Open Studio: The location of Culture II
Objects that have lost their origins?
Leon Wainwright
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/late-tate-november-behind-scenes-outsider-leon-wainwright
Sonia Boyce
Lay back, keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great , 1986
Lubaina Himid
Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service
https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/lubaina-himid-modern-art-oxford-spike-island-nottingham-contemporary-300117
Rivers of Blood - Enoch Powell
The Other Story - Curated by Rasheed Araeen
"Of the twenty-four artists in the exhibition, only six were drawn from the younger generation, which included the only four women: Sonia Boyce (fig.1), Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid and Kumiko Shimizu.5 Among the more analytic exhibition reviews, the poor representation of women artists drew the most criticism, not ameliorated by Araeen’s apologia regarding his inability to locate Black and Asian women artists from the earlier generations and the refusal of several women to participate in what they possibly feared was a ghettoising context.6 Among the supportive reviews, Petrine Archer-Shaw complained that the exhibition reflected none of the vibrancy of Black vernacular cultures, film and music.7 However, this was not Araeen’s curatorial remit; his criteria for selection were strictly focused on the relationship between modernism in the visual arts and African, Caribbean and Asian artists resident in the UK for at least ten years, with the aim of interrogating how certain practices, barring a few isolated cases, had become not simply marginalised but ‘whited out’, as it were"
Symposium: Conversation: What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism?
- 'Becoming' rather than 'Otherness'
Belonging, shifting, preservation
Feeling: Absence of roots, belonging.
Am I talking about multi-culturalism? Colonialisation? I don't want to talk about colonialisation - more of the how nationalism is a dupe? What is national identity/national pride when a. you have nothing to do with their past glories/traumas and b. the whole idea of being from one single place doesn't exist anymore - or having that place to do anything with whom you become.
Keep it simple - what do I want people to feel?
- Absence of belonging?
How do I want to make people feel that?
- disoreintation
-challenging pre-conceived knowledge
-things that you hold dear to your heart as something that 'comes from your country' (national pride) doesn't even belong to you.
What are you being so precious about preserving?
Or now that you have adopted it and helped in it's growth - are you the new owner?
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/The-Origins-of-Polo/
Played on horse back, in the Middle Ages it was used in the training of cavalry across the East (from Japan to Constantinople, and was played almost as a miniature battle. It first became known to western peoples via British tea-planters in Manipur (between Burma and India) and it spread to Malta with soldiers and naval officers. In 1869, the first game in Britain (of “hockey on horseback” as it was referred to at first) was organised on Hounslow Heath by officers stationed at Aldershot, one of whom had read about the game in a magazine.
http://www.polomuseum.com/sport-polo/history-polo
The Modern Game
Modern polo originated in Manipur, a northeastern state of India. The Silchar Polo Club was founded in 1859 by British military officers and tea planters, after Lieutenant Joe Sherer saw the locals playing polo and said, “We must learn the game!” From India, polo spread as fast as its enthusiasts could travel, appearing in Malta in 1868, England in 1869, Ireland in 1870, Argentina in 1872 and Australia in 1874.
On a trip to England, James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the N
ew York Herald, saw his first polo game. Early in 1876, he returned to New York with mallets, balls and a copy of the Hurlingham rules. The first game was played at a city riding academy; in the spring they moved outdoors to a field in Westchester County. That summer, the New York players took polo to Newport, R.I. Soon the galloping game was being played across North America.
http://time.com/4055543/ralph-lauren-polo-shirt/
When he needed a name for the label, he wanted something that sounded right for the lifestyle he had admired on movie screens and in the pages of magazines like Esquire. “I couldn’t call it Basketball,” Lauren joked to TIME. So, though he’d never seen the sport played, polo it was.
Today, the logo still carries the resonance of a polo match, channeling the elegance and spirit of the sport it’s named after. Whether on a Polo shirt or an oxford, and whether dressed up or worn casually, Ralph Lauren’s signature pony is a symbol of enduring quality and timeless American style.
History of Tea in India
Chinese varieties of tea were first introduced into India by the British, in an attempt to break the Chinese monopoly on tea. The British, "using Chinese seeds, plus Chinese planting and cultivating techniques, launched a tea industry by offering land in Assam to any European who agreed to cultivate tea for export."