Making History:

Art & Documentary in Britain 1929 to Now

An exhibition at Tate Liverpool, 3 February-23 April 2006

"Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now surveys the impact of the documentary form on art and artists and vice versa. Encompassing film, photography, painting and installation art, the exhibition focuses on works where a dialogue between art and realist documentary occurs. It seeks to question the traditional opposition between art and documentary, and to ask whether this is really a false dichotomy." From the exhibition website.

I visited this exhibition in April 2006. John Grierson, William Coldstream, Humphrey Spender, Bill Brandt, Humphrey Jennings, John Bratby, Lucian Freud, Martin Parr, Isaac Julien, Jeremy Deller and Gillian Wearing all featured in this exhibition about the documentary tradition in Britain. The works explores 'Britishness' in its widest sense, as seen through the still and moving image, painter's canvas and other documentary forms.

Arranged chronologically, we are taken on a journey through life in Britain from the 1930s almost to the end of the 20th century. Along the way we encounter the first documentary films made in the 20s/30s by John Grierson (who first coined the term 'documentary') which attempted to strike a balance between modernist film practices and avant-garde social commentary.

A decade of so later, Humphrey Jennings built on the social documentary tradition established by Grieson and his contemporaries. The practice of documenting the lives of working class people in both urban and rural settings continued to widen until in the 1960s we reach what might be considered the peak of the 'kitchen sink' genre with fictionalised docu- dramas and reality-like soaps.

Nick Hedges portrayed the impoverished lives of people in the Midlands in his work for charitable organisations, which pulls no punches in its message about social deprivation on our doorsteps, whereas Roger Mayne's series from 1959-61 of one particular street gives us a long-term insight into the unglamorous lives of 'ordinary folk' as the decade turned towards the swinging sixties.

The section of the exhibition devoted to the 70s and 80s focuses on race, gender and politics. Margaret Harrison, Mary Kelly and Kay Hunt collaborated on Women and Work 1973-5 which drew attention to the huge discrepancy between male and female pay and conditions in the workplace, and racial tensions are explored by Gilbert and George's eye-catching photomontages.

The whole concept of documentary is still being explored and redefined in the final section of the exhibition, which contains work from the last couple of decades of the 20th century and the early 21st century. We see works which attempt to rewrite history by staging it differently, such as Jeremy Dellers 2001 work The Battle of Orgreave, which tells the story of the miners' strike of the mid-eighties from the perspective of those taking part rather than those who were in power at the time. (History is always written by the winning side... discuss.) This part of the exhibition also gives space to the subject's own voice in Gillian Wearing's 1991/2 series Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say, and Richard Billingham's highly personal photographs of his parents' lifestyle.

URLs

all sites working 8/6/06

Tate Liverpool