Keywords
Tate Liverpool, 02/28/2014 - 05/11/2014
ABOUT
Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain, is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society.
An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition is one such interpretation.
Keywords focuses on British art from the 1980s. This was a tumultuous decade in Britain, marked by many forms of oppositional politics which had a direct impact on culture – from the miners’ strike, to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, race riots, gay liberation and feminism to an ongoing insurgency against British rule in Northern Ireland. These viewpoints are represented in contrasting forms by a generation of British artists familiar with the ideas that Williams and other cultural theorists were exploring at the time.
For More Information
Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain, is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society.
An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition is one such interpretation.
Keywords focuses on British art from the 1980s. This was a tumultuous decade in Britain, marked by many forms of oppositional politics which had a direct impact on culture – from the miners’ strike, to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, race riots, gay liberation and feminism to an ongoing insurgency against British rule in Northern Ireland. These viewpoints are represented in contrasting forms by a generation of British artists familiar with the ideas that Williams and other cultural theorists were exploring at the time.
For More Information