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Gilbert and George's 1980 Pictures and the Spectre of Nationalism in Postcolonial Britain
Art History Pub Date : 2021-10-15 , DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12614
Alexander Bigman

With their hallucinatory juxtapositions of medieval English iconography, imperial-era public statuary, and indicators of contemporary urban unrest, Gilbert and George's monumental 1980 Pictures marked what many initial critics perceived as an unsettlingly political turn in the duo's work – even, some alleged, a gesture of identification with Britain's neo-fascist right. In fact, this essay argues, much of Gilbert and George's preceding work, including their collages of Edwardian-era picture postcards, and their canonical performances of The Singing Sculpture, was similarly oriented toward questions of national identity and belonging in a manner more philosophical than propagandistic. At a moment marked by an ascendant if internally contested effort by the political right to reconceptualize ‘Britishness’ for a postcolonial age, the artists used their self-appointed roles as ‘living sculptures’ to emphasize the discontinuities, contradictions, and instabilities inherent to the construct of British identity, stoking an emerging set of anxieties regarding the street-level legibility of political partisanship in a highly polarized London.

中文翻译:

吉尔伯特和乔治 1980 年的照片和后殖民时期英国的民族主义幽灵

吉尔伯特和乔治在1980 年的巨作中将中世纪的英国肖像、帝国时代的公共雕像和当代城市动乱的指标进行了幻觉并置,这标志着许多最初的评论家认为这对二人组的作品出现了令人不安的政治转向——甚至有人声称,认同英国新法西斯右翼的姿态。事实上,这篇文章认为,吉尔伯特和乔治之前的大部分作品,包括他们的爱德华时代明信片拼贴画,以及他们对歌唱雕塑的经典表演,同样以哲学而非宣传的方式面向国家认同和归属问题。在政治权利为后殖民时代重新概念化“英国性”的努力正在上升(如果内部有争议)的时刻,艺术家们利用他们自封为“活的雕塑”的角色来强调固有的不连续性、矛盾和不稳定性。英国身份的建构,在高度两极分化的伦敦引发了一系列关于政治党派在街头易读性的焦虑。
更新日期:2021-10-15
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