Early on in Tate Liverpool’s Radical Landscapes exhibition (on until 4th September 2022) visitors encounter a small screen playing a 90 second or so clip from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing.
In it Berger – amongst the finest Marxist public intellectuals Britain has ever produced – pithily explains how Gainsborough’s 1750 pastoral portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews reifies and promulgates an ideology of ownership and accumulation.
This is one of the standard ways of depicting and conceiving of the British countryside. As a private asset, enriching those who claim ownership of it, and excluding the rest of us. Alongside ostensibly depolicised and often kitsch pastoralism, as well as works which in their subject matter and composition have openly reactionary intent, these kind of art works which celebrate the established order and serve a similar semiotic purpose to a “keep out sign”, are the dominate way in which the British countryside has been artistically represented.
What the Tate exhibition does is look back across the recent past (there are few works from prior to the late 19th Century on display) to show visitors that there is a fourth tradition when it comes to depicting the British countryside. One which is disruptive and uses the wild and rural alike to challenge the status quo, established bastions of power and explore new, freer, ways of living and understanding ourselves and our place in the world.
The exhibition was curated in collaboration with a wide ranging and superb ensemble of activists and others who are working in contemporary Britain to open up access to the countryside, build a genuinely free and egalitarian society, and save our ecosystems and the wider environment from destruction through finding ways for humans to live more sustainably and symbiotically with other lifeforms.
Amongst the more than 150 paintings, sculptures, photographs, films are works by some of the contemporary artists most deeply associated with exploring and critiquing the British landscape such as Jeremy Deller, Ingrid Pollard and Derek Jarman. Yet there are also some surprises. The arch-modernists Henry Moore and Bill Brandt, neither of whom I especially associate with the countryside or indeed the natural landscape, both have several works on display which do show a deep engagement with the natural world and concern for humanity’s relationship with it.
Cleverly, and befitting the exhibition’s roots in activism, campaigning and critique, the works are not left to speak for themselves. Instead they are placed within a clever and thoughtful narrative telling the story of how throughout the modern period artists, filmmakers, and other creatives such as graphic designers and photographers, have involved themselves with and been inspired by movements to open up access to the countryside, better conserve the natural world and challenge the power of landowners and other capitalist interests.
This gives visitors solid context, a sense of history, and insight into how certain questions about the countryside and our relationship to nature have been returned to throughout the modern period. For instance the early section of the exhibition about how artists and other creatives reacted to the threat atomic warfare posed to the natural world as well as human society, is accompanied by a Ministry of Agriculture informational film about fallout from the early 1950s.
The next room exploring questions of access to the land features bright modernist railway company posters from the inter-war era encouraging hikers onto their trains alongside promotional photographs and journalism connected to the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in 1932. A bold, defiant action, which saw Young Communist affiliated ramblers from Greater Manchester and Sheffield directly confronting the power of absentee landlords in the Peak District by asserting their right to roam freely en masse. As Harry Stopes recently argued the event’s origins in the revolutionary socialist movement of the inter-war period has been largely obscured by the event’s (belated) incorporation into the UK’s pantheon of sanitised officially beatified – not least by organisations like the National Trust and The Ramblers – acts of civil disobedience. The array of contemporary documents and the text accompanying this section of the exhibition does a good job of challenging this, placing the Kinder Mass Trespass and the trespassers back in their context, and explaining what the stakes were in the 1930s.
This weaving of history and documentary photography with the paintings, sculpture and artists video installations continues throughout the exhibition. This includes explanations of the origins of concern about climate change and conservation, as well as the history of Britain’s anti-road protest movement and the radical potential of rave.
To my mind this impressive blend and the sheer mix of media does an unusually good job of contextualising the art and explaining to visitors what the artists and their comrades were concerned about and placing them within the context of the ideas and the movements they were enthused by and participants in. It also does a great job of teasing out connections between ideas, movements, artworks and the concerns and challenges we have today. This approach makes an exhibition which is incredibly diffuse, hosted by a major art institution and including lots of avant garde works, incredibly grounded and connected to the world beyond the gallery.
Radical Landscape’s willingness to directly engage with contemporary issues comes across in the exhibition’s treatment of Claude Cahun and their work. The exhibition picks up on how they chafed at the restrictive gender categories and incredibly limited understanding of being trans which existed during their lifetime. All in all the exhibition does an excellent and insightful job teasing out and foregrounding the LGBT and other queer elments of the artists being exhibited’s works. This presents a challenge to the current drive by sections of the media and some centrist and right-wing politicians to attempt to smooth out and bury many of the complexities and ambiguities which define the reality of who people relate towards, understand and articulate their gender identity or sexuality.
A sense of fluidity and possibility unites the disparate artworks on display. On the surface there is little to connect William Morris with contemporary art activism agitating for Black and other people of colour to access the countryside. Or for that matter, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass with 1970s performance art inspired by traditional southern English folk customs, or 1980s feminist performance and video art.
Rather clearer cut is the lineage running between inter-war rambler activism, 1980s and 1990s new age traveller and rave culture, the large-scale anti-road building protests in the mid-1990s and contemporary activism targeting High Speed Two. All of these actions and movements have inspired supportive artistic responses both at the time and in the decades since.
There has been an outpouring of artworks, well represented in the Radical Landscapes exhibition, inspired by rave culture, for instance the enormous Castlemorton Free Festival which took place 30 years ago, in recent years. This has doubtless been given urgency in recent years by an increasingly authoritarian government’s crackdown on protest and Gypsy, Romany Traveller (GRT) culture through laws like the Police, Crime, Courts and Sentencing Act on one hand. Whilst on the other hand – more positively – there has been a revival of the radical right to roam movement, especially since COVID-19, which has seen a new generation of activists using trespass, and collective enjoyment of the land, as a campaigning tool.
Fundamentally the key thing which actually unites the disparate artforms, artists and political and philosophical movements explored in Radical Landscapes, is their turn to the countryside as a form of counterculture. This may take the form of embracing nature’s fluidity and untamed uncertainty, attractive in different ways to women, trans and queer artists and activists. Or looking backwards, towards a mythologised past pre-enclosure acts, or pre-hierarchy, when the access to the land and the ability to enjoy it was free, so as to imagine a future beyond capitalism and scarcity. Something that is politically useful in myriad ways to GRT people, the early Marxist William Morris, old school communists ramblers in the 1930s and the anarchists and autonomist currents that animated the 1980s and 1990s rave, anti-consumer and anti-road building movements. It was also useful in not dissimilar ways to the art of the Festival of Britain and post-war social democrats like Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore.
Ultimately the inspiration the landscape provides politically engaged artists and activists is one of freedom and possibility. This could be the possibility of a truly free egalitarian future, or one in which people live in genuine harmony and synthesis with non-human species and the environment, potentially it could be a mixture of the two. Turning to the landscape, whether heavily impacted by humans or ostensibly wild, provides a canvas and a means of escape from the present into spaces, or communities which possess something of the desired future, or enable the articulation of a desire for change.
These currents are amazingly current throughout the modern and contemporary era of British art and activism that the exhibition spans. There are, however, interesting disjunctures, such as the rising salience of climate breakdown as opposed to straight forward conservation, from around 1970 onwards as the threat posed by climate change became clear. It is also evident in the art created by British people of colour from the early 1980s onwards, a generation after large communities of colour first became established in the UK, articulating their just anger at the country’s colonial past and ongoing racist presence. Something which manifests itself in the landscape in everything from the history of stately homes and parklands, to the continuing absence and exclusion of non-white people (around fifteen percent of the population) from the countryside to this day.
There are also interesting reassessments. This includes Ruth Ewan’s Back to the Fields, a vast and fascinating response to the French Revolutionary Calendar, which highlights its strong connections to the reality of the overwhelmingly rural society in which it was created. Much derided since its promulgation in 1793, I felt a new appreciation for what the calendar was trying to achieve and the society which created it having seen the work.
Another reassessment which really stuck with me was the story of Scotland’s bings. Created by oil shale mining in 19th Century Lothian the bings were long considered eyesores. They are essentially slag heaps. An investigation was conducted in the 1970s to consider whether they should be cleared away and disposed of. When it reported in 1976 however, it strongly suggested that the bings despite being created by human activity, were an important landscape feature and one deserving of preservation. Today they provided a home to rare birds, species of plant, and other wildlife.
A hopefully portent for the future as humanity transitions towards a more symbiotic and sustainable relationship with the non-human world, maybe? Leaving the exhibition I was in awe of the sheer volume and diversity of artwork the curators had brought into dialogue with each other. I admire the deft curation which blended the art with clear and insightful wider explorations of the moments and concerns in which they were created. Radical Landscapes is nothing less than a tightly compact and expansive history and exploration of how politically engaged British artists during the modern period have expressed their concerns and desires through responding creatively to the natural and human landscape. It also, through exhibiting new artworks, including two commissioned especially for the exhibition, shows how artists continue to be inspired by the landscape and the radical politics and potential of land to this day. I walked away into a sunny early afternoon around Albert Dock feeling somewhat hopeful, and excited to see where art and activism in the British countryside goes next.
Radical Landscapes is on at Tate Liverpool until 4th September 2022. Tate Liverpool has a “summer sale” on with adult non-concession tickets to the exhibition now priced at £10 until the end of August 2022.
Featured image: Claude Cahun, Je Tends les Bras, 1931. Courtesy of Jersey Heritage Collections