The Quote Box:

Some quotes which 'took my eye' while undertaking the research:

"England is the only country apart from guilt-ravished Germany where it is actually shameful to be proud of where you come from. [...] It is impossible to build a coherent nation where all citizens, newcomers and oldtimers are proud to belong if the defining national emotion is shame." -- Anthony Browne in The Observer, 21st April 2002.

"What the Left today characterises as fascist or racist simply cannot be taken at face value. 'Fascist' is the adjective of first choice by the Left for anyone who disagrees with any aspect of their policies." -- Barbara Amiel in The Daily Telegraph, 29th April 2002.

"For [early] leftists, patriotism was indispensable. It made their dissent and rebellion intelligible to their fellow citizens - and located them within the national narrative, fighting to shape a common future. [...] Having abandoned patriotism, the left lost the ability to pose convincing alternatives for the nation as a whole." -- Michael Kazin in Dissent, 28th October 2002.

"[...] while Britishness is a matter of civic rights and obligations, Englishness is a matter of cultural identity." -- Mike Sutton, England, whose England? - Class, gender and national identity in the 20th century folklore revival.

"What we need to do is each re-evaluate what it is to be English in the 21st Century and so establish the foundations of a collective sense of Englishness. Only then can we take a step back from this big picture and see the common elements that give us, the English, a sense of belonging. However, this [collective sense of Englishness] cannot be achieved simply by promoting multiculturalism at the expense of the host culture. Multiculturalism can be used as a get-out clause by politicians who are only prepared to pay lip service to notions such as equality and diversity." -- Billy Bragg, the BBC 5 Minute Lecture, 2002.

"In most towns and cities around the world, three cultures coexist more or less amicably. There's international high culture [...]. There's international pop culture [...]. And alongside them, there's a distinctive indigenous [folk] culture, celebrated in local festivities, and exported as an advertisement for the nation. It has an official place in the school curriculum, and a protected niche on the broadcasting networks, and it is encouraged (and subsidised) by the government. Everywhere except England." -- Mike Sutton, England, whose England? - Class, gender and national identity in the 20th century folklore revival.

"Nationalism is fraught with dangers, of course, but so is the blind refusal to recognize that attachment to one's own culture, traditions, and history is a creative, normal, and healthy part of human experience. A democracy that stifles debate on such vital and difficult matters by means of speech codes, explicit or implicit, is asking for a genuinely fascist reaction." Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal, 25th April 2002.

"In the decades ahead many gays will be coming out in a new way. They will be scaling the walls of the political stockade where they once needed shelter and exploring the wild woods. The wildest of these is likely to be what we used to call the Right but which might better be called populism and which will often have an authoritarian streak. This rightward migration has been happening for some time with Jewish voters and politicians, once a mainstay of socialism. It will challenge and in the end break the Centre-Left's dream of gathering a rainbow coalition of once-beleaguered minorities to dance behind the machine." Matthew Parris in The Times, 11th May 2002.

"Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most Leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege." -- Camille Paglia, The Times, 17th August 2002.

"Support for the BNP is not just a working class phenomenon. Reading some of Britain's newspapers you might reach a different conclusion. Some commentators are guilty of perpetuating stereotypes of the 'uneducated reactionary racist' versus the 'educated' broad-minded, tolerant liberal." -- Sam Wilson in Scoop, 24th May 2002.

"Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. [...] Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian. In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with [T.S.] Eliot's benignly landowning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal." -- Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No. 18; 19th September 2002.

"Anyone who is more than marginally interested in justice and politics will have observed that socio-political movements that start out with ideals frequently end up betraying those very ideals. After a while we find them practising precisely what they fought against: from non-violence to condoning righteous violence, from democracy to manipulative leadership, from respecting people to dismissing their real life choices as 'false consciousness'. This is especially disturbing in the case of left-wing egalitarian movements when their leaders' actual behaviour mirrors the practices and convictions of the extreme right." -- Herman van Gunsteren (Leiden University) in e-Extreme research newsletter, Vol 2, No. 3, Autumn 2001.

"You can discuss voting Conservative with your mother, with the waiter, taxi driver, but not with the art world. To say you are Conservative is to say you're a Nazi. It's absurd." -- Gilbert & George, The Observer, 5th May 2002.

"One of the odder social developments of the past 40 years has been the growing sense that there is something decidedly off-message to even admit the fact, let alone celebrate it, that there is a country called England and that, in being of it, one is English." -- William Packer. Financial Times.

"...there is, as yet, no shared understanding of what the term [action research] means or what the process involves, in an arts context." -- Seminar Report: Action research in the arts - current and future uses. Arts Research Digest. Issue 24, Spring 2002. Pages 4 & 5.

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." -- G.K. Chesterton.

"In the context of English history itself, the extent to which a powerful imagination or significant passage of writing can affect external events - can in a real sense 'create history' - is of absorbing interest" -- Peter Ackroyd, Albion, 2002.

"I believe modern art as resistance is headed for the condition of the Unseen. That which is real but not seen has the power of the occult, of the imagination, of the erotic - like Sean's spirit-mask [left by him] at Patrick's Well [in County Kildare], it gives back meaning to the landscape - it abides unnoticed until someone perhaps takes it as a free gift - by its very existence it challenges the world of the commodified image and changes (however slightly) the shape of consensus reality. Even at its most hidden and secret, it exercises a magnetic effect, brings about subtle shifts and re-alignments - and at least in theory, it gives up merely talking about the world in order to change it. Is this perhaps however covertly an authoritarian act? No, not if it were a sharing of meaning, an opening into the field of "delicate tenuities". What if it were rendered completely invisible? Then perhaps we might speak of the presence of spirits, of a necessary re-enchantment too tenuous for the imperial heaviness of the eye - and of a necessary clandestinity. And what if it were to re-appear sometime as sheer opposition to the unbreathing virtuality of a world which is always deferred, always someplace else, always fatal?" Peter Lamborn Wilson, Millenium.

Further quotes, found later:

"We have a fine, if currently terribly unfashionable, record in classical music. Most countries would be very proud of a repertoire which included The Lark Ascending and The Planets, and would likely commemorate the fact every year — and make an awful lot of money from such an enterprise. Not here. A passion for English music, as specifically distinct from any other nationality of music, is thought of as being not quite on .... The notion that one would have a festival celebrating the beauty of ‘English’ music seems to be anathema to all concerned — the Arts Council, the NGOs, the big industries and so on. They are worried, one suspects, about connotations of racism — and yet they would be happily disposed towards doling out the sponsorship dosh for a festival celebrating Azerbaijani music or Irish music. It’s just English music that causes a problem. Why?" -- Rod Liddle, "No funds for the English Music Festival", The Spectator.

 "WHY DO PEOPLE SUPPORT
 & VOTE FOR THE
 BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY?"

 An artist's investigation into
 people, identity, and place.

Project supported by: PUBLIC ART WEST MIDLANDS, c/PLEX and JUBILEE ARTS.