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There's nowt so queer as folk: British Folk Art at Tate Britain

20/6/2014

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“I say Brothers, We are three Clever Fellows to Preach Against Tippling. Tippling, Do you say, I call this Down Right, Hard, Drinking. You may say what you Please Gentlemen, but I think Wine makes Our Hearts Merry.”

'Three Sober Preachers', oil paint on canvas, c.1860

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Bone cockerel, c.1797-1814
One of the questions that comes to mind when visiting the new British Folk Art exhibit at Tate Britain is whether the pieces on display are ‘art’ or ‘craft’. Does it matter what we call them? There has long been, and continues to be, a lively debate on the distinction between the two, reflecting a degree of snobbery on both sides of the divide. This exhibit doesn’t give a definitive answer, and nor should it.

The Tate, of course, is an art museum, and this exhibit is an exuberant celebration of the art we come across in our everyday lives – shop signs, for example – and the art we make in the everyday task of living, such as making quilts from scraps, collages from found objects, and driftwood sculpture. 
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Tin tray covered with 'boody'
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God-in-a-Bottle, 19th century, glass, wood and water
Not all of these have function as their primary purpose – one of the possible definitions of ‘craft’ as distinct from ‘art’. But nor do they necessarily have something to 'say' in the sense of deeper meaning. Many display great innovation and originality - such as the boody pieces from the north of England, using broken china (called 'boody') to create mosaic tins and boxes in the late 19th century - but weren’t created to convey an idea or emotion. With others, the purpose is unknown, such as the God–in-a-Bottle pieces associated with the construction workers and miners who were part of the Irish Catholic diaspora.
And it’s not just the terms ‘art’ and ‘craft’ that are contentious. “For many people”, writes Jeff McMillan in his introductory essay to the exhibit’s catalogue, “folk is a four-letter word. But because we all have a different and vague idea of what it refers to, it works like an umbrella to cover many other terms such as ‘vernacular’, ‘popular’, ‘rural’, ‘traditional’ and is a second cousin to labels like ’self-taught’, ‘naive’ and ‘outsider’." There is also a connection with ‘art brut’ – raw or uncooked art that is uncontaminated by culture – a term coined in the 1940s by French artist Jean Dubuffett. 
Raw it may be, but at least one folk artist made much of his royal connections. George Smith was a tailor in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in the early 19th century. He described himself as “Artist in Cloth and Velvet Figures to His Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex”. His fabric and paper collages, such as this one in a series from 1830-40 called 'The Goosewoman', became a tourist attraction.

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George Smart, 'Goosewoman', c.1830, paper and fabric collage
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Alfred Wallis, 'Schooner under the Moon', c1935-36, oil paint and graphite on cardboard and plywood
The work of Alfred Wallis shows how ‘folk’ makers were sometimes feted by established artists. Wallis was ‘discovered’ by Modernist artist Ben Nicholson in an unexpected encounter in Cornwall, where Wallis had been using old pieces of cardboard as the canvases for his paintings.

Perhaps what matters is our response to the work - the meaning or intention we infer as viewers, the emotions that the piece triggers in us personally.

In her closing essay in the exhibit’s catalog, curator Ruth Kenny writes that one definition that has become a useful tool in understanding folk art is that of American sociologist Gary Alan Fine, who suggested the idea of ‘identity art’: Kenny writes: “Moving away from a focus on the finished product and the response it invokes, identity art privileges the characteristics of the creators and the circumstances and process of making.”

Many of the pieces in the exhibit are rooted in the notion of community identity – whether the community of a courting couple who together produced the Bellamy quilt during their year-long engagement, or the members of the community who contributed to the production of shop signs.

Wherever you stand on the art/craft debate (or indeed whether or not you see any distinction), you're sure to enjoy the works in this show and the questions they provoke.

British Folk Art is on at Tate Britain until 31 August 2014.
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Popular art and Merz – Black Eyes and Lemonade

25/8/2013

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Black Cat advertising on The Hatch, Colemans Hatch, Sussex
A person’s heaven is easily made. 'Tis but black eyes and lemonade.’
Thomas Moore, 1813

Catch it while you can! The exuberantly fun Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit at Whitechapel Gallery is on only until next month. It celebrates the work of Barbara Jones (1912-78), the collector and curator of English popular art and author of The Unsophisticated Arts (1951). Specifically, it celebrates an exhibition curated by Jones for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
What is popular art? Is it as simple as the art of the everyday? Jones herself found it hard to define, but said the best of it is bold and fizzy (hence the name for the exhibit chosen by the curators). It certainly is that.

In effect it’s an archive exhibit, re-creating much of the original collection exhibited by Jones at the Whitechapel as part of the Festival of Britain. The gallery blurb describes the original exhibit as:

“…divided in categories such as Home, Birth-Marriage-Death, Man’s Own Image and Commerce & Industry, reflecting Jones’s ideas on popular art and museum culture, questioning the cultural values attached to handmade and machine made objects.”
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Jones celebrated and championed the judgements made by collectors, makers and consumers and the collective desire for beauty. The 1951 exhibit, in the final years of post-war rationing in Britain, had the feel of a bazaar, a celebration of consuming, with every object pleasing and of equal value.  Even better is hearing how she did her collecting - driving around England with a friend in a converted taxi.

Art director Simon Costin writes about Jones and the Black Eyes and Lemonade exhibit in a post on blog Caught by the River.  Jones, Costin says, collected objects with "long folkloric histories, such as horse brasses, corn dollies, canal boat artwork, ships’ figureheads, and the pearly King & Queen outfits." But in bringing these together with "post-industrial advertising devices like the Idris Talking Lemon, beer mats, pest control adverts, shop posters", Jones

"...gave ‘folk art’ or ‘popular art’ a cultural currency, she made it relevant, exciting. And by putting the machine-made and the hand-made side by side, she blurred the boundaries between what was considered art, liberating a way of seeing that continues to widen our appreciation of the ordinary, the everyday."

I was reminded of Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who devised the concept of Merz in his collages. (Tate Britain recently had a fascinating retrospective of Schwitters’ work.) He incorporated found objects and litter, sweet wrappers and used bus tickets in his work, giving equal value to the everyday and the fine, the costly and the cheap.
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In 1919 Schwitters defined Merz as:

“essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials….A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.”

A refugee from Germany to Norway, then to England when the Germans invaded Norway in 1940, Schwitter was interned as an enemy alien for more than a year. After he was released he moved to London, where he collected discarded litter on the streets to use in his work. He was fascinated with English words and phrases and often used bits of newsprint and magazines in his collages. Unlike Jones, however, his work shows an ambivalence, even cynicism, about contemporary popular culture, especially the post-war plenty in the US and its contrast with the austerity that governed daily life in most of Europe at the time.
In very different ways, both Jones and Schwitters found treasure in the ordinary. 

Black Eyes and Lemonade, Whitechapel Gallery, free, until September 2013.
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    About me

    I'm Margaret Doyle, a mediator and researcher in administrative justice. I'm also a Welcoming Ambassador at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world's leading museum of art and design.

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