Items where Year is 2006

As one of Britain's most eminent 20th century painters Stanley Spencer's work has often been overshadowed by his chaotic and colourful private life. This is the first book since Richard Carline's Stanley Spencer at War (1978) to focus entirely on the painter's service as an orderly, soldier, and patient in the First World War, and to critically evaluate his time in Bristol, the Balkans and Burghclere between 1915-1932.

Drawing on Spencer's letters, illustrations and paintings, and interviews with relatives, curators and others who knew him, Gough examines Spencer's journey from cosseted family life, through the drudgery of a war hospital and the malarial battlefields of the Macedonian campaign, to the commission for the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere. Through a close reading of contemporary texts and artwork, the book locates Spencer's work as a key component of the commemorative era after the Great War, situating Spencer's paintings of resurrection as a response to the complex bureaucracies of commemoration and a visual re-imagining of the exhumations and burials that were then taking place in battlefields across Europe. Spencer's work is examined in the context of other architects, sculptors and soldier-artists of the period, but is also positioned within the discourses of haunting and memory construction.

A number of the themes in the book were aired through several conference papers: 'Resurrection: reviving the dead in the work of Stanley Spencer, Otto Dix and Jeff Wall' Spaces, Haunting, Discourse conference, Karlstad University, Sweden (15-18 June 2006); 'Heroic death: models and counter models', WAPACC conference, USA (28-30 October 2006).

Preservation of historical remains is ridden with complexity. In particular, battle landscapes are multi-layered, with many different and intersecting ideas and meanings about identity, place and landscape production. This article explores the site of battle as a place of the imagination, as a site of continued dispute, a ‘debatable land’. Focusing on contested terrain in northern Europe, the article also briefly examines the creation of new monuments in ‘imperial’ London and New York, suggesting that the lack of a dialogical rationale for such memorabilia fails to extend the language of remembrance, settling instead for monolithic forms that perpetuate the status quo, prioritizing the ‘plinth’ over more fluid forms of remembering.

‘Peace’ has not lent itself easily to emblematic or mnemonic forms of representation. In the furnished urban landscapes of the 19th century peace was often personified in female allegorical form. She can be seen in many of the sculpted memorials that commemorate distant battles fought on the edge of Empire. Invariably, however, the figure of ‘Peace’ had a more modest role in the allegory of commemoration than that of ‘victory’ or ‘triumph’. As an ideal, peace and pacifism is more often regarded as a process, a long-term goal that cannot be captured in single static form. To this end, the promotion of peace has most often been realised through intervention, occupation, and fluid, temporal forms such as campaigns, marches, songs, dances and other extended programmes. Peace has also promoted through slow, evolutionary forms such as designed landscapes, parks and gardens. This paper examines in detail two community gardens in central London. Each owes its origins to the radical political agenda of the Greater London Council in the 1980s, but they were borne out of grander visions for world peace, multi-lateral disarmament, and global accord. Twenty years after their creation the author explores their current condition and examines their value as sites of political value and heritage.