What is the nature of a provincial city in late 1990s Britain? Is it possible to imagine such a city as a hub of activity, or are long-established relationships between capital city and regions relatively unchanged, ensuring that the term 'provincial' remains both a geographical description and a definition of lowly cultural status? Is it possible to transcend such definitions?
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Provincially Provisionally presents a conundrum around these questions in the form of a line of text in yellow neon, fragmented into 15 short sections which flash at different rates - hinting at an ironic appraisal of bureaucratic processes, and a sense of terminal equivocation in relation to past and future. In the version shown here 15 units are installed around the top of Sheffield's Town Hall extension: the loved or reviled 'egg box', completed in 1977 and due for demolition 23 years later.
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Sheffield is among many regional towns and cities which emerged in Britain due to the demands manufacturing industry. Throughout the 1980s, many aspects of 20th century working class life were vigorously appropriated by a heritage industry keen to promote them as forms of indigenous culture. Many have seen this as a cynical attempt to disguise the economic and social effects of downsizing in manufacturing industry, a trend often perceived as an attack on working class collective identity. 'Collective identity' has become a questionable concept in multi-cultural Britain, where the sense of community under industrialisation (and the socially cohesive effects of survival under wartime bombardment) have waned with the rise of modern consumerism. Provincial city administrations continue to promote ideas of community and collective identity which are essentially nostalgic, since the conditions which may have supported this kind of society are no longer in place.
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Cultural activity can usefully raise questions of identity, yet in 1990s Britain 'serious' culture is still defined as that which is disseminated from capital city to provinces via 'national' arts institutions, touring events and media coverage. There is no equivalent national promotion of the cultural output of the regions. This is not exclusively a problem for artists and other cultural practitioners living outside London: it has wider implications in a global scenario where cultural output can be as important to the status of a region as the industrial output of its past.
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'Provincialism' can be viewed as a self-perpetuating state. The cultural life of a capital city must of course be richer than that of smaller cities, and provincial cities do partly define and promote themselves in ways which they themselves determine. Yet in a country where long established cultural power relations imply that the provinces are culturally dull, unsophisticated workshops, the mindset in these places easily becomes inward and parochial, increasing the likelihood that 'regional culture' in turn becomes quite narrowly defined.
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Perhaps provincial Britain is in fact culturally vibrant, generating its own links with the wider world, suffering only from prejudicial representation in the national media... Provincially Provisionally aims to provoke discussion around these complex issues, at a time when the city hosting the project is re-styling itself for the millennium.
A.S. December 1997
Funding and exhibition details
Commissioned by Lovebytes, funded by Photo Arts 2000 as part of the Public Sightings programme
for Photo 98 - The UK Year of Photography & the Electronic Image.First shown on Sheffield Town Hall Extension, 16 March - 25 April 1998 as part of Lovebytes/Hypertribes event.
Neon units manufactured and installed by Dale Signs, Sheffield.
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