Extra, extra

I couldn’t resist scratching the nation’s heritage obsession further so a few more quotes from Robert Hewison’s book, The Heritage Industry, are below.

However, this time I am not commenting, except this comment that explains that I am no longer commenting (for the moment!).

Prescient?

Part of the reason for late twentieth-century doubt and uncertainty is that our mutual relations across the planet have become instantaneous, a vast computer network, but almost entirely abstract. If, metaphorically, Renaissance society was organised around the hierarchy of single-point perspective, and nineteenth-century society shaped by the division of labour that developed from the railway line to the assembly line, then the model for the society of the fourth machine age is the microchip: an abstract pattern printed on a flat surface that functions in series, accumulatively, but unlike a classical façade or a steam engine, has no emblematic or visual power.

[…]

Post-modernism and the heritage industry are linked, in that they both conspire to create a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives, and our history. We have no understanding of history in depth, but instead are offered a contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse. We are, as Jameson writes, ‘condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains for ever out of reach’.¹⁰

Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry

Wrecked?

In Britain the popular approach to history is to rewrite it. This has served its purpose, obscuring the military disasters of 1940 with ‘the Dunkirk spirit’. The recovery, indeed recuperation, of the wreck of the Mary Rose, is a specific example: Henry VIII’s battleship went down as a result of pure incompetence; its recovery - which also very nearly went wrong - is presented as a technological triumph. Patrick Wright has identified the resonances the recovery of the Mary Rose struck during the Falklands War.¹³ Only some deep royal memory may have caused Prince Charles, who was present to watch the raising of the ship that Henry VIII had watched go down, to decline to step onto the wreck once it had broken the surface, on the grounds that he was wearing the wrong kind of shoes.

Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry

Observant?

[…] The past is made more vivid than the present. It never rains in a heritage magazine. By the use of microchip technology the past is made more engrossing with slide presentations, taped sounds, film and ghost rides to the tenth century. The past becomes more homogeneous than the present, it becomes simply ‘yesteryear’; if there is development it is ‘progress’ where continuity is discovered in the place of chance, and where rooms and houses are restored to a uniform conception of a period, and objects are standardised by their display. Alternatively, all styles and periods are represented as equally valid, to the extent that even the stylistic confusion of Wigan’s Officers’ Club achieves its own ‘period style’. The past is domesticated and, by regulation, made safe; it is rescued, removed, rebuilt, restored and rearranged. As David Lowenthal has pointed out: ‘History thus transformed becomes larger than life, merging intention with performance, ideal with actuality. Acting out a fantasy our own time denies us, we remake the past into an epoch much like the present – except that we have no responsibility for it. The present cannot be moulded to such desires, for we share it with others; the past is malleable because its inhabitants are no longer here to contest our manipulations.’¹⁵

The distance between this polished past and actuality can have a paradoxical effect, as a former director of the Ironbridge Gorge museum admits: ‘One of the changes I see of the new wave industrial museum is that it creates a sort of curious nostalgic, rose-coloured picture of a sort of Pickwickian industrial past which bears no relation to reality, but which we like to imagine. And we do like to doctor our history to suit our image picture, don’t we? A lot of what is presented isn’t based on scholarship at all but upon attitude and emotion. So I think the anti-industrial attitude is an antipathy towards industry now, but we’re quite happy to look at history of say fifty years ago, because its part of our heritage.’¹⁷

[…]

Yet we have no real use for this spurious past, any more than nostalgia has any use as a creative emotion. At best we turn it into a commodity, and following the changed language of the arts, justify its exploitation as a touristic resource. The result is a devaluation of significance, an impoverishment of meaning. Yet to admit that the commodity on sale is fraudulent would be deeply unsettling, especially to the salesmen. David Lowenthal writes: ‘To recognise that the past has been altered understandably arouses anxiety. A past seen as open to manipulation not only undermines supposed historical verities but implies a fragile present and portends a shaky future. When we know that hoary documents are regularly forged, old paintings imitated, relics contrived, ancient buildings modernised and new ones antiquated, the identity of everything around us becomes dubious. When a past we depend on for heritage and continuity turns out to be a complex of original and altered remains enlarged by subsequent thoughts and deeds, if not an outright sham, we lose faith in our own perceptions.’¹⁸

Had we more faith in ourselves, and were more sure of our values, we would have less need to rely on the images and monuments of the past. We would also find that, far from being useless except as a diversion from the present, the past is indeed a cultural resource, that the ideas and values of the past – as in the Renaissance – can be the inspiration for fresh creation. But because we have abandoned our critical faculty for understanding the past, and have turned history into heritage, we no longer know what to do with it, except obsessively preserve it. The more dead the past becomes, the more we wish to enshrine its relics.

Disconnected, it seems, from the living line of history by world war, and the successive strokes of modernisation and economic recession, we have begun to construct a past that, far from being a defence against the future, is a set of imprisoning walls upon which we project a superficial image of a false past, simultaneously turning our backs on the reality of history, and incapable of moving forward because of the absorbing fantasy before us.

[…]

The heritage industry presents a history that stifles, but above all, a history that is over. The development of Britain has reached a finite state that must be preserved at all costs against the threat of change. Any shift away from that finite state must be interpreted as decline. Patrick Wright has argued that the National Trust lacks the capability: ‘To think positively of history as transformation, discontinuity or change. The National Trust arrives at its superior definition of the nation through a purifying cult of permanence, continuity and endurance. The nation is not seen as a heterogeneous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, in the future. Instead, it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical identity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’²⁴

As we loll back on a close-clipped bank in the garden of some National Trust property on a drowsy summer Sunday, it is not difficult to be persuaded that the tangible past is desirable and attractive. The feeling lingers with us, even as we struggle to get out of the car park. All this, the garden, the house, the weather, must be preserved for ever. But the conservation movement brings other ideas besides a certain concept of national identity in its train. It introduces the idea that our own time has nothing to contribute to the achieved culture of the past. The heritage, far from compensating for present discontents, either as a spiritual or crudely economic resource, quietly increases them, by holding before us the contrast between a decaying present and an ever improving and more appealing past. The true product of the heritage industry is not identity and security, but entropy. If history is over, then there is nothing to be done.

[…]

Yet if ‘we’ are to come to terms with the inevitable disruptions of change, then we must seek to understand it, and not reject it as only more evidence of decline. The continuity between past and present must be maintained, the difficulty is that it is far harder to rethink the way we treat the past, than to make the present conform to the image of the past that we have created. There is no denying that the erasures of modernisation and recession have been an enormous disruption, but if we are to make any sense of them, they must be confronted, however painfully. It is no solution to retreat into a fake history: we need to recover the true continuity between past and present by coming to terms with previous failures. If the disruptions they have caused are so great that it seems impossible to make sense of them then we must make new meanings, not retrieve old ones.

The impulse of conservatism is to ignore events which do not match our understanding or expectation, to isolate innovation, and to label anything that does not fit into established patterns as deviation. Disenchantment with the present drives us back into the past, or such elements of the past as survive into the present day, and their protection becomes the sole object of our energies.

[…]

Heritage, for all its seductive delights, is bogus history. It has enclosed the late twentieth century in a bell jar into which no ideas can enter, and, just as crucially, from which none can escape. The answer is not to empty the museums and sell up the National Trust, but to develop a critical culture which engages in a dialogue between past and present. We must rid ourselves of the idea that the present has nothing to contribute to the achievements of the past, rather, we must accept its best elements, and improve on them. It will be necessary to distinguish carefully between the ideas of a single closed tradition appropriated by the Right and the genuine tradition that involves a continual renewal of the best ideas and values of a society from one generation to another. The definition of those values must not be left to a minority who are able through their access to the otherwise exclusive institutions of culture to articulate the only acceptable meanings of past and present. It must be a collaborative process shared by an open community which accepts both conflict and change.

The elements of such a critical culture already exist, in the ideas and activities of contemporary artists who have continued to struggle with the material of the present, in spite of their increasing neglect by the institutions of culture which have been the subject of this book. The heritage industry is not interested in art as a process of making and renewal, but in works of art that are already achieved, where they can be absorbed as symbols of the general culture the heritage institutions support. Culture is the work of a whole society, but art is made by individuals, and it is to such individuals that we must look for fresh perceptions of the present and new approaches to the legacy of the past.

[…]

One of the first conditions for the emergence of a critical culture, then, is to disconnect the function of the artist as creator, from the function of the artist as wealth-creator, or simply job-creator. With the enthusiastic collaboration of the arts bureaucracies that depend on subsidy-distribution for their salaries, politicians of all hues defend public funding of the arts on grounds that have nothing to do with what artists have to say, and everything to do with the turnover they can achieve. As already argued, this has changed the language of the arts, and in such a language there are things it becomes impossible to say.

This is not an argument against subsidising the arts. One of the many ironies of the present situation is that a philistine government has done as much to stimulate the growth of a heritage industry by starving museums of funds, as by encouraging business sponsorship. This is an argument for freeing the artist to return to his or her true function, which is to find expressions for the images, ideas and values by which the rest of us may live.

If the first condition of a critical culture is to return artists to their vocation, the second is to accept that their imaginations must be free to look at the present rather than the past. In reality, the present is a more exciting and risky place than the comforting simulacrum of a triumphant, undivided nation that the heritage industry tries to carry forward from the past into the present. If we abandon ourselves to the rapt contemplation of the past, the demoralisation of artists who necessarily can only work in the present, will be complete.

The third, and subsequent conditions for a critical culture are the responsibility of artists themselves: to penetrate the screen of the past and unmask the present; to rediscover their creative energies and attack the material of today in order to re-shape the future. And if a critical culture is to begin anywhere, it must begin by criticising the heritage industry, before we drown in honey and aspic.

It may be argued that the technocratic society of the fourth machine age is incapable of creating the transcendent values that would bind the creatively conflicting elements of an open society together, and that the only reservoir of values is the past. Yet the very drive towards the production of goods which contribute to the new industries based on the technology of information is an opportunity to recover and enlarge the creative possibilities of culture. Instead of the miasma of nostalgia we need the fierce spirit of renewal; we must substitute a critical for a closed culture, we need history, not heritage. We must live in the future tense, and not the past pluperfect.

Robert Hewison The Heritage Industry