Keywords
Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

The book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society by the writer and Marxist cultural critic Raymond Williams, is a study of words and how their meanings are contested over time. It explores how words are used to describe systemic shifts in society and how changes within language become part of what Williams called the ongoing practice of making our own language and history. Central to this are the interpretations and conflicts that reflect the interests of different groups, and the part played by culture in this process; something that he and other figures on the New Left such as Stuart Hall argued for strongly. Williams understood ‘Keywords’ as those words that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society, its institutions and practices, including terms such as: democracy, reform, consumer, ideology, industry, liberation, popular, unconscious and art.

The exhibition Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain, takes Raymond Williams’ dictionary of terms as a source to select and display works from the Tate collection. It focuses on artists from the 1980s, a time when a reappraisal was taking place on the left, with issues such as race, gender and sexuality becoming more prominent, and the politics of language being examined as an element in the fight for social justice. This takes place in the context of events including privatisation, the miners strike, Clause 28, the AIDS epidemic, and conflict in Northern Ireland which occurred during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. Reflected in works such as Lubaina Himid’s A Fashionable Marriage, Sunil Gupta’s Gay Switchboard, Derek Jarman’s Ataxia Aids is Fun, Donald Rodney’s Visceral Canker and Rita Donagh’s H – Block painting Long Meadow.

The presence of keywords in the exhibition comes in a commission from artist Luca Frei, and graphic designer Will Holder, who have developed a font which they use when painting keywords onto the gallery walls. These words are positioned in relation to a constellation of works, producing tensions, echoes, and illuminations, in an expanded field of interpretation. Williams said he often wished some other form of presentation could be devised for his project, a format that would reflect how words produce networks of meaning in relation to one another instead of an alphabetical list. This exhibition attempts such a format, by considering words through works of art, that come together in clusters.