Heritage and the visual arts

Despite the disciplinary distances between heritage and the visual arts, there is much the two knowledge practices share. They exist within a shared visual culture; they share a material culture approach to history and the idea that objects bear the imprint of something else (history, aesthetics, the nation, social relationships, identity etc.); they share the object/language/representation conundrums; they are both shaped by discourse and share elements of those discourses; they share particular constructions of historical time/place (Baroque Rome, Renaissance Florence, Islamic Granada, Colonial Melbourne); both share a problematic relationship with history and archaeology as discrete disciplines; and both can be viewed as performative. The list can be extended. Nevertheless, despite the inextricable interweaving noted at the outset of this chapter, as a research agenda within heritage studies, the visual arts has an uneasy existence, ever present and yet ever lurking in a type of research twilight zone with only partial visibility and substance.