Peter Lord is probably generally
described as a “Welsh art critic” or “Welsh art historian”,
and while the majority of his professional life has been spent in
Wales working with a particular focus on “art” produced in Wales
he is in fact English (in origin at least), and there is a sense in
which it is only as an outsider that he could see the depth of
artistic endeavour within Wales.
We all know Wales is the “Land of
Song” which Crowns (and Chairs) its Poets – and the counter point
of this narrative is that Wales is a nation without a visual culture
– a land of words not pictures. In this interesting book Peter Lord
sounds a loud challenge to this (mis)conception.
Key to this challenge is a general
challenge to the Art Establishment and any framework of ideas that
attempts to police the boundary between “Art” and “not-Art”.
This is a boundary that the Pop Artists of the 1960s kicked against –
although I think the Art Establishment was phenomenally successful in
neutralising that challenge. When Andy Warhol painted soup tins
rather than seeing the Art in the ordinary the Establishment focused
only on the status of a piece being a “Warhol” - content became
irrelevant. (Although perhaps Warhol is a bad example, as clearly the
greatest work of Art he ever produced was the persona “Andy
Warhol”).
There is almost a quality of the
detective novel about this, as from the starting point that there was
no Welsh Art, Lord begins to discover more and more artists,
stumbling across them, with a glimpse or a rumour, and then working
to put their story together, to find their art. Maybe it is the
equivalent of the BBC “Who do you think you are?” for a whole
nation, a whole culture. While the BBC's celebrities come to terms
with the drunks, adulterers, and war heroes among their forebears,
the Welsh need to get to know their inheritance of artists.
It is also a tale of how the Welsh have
in certain ways gilded their own prison bars – there is a
psychological collusion, we may love Wales but deep down we don't
really expect too much from her? There is today a story on the BBC
news website headlined “Wales economy adds least value in UK” -
but if you read the story it also states that Wales “showed the
biggest growth”. So why was the headline not “Wales fastest
growing economy in UK”? We might blame it on the London centric
Beeb, but are the leaders in Wales actually aspirational enough to
challenge the rhetoric – for you can bet if in the same position
Alec Salmon would have raised a storm, a storm that would have more
than likely broken to the advantage of the people of Scotland.
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