Introduction: sculpture and the sea

Abstract

The now obscure edited volume The Decorative Arts of the Mariner, published in 1966 and edited by Gervis Frere-Cook, former Naval Lieutenant Commander and Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, presents a dazzling array of maritime ornament and artefacts, from the Oseberg Viking ship through Maori canoes, scrimshaw and steamship smokestacks to the mid-twentieth-century prow emblems of the Norwegian Fred Olsen Line.1 As one of its contributors argues, 'There is a basic beauty in the ship and in the sea that lends itself naturally to decorative purposes.'2 Many of the objects featured are of high technical and conceptual quality, and would now be classified as sculpture. The way in which the material in this 1960s volume is framed, however, and the terminology used, tells us much about the neglect into which maritime culture has fallen. To be 'decorative' is to be instantly marginalized as not serious: a luxury or indulgence rather than an integral part of society's cultural, economic or political functions and processes. The outmoded term 'mariner' also suggests a romantic past, in both senses of that word (with obvious echoes of Coleridge). It seems nostalgic for a golden age of sail, and for a past whose maritime bearings were at that moment fading from public view.A different sense of the maritime material environment is captured in the extended sculptural imagery used by J. C. Beaglehole in his preface to the collected edition of James Cook's diaries, published two year later in 1968, to evoke the extensive array of travel literature that arose in Britain in the eighteenth century. Beaglehole describes the books of this period as objects in themselves, likened metaphorically to:a fleet of first-raters lying now passively in harbour, their sails furled, their gun-ports closed, their splendid figure-heads and gilded sterns reflected palely in calm water, dutifully attended by their octavo frigates, their duodecimo sloops and cutters.3Again the visual presence evoked is compelling indeed and is now allied with the force of connoisseurial and technical language. The sculptural maritime realm seems to be historicized, archaic and inaccessible. How to harness the expertise of a former age and capture the visual and material impact of maritime sculpture while also attending to its social context is one of the challenges this subject presents, and one which this special issue sets out to address. The term 'maritime' itself encompasses the sculptural elements of both naval and merchant vessels, while the title of this special issue captures the breadth and variety of sculptural activities connected with the sea: deliberately setting out from a broad base which subsequent sculpture studies will refine and finesse.Maritime history and culture have been largely neglected in art historical scholarship during the last thirty years or so, in Britain and elsewhere. This is partly due to a broader social and cultural shift of focus away from maritime heritage, so dominant during the period spanning the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, coupled with an uneasiness in Europe and the US about its imperial and colonial connotations, in particular its connections with slavery. In the light of new art historical approaches which embrace the complexities of understanding cultural forms within their contexts, however, the maritime is surely ripe for new exploration. Its visual and material cultures in particular deserve closer scrutiny as the focus of sustained research. If maritime cultures can be seen as both central and peripheral (as Geoff Quilley has commented on marine painting),4 then this strength can also be exploited: central to national identity but also marginal and 'other'. The space of the sea, whose borders with the land are in constant flux, and which is the arena for the movement of people and things across geographical and cultural boundaries, resists easy conceptualization and categorization. …