{"id":97,"date":"2012-05-17T10:39:53","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T10:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1051675528.test.prositehosting.co.uk\/?p=97"},"modified":"2012-05-29T13:55:24","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T13:55:24","slug":"misplaced-trust-tripping-along-with-the-teddy-bears-picnic-laura-gascoigne-looks-at-the-obvious-mismatch-of-the-national-trust-and-contemporary-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"Misplaced trust: tripping along with the teddy bears\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 picnic, Laura Gascoigne looks at the obvious mismatch of the National Trust and contemporary art"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Philippa Lawrence, Barcode: FB184<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you go down to the woods today, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sure of a big surprise. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s if the woods are Mortimer Forest in Herefordshire, and the surprise hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t by now been deliberately spoiled by tree-hugging vigilante forest rangers.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last spring, RCA graduate Philippa Lawrence took it into her pretty little head to barcode the trunks of selected young oaks in this ancient woodland at a spot called High Vinnalls, conveniently close to the Forestry Commission Car Park. The trees are due to be felled to make hardwood dowelling, a product for which the builders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 merchant barcode is FB184.<\/p>\n

Barcode: FB184, organized by Meadow Arts and funded by ACE, is a site-responsive piece (responsive, mind, not merely specific) whose purpose, sayMeadowArts, is to draw \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the viewer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention to how the individuality of each tree contrasts sharply with the uniformity of the commodity that it becomes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. You may question whether, four centuries after the invention of the sawmill, we need our attention drawn to this fact, but the artist thinks we do. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hereford is known for its special relationship to trees,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she says \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and special relationships, as we know, \u00c2\u00a0need work. She hopes hers may help us \u00e2\u20ac\u0153reconsider our relationship to these places and the centrality of wood in all of our lives\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and, quite possibly, in some of our skulls.<\/p>\n

Lawrence\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own relationship with trees, she confides on her website, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is one built on a close and easy physical proximity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. In childhood \u00e2\u20ac\u0153local trees accepted my slight young limbs and that [sic] of my friends as we scaled and climbed, testing our dexterity, flushed with delight at our exertions and in being abroad \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcin another place\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 within the arms of the tree.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Steady on, my dear, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get the paedos excited.) Well, I spent much of my childhood up a tree and when the image of her barcoded trunks dropped into my mailbox it made me want to reach for the bow and arrow I used to take up there, dip the arrow tip in curare and lie in wait for Lawrence to waft along, flushed with delight, to install her next site-responsive project.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the way things are going, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll need a quiverful. Since ACE teamed up last year with the National Trust on a new three-year partnerhip, Trust NewArt, site-responsive blights on the landscape have been spreading. The Trust now boasts a fresh young ContemporaryArts Programme Manager called Tom Freshwater who, with advice from experts including seasoned site-responders Ackroyd & Harvey and Richard Wentworth, is under instruction \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to encourage new ways of looking at the work and the world\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Sounds harmless enough as far as it goes, but there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more. The aim of Trust New Art, the launch announcement informed us, is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to build links between the National Trust and the contemporary arts and crafts sector<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153to make contemporary arts and crafts an integral part of the National Trust\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s daily offer<\/em> to visitors\u00e2\u20ac\u009d [my italics]. This sort of management-speak speaks of one thing and one thing only: money. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the same old story of mismatched partners climbing into bed together for mutual warmth in a cold economic climate.<\/p>\n

The National Trust has a circulation problem. While more and more visitors swarm freely over its 600,000-acre rural estate the size of Derbyshire, fewer and fewer want to pay an entrance fee to circulate around its historic houses which consequently, like gangrenous limbs, \u00c2\u00a0are in danger of dropping off. Without increased footfall through its miles of stuffy corridors, it cannot meet the expense of keeping up its buildings. But who of the post-end-of-history generation wants to pay good money on a sunny afternoon to traipse around an airless house with the blinds half-drawn admiring the faded possessions of long dead toffs? They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d rather have a tour of Beckingham Palace. While the Trust\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s energetic Chairman Simon Jenkins has managed to breathe some warmth into his hypothermic patient by such simple traditional expedients as lighting fires in grates, his organisation has been looking enviously at the inflated attendance figures of contemporary art galleries and, being of a trusting disposition, believing them. The trouble is, the two constituencies are poles apart. The blue-rinsed rump of NT membership wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Trust New Art further than they could throw it, which at their advanced average age is not very far.<\/p>\n

Trust properties that have so far signed up to the new art deal include Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, Tatton Park in Cheshire, Croft Castle in Herefordshire, and Calke Abbey and Kedleston Hall, both in Derbyshire. Waddesdon had already converted its Coach House into a contemporary art space, opened in 2009 somewhat inauspiciously with an exhibition of Angus Fairhurst, a contemporary artist who chose to end it all by hanging himself in a wood. But Waddesdon is au fait with art and not in danger of doing anything silly, unlike Calke Abbey, winner of our 2010 Trust New Art Bumpkin Prize for a summer programme of supreme artbollocks titled Profusion \u00e2\u20ac\u201c devised for it by Beacon Art Projects \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that made no concessions to the rural location, \u00c2\u00a0and no sense. Among its advertised attractions were a Doug Fishbone performance in the Deer Shelter of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a stream-of-consciousness mode lecture incorporating images found on the internet into unlikely scenarios, propositions and diatribes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; a Jimmy Durham video in the Ice House showing the artist \u00e2\u20ac\u0153smashing his students\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 works, reminding us of the origin and end of all things\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as if we were short of reminders of this in the countryside \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and a display of Roger Hiorns\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153intention to dust areas of the smithy with powdered antidepressant, triggering different contradictory avenues of association between the setting and his intervention\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Mercifully Health & Safety intervened to nip his intention in the bud at the display stage.<\/p>\n

Visitors to contemporary art museums go to look at contemporary art; visitors to National Trust properties go to look at flowers and trees in the gardens and cake display cabinets in the tearooms. Thankfully, the heritage-visiting public seems already to be taking things into its own hands. The fightback started in a small way last September in the grounds of English Heritage\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Belsay Hall in Northumberland, where nine Lilliputian hostages were seized from a mini-installation by street artist Slinkachu forming part of the exhibition Extraordinary Measures. A single escapee was later recovered from the weeds by a gardener, but the others are still missing, despite an amnesty. (Jackdaws were, unsurprisingly, on the list of suspects.)<\/p>\n

There is a limit, beyond installing wheelchair ramps and disabled toilets, to how accessible you can make a historic house to a public increasingly uninterested in history. But wait! What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s this? An announcement from the ICA, that body cryogenically frozen in the 1950s and recently chilled to a deeper permafrost by Arts Council cuts. \u00c2\u00a0During the run of its summer exhibition Sketches for Regency Living, \u00c2\u00a0an architectural-cum-choreographic intervention by the fabulously named Pablo Bronstein, gallery guides will be offering daily \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcNational Trust-style tours\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of Nash House, with dance performances on the hour and evening talks from historians, architects and antique specialists. \u00c2\u00a0What goes around comes around, in a sexier costume. Time, perhaps, for a revivified National Trust to issue its volunteer room guides with oak leaf-monogrammed tights.<\/p>\n

The Jackdaw Jul-Aug 2011<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you go down to the woods today, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sure of a big surprise. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s if the woods are Mortimer Forest in Herefordshire, and the surprise hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t by now been deliberately spoiled by tree-hugging vigilante forest rangers. Last spring, RCA graduate Philippa Lawrence took it into her pretty little head to barcode the trunks of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":654,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}