The Jackdaw

Tag: Modernism

  • Editorial – July 2016

    Der Clapham Strassenbahn

    When very young, and when not train spotting, I was a keen bus spotter. It was an ideal apprenticeship for a fledgeling art historian. It involved identifying, sometimes at a considerable distance (through rain), the beautifully crafted, hand-built models, of which there were many different marques and specifications. Every town corporation in the county had its own company, each with its distinctive colour combinations and decorative embellishments. All of these buses were built in England: for example, Crossley’s, whose factory was only a few streets from our house in east Manchester, built a splendid three-axle trolleybus for the Denton run up Hyde Road. By the age of ten I could have told you where I was – Rawtenstall, Stalybridge, Bolton, Ramsbottom – by their buses. My two favourites were Crosville’s single-decker Bristols and Lancashire United’s Foden double-deckers (ex-Sandbach) with their Art Deco frills. Identification could often be established by sound alone. The Bristol whined through its gears and even bouncing downhill roared alarmingly as though it was straining in bottom. The Foden’s engine turned over with a reassuring metallic tick, not unlike a loud blackcap.

    In 1970 I visited Holland for the first time arriving at Rotterdam railway station via a local stopping train through polder landscape from The Hook – the diesel was bright yellow and blue with a blunt bull nose, quite unlike the flat-faced, toilet-green electrics on our local line (built at Wolverton Works). Everywhere were whiffs of Art Nouveau. Tendrils, ogives and curlicues cut no ice in Manchester; we liked bricks, circumcised chimneys and oblong windows. The art of Mondrian, Vantongerloo, van Doesburg and van der Leck here made thrilling, perfect sense. Colours were primary, graphics Symbolist, planning rational – here Modernism was alive. Lancs looked nothing like this. Thus, we got Lowry and they produced Rietveld: Oldham Road Dwellings versus the Schroder House… I still love both.

    These geriatric musings were prompted by a news report from Birmingham. A councillor was expressing delight with the city’s new trams. “They give a real European feel to Birmingham,” she trilled in that comical voice they have – a royal European foil. “We look as though we’re royally part of Europe now.” Indeed indeed, Brum’s trams were designed and built (like Edinburgh’s) outside San Sebastian. From Eindhoven to Berlin, Toulouse and Bratislava Brum’s trams now await at every Ryanair outpost.

    Manchester also has an expanding tram network. Nippy and frequent they’re criminally dear but, like Brum’s, our trams are ever so European … they are even owned by the French company that runs the Paris Metro. And if on your travels you happen to visit Cologne, Croydon or Blackpool (which until 2012 had unique double-decker trams with streamlining and two-way seats) you’ll see Manchester’s trams there as well, because they’re built by the same lot in Germany and southern Spain.

    Two days after this issue goes to press the referendum takes place. My grouse with the EU is that it’s meddling regulations have contributed significantly to making everything and everywhere look the same. By insinuating uniformity it has replaced difference with committee-induced sterility. But why must Birmingham or Blackpool have to look like Budapest? And what sly brainwashing has been sneaked through to convince municipal jobsworths that such pan-European overlaps are in any way desirable? You might as well walk around Europe now with eyes closed because you know that flats and offices, clinics and swimming pools, buses and trams, cars and vans will look just like home, because they are the same, and all dictated from Brussels (whose own trams, incidentally, also mimic Manchester’s because they derive from the same production line near Dresden). The homogenising of appearances resulting in the visual poverty of surroundings, courtesy of the EU, is the most grievous cultural loss of my lifetime. Before we joined the EU, streets across our continent were a free museum and immeasurably more stimulating to experience than they are now. It is precisely because anything but variety is unendurable that I loathe the EU.

    David Lee
    The Jackdaw Jul/Aug 2017

  • ‘Sculpture’ v. sculpture

    Martin Jennings

    Among the least impressive legacies of arts administrators’ obsession with Modernism and its aftermath is the impossibility of predicting a work’s status solely from its appearance. You might form your own view about it, but you can’t predict what State Art’s opinion will be because there are no published criteria or guidelines for making such a judgement. You can’t second guess a whim. The bottom line is that we have allowed a body of ‘experts’ to evolve who unashamedly make it up as they go along. This gullibility on our part for allowing it to happen, and the smug charlatanism of those in authority who are impervious to and ignoring of criticism, is the inevitable result of being for decades under the thumb of an establishment which – for all its daily protestations to the contrary – is not only awash with cash and therefore patronage, but has decided, god-like, that anything at all can be art if it says it is. In its way State Art’s is as extreme a form of capricious and intolerant dictatorship as any regime in North Korea.

    There is a useful current example of how fossilised prejudice and arbitrariness inform establishment policy. It concerns two works of public art each designed for city locations. Both are, on the face of it, conventional figurative bronzes. Superficially similar though they may seem, to the Arts Council there is an enormous gulf in acceptability between the two, a difference invisible to you and I. One of these works, that recently unveiled outside the tacky new public library in Birmingham and called A Real Birmingham Family, is a ‘challenging’ piece presenting two local women and their children. The other, depicting women in overalls and commemorating the crucial contribution of female workers to the steel industry during the World Wars, will soon be unveiled in Sheffield.

    The Birmingham sculpture is by former Tate trustee Gillian Wearing. Obviously she didn’t make the sculpture herself, a skilful craftsman will have run it up from snaps. The result is a hideous, styleless simulacrum of real people, the point of it being to promote the view that nuclear families are not now the norm – how very trendy, how perfectly BBC. This sort of conceptual conceit must of necessity be a sculpture-free zone because the last thing Wearing wants is for the object to be gauged by its form rather than for its ‘idea’ – albeit one which, to the rest of us, would be so small as to be not worth the effort and expense of illustration. As sculpture it stinks, it’s stillborn.

    In contrast, the Sheffield piece is a work of imagination and looks like a sculpture because it was made, with his own hands, by Martin Jennings, a renowned specialist in this area of modelling and invention. To State Art this sort of traditional approach is vile anathema.

    But here’s the real rub. Conceptual art, even when it comes in the otherwise despised bronze figurative form, is funded by the Arts Council, to whom Wearing is well known. She has had two national touring shows and has exhibited in every ACE-funded gallery. ACE also bought in 1999, for £30,000, her Turner Prize winning film in which two dozen coppers stand silently still for an hour. Confirmation of her A-list status is supported by the fact that 31 of her works are in the Tate, Arts Council, British Council and Government collections: curiously, all four own an edition of the same print, unnecessary duplication of a kind that ought to have been outlawed years ago. Wearing’s family sculpture was administered by local Ikon Gallery, which itself receives over half a million a year from the public.

    In contrast, Sheffield had to find all the money through public donations because Martin Jennings is the wrong kind of artist.

    State Art always prefers ears to eyes and has never based funding decisions on the merit of what you actually see. Why artists nationwide are not campaigning about ACE’s continued unfair discrimination and casuistry is baffling.

    Here is yet another filthy, indefensible racket.

    David Lee

    Jan/Feb 2016

    http://www.martinjennings.com/Biography.aspx