The art of cronyism

The real world has prevented me posting for a while, but I had to point out the latest tat Ramsey Commissioners have dumped on us under the ongoing town degeneration scheme (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/rnli-saluted-by-commissioners-with-sculpture-1-6995364 ).
Believe me, however bad you think it looks in the picture, the reality is far worse. No wonder it was unveiled in the dark. Until this gargoyle rocked up, a disability scooter or pram could just about get up a section of pavement the regeneration scheme had finally (and I suspect accidentally) fixed. Now it's back to normal. Another nice one, Nigel and his co- numpties.
And what is it about the conception and delivery of “public art” that local government and the Manx Culture Mafia find so hard to think about? Everything, apparently.
Why else could it be that every time some public sector apparatchik hatches half an excuse to commission a statue we get a giant size replica of one of those toys you used to get free in Cornflakes packets?
Since the Millennium, Ramsey has now suffered the Nazi Tyre outside the Shoprite toilets, the Two Crusties moved from the Town Hall to the “community area” outside the soon-to-be closed Ramsey Post Office (the only public fixture in the redeveloped area any member of the public genuinely wants) ...... and now this.
Look, the return to the figurative (rather than abstract) in 21^st century public sculpture is supposed to engage the public. When Damien Hirst creates ghastly giant size versions of awful toys it is meant ironically. When Anthony Gormley, (perhaps more effectively) created the Angel of the North or his sea watchers on the beach it caused people to look twice or gasp, and then rethink the way they see that landscape. Whoever commissions such pieces at least assumes ordinary members of the public without art history degrees are intelligent enough to do that.
By comparison, the rash of god-awful cod-fascist crap inflicted on the Manx public over the last 20 years and excused as statuary or urban redevelopment really needs …......
Well, let's just ask where are Gustav Metzger and Jean Tinguely now that we really need them?
Some will say that if I feel this strongly I should do something more than moan; possibly stand for the IOM Arts Council or something. Well, I would, only the call for next year's members was only made yesterday (Friday), the applications have to be in by next Friday, and the new Council starts operating in January.
Think about this. Applications to be in three and a half days before all government departments take the phone off the hook, have a glass of bubbly on the taxpayers and shut up shop until January 5^th, from about which date the new Arts Council has to be up and running?
Does anyone else spot the obvious problem?
And does anyone else have just the teensy-weensiest suspicion of a private club pre-deciding next year's members?

Necromancy considered as a subsidised performance art

See http://www.iomtoday.co.im/what-s-on/manx-entertainment-news/manx-passion-play-to-be-performed-around-isle-of-man-over-easter-1-6552955 for the latest episode in “Year of The C Word”.

Sorry to go on about it, but however cretinous this whole exercise is panning out to be there is a serious point. Culture is now a bit of a buzz word, especially amongst conservatives and bigots, but it still gets used as ignorantly as the time when some chinless Cambridge inbreed or other misused the word in front of an uppity grammar school boy called Raymond Williams back in.. oh, maybe the 1940's. This led Williams to look into the matter rather more seriously and he went on to found what later became Cultural Studies (along with some similarly uppity blacks, gays and girlies who kept redefining the term on finding it didn't seem to include them either). And that was all good, intelligent and positive stuff.

So different to today, when anyone who tries to take politics seriously is told that “nobody talks about class”, though the “nobody” who isn't talking about it is also a tiny subculture - but sadly one which just happens to run everything. More precisely, that “nobody” does not want to acknowledge that class divisions are getting worse and the local nobody cannot acknowledge that Manx society has an underclass that is trapped from the cradle to the grave as surely as the Welfare State project (now abandoned) was supposed to be a safety net against such problems.

And as for race..............

In the Isle of Man nobody in government (either the politicians or civil service mandarins) wants to talk about race, for fear of having to consider how racist the island still is. So maybe “culture” is little more than an excuse to continue racist prejudice now that a more open system of apartheid is no longer possible.

And eventually, who decides what “Manx culture” is anyway? Certainly not ordinary Manx residents, to whom this crap is about as relevant or recognisable as Moon rocks.

“Ours”? No, just “theirs” - and “they” are neither many nor approachable.

Which brings us to this shining example of Culture as something that is a bit icky-poo and badly needs spoon-feeding. This event has been subsidised to hell and back, so on that basis we can safely identify it as the art bore equivalent of a Nil By Mouth hospital patient.

Though, of course, in the worlds of art and culture attitudes are so Catholic. Everything that might otherwise get quietly knocked on the head seems to be a cause celebre for some vociferous Right To Lifer. Considering how dominated proceedings will be by acolytes of the Zombie Carpenter, turning up to watch this show will be like being trapped in an advocate's waiting room after a hospice death.

It sounds like the kind of gig most would pay to get out of, not into. Be grateful, then, that most if it takes place in the kind of god-forsaken bat sanctuaries most of us in these enlightened days will never even be seen dead in.

Strategy: Stop Art

Just when you think Douglas Degeneration Parsnips (having collaborated with the Department of Home Affairs to prevent free speech in communal spaces) cannot do more to screw up the quality of Manx life, this (see

http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/market-hall-to-become-base-for-arts-degrees-1-6282129 ) is announced.

Oh joy! A perfectly respectable refuge for low rent bohemians (not to mention a treasure chest of arcane knowledge you cannot find anywhere else locally) is being swept away, just so arty upper middle class dullards who are too arrogant to work in the real world (and too thick to know they have nothing to contribute to the arts) have yet another place to play.

How dumb. How utterly, utterly depressing!

If you cannot be bothered to root through the whole PR sick-bag, read this and try not to puke...

“Speaking on behalf of Douglas Corporation, Chris Pycroft said: ‘It is a really exciting prospect to work with the college in a partnership between the council and the college to breathe new life back into the Market Hall and make it a place really for the whole community, to start to be creative and think creatively.’

He added: ‘The project should allow the market operation to continue, not in the same format as it is at the moment, but at weekends and holiday times, but with additional uses happening in the building as well.’”

Oh............. piss off and get a proper job, Pie-Chart, I'm sick of us taxpayers subsidising anti-democratic clowns like you.

Has anyone actually talked to any of the island's art veterans? Has nobody noticed that internationally known Manx born sculptors, conceptual artists and painters cannot actually get employed to teach arts locally?

Has nobody asked why Manx fine arts students almost never go on to reputable British courses? Could that be because fine arts was phased out of local college courses two decades back in favour of 'practical' arts (graphic design, fashion...) taught by losers who couldn't get an industry job even when there was an industry, when just three decades back a lowly foundation diploma from the Manx FE college was almost a passport to Goldsmiths, St. Martins or even the RCA?

Even leaving aside 'career' arty types, I can remember in the mid-1980's spending free afternoons from split shift 'day jobs' browsing two incredible book stalls in that market, and amongst the usual airport novels and conspiracy theorists discovering a shelf-load of not only Michael Moorcock and other new sci-fi writers, but rarities ranging from Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft through to Henry Treece (a mid-twentieth century New Apocalyptic chum of Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Rexroth, known to school-kids of my age for his Celtic twilight stuff, but also the author of adult versions through which Moorcock and others discovered something more imaginative could be written even in Cold War conformist Britain).

Certainly, the little community of truly knowledgeable Manx art and book-sellers which existed until around 2000 has been replaced by anal 'collectors' who know the investment value of everything and the intellectual value of nothing, but that is not the point.

I was back there, by chance, last weekend, and it was the same as ever. A bunch of wheelchair users having an animated meeting in one corner, an unpretentious caff and small shops, the book stalls.....

The source material is still there to be discovered by any chance explorer willing to risk 50p, but we are now to lose, forever, the only place on the island comparable to, say Liverpool Whitechapel in 1979 with Bill Drummond and Teardrop Explodes chatting to Pete Burns in Brian's Caff, Burnsy on a lunch break from Zoo Records, the legendary punk venue Eric's 50 yards away. And, yes, even the School of Language, Dreams and Pun with the statue of Jung (where the kind of pretentious rich thickos DDP want to attract hung out) got blitzed in the 'regeneration' of the area, and Eric's, having been shut on health and safety grounds, is now a Cavern museum for Japanese tourists while the much bigger and more important 'Mersey scene' of the late 1970's and early 1980's is wiped from 'official' Liverpool history.

But doesn't that just prove the point?

What you actually need in order for creativity to run riot is a low rent space full of odd source material which can become the stuff of new and better dreams, and for rich poseurs and bureaucrats with pebble-dash for brains to butt out.

By the way, returning to the matter of free speech in public places, you may want to take a look at

http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2013/11/feel-free-to-annoy-me--new-campaign-launched-to-protect-free-expression , a defence of the concept in which even the National Secular Society and Christofascist loons like the Christian Institute are united.

Because as the NSS point out:

“The proposed new law is contained in the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill . Clause 1 of the bill introduces "Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance" (IPNAs), which seek to suppress anything deemed to be potentially "annoying", however vague the justification. IPNAs will replace Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), which had been introduced under the Labour government.

Whilst in order for an ASBO to be issued, a court has to be satisfied that someone had at least caused or threatened to cause "harassment, alarm or distress" to someone else and that the order was "necessary" to protect the victim, the proposed new law would allow a court to impose sweeping curbs on people's liberty if it thinks they are "capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person", and so long as it is "just and convenient" to do so.”

Anything their colonial cousins in Westminster think a wizard wheeze, our chumps in the Wedding Cake and their (Westminster trained) 'expert advisors' are bound to swallow whole, without even a tentative “Are you sure about this?”, never mind “Has anyone actually thought this twaddle through?”

I would be willing to bet that at some point in the next year the DHA (or perhaps even their house-trained monkey, Juan Watterson) announces plans for IPNAs . So follow the UK campaign now, so that when (or perhaps if) we get a public consultation over here you can make informed comment.

P.S. The title of this rant is a pun on Reg Quayle's groundbreaking Strategy:Get Art campaign in the early 1980's, which put on (in empty shops during the worst recession the island had then seen) the work of truly inspiring Manx art experimentalists like Kevin Atherton. As folk like Reg never get credit for keeping this septic isle out of the Dark Ages during the knock-on effects of Thatcherism, and nobody in the current Manx government arts administration will even have heard of the project I thought I should mention it.

Art attacks

 I was struck by  the news (see http://www.energyfm.net/cms/news_story_222843.html) that local artists are being invited to submit ideas for ‘public art’ in Laxey and Ramsey. In particular, I was amused by the time at which the government culture muppet planned to introduce the scheme.

Who but the usual gaggle of pensioners and dossers have time to meet some Arts Council bigwig mid-day? And who else would want to anyway?

Really?

Seriously?

Back in the 1980’s, I knew the few vaguely competent Manx art pros who still lived here, and they all had day jobs. That wasn’t because the general populace failed to appreciate the arts (not any more than the general populace anywhere else, anyway), but because the only commissions on offer were to produce ambient tat for yuppies or oil paintings of and for the same wealthy inbreeds who run this gaff today. If you were serious, or just had any self-respect, you produced if and when you could for patrons elsewhere and held down some rubbish job to feed your family. Most eventually moved away, leaving the field wide open for the idiot spawn of bankers who now hoover up contemporary art commissions (as none of them can even hold down a cleaning job in Daddy’s office, never mind take over the firm).

 So, looks like the Kulchur dumsters are about as serious as they ever were about tarting up the town. And…. oh Lawdy Lawdy…. we do got public art in Ramsey already!

For a start we have the infamous ‘Two crusties playing chess’ sculpture inside our dull if functional Town Hall (though if the sculptor had really been paying attention those fictional figures so finely rendered in stone from some quarry clearance sale would be doing the 10^th century equivalent of grumbling about their benefits amongst discarded Special Brew tins, just like their descendants).

Then we have that odd and ugly ‘millennium’ slab outside Shoprite which nobody can figure out or find a use for. Presumably it is meant to signify something Christian (and could only have been approved by an entire committee of godbothering rednecks), but is more like a logo for a dodgy fascist cult - as conceived by the architect of a brutalist 1960’s multi-storey car park or council housing complex.

Oh, and never forget (if only we could!) ‘The Muriel’ in the picnic area by the Swing Bridge, which serves the same purpose as one of those ultrasonic devices meant to deter kids from gathering in public areas. It seems to work. You certainly never see anyone there under the age of 60 and mentally competent enough to dress themselves.

So, what do we make of this latest breathless announcement then?

Can either the talent of today’s generation of artists or the taste of today’s generation of culture bores bring something new and exciting to this town?

That would be a ‘No’.

Oxfam would not take this tat. Why should we?

I was intrigued, and even encouraged, by a small piece of graffiti I saw in Douglas yesterday.
On the wall outside the multi-storey car park, beneath a crude image of (presumably) a hammer or axe, someone wrote: “Art isn’t always well fought out”.
Someone else then crossed out “fought” inserted “thought” and scribbled “idiot!” beside the original graffiti. But I think they missed the pun, and the point.
As a cultural academic and veteran of numerous serious (if also playful) attempts to question the point of art (and in particular if all art inevitably gets commodified eventually, so we might as well give up and do something else) it was at least encouraging that someone thinks such questions might still matter. Especially on the Isle of Man, where – to be blunt – the local Arts Council was always run by water-colouring fossils under the thumb of small town politicos who were proud to know nothing about art but know what they like and things have now hit a sub-YBA low (YBA being ‘Young British Artist’, for anyone who still cares).
In the 1980’s I probably knew three Manx artists (at most) with some sort of internationally recognisable talent, social conscience or knowledge of contemporary art history – mostly gained from being around politicised punk like Rock Against Racism. By the late 1990’s, when I returned here tooled up by direct contact in Leeds with most of the original art theorists and armed with the opportunity to explore such stuff in a local newspaper column, even they had been replaced by a new generation of dull conformists. Younger, nominally qualified but more terrifying than the ‘ladies who paint’ one still meets at Manx art gallery openings.
Yes, there is public and private money being thrown at local art world hacks to prettify awful and socially pointless new buildings and shopping complexes, generally thrown up like a bad curry after a drunken Friday night out in the vain hope some gullible tourist will splash their disposable income around. But would any sane and socially responsible artist take it?
Are there any anyway? And why is there no public engagement or debate about the arts? Sorry, but ‘government surveys’ which filter out all attempts to comment on a pre-decided policy do not count.
Real questions need to be asked. We could start with basic ones, like would you rather have a concrete seagull stuck next to some harbour-side cafes or a home help? But we could ask better ones, like would you rather pay some spawn of a banker with an art degree to come up with ‘public art’ or plan something better with your neighbours........ or just not bother?
Off hand, I cannot think of one piece of art in the Manx public domain which actually contributes to a sense of well being or pride in a community. Honestly, I just cannot, and I am actually interested in art and the regeneration of community!
These days walking through Manx towns is like walking through a surreal scene in which the family of some recently deceased person, rather than donate the stuff to a charity shop, has dumped giant versions of 50p store paintings and ornaments out in the street, where they clutter pavements or lean against walls.
Oxfam would not take this tat. Why should the rest of us?

Talking to God on the big white phone

I was intrigued yesterday by an art installation outside Ramsey Methodist Centre (it’s actually just a church, but they rebranded it ‘centre’ in an attempt to suggest some community relevance a few years back).
Well, I think it must be an art installation, because it has a touch of the Tracy Emin about it. On the other hand, as ‘proper’ Manx artists tend towards either (a) insipid oil or watercolours which suggest more than a passing acquaintance with the art therapy room at a long term mental institution or ( b) cack-handed ‘explorations’ of ‘Manx identity’ which get easy heritage money it can’t be their work. I would happily recommend this piece for an arts council grant, but it’s far too interesting and professionally executed.
So, the ‘installation’ is placed just outside the church within the yard and consists of a white toilet inside a little shed with the door open, facing the street. It has notices on the roof and sides, but as you’d have to enter the yard to read them I don’t know what they said.
As I mentioned recently (‘All Over Bar The Touting’) it’s Back To Church Sunday today, and the Methodists decided to throw their house open for the entire weekend, with little flyers distributed to all the local houses. The installation, I suppose, was meant to draw folk into the church for their display yesterday, but as even whimsical humour couldn’t get this family through their doors I’ll just have to pass on the ‘real’ explanation and wonder instead.
My first reaction was, is it a cruel teetotal reference to the euphemism ‘Talking to God on the big white phone’?
For those who lack imagination (or have no memory of Freshers Week at university) that refers to the moment when a hopeless drunk is on his or her knees in front of a pebbledashed toilet bowl, having regurgitated several meals he or she has no memory of eating, moaning “Oh God”.
But, on a Saturday night, how crazy would you have to be to leave a toilet in plain view on your property if it lies the opposite side of the road to a major pub with a bus-stop outside it?
Or was it just a bizarre attempt to cash in on the unwitting public service offered by one of the town’s odder cults, also close to that pub?
The thing is, the alleyway on the side of the pub offers faster relief to the weak of bladder than queuing for the pub toilet. Patrons of a charity shop housed there are already asked not to leave donations in bags overnight outside the shop.
The doorway of a small church at the end of the alleyway isn’t an obvious makeshift toilet, partly because it is at the crossroads of busy walkways joining local streets, partly because the bloke in the house facing it breeds Rottweillers. On the other hand, the back of the church is more sheltered, and must see far more congregants around Friday or Saturday midnight than the inside ever sees during Sunday opening hours.
Who says churches cannot offer a valuable public service to those in desperate need?

Never mind the Arts Council, I was the Dog's Bollocks

I had the wierdest experience yesterday. Don’t think I’m going to recover from it in some time.
Really got back a sense that, once in my life, I did something not just good but damn good. Excellent, a one-off, no-one else could have or has done it.
The thing is, 28 years ago in Belfast I founded a thing called Calamitous Clown Collective – a performance group that did clown shows in community centres, schools, in the street, at small town festivals…..places like that. Doesn’t sound much, except you have to know what Belfast was like at the time.
Absolute hell! Two communities who only communicated with each other to kill each other, a police force riddled with protestant paramilitaries and a death squad operating with state impunity to assassinate political undesirables, no law and order on the estates except that dealt out by the Provies or the UDA….
..and somewhere in this mess kids were trying to grow up and parents wanted that to happen without them being too screwed up, which wasn’t going to happen in schools and an education service run totally on sectarian lines - as was access to most government jobs, while outside the public sector were simply no jobs at all.
I was working there with an arts group that somehow did work on both sides of the sectarian divide. We’d ask kids ‘What do you want to do’, and ineviably they’d answer ‘This is Belfast, you can’t do anything’. So one day I got pissed off and said ‘OK, if you can’t do anything, let’s try the maddest, most outrageous thing we can, and if we fail, doesn’t matter cos you can’t do anything anyway but we still had the best laugh trying…’
And one kid said, ‘well, you couldn’t put on a circus show in Divis Flats’ ……and next Christmas we did, and we went on performing all round Ireland.
Which pissed off serious art bores somewhat, because the style of clowning we did was faster, louder, fuller on than anything anyone had ever seen ....... anywhere….. ever! Street kids from the Falls and Sandy Row with all the black humour you develop from those places, really going for it. Not so much Marcel Marceau or those baggy pants saddoes in the proper circus, more like Chaplin on speed performed by the Sex Pistols or Motorhead.
Wow, the English ‘alternative theatre’ types and the Dublin mime mafiosi hated it – almost as much as kids and Northern Ireland’s hardcore punk community loved it. We could, and did, blow anything else the ‘proper’ arts and theatre community could produce off stage.
There’s one BBC Northern Ireland TV clip I’d kill to see again. A TV producer and the manager of the Undertones put on a street festival in Belfast – mostly punk bands, and the Arts Council tried to hijack it. Welfare State International – then the UK’s leading cutting edge dangerous ‘alternative theatre troupe’ (at least to Guardian readers) were putting on some big performance in Botanical Gardens, and came marching down the street with their ‘rather droll’ version of a clown brass band just as the cameras were about to roll on our show. The entire street went silent, seething as WSI honked and bashed their way past, for all the world like an STD at an orgy.
I was fuming, more wound up than usual at their cheek, so as they passed the crowd and got to the top of the street I flew on stage and yelled ‘Never mind the Arts Council, we’re the Bollocks' as we went storming into our act. That street erupted like a riot kicking off.
Fecks sake, this was 'only' a clown show. Small kids fidget and get bored at the clown rich parents book for a birthday party. But here were hundreds of not just small kids but grown adults pushing each other - and even armed coppers - out of the way to get closer to the stage. I'd been at quieter Clash gigs than this!
And a year later it was all over – for me anyway. I had an accident performing, plus other heavy stuff happened and I had to give it all up, move away.
I knew the show went on. I knew some of the guys in 1985 put together something called Belfast Community Circus, which evolved, got serious and is now teaching circus arts to folk all around Europe, but I lost contact and never had a part in it.
Then yesterday at Peel Carnival some Northern Irish street performers looked strangely familiar. I recognised the full-on aggressive style, the dramatic build-up of the tricks, even my old bed of nails. It was like it must be for errant parents seeing a kid you were parted from at birth, fostered, all grown up and doing stuff to make you proud, without even knowing you.
I’m boasting, but I don’t care. I MADE that, I brought it to life and it brought joy to others. Seeing that one good thing from my distant past – almost forgotten, made me realise I neeedn’t care about all the petty crap going on around me, needn’t be dragged down by all the nonsense jobs and halfwit employers I must endure for the foreseeable future to look after my family. Because just once I created something so unique, so great, that no-one else could have done it. And it’s still excellent, still bringing nothing but joy to those who do it or experience it.
My Mona Lisa, my punk as fuck Sistine Chapel.
Never mind the Arts Council. Never mind anything. Yesterday was the dog’s bollocks.

Child abuse as a public art form

As if our Education Department and Arts Council haven’t screwed up enough young lives with godbothering theatrical shite (see, for example 'How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids' on 10th October), they’ve done it again.
Now they want to put on a ‘Rock Nativity’ in the island’s only community performance facility (though the real community will never be allowed to perform there anyway – and that’s another issue). See http://www.gov.im/lib/news/education/studentstakeonhe.xml for more details.
Look, I laughed my socks off with every other parent a few years back when my kid, then aged four, raced round on a wheeled toy donkey as ‘Virgin Mary’ in the nursery school nativity play. Tiny kids with towels round their heads playing holy mummies and daddies, making up their own words based on stuff they overheard at home and making you blush – that’s a proper nativity play.
Teenagers playing Joseph and Mary under threat of poor grades if they don’t? That’s seriously sick and someone should ring Childline.
I also love the fact that they’re wasting public space every night of the week ‘except Sunday’.
WHY?
Do you seriously think any 14 year old with more than two braincells would be in a church unless they’re drugged up to the eyeballs?
Maybe the emergency services should just rope off the Studio Theatre at Ballerkermeen School and declare it a disaster zone, because this is getting serious.
When a big chunk of not only Education Department cash but the island’s arts budget goes into what is supposed to be a ‘community facility’, shouldn’t that community have some access, and some say in what gets put on?
We are consolidating a ridiculous position where, as churches island-wide close through lack of punters, the superstitious still dictate our public arts programs and have open access to our schools as cheap churches on Sundays, because they can’t be arsed to repair their current faith hovels or rent a room like anyone else.
Meanwhile, try booking a building anywhere on the island to show a film, host a discussion or put on any public event either critical of religion or where views might be offered which differ from godbothering dictats handed down by national or international ‘faith leaders’. I have been trying it for two decades here, and I tell you bluntly it cannot be done.
This sucks. I’m writing to the Arts Council.
I want my money back, so I can spend it on something else. Any DVD splat or shag fest you can name - I don’t care how bad it is, any gig by any loud and raucous visiting over the hill punk band. I don’t even care if some colour-blind smackhead wants to spray-paint a wall in his own vomit and call it art. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, is better than underwriting more superstitious shite with public money.