Page 6 - Art First: Helen MacAlister: The Glamour of Backwardness

AF HM catalogue 2023 PRINT.qxp_Layout 1 15/06/2023 17:35 Page 4

The Glamour of Backwardness

The title of the exhibition, The Glamour of Backwardness, is extracted from Tom Nairn’s well-known
meditation on the British State: The Enchanted Glass (1988). Nairn requires that we take a pejorative
reading of not just ‘backwardness’ but also ‘glamour’. The word ‘glamour’ in this context should be
made to collocate with words and phrases such as ‘surface’, ‘façade’ or ‘false lustre’. As for ‘backward -
ness’, this was, during the period of British Imperial expansion the condition attributed by Britain to
most of the rest of the world. It referred to those incapable of industry and democracy, or still on the
long uphill road of modernisation. ‘This backwardness represents the perspective of the establishment
towards “the other”. The glamour of this backwardness is its legitimation through icons of continuity and
1
reassurance . . . ’ This process is finely articulated by Andrew Blaikie when he writes: ‘a region that had
been regarded as hostile and alien before 1746 was by the early nineteenth century incorporated and
tamed through a semiotics of romantic painting and literature characterized by “subjugation, survey,
2
and appreciation”’. The point that could have been added by Blaikie is what Ronald Turnbull and Craig
3
Beveridge refer to as ‘the historiography of external control’. MacAlister is intent on showing in her art,
the need to see through the way that the past has been packaged and idealised. There is one drawing
entitled ‘The Glamour of Backwardness’ but we could usefully regard this phrase as a key to the whole
series. MacAlister speaks of a creative work as being made up of a ‘a germ cell of keywords’ so we need
to keep in mind the words ‘glamour’ and ‘backwardness’ through our readings.

The exhibition of works comprises thirty-nine pieces but this essay will refer more specifically to fifteen
of the oil on linen pieces. These are of identical measurement (A4 size) but configured either as diptych
or triptych, and with one sextet to make up the series. There is a conspicuous uniformity throughout in
terms of technique, surface finish (striations) and colour. We might characterize this as a stripping away,
a condensation, an intensity, a formality, a Presbyterianism, a discipline, a minimalism or, as MacAlister
has it: ‘a paring away to the minimal core to get to the essence of something’. On first encounter we see
the pieces as so many instances of layered wallpaper through which erupt occasionally patches, spots

1 Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy, Radius Books (1988)

2 Andrew Blaikie, The Scottish Imagination and Modern Memory, Edinburgh University Press (2010), p.138.

3 Ronald Turnbull and Craig Beveridge, ‘The Historiography of External Control’ in Cencrastus, 23, (1986), pp.41–44.
On the way that Scottish History has been taught by academic historians up until that time, the authors write ‘to control a people,
first control their history . . . movements of national liberation are compelled to challenge official historical discourse, p.41.