Edward Said’s seminal 1978 book, Orientalism may seem an illogical text through which to approach the study of our native Lake District, but often it is the most seemingly extraneous texts that can give a subject sharpest illumination. In Orientalism’s introduction, Said asserts that ‘the orient was almost a European invention, and had been, since antiquity, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes, and remarkable experiences'. It is not difficult to apply this quotation to cultural conceptions of the English Lakes: not too much of a stretch to see that the Lake District is an invention of its own, albeit an invention that sits close-by, which masks its stark ‘otherness’ (as Said would have it). This post seeks to examine the ‘otherness’ of the Lakes through a prolific Lake District-based artist – Conrad Atkinson.
What makes Said’s text so helpful is his ability to call attention to the powerful objectives that are at play when receiving, or viewing, a place. Said’s desire to unpack the terms of the gaze under which a particular landscape falls is important to the objectives of my own thesis. Moreover, his intellectual allegiance with Italian-philosopher Gramsci’s project – to ‘pick over’ the ‘infinity of traces’ that make up a particular place, or cultural monument, or historical moment – corroborates my own ambition to re-audit the cultural, literary and artistic output of the Lakes in order to reconsider the pre-existing assumptions and preconceptions that otherwise stand to be inherited.
I shall begin with an analysis of the above - one of Conrad Atkinson’s paintings, painted in 1980 and entitled ‘Landscape’. Atkinson is interesting for his desire to reassemble his own history and sense of place, and this is in keeping with one of the major themes of Orientalism. Like Said, Atkinson is acutely interested in sidelined or partisan peoples and their susceptibility to being reshaped or ‘placed’ by a dominant ideological party. Atkinson suggests that ‘taken in it’s entirety, [my exhibition] ‘For Wordsworth, For West Cumbria’ takes an impassioned stand against smug, unquestioning ideas about the English landscape’. Said too argues that it is the unquestioning nature of a gaze that renders it problematical and likely to become imbued with doctrines of superiority. In the case of the Lake District, these doctrines can largely be traced back to the period of Romanticism that occurred during the second half of the 18th century; it was during this time that a small group of poets and writers visited the Lakes and used the ‘rugged’ landscapes as allegory, metaphor and poetic inspiration in their linking of nature to a volatile political scene. This group forged a link between writing, thinking and landscape. Often this politicism is stripped away in a retrospective appreciation of Wordsworth, Colderige, Shelley and their contemporaries, in a reconfiguration which marks the group of artists as more socially inert than was actually the case – theirs are not poems simply of hills and vales but work which, like Atkinson’s, attests to a deeply engaged interest in outcasted members of society and the denial of certain – as Foucault would have it – discursive regimes. It is this activism and propensity towards reshuffling Gramsci’s ‘traces’ that we see in Conrad Atkinson; who is keen to untangle outmoded assumptions from notions of heritage, history, and ‘Real England’
Of his portrait of Wordsworth (shown at the top of this post) Atkinson has said, ‘I basically make the point that Wordsworth was a political animal, along with Shelley, Keats, Byron and Blake who have been presented as dreamers, detached from reality Wordsworth has written that although he was thought of first as an artist, for spent 12 hours a day on politics to every one hour on art. I am recovering history’. Atkinson is keen to shake off the notional cultural baggage that comes with being a Lake District artist – keen to redefine the Lakes as the site of activism and radical thought as opposed to a landscape devoid of its liberal history. I argue that it is through the specifics of Atkinson’s very particular art practice that he is able to do this, since Atkinson’s work exists in the middle of a venn diagram of fine art and illustration. He is exhibited and recognized within a Fine Art context – his work having appeared at Tate Britain, V&A and numerous other Fine Art-led institutions – and yet his desire to reprint and physically reproduce his work destabilizes notions of Atkinson as being an ‘Artist’. It is this desire that I argue aligns him with his literary forebears; since Atkinson has taken up modes of political activism similar to Wordsworth et al with their printed pamphlets. His work too is designed to enter spheres of public consciousness quickly and rapidly engage with current affairs and national events. It is, then, both the content of Atkinson’s work, as well as his proclivity for illustrative processes that marks Atkinson out as a good case study to interrogate notions of ‘otherness’. Within spheres of Fine Art, reproduction is regarded as a process capable only of devaluing original artwork, due to a deeply ingrained correlation between rarity and value – both in a monetary and a creative sense. In illustration practices, reprinting and reproduction figures as one of the strongest tools available for successful communication between artist and recipient, and it is important that ‘mass’ does not become interchangeable with a Fine Art equation to ‘low’. Indeed, Atkinson is ‘keen to use prints as a way of promoting ideas to and communicating with a wider audience’. Again, Atkinson takes up the project of his forebears, by exposing the organisations of power that lie behind a landscape.
The V&A introduce Atkinson’s ‘Landscape’ by noting, ‘his artwork is labeled with words and phrases calling attention to the invisible social and economic problems that pervade this seemingly idyllic setting’. Atkinson’s desire to represent the working class native Lake District populace and to reshape conceptions of their landscape – his labels include phrases such as ‘alienated picturesque’, ‘seasonal employment patterns’ and ‘sale of council houses’ - is thus assisted by his employment of illustration-based methods of practice. His incorporating artifacts of popular culture – such as labels but also postcards, adverts and newspaper articles – enable him to ‘speak’ or make work whose delivery is in keeping with the political aims of his art. And hierarchy of medium is a seemingly long-contentious issue for Atkinson himself, as noted by Sue Hubbard in her biographical article in ‘Artists Talking’: “Everything was changing; the last shackles of post-war constraint were being overthrown; the personal became the political. He became disillusioned by painting, felt there was "too much disparity between his family background and what he was doing". This friction, between Atkinson’s place in the art world and the audience to whom he feels his art belongs posits Atkinson as an interesting ‘other’ – I suggest that illustration is appropriate to Atkinson because it exists as a discursive register that is as sidelined as the realities of his Lake District upbringing. This idea is confirmed by a further moment in Hubbard’s article, in which she notes the use of everyday ephemera in his work, and aligns this with the idea of being ‘mute or silenced’.
Since then Atkinson has built his reputation on an art that dares to act as a catalyst to discussion on social issues from nuclear war to 11 September. Atkinson does not, he insists, favour a particular 'style'. Rather he uses whatever materials he feels best suit his subject, everyday objects such as shoes or newspaper in which he might paint over the text to make a point about being mute or silenced.
We begin to see, from Said’s idea of poring over and re-selecting ‘bits’ of history; from Gramsci’s poetic notion of there existing an ‘infinity of traces’; and from Atkinson’s use of everyday objects, that ephemera could be regarded as a linking mechanism important to my line of enquiry. Moreover, the study of ephemera indicates a particular historical approach or set of ideological concerns that are counter to more traditional forms of historicism. Ephemera, in this context, refers to transitory written or printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved; and can include “leaflets, handbills, tickets, trade cards, programmes and playbills, printed tins and packaging, advertising inserts, posters, newspapers and more”. As Maurice Rickards, founder of The Ephemera Society would have it, ephemera can be regarded as “the minor transient documents of everyday life”. Such stress upon the ‘everyday’ is useful in destabilizing approaches to history and culture that emphasise the dominant ideological forces. It is an approach that seeks to understand culture, and the past, from the bottom up, rather than top down, and sees texts that belong to the popular realm of the public as viable agents of meaning and worth. In terms of my own project, the study of ephemera offers a way of accessing the Lake District in a precarious fashion – an approach that sifts through cultural artifacts and pieces together a representative vision of the Lakes that is more progressive than the ‘frozen countryside with powerful natural and historical appeal – a sacred geography to which the public has no legitimate relation except through an appreciative and increasingly educated visual imagination’. Patrick Wright considers such matters in his ‘On Living in an Old Country’ as he reads the Shell Oil guides as arbiters of homogenized cultural and national values. “For a consideration of public ideas of the nation, then, Shell is significant as an apparatus of cultural reproduction”. This helps articulate the way that reproducible matter can contribute to and comment on national or public discourses, and offers a model of cultural analysis quite distinct from more traditional historical methodologies. It also throws up interesting and worthwhile questions pertaining to the practice of visual illustration. To draw once more upon a notional reading of Gramsci, it could be argued that visual illustration offers a way of opposing or agitating the Lake’s dominant cultural voice : and so even in its basic status as ephemera, visual illustration carries subversive or anti-dominant implications.
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