Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Southampton Solent University
A Bucolic Frolic
This exhibition and its wider context drew together a number of cross-disciplinary research strands, professional practices and cultural institutions, in an attempt to make a significant research contribution to the critical re-examination of English Romanticism, landscape and popular culture as they have been applied to the visual arts, literature and design. (As reflected, for example, in Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns.)
My contribution consisted of on going research into the visual representation of rock music and the construction of photographic identity linked to music, place and memory. The research was exhibited as a group exhibition at Mummery+Schnelle Gallery and an offsite video installation at The Dye House, London. The exhibition was accompanied by a ‘newspaper’ publication and website www.abucolicfrolic.com
The exhibition included artworks by Roger Dean, Jonathan Gent, Merlin James, Peter Kinley, Bob Law, George Shaw and Mark Wallinger as well as items of ephemera drawn mostly from the history of the ‘free-festival’ movement and associated and underground press of the 1960s and 70s which were attempts to site popular music culture in a politically motivated social/landscape context.
This exhibition gave me an opportunity to extend the reach of my previous research linked to submitted outputs 1,2&3 (Hats Off To Roy Harper, The Solo and Ensemble: featuring the music of The Enid and Robert John Godfrey), all of which involve research into the history and collaborative potential of music and the visual. These have been disseminated via exhibitions and publications that offered a wider consideration of visual arts and popular music in the context of English cultural history.
The accompanying publication, edited by myself, extended the social context of the exhibition beyond the gallery, and broadened the parameters of my research by combining images, with specially commissioned texts and historical extracts that were not possible to present within the exhibition itself.
