BEAMISH OPEN AIR MUSEUM 'THE NORTHERN EXPERIENCE'

© The Artist

BEAMISH OPEN AIR MUSEUM 'THE NORTHERN EXPERIENCE' 1992

Paul Reas (1955 – )

Details

Dimension
50.8 X 61 CM
Media
C-TYPE COLOUR PRINT
Accession number
P6174

Summary

The two works in the collection come from the series Flogging a Dead Horse.‘The title (a regional expression meaning: to try and sell something which has no use: an effort in vain), is a critical view of the Heritage industry. As one of the most marked cultural tendencies of the late eighties and early nineties the emergence of ‘the past’, as a focus of popular leisure-time consumption, is a major issue in Britain today. A whole diversified industry has arisen to process and market whatever promising bits of raw past suggest themselves for development. As the pace to portrait the past quickens and the industry’s growth rate increases, so ‘war history, in its museum cases and roped off areas, becomes less adequate at satisfying the appetite of a generation reared on perceptions of reality cut up by television into easily digestible chunks. The tourist of the nineties, with camcorder and auto-focus camera, expects a ‘hands-on’ experience. But the trouble with Heritage Culture is that the safe inconsequential history it markets doesn’t educate, it only sedates its audience. Heritage is meretricious history that never challenges the present. Consumerist history: history for a disposable income. Like a steam train, it takes you on a pleasant ride to nowhere, and then back to where you started.

Documentary Dilemmas Aspects of British Documentary Photography 1983-1993, The British Council, London 1994