This blog post was published under the 2010 to 2015 Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government

Jonathan Knott

Former British ambassador to Hungary, Budapest

Part of UK in Hungary

12th November 2014 Budapest, Hungary

Turning Points – The twentieth century through 1914, 1939, 1989 and 2004. Contemporary art exhibition

Guest blog by John Timberlake, exhibiting artist at the Turning Points exhibition opening on Friday, 14 November 2014 in the Hungarian National Gallery.

Turning Points is a contemporary art project created together with British Council and other foreign cultural institutes operating in Hungary. Twenty-six artists from sixteen countries from Great Britain to Israel, from Spain to Japan present their analysis of history and the last century, awakening in us new, personal and emotional ideas about the past that we lived through, or which we know from listening to older generations.

I made the Another Country series between 1999 – 2001. The first works in the series were first exhibited at Sabine Wachters Gallery, Brussels, early in 2000. In 2002 they were shown at Artists Space, New York City, and then, through 2002-2003 they were the subject of a touring exhibition in England initiated by Focal Point Gallery, and supported by Arts Council England.  Thereafter various works have been exhibited singly and in groups internationally on a regular basis, were purchased for various collections, and have been the subject of writing by art critics and historians.

John Timberlake, creator of the Another Country series
John Timberlake, creator of the Another Country series

The work comprises handmade un-retouched photographs of dioramas I made, painted and photographed in the studio. The nuclear clouds in the works are drawn from archival photographs of British nuclear test explosions, conducted between 1953-1958. I came across them whilst researching the history of the British nuclear bomb project in the Imperial War Museum’s archive.  When I saw them for the first time, in the late 1990s, I was struck by a sudden sense of distance. Furthermore, the photographs reminded me of Romantic oil sketches. I suddenly imagined the clouds rising over the painted landscapes of JMW Turner and John Constable. There is a deliberate sense of fictionalized remembrance in the work: a soft-edged perversely nostalgic picturing of the unimaginable, which contrasts sharply with what we know of the dreadful reality of atomic weapons.

A piece from the Another Country series, where tourists are watching with perfectly calm a bomb cloud, a mushroom-shaped formation characteristic of a nuclear explosion. The scene is very similar to the way we watch conflicts, terrorist attacks and wars on the media.
A piece from the Another Country series, where tourists are watching calmly, a bomb cloud, a mushroom-shaped formation characteristic of a nuclear explosion. The scene is very similar to the way we watch conflicts, terrorist attacks and wars on the media.

What does it mean to remember a war that never happened, but that nevertheless shaped all our lives as a dreadful possibility? Is it possible, in a changing world, to feel nostalgic for the certainty of uncertainty?

In this sense, the pictures’ content is latent rather than manifest, since they cannot represent a putative Third World War. Rather they point to a collective shared fiction of signifiers a kingdom of shadows. I’ve had a long admiration for the work of the Twentieth Century English artist Paul Nash: his response to the Second World War drew upon his Surrealist experiments of the 1930s, whilst the war around him grew increasingly terrible and surreal.  Nash’s late works about World War II use a range of forms and shapes well established earlier in his work to depict the new circumstances of the war. It is a world of the familiar used to create estrangement, and strange things rendered oddly familiar. My choice of photographing the dioramas seemed at the time to serve both as a reference to the medium of documentary realism, and to add another layer of distance, so that, to paraphrase the English novelist L. P. Hartley, the past became another country, where things might have happened differently.

The chance to exhibit some of the Another Country pieces in the exhibition Turning Points at the Hungarian National Gallery represents a wonderful opportunity to review this work in the context of an ambitiously curated group exhibition: to think through some of the implications of the work in a fresh light, and engage with the work of other artists who share a restless fascination with history.

turning_points_web

Learn more about the Exhibition

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the British government.

About Jonathan Knott

Jonathan Knott was appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to Hungary in March 2011 and arrived in Budapest in February 2012 to take up his post. He left this post on April…

Jonathan Knott was appointed Her Majesty’s Ambassador to
Hungary in March 2011 and arrived in Budapest in February 2012 to take
up his post. He left this post on April 2015.
He has previously held a variety of diplomatic posts at home and
abroad, several with a particular focus on commercial and corporate
finance issues. Jonathan has served in a number of positions in the
British Diplomatic Service since joining in 1988:
Before his appointment was Deputy Head of Mission and Director for Trade and Investment in South Korea from 2008 to 2011.Between 2005 and 2008 he held the post of Deputy Finance Director in the FCO.From 2000 to 2005 he served as First Secretary (Trade, Corporate Affairs and Finance Negotiator) in UKDel OECD Paris.From 1996 to 2000 he was First Secretary (Head of Political/Economic/Aid Section) in Mexico.From 1995 to 1996 he worked in the FCO as Deputy European Correspondent at the EU Directorate.Between 1991 and 1995 he served as Third later Second Secretary (Political / Press and Public Affairs) in Havana.From 1990 to 1991 he was Desk Officer in the FCO’s First Gulf War Emergency Unit.Between 1988 and 1990 he worked as Desk Officer in the FCO in the Anti Drugs Cooperation Department.
Jonathan holds an MA in law from Oxford University, and he is a
member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. He speaks
English, French, Spanish and Hungarian. He is married to Angela Susan
Knott and has one daughter and two sons.

Follow Jonathan