John Wilson, Guest Curator

 

The Documenting the City project was an obvious response to Newport's assumption of City status in 2002 and has provided an exciting opportunity to explore the Newport Museum and Art Gallery collections.

Our art historical journey into the making of modern Newport has been conducted over the past eighteen months against the back-drop of dramatic city centre redevelopment. It's therefore appropriate to indulge in some reflections upon my task as Guest Curator and the wider civic context:

 

 

 

  • "The city is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of unorganized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in those customs and are transmitted with this tradition"| Robert Ezra Park [The City (1925); cited in H.J.Dyos (ed.), The Study of Urban History (1968)] 
 
  • "Under capitalism there is (...) a perpetual struggle in which capital builds a physical landscape appropriate to its own conditions at a particular point in time (...) only to have to destroy it, usually in the course of a crisis, at a subsequent point in time" | David Harvey
 
  • "The modern economy is likely to go on growing, though probably in new directions (...). The process of modernisation, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our imaginations and energies to life, drives us to graps and confront the world that modernisation makes, and strive to make it our own. I believe that we and those that come after us will go on fighting to make ourselves at home in this world, <b>even as the homes we have made, the modern street, the modern spirit, go on melting into air." | Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
 

 

Celebrating Newport's coming of age as a City

  

The Documenting the City project was conceived as a special exhibition to celebrate Newport's coming of age as a City following the official bestowing of city status in 2002. 

 

 

 

Our basic curatorial aim has been to showcase works of art in the permanent collection of the Newport Museum and Art Gallery, as a means of exploring the evolution of Newport as a city. 

 

 

 

 

  

The official bestowing of city status was a long overdue act in many people's view for Newport has always acted like a city on the move, from the Citadel of Chartism to the Steel Town boom of the 1960s and beyond. In recent years Newport's music scene led to the journalistic tag "the Seattle of Wales", and that was closer to reality in capturing the vibrant urban edge of Newport. At times the Newport art college has been almost synonymous with the Newport music scene,  a locus for talent such as Scritti Politti and the Clash to emerge.

 

Change is in the air. In the city centre, in the new spatial order and cultural geography that is in the making, we arrive at a new crossroads in the evolution of the city and its response to the challenge of modernity. Janus-like, it is appropriate that we survey the historical journey so far, focus on current options, and engage possible future paths.

 


 


 

The Art and Society in Newport series: From the archive to the web

 

Documenting the City is the third project in the series Art and Society in Newport that I have produced as guest curator in collaboration with the Keeper of Art at Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Roger Cucksey . Each project has comprised a large-scale gallery exhibition plus publication (-read more here ):

* James Flewitt Mullock and the Victorian Achievement (1993)
* Documenting the Twentieth Century (2000, a Millennium year project)
* Documenting the City (2007)


I would like to acknowledge my debt to Roger Cucksey for the opportunity to engage our productive partnership over this period. We have worked  together against the grain of fashion in an effort to place on public record something of the energy of the Newport art world and the Newport College of Art. Our basic aim has been to bring together the practices of curation and historical research, to excavate the institution's archival holdings, and produce public exhibitions and publications that engage the challenge of culture and the public sphere. In our own modest way over this extended period, we have remained true to a Braudelian vision of exploring the locus of Newport in its long-term process of evolution across the generations.  In the shift to today's "post-industrial" phase of "liquid modernity" we nevertheless affirm that focus upon place as a means towards a more vital "space of place" in which questions of place, identity, history, art, culture and society can be engaged.

 

When we produced Documenting the Twentieth Century we looked forward to working in the new Internet environment. We now inhabit the world of Web 2.0 and are able to use the readily available web-based publishing tools such as flickr both to produce our materials and to engage an extended audience. Whilst the web-based environment provides a qualitatively new space of exploration for the visitor and curator alike, our experience of producing Documenting the City has nevertheless highlighted the fact that traditional (analogue) skills remain at a premium. For we seem to have returned to the preliminary and time-consuming art historical tasks of accession records and cataloguing of art works, before we can move on to additional documentation, critical debate and further research. We look forward to using art_newport on flickr as an online resource for ongoing research.


 

Modernity, the city, and art: Towards a new cultural geography

 

 The burgeoning City of Newport has lost no time in forging ahead with a major city centre redevelopment scheme. In typical fashion Newport has expressed its confidence in the future with the building of a monumental bridge, the Newport City Footbridge, an iconic structure and emblem of the new entrepreneurial City of Newport whose cantilever design symbolizes the history of steel-making in the town and stands as a counterpart to the Transporter Bridge erected a hundred years ago to the day of the opening of the new bridge. Bridges have enacted Newport's rite of passage into the new century, monumental responses to the challenge of modernity [[add, 1800 stone bridge]]. With large-scale redevelopment moving apace on the ground, the City of Newport is rebranding itself as a vibrant entrepreneurial city as the horizon of 2010 approaches when Newport will host the Ryder Cup and occupy a world stage.

 

As the new entrepreneurial city of Newport follows its redevelopment plans to produce a new spatial order in the city centre and alongside the River Usk, we see that the planner's blueprint includes the  "Left Bank District" with a new campus on the west bank of the Usk for the University of Wales and the the re-location of the Newport School of Art, Media and Design. One is reminded of the municipality's building of the model Newport Technical Institute (home of &quot;the art college&quot;) at Clarence Place in the early part of the twentieth century [[photo, cover of opening brochure for art coll?]]  

   

Newport's visibility in the wider art world has not been quite so brash or insistent as its Chartist radicalism or its booming port , coalfield and steel industries. But for those in the know the Newport College of Art was always a special place, offering a solid grounding to the local student, allowing staff to nurture their own talent, and setting the exceptional student and staff member on the road to achievements in the wider world of art beyond. In the 1970/80s the Newport Museum and Art Gallery had a vibrant programme of contemporary art exhibitions, enjoying an especially close relationship with the Newport College of Art, which provided a focus for the South Wales art world (- the capital city of Cardiff not having a municipal museum and art gallery to perform such a role; whilst the National Museum of Wales oriented itself to the connoisseur tradition of art). 


When I compiled the catalogue notes for the preceding project <i>Documenting the Twentieth Century</i>, my reflections upon the Newport College of art identified discontinuity as a key feature of the art college's changes across recent decades (from the 1980's). I wrote (in 2000):

 "The post-1970s period marks a passage of radical change and discontinuity from this process of long term development in Newport (...). We then connect with today's agenda of critical debate, dominated by the thesis of a post-modern departure in contemporary culture and society. This is the period in which the local municipal art college (...) has been superceded as an institution; one in which the institutional and professional specialisation of art practice has achieved a new level of autonomy and public invisibility. A fact highlighted in many people's minds by the spatial migration of Newport Art College from the urbanity of Clarence Place to the suburbanity of Caerleon, so that the only fact of continuity between past and present that remains is location alongside the River Usk?" 

I still see discontinuity and invisibility as the key feature of these changes, consonant with the changes of the art world at large; a rupture from the tradition of the municipal College of Art and that sense of belonging to, and means for participation in, a wider public cultural sphere. 

 

The new social and cultural geography of the city of Newport may enable a newly charged "space of place"? A new constellation of cultural relationships, affinities and affiliations? It remains to be seen how far a re-location of the Newport School of Art from Caerleon to the "downtown", west bank of the River Usk in Newport city centre may restore a new sense of urbanity  back into the culture of art education.

And so we arrive at today's crossroads in the fortunes of the City of Newport, with the horizon of 2010 set for completion of the major city centre regeneration project. Is it too utopian a hope to look forward to a renewed relationship of the art world and the public sphere, as both the Newport Museum and Art Gallery and the Newport School of Art orientate themselves to new directions in the new city that is in the making? It is hoped that the Newport Museum and Art Gallery and the Newport School of Art, Media and Design can find a means for partnership over the next few years. The Documenting the City project has provided a starting point for such dialogue.