many went to live rough in the countryside outside the city. The King and Queen were booed when they visited the East End of London, which clearly belied the Blitz spirit. Yet the suicide rate dropped during the ‘Blitz’.

At which venerable London art gallery would you find a picture of a mud pie?

This innocent reference to childhood play and getting dirty, sand castles and summer holidays, along with a Christmas pudding, illustrations of football, cricket and hunting, a Covent Garden porter, a farmer washing a pig, a coal miner, a contortionist, a girl cyclist and a girl jiving.

Where can we find these images of British ‘modern’ life, its labours and pleasures? Where bygone celebrities are seen as allegorical personifications –

Sir Winston Churchill is shown as Defiance, Dame Margot Fonteyn as Delectation and Bertrand Russell as Lucidity, the physicist Lord Rutherford is Curiosity, T. S. Eliot contemplates a kindly Loch Ness monster and Einstein’s formula for Leisure, astronomer Fred Hoyle represents Pursuit, Sixth Sense sees Edith Sitwell reading a book of poems, Augustus John is Neptune offering Alice of in Alice in Wonderland gifts from the sea for Wonder, Virginia Woolf wielding an elegant pen as Clio and the art critic Clive Bell as Bacchus, all of which are on permanent display.

This post-modern like collision of the popular culture and high art can be found in the National Gallery. Where else?

It is not an Old Master that first greets you on entering the National Gallery but these eccentric and witty images of Modern Britain. Set into the vestibule floor of the Portico entrance are the marble mosaics laid from 1933 to 1952 by the Russian-born artist Boris Anrep,financed by Samuel Courtauld. These mosaics are a celebration of modernity and everyday life in Britain that gives little clue as to the purpose of the building you have just stepped into.

So, the next time you are in the National Gallery look down at the floor and try and find a mud pie.

The latest national characteristic seems to be that ‘we can laugh at ourselves’, a claim made on the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. This is what I wrote on the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games 2012, Isles of Wonder:

“Fish and chips? Elgar, Parry, Jerusalem and chips? Shakespeare and curry, sand castles, Christmas puddings? Cricket? Football? James Bond and the Monarchy? Or friendly policemen, unemployment queues? Omnishambles? Cold and depressed or a warm beery England? British reserve, Wellington’s stiff upper lip or drunken loutishness of a Friday night city centre monoculture. Or the fact that “we can laugh at ourselves”, (where did that one come from?). A rural idyll or inner city crisis, decay and riots? One nation, multicultural or class war? London on fire! Maybe, ‘Trainspotting’ or ‘Billy Elliot’? Alcohol, drugs and more nostalgia for miners and brass bands? Or perhaps a typically English compromise of it!”

Danny Boyle’s propaganda on British culture was a travesty of history. For instance, the move from a rural economy to an industrial one was tragic and dramatic for many, Boyle’s representation of the industrial revolution and rural life was simplistic, perpetuating sentimental symbolism and mythology. Boyle’s Olympic opening ceremony represented British history as a creative blossoming that started in the nineteenth century but seemed to reach its zenith in the twentieth century when fashion, film and pop music boomed – “history reduced, to commodified cultural heritage?“ As Terry Eagleton put it.

And yet it seems to me that Boyle’s Olympic opener –just like the Great Exhibition –was telling a story about Britain that had already ceased to be true.

History isn’t made by great individuals but the people.

A People’s Culture, Carnival.

From medieval times the fair and carnival were the people’s expression of all that was not official. The carnival festivities and comic spectaculars had an important place in medieval life. Carnival has the same derivation as carnivore, carnis – flesh, carnivale –to put away flesh, the feast. These feasts and festivals offered a completely different, non-official, anti-dogma, anti-protocol, anti-serious spectacle. An extra political aspect of the world and human relations, Bakhtin described this as a ‘second world …a second life outside officialdom’during which laughter reigned supreme. There was also a free, even egalitarianspirit to Carnival when all hierarchical differences were suspended. The Fool became King; the King was uncrowned and became Fool. The fool appears in carnival as the ‘Lord of Misrule’, the elected King of Fools exercises the fools right of free speech, modeling himself on the court-fool and village idiot. He claims the privileges of the court jester. This traditional mock-king is also the ‘Abbot of Unreason’, the Prince of Fools ruling over the topsy-turvy world whose origins go back to the tradition of the Dionysian rite and the pagan Saturnalia of Rome which remained unbroken and alive in the medieval world. This is the ‘world turned upside down’. Good-natured abuse and familiarity ruled the day.

Bartholomew Fair. Grotesque. Vulgar. Over the top. Blackpool, a remnant of carnival.

The dirty seaside post card isn’t that British! Part of the grotesque carnival Rabelaisian tradition. Over the top, larger than life.

Grotesque laughing faces. Frontispiece to Rabelais.

History tends to be the history of the ruling class, the dominating ideology or is written by the victor. History is not made by a few great individuals or leaders. Dostoevsky would say great historical events and personal ones are accidental, random.

The people make history.

World turned upside down. The revolutionary cry of the Civil war.

Though it might have been the ‘stiff upper lip’ that built the Empire, it was Wellington’s Scum of the Earth that built democracy. Democracy, civil rights, our freedoms were not handed to us on a plate. But fought for by the people of this country.

Even the universal freedoms embodied in the Magna Carta where brought about by rebellion, force, confrontation, even civil war.

Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Peterloo. Free Speech.

Women’s suffrage. Trade union Rights. Civil Rights.

The Mass Trespass campaign that eventually allowed British folk to wonder in their own country.

Protest. Dissent. Demonstration

Banners

My banners.

Dissent, protest and rebellion is part of our National Character. The fight for justice, leading to what has been called the British sense of fair play.

Miners wives banner.

Beach Party. The demonstration seems as an ironic carnivalesque pageant of life. Herbert 1984.

But isn’t also Satire part of our heritage. Irony that grotesque carnival humour.

Jonathan Swift. Note not called Gulliver’s Travels. Originally sold under the pseudonym as a spoof travelogue. There was the story of the old gentleman who when lent the book, was alleged to have gone immediately to his map to search for Lilliput, or the Bishop who declared that it was ‘full of improbable lies, and, for his part, he hardly believed a word of it‘.

“A travellers chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad as well as the good example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.” Lemuel Gulliver.

The Travails of Blind Biff Jelly is a narrative series that documents the encounters Blind Biff has in and around The British Isles. Biff is a grotesque and his bizarre behaviour is epic and gross, yet there is something fundamentally pedestrian about Biff. He is a buffoon, a fool and is often bamboozled by the commonplace. As an outsider he has the exaggerated provinciality of a primitive from another land.

Irony and satire at its heart.

Swift’s book contains a vulgarity that we also find in Rabelais and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Lilliput where political rivalry was between the big Enders and the little Enders. Which end of the egg. Where politicians demonstrate their acrobatics, juggle and walk on tight ropes. A political metaphor, become real, that is familiar to us today with politicians.

Gulliver’s Travels was critique of human nature with the sinister message ” those not for us are against us”.

Punch – Private Eye. Rowlinson Gerald Scarfe Bell .. and on this dissent isn’t this British.

So this over the top, grotesque, larger than life, laughter, vulgar, visceral love of life, is far from the repressed emotions of the stiff upper lip.

So what of sex!

No Sex please, we are British.

Puritan propaganda. The Puritans saw sex as sinful.

In January 1984 I had a one person show at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, entitled Dirty Tricks, the then Coventry Evening Telegraph 31st January 1984, declared in banner headlines on the front page, ‘Art Show Branded as Porn’, the exhibition was attacked by a Tory councillor as being “overtly pornographic” and by the Coventry Evening Telegraph as “smut not art”. The latter concluded in a vitriolic and homophobic editorial that “the power of censorship is a heavy burden to bear but the argument for it becomes all too plain when pictures such as these are displayed before even the most innocent eyes“.

The Arts Council bought one of the offensive paintings and 2 were exhibited in the British Art Show of 1985/6.

Deliberately not giving way ones emotions can be seen as one side of a British repressed character, the other Victorian characteristic is – not to talk about sex.

It is said that we are still dominated by a Victorian regime and the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality.

At the beginning of the 17th century, a certain frankness was still common. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; things were done without too much concealment. The illicit, the coarse, vulgar, obscene and the indecent were lax compared to the 19th cent. It was a time of direct jesters, shameless discourse and open transgression a period when bodies ‘made a display of themselves’.

But during the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeois, sexuality was confined to the parents bedroom for the serious function of reproduction. Silence became the rule.

The brothel and mental hospital were the places of tolerance. The prostitute, the client and the pimp together with the psychiatrist and his hysteric were those ‘other Victorians’. Elsewhere modern Puritanism imposed its triple edict of taboo, no existence and silence.

This history of repression coincides with the development of Capitalism, from the 17th cent after hundreds of years of free expression, the repression of sex becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. Condemned to prohibition, non-existence and silence.

Foucault in his book the History of Sexuality, questions this ‘repressive hypothesis’ that, rather than imposed silence on sex, a codified authorised vocabulary existed, a whole rhetoric of allusion to sex. Like the Catholic confessional. This was an institutional incitement to speak about it. Foucault says the Victorians talked about sex all the time.

Warning, sexually explicit: Porto exhibition.

I was warned that the work would be problematic in this Catholic country.

But no problems. I had more problems showing the work in this country.

It’s Protestant Puritanism that is the problem. I seemed to be fighting the Civil War again.

Like food, Religion characterises who we are.

As a Republican and socialist, a democrat I would have obviously supported the Parliamentarians. However King Charles 1 collected important contemporary European art, and whilst Popes patronised art, such as Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. The Protestants were smashing sculptures and whitewashing images in the churches. Iconoclasm that destroyed the British Renaissance in the visual arts.

Holy Trinity Doom painting, Coventry.

I would not have got on with either side.

It was the Second Commandment, the one on ‘graven images’ that lead Oliver Cromwell’s Taliban to destroy, the same commandment that forbids images of Mohammed in Islam, indeed all figurative and representational art are censured by Islam, hence the beautiful complex abstract designs and inventive calligraphy.

Christianity seems good at ignoring the Second Commandment.

We seem to be fighting the The Civil War, the English Bourgeois Revolution all the time, every day.

National identity can be seen as the differences between the forces of the Civil War, (the English bourgeois revolution), these character traits are still amongst us. The dichotomy between the Roundhead and the Cavalier. The Protestant, democratic, egalitarian Roundhead, hardworking, professional and high-minded. Whilst the Cavalier would represent the Catholic, elitist, dictatorial, pleasure seeking character, flamboyant, drunk, immodest, the frivolousfun side of the English personality. We are all a bit of some of the above.

Food and National Identity.

National dish.

The derogatory terms – Frog, Kraut and Roast Beef, see food as a signifier of national identity and we have even regionally identity – Scouse.

Food, its customs and its origins also reveals many contradictions.

Vanitas Table.

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. Traditions are inventions and everything has a history. Fish and chips, our national dish, for instance, was introduced to the East End of London by Jewish immigrants in the 19th century, chips being French, of course. Curry has been a part of the English diet for longer than fish and chips and even the macho eating of hot vindaloo features in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. (Vindaloo being of Portuguese origin from Goa). Morris dancing – the seminal English folk dance – was originally introduced into England from Moorish Spain and Islamic North Africa by British sailors. The Morris also retains some of the sailors dance movements. Interestingly, Islamic Spain is also the origin of the Spanish ‘national dance’, the Flamenco. Whilst batter puddings were also known in the south of England as well as in Yorkshire, ketchup is derived from the Chinese sauce ke-tsp. Even the whole of Scotland was reinvented in the 19th century by Sir Walter Scott and Queen Victoria. After years of cruel repression by the English following the Jacobite rebellion, Scotland became a Romantic tourist destination. The highland Games are not ancient but Victorian, becoming popular through Royal patronage. Haggis was eaten in ancient Greece and Rome. The first reference to haggis in Britain was in Lancashire and probably brought over by the Vikings. Whiskey was invented in Italy. The kilt is Irish (the word kilt being Danish), the word Tartan is derived from the French ‘tiretain’ in reference to woven cloth. The traditional British Christmas is also a Victorian invention. The Christmas tree has its pagan origins in Germany and was made popular in Britain by Prince Albert and the turkey is an American!

Our assumptions about what is quintessentially British or even European are usually erroneous. British culture stems from a distant and diverse past and is the product of a multiplicity of cultures and traditions brought about by invasion, trade, theft, colonialism, Empire and immigration

Yet I wonder if there is still such a thing as ‘Englishness‘.

Recently I have been looking at painters that are regarded as typically English –

Samuel Palmer – English Romanticism. Associated with a group of William Blake-influenced artists. A Demi paradise, mysterious and visionary in sepia shades under moonlight.

The Shires, safe cosy.

JRR Tolkien alongside writers including C S Lewis looked at the possibilities of creating new myths to help us better understand the modern world or how to understand it differently. Tolkien’s myths are profoundly conservative, ‘returning the King to his rightful place’. Where people know their place. The myth, that a better world has been lost but can be reclaimed by turning back the clock.

This is a reoccurring theme.

Nash brothers, John and Paul

Sutherland, a hostile menacing nature. Red in tooth and claw. A landscape of living things.

John Piper.

Eric Ravilous

Also the idealised landscape of the British railway posters.

Shell posters. Nash, Sutherland.

The Ruralists Peter Blake, David Inshaw and Graham Ovenden, they admired Samuel Palmer, Stanley Spencer, Thomas Hardy, Elgar, cricket, the English landscape and the Pre-Raphaelites. Cannot get much more English than that. Are these archetypes or cliches?

The landscape has been politicised,

“Your Britain, Fight for it Now“, this is the spirit of Recording Britain.

The Recording Britain project from the years of WW11, where professional and amateur artists were invited to paint their local scenes to preserve them.

All redolent of Englishness.

George Shaw – Swing – Landscape with Dog Shit Bin.

I have known George since he was 15 and he became one of my students in Coventry.

This is an extract from what I wrote for a review in the Morning Star:

“George Shaw has for 15 years doggedly painted Tile Hill housing estate on which he grew up and his mother still lives. He records the lowly and mundane of this suburban hinterland as it disappears and changes with the dedication of a hobbyist using Humbrol Airfix enamel paint. Humbrol ‘harks back to a solitary adolescent pastime – the creation of a world of one’s own’. These ‘non fine art’ materials are Shaw’s witty imperceptible nod to conceptualism and process.

As with Lowry the specific locality is probably the least interesting thing for me, these neglected empty spaces of graffitied shop fronts, flats, regimented houses, bus shelters, derelict garages, fences, gates, this melancholic unloved wasteland and abandoned woodlands, this feral landscape is all too familiar, no matter where we come from. As with Edward Hopper, the American painter, the theme is the aftermath, emptiness, the void.

These are not paintings of the country landscape or the urban landscape, that is, they are not of the inner city, nor the teenage angst of Morrissey’s suburbia or the suburbia of Larkin, though these are important literary sources. These are paintings of a working class estate and this has no name. Shaw gives this unregarded, anonymous landscape identity. Shaw has invented a genre, Shawland has been coined.”

How would we describe English landscape painting? English landscape painting begins in the 18th century and much landscape painting is about ownership, wealth and labour. Gainsborough.

With Birket Foster, Helen Allingham and Arthur Claude Stracham, and other Victorians we see the sentimentalisation of rural life, poverty and labour.

Other painting seems to be about meteorology, the favourite English topic and national obsession – the weather. Constable and Turner studied clouds (a sensible thing to do when half your painting might be sky!). They knew the young Quaker Luke Howard’s essay on Modifications of Clouds, of 1802, where Howard categorised clouds like species of plants and animals.

An interest in extreme weather was as a product of Romanticism, the sublime, powerful forces of nature, the storm, terrifying and intimidating.

The picturesque was also an invention of the British who where the first ‘tourists’. The Picturesque 18th century landscape (Claude) would contain craggy rocks, ruins, follies and a crumbling classical or historic building, looking at ruins in the 18th century was an aesthetic and Romantic pastime.

I am interested in those who complain about pylons and wind turbines ruining the ‘natural beauty’ of the countryside, for me, wind farms, pylons and the National Grid wires define and articulate space. They are dramatic, like the industrial buildings that feature in the work of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The windmills of Holland or the Fens in Norfolk are regarded as picturesque, yet they are just old technology, old machines. The windmill was a symbol of power, along with the Church and the Manor House, the windmill would have been a large and prominent building in the town or village and the windmill tied the peasant to the Lord who owned the mill.

Forth bridge. William Morris hated the Forth Bridge and many thought it spoilt a wonderful view. Turner would probably not agree. Tower Bridge. Technology and Gothic. Houses of Parliament, Gothic fantasy palace, nicknamed Hogwarts! Pugin interior. Pre Raphaelites more than nostalgia. The Victorians were fearful of the dehumanising effects of industrialisation. This return to the past persists in vernacular houses. It is as if Modernism or the 20th century never existed.

The past is good, a safe place, we can lie about the past and pretend it was an easier life and a more beautiful place. Constable’s Hay Wain was a painting of a bygone age, already nostalgic when the paint was wet.

My point is, what is natural beauty, what defines this and where does this judgment come from?

The landscape was not always a thing to be looked at or regarded as beautiful or painted.

For the townsperson, it had to be borne, to be feared, to travel through with difficulty and danger. Bad roads meant that accidents were common and traveling by stagecoach portended that you could be robbed and had to contend with highwaymen and then there were the bogs and marshes! This was a time of superstition and folklore, so the countryside was also haunted by evil spirits.

However, for the farmer and his labourer it was the site of work. The countryside has been the location of labour since Neolithic times, it has been transformed by the removal of the great forests, by agriculture and animal husbandry, divided into a patchwork by dry stone walls, fences and hedges, roads, canals and railways. In this sense the countryside is also the scene of toil, hardship, poverty, cruelty, exploitation, human drama and politics as much as and as artificial as the urban setting. Woods, rivers, fens, moorlands, hills and dales, it is all ‘managed‘. Every tree you see has been planted, somebody decided where it should go, and its placement has been designed. We do not have any or much real wilderness left, the natural state of Britain and indeed, Europe, would be unbroken forest.

When we appreciate the landscape, we are appreciation an idea of landscape, a construct, and an invention. What we regard as beautiful in the British landscape is an ideological position. And you need not understand or be aware of the ideology to hold that opinion. This is your preconception. Our contemporary opinion on landscape seems to be a universal truth, but this is a judgment, it is not the Third Law of Thermodynamics, it is a subjective attitude to landscape, all is relative and there are no Universals. Probably it’ll turn out that the course of our life was determined by the prevailing ideology but we were just unconscious of its control. Is that the same as bourgeois consciousness?

In the 18th century, Cumbria was feared as it was hostile, bleak, forbidding and dangerous. Three hundred years ago, the Lake District was a place to be avoided. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1724 that the Lakes District was “the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England…” This view of the English landscape prevailed until some early 19th century poets ‘discovered‘ this wild landscape or rather constructed it. This was a revolution in how the English think and feel about landscape, these poets and artists wished to show nature at its most terrifying and intimidating, fragile humans in awe of nature. This was Romanticism – the sublime. The isolation and dangers of the Lakes District suited this movement. Mountain wilderness gave an escape from the industrial revolution. Lead by artists and poets, later botanists, geologists, mountain climbers and tourists followed. Cumbria was the closest we had to the Alps and it was Romanticism that conceptually transformed and constructed this remote wilderness into a site of ‘outstanding natural beauty’ and it is this view of the landscape that still predominates. W. H. Auden understood and questioned the social construction of the Lake District when he asked:

Am I to see in the Lake District, then, another bourgeois invention like a piano?

Giving us the possibility to see beyond the conventional cultural construct.

Today, ‘wilderness’ is seen as a precious national resource for tourism, wildlife reserves and heritage, the Lake District is a National Park protected by the National Trust. No wind farms in the Lake District! (This Romantic view of nature is the predominant one, even extra-terrestrially; the Moon has been described as “magnificent desolation“).

Gardens and Parks are an important part of the English psyche, bringing the countryside into the town, but the artificiality of the golf course is one step too far. Agreeing that golf spoils a pleasant walk in the countryside, I despised the manicured landscape of the golf course, this sanitised landscape is too fake, like a gated village, too middle class and guarded.

The most organised and less sanitised idea of the English landscape is the garden.

Capability Brown constructed his gardens like a classical landscape as if from a Claude. Yet, Brown designed gardens that were informal, ‘natural’, from which you could look out into the ‘real’ countryside. With the use of a Ha-Ha, based on a French military trench, the Ha-Ha, (the name coming from ladies who venture too near the edge), stopped the livestock in fields getting onto your ‘natural’ garden. Brown made a seamless transition between garden to the countryside beyond, thus making the landscape part of the garden. In this sense all of England becomes a garden, all of England is part of this design.

Site of Leisure.

Politicisation of landscape.

Conrad Atkinson. Landscape of Cumbria, both industrial coastal region where he was born and the Lake District. A collage centred around a post card. A series of painted lines radiate out from the card, labelled, that sets this apparently idyllic scene in the context of the area’s invisible economic and social problems – poverty, unemployment, lack of affordable housing etc. Atkinson has described this area as ‘a mining community… Blasted by years of depression and unemployment, and isolated by what is essentially a middle class, high-income bracket outdoor museum and playground, “the English Lake District” in which the workers are ‘invisible’ or ‘hidden’.

Pastoral Interludes 1987

Sea Side Series 1989

Ingrid Pollard.

The landscape is white. The historical, patriotic English countryside.

The ideological content of landscapes is being re-examined as a articulation of national symbolism. Black artists have drawn attention to the problematic nature of national identity. As exemplified in the work of Ingrid Pollard.

National Identity ignores the different attitudes between classes and different ethnicities.

Pollard has documented her discomfort with the English landscape at a time when the landscape is becoming a retreat and locus of self-understanding for large numbers of white British people. Pollard does not feel at home in it.

“It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within a urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District when I wondered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease and dread“.

The Black British experience is typically seen as an ‘exclusively urban phenomenon’.

Yet, many Caribbean immigrants and Indian immigrants initially come from small agricultural villages. It would seem that their rightful place is in the English countryside.

Pollard questions the concept of Englishness by simply placing her Black subjects in the countryside. Her pictures display how prejudices and preconceptions turn into patterns of representation. She examines the myth of a white, homogenous landscape populated by local characters.

National identity seems topical at the moment, with the Scottish Nationalist referendum

..and concerns with immigration somehow diluting or appearing as a threat to our identity as a nation.

To conclude, I am not saying that there is no such thing as the National Character or National Identity, just that it changes, and has changed over the centuries, over decades. It has always been in flux. One cannot help be influenced by the things around you, particularly your education.

We often express a “nonchalance” about nationality, shown by ingrained embarrassment at flag-waving.

Terry Eagleton states that a touchier sense of English identity has clearly increased in response to Scottish and Welsh nationalism. But Englishness for most people has a sentimental rather than a political charge. The 18th-century philosopher David Hume thought that the English had no “national character”, because liberty had engendered diversity, not uniformity. Englishness was therefore not based on notions of ethnic purity, cultural uniqueness and “exclusion and opposition”, but rather by “inclusion”.

Today in this multicultural society it seems that national identity is up for grabs, it is not a crisis of identity but it is whatever you might wish it.

John Yeadon, February 2015