NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021
Concern has been expressed from museums that visitors are not returning quickly enough following recent extended closures. No wonder if the main galleries in Manchester are typical of the rest. At the Whitworth and City Art Galleries, which although distinct institutions now share the same director, activists have replaced curators and scholarship has been supplanted by agitation. Visitors enter, it seems, only to furnish captive audiences for political indoctrination. There is no room for pleasure in the activists’ tedious agenda, where no opportunity is lost to advance their creed.
An additional disadvantage of employing exclusively activist curators is that they choose like-minded artists whose devotion to the preferred propaganda far exceeds any ability to make anything remotely artistic.
In the last issue we mentioned a Whitworth exhibition by a collective based at Goldsmiths’ College called Forensic Architecture (FA), who have become the State Art-approved go-to group for work of a Wokeist persuasion. Their display made the papers because it sided openly with Palestinians in their 73-year dispute with Israel. It was a naked abuse of regulations stipulating charities remain politically objective, a principle State Art now routinely ignores. Meanwhile, the Charity Commission just hides; cowards all, terrified of making a decision. FA threatened to pull their work if it was censored, but eventually a compromise was reached. They still openly state support for the Palestinians while a letter from a Jewish body is included highlighting their concerns over inaccuracies and one-sidedness.
The whole of the Whitworth’s ground floor is given over to FA. One large gallery is empty except for a couple of tiny pictures and a notice announcing ‘This sign exists to make you see the wall better’. In another gallery dull, monochrome wallpaper illustrating the myth of Cupid and Psyche is used to demonstrate the dominance of white power and “overwhelming whiteness”. Anything more joyless you couldn’t imagine. Such urgent insistence took me back to playing football in the ’70s for a Socialist Workers Party team. A humourless lot, they were incapable of understanding how off-putting were their robotic broadsides about Class War. When we played Old Etonians away it was a bloodbath, bone on bone, Red versus White Guards on the playing fields of England.
FA’s main ‘exhibit’ is a projection called Cloud Studies. As film it’s pretty much what we expect of artists’ efforts i.e not much cop. There’s a confusing tendency to overlay too rapidly images and complicated charts, and in parts the voiceover is unclear. In half an hour it addresses the many ways in which we poison the air, whether by chemical weapons, manufacturing, travel, corruption, fossil fuels, consumption or power generation. If Cloud Studies was re-jigged by a decent editor, and its Spartist volume turned down, one could see it as a short documentary on BBC4. Of the three people who watched this film with me I was the only one who persevered to the bitter end. I agreed with all its basic premises, and its examples, testifying that we are slowly killing ourselves – to be honest the evidence is so overwhelming I don’t know anyone sensible who could now disagree. All FA’s shocking points have merit. What I don’t understand is why this needs showing in an art gallery where an audience of the already converted is in single figures.
And if after this you need convalescence with painting and sculpture none is offered because all the Whitworth’s upstairs galleries, where the art is, are closed.
At the main art gallery hectoring is turned up to eleven. Every room has its blackboard urging appreciation in terms of feminism, race, gender, sexuality or colonialism. A gallery of pictures by Turner and Constable is being re-jigged for use as a discussion on climate change. The Pre-Raphaelite section is an excuse for an ear-bashing about low pay, immigration and unskilled labour. Herkomer’s Hard Times provides an introduction to the effects of Covid on employment. Landseer’s dead lion, whose outline was used on a Tate & Lyle syrup tin (you know what’s coming!), provides a convenient opportunity to bring up sugar and slavery. It’s relentless. It’s like walking round a corner and suddenly finding yourself kettled in a demo you can’t escape from. They won’t leave you alone. And after a while you feel as if you’re being secretly observed by thought police for compliance.
It turns out this is not just Manchester. The director of Tate Britain, an unbelievable idiot, recently used Turner to bring up climate change in what was a stupendous piece of hypocrisy. Notwithstanding the brass neck of charging £22 for a show – Turner and the Modern World – nearly all of whose works you should be seeing free of charge anyway, the Tate trucked in at least 15 pictures. That’s not so bad, but 96 works are being air-freighted 4,800 miles to Texas and then 1,800 miles further on to Massachusetts … and then dispersed back to where they all came from. What on earth is the carbon footprint of this exhibition?