Redrawing the boundaries: questioning the geographies of Britishness at Tate-Britain

摘要

In the mid to late 1990s the matter of Britishness was, it seemed, everywhere; from the re-appropriation of the Bonzo Dog Doo Daa Band's term Cool Britannia to Britpop, Britart, NewLabour, New Britain and the process of political devolution. It seemed that discussion of whatexactly this term meant was ubiquitous. Much of this emerged from the rhetoric of Blairitepolitics, as is implied by the above examples. The institutionalization of this 'RebrandedBritain' manifested itself explicitly in spaces such as the much-maligned Millennium Dome inNorth Greenwich. Here we were invited to consume a Britishness that rejects the dustyconservation of heritage and projects itself as innovation for the future. It is this allusion to thetemporal concerns of Britishness which is of interest, for the very name Millennium Domefacilitates, albeit in rather crude terms, an understanding of Britain as simultaneouslypertaining to time and space, or time-space. By drawing together both the temporal and thespatial in this way, it is possible not only to re-think Britishness, but also to take things furtherby reflecting on how time and space inform the ways in which we 'think' of Britishness. Justas we might consider whether the Millennium was something which was more completelyrealized at a reclaimed industrial site on the Greenwich peninsula than in, for example, theWest Country or the North West, so too we might also think about what Britishness meansunder New Labour as compared to the time of Charles II during the Restoration. Throughthinking of time and space as not only co-related but as co-present, we might also want toconsider 'where' Britishness is. So, what I want to consider here is a notion of British identitywhich links and 'cuts across' different spaces, moving beyond the confines of the boundednation state. As Brandon Taylor has argued, 'art institutions termed 'national' are highlycomplex objects, whose histories can be told in many ways' (Taylor 1999: xiii); it is the multiplespatial and temporal dimensions contained within the notion of Britishness that constitutethese complexities. This paper uses the case of Tate Britain to explore the social constructionof national identity in its relationship to the museum's culture of time-space. My argument isthat the identity which is projected by a museum is not a fixed attribute which is generated fromwithin the nation and unproblematically realized as a national collection. Rather, as I show inthe case of Tate Britain, the times and spaces which have emerged within the British nationstate can be seen as arrivals and departures which are themselves informed by 'other' timesand 'other' spaces