William Morris, socialist, had strong views on giving the workers access to healthful rural space. He has survived into our own times in the guise of soft furnishings and wallpaper but of the utopian socialist, not much remains.
The William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow – near what was once the great forest of Epping, and is still one of this part of Britain's most ancient woodlands – keeps the flame alive with Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism. You encounter the agenda early on with the inimitable figure of John Berger (Ways of Seeing) on screen, taking issue back in 1972 with Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Joseph Andrews since they were “landowners and their proprietary attitude … is visible in their stance”.
This small exhibition is about access to and ownership of the land, or art as “an apparatus for interrogating structures of power”. That’s nothing new; it’s a debate that’s been going on since the enclosures of the medieval commons, and which came to a head with the Industrial Revolution. Here we breeze through the issues: the right to roam, military use of land, Greenham Common, road building... until we end with Morris’s vision of the rural life.
These disparate parts don’t quite make a coherent whole. Radical Landscapes starts with romantic landscapes: Gainsborough, Ruskin, Constable, Turner, before we encounter Berger. Then there’s Derek Jarman’s alienating garden near Dungeness. There are some striking photographic studies – Homer Sykes’ look at folk festivals; Chris Killick’s moving and rather beautiful photographs of Travellers on a Northumbrian beach; and Jo Spence’s depiction of her own “non-idealised” naked body splayed faced down next to a Trespassers will be Prosecuted sign.
Where Veronica Ryan’s baffling organic pieces fit in is anyone’s guess but, as a Turner prizewinner, she can claim that what look like bronze morels on a nice bit of red crochet is a confluence of ecology and culture. More obvious is Jeremy Deller’s A303 sign saying Built by Immigrants – yup, we get it. Ditto the reworking of Constable’s Haywain by Peter Kennard, with cruise missiles on the cart.
There’s quite a bit about Greenham: photography of the women’s camp protesting at the deployment of cruise missiles there, with a huge, naif Greenham Common banner. It was perhaps the last prominent public display of radical activist trespass.
The exhibition ends with William Morris and his idealistic take on Walthamstow and Epping Forest. There are lovely depictions of the area when it was wild, a selection of pleasing agricultural implements and a farmer’s smock, plus a stuffed red squirrel.
We learn that Morris approved of slum workers being relocated to the area. But that’s the paradox that’s not explored here. The more people move into rural areas – consider the row about building on the green belt – the less of it there will be, and untrammelled immigration adds to the pressure to increase the amount of land given to housing. There are indeed genuine issues about landscape and politics, but the obvious ones are avoided in this provocative but disjointed show. Entrance, appropriately, is free.
