British Art Studies (May 2019)
Cumbrian Cosmopolitanisms: Li Yuan-chia and Friends
Abstract
he LYC Museum & Art Gallery (the LYC) in the Cumbrian village of Banks (astride Hadrian’s Wall) was the single-minded effort of artist Li Yuan-chia (1929–1994). His initials gave the museum its name. It was sited in a set of converted farm buildings that Li had bought from his friend, the painter Winifred Nicholson. Between 1972 and 1983, the museum showcased the work of more than 320 artists—from local artists (Andy Christian, Susie Honour) to totemic national figures (Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth), and contemporary artists, now of international renown (Lygia Clark, Andy Goldsworthy), but then barely known in Britain. A young David Nash designed the LYC’s window. The programme reflected Li’s circuitous cosmopolitanism, his commitment to art as experimentation, and his expansive range of interests: the LYC had a children’s room, library, performance space, printing press, communal kitchen, and a garden. The networks and practices that the LYC enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely, but it is an exemplary site from which to explore how friendships inform shared practices, generate work, and socialise narratives; and, how the LYC itself functioned as a kind of infrastructure. This article is anchored in the recent exhibition Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition (Manchester Art Gallery, 2018–2019) and its accompanying symposium The LYC Museum & Art Gallery and the Museum as Practice (2019). It explores the idea of “friendship”, and to a lesser extent that of “infrastructure”, through the lens of three works in the Speech Acts exhibition. It forms part of an ongoing collective effort towards inquiries that cross disciplinary and geographic borders, and test polyphonic, multi-authored, and speculative approaches that I have described elsewhere as “art histories of excess”. It invites methodological reflections on the forms and possibilities for conducting and staging collaborative research, and on wider questions of how historic entanglements have the potential to expand existing histories of British art.
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