This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores a tension between the hurt body, as an immediate object of vision, and the hurtful body, understood as a much more intriguing, invisible and elusive experience. It argues that the unresolved tension between the visualisation of violence and the experience of pain affects our understanding of human suffering. The study of the hurtful body of the past does not refer to an elusive entity, but to the historical forms of its constituency. When it comes to the study of pain, the real difficulty does not lie in how we can reach the most intriguing and hidden howls of the self. On the contrary, what is really intriguing is how an experience, a primal experience, became a story.

In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, Roselee Goldberg outlines the development of performance in Western Europe and North America, pointing to its origins in Futurism and Dada in the early years of the twentieth century. This chapter discusses the origins and beginnings of performance art in the former communist countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe demonstrating both continuity with, as well as divergence from, the Western model. In the former USSR and its republics, the experimental practices that began to develop after the Thaw in the mid-to-late 1960s were initially confined to painting and sculpture. This is because Stalinism and its control over the arts had a much farther reach here than in other parts of Eastern Europe, both geographically and temporally. Performance art in Poland was perhaps most thoroughly codified by the artistic pair and couple Zofia Kulik and Przemyslaw Kwiek.

Discussions about the display of Indian art and material culture in the Victorian imperial metropolis have largely focused on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its progeny, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum). However, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham Hill was an important, but much overlooked, location of imperial and colonial display well into the twentieth century. This essay begins by examining the Sydenham Palace at a site of imperial spectacle from its opening in 1854 and well into the twentieth century. Relevant events included the African Exhibition of 1895, the opening of the Victoria Cross Gallery in the same year and the Colonial Exhibition of 1905, and the display of Major Robert Gill’s copies of the frescoes from the Buddhist rock-cut temples at Ajanta in India (until they were destroyed by fire in 1866). The crowning occasion in the Sydenham series of imperial events was the Festival of Empire in 1911 which celebrated the ascension of George V as ‘King-Emperor’. Taking the 1911 Festival as a case study, this essay explores the complex and often conflicting narratives of empire that were communicated through the courts and grounds at Sydenham.

In 1951 the filmmaker and poet James Broughton moved to London from San Francisco. At that time he was beginning to garner a reputation for his short, whimsical, films, which often made use of outmoded costumes and decaying public spaces. One important reason he gave for moving was the idea that Britain had a more open-minded society for queer artists like himself to work within, in contrast to the McCarthy-era USA. With the help of a number of figures from the British film establishment he managed to make a half-hour-long film The Pleasure Garden in London. The film is for the most part set among the ruins of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham and the surrounding park. Broughton’s film is an allegory of Britain as he found it in the summer of 1951, asserting its own vision of a post-war national identity in the Festival of Britain. This chapter examines the way in which the Festival of Britain revived certain ideas of national identity from the past, yet neglected others – and the way in which these ideas were doubled and questioned in Broughton’s film.

Rowheath Park at Bournville (from 1921) and the Hills and Dales Park, the Old Barn Club and Old River Park, made for NCR employees between 1906 and 1939, are highly significant to the history of corporate landscapes in terms of their scale and the sophistication of their designs in a factory context. A comparison of these parks, designed by landscape architects Cheals of Crawley, and the Olmsted Brothers respectively, reveal differences in the cultural, symbolic and stylistic approaches to landscape design in the two nations, including what it was possible to achieve in the suburban landscapes of Britain and the United States and in the beliefs, desires and expectations of the factory worker and his patriarch in what the landscape could provide for them. In context of corporate recreation, the scale and sophistication of these gardens and parks were astonishing and unprecedented. Their landscape architects succeeded in projecting local and national landscape identities through design, thus creating spaces that heightened employees’ sense of belonging to the region and to the corporate community.

This book presents a history of the factory gardens and parks movement in Britain and the United States, from its origins in the early Industrial Revolution, to its zenith in the years preceding the Second World War and concludes with an overview of the evolution of corporate landscapes from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Industrialists attempted to assuage the effects of mass production by embracing the historical, cultural and metaphorical meanings of gardens to refine corporate culture and to redefine industry as progressive and responsible. Industry contributed distinctively and significantly to gardening culture and to opportunities for outdoor recreation in the first half of the twentieth century. Analysing factories from the point of view of landscape has produced a significant new interpretation of factory design, society and culture, which draws out the meanings of time and space in the factory that are not related to the production line.The discussion draws on empirical evidence underpinned by sources from a broad disciplinary base, including areas of research within architectural, art, photographic, landscape and garden histories; cultural geography, social history, philosophy, gender studies and social science.

From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War corporate gardens and parks provided opportunities for sports, music, dancing and gardening, activities that in some districts would not have been so readily accessible to working people, particularly to women and to youth. Middle class attitudes to ‘rational and respectable’ recreation shaped these activities and before the First World War, they were segregated by gender. However, recreational opportunities provided by these companies for their female and child employees were progressive by the industrial standards and, in some ways by the social standards of the day. The corporate landscapes also provided valuable land for food production in wartime and in the Great Depression.