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NORTH EAST LABOUR HISTORY |
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CO-OPERATIVE COLLEGE The Co-operative College has a nice web site at: http://www.co-op.ac.uk/ It carries a most attractive picture of the Gateshead Co-operative Women's Guild banner and links to the Co-op museum (Rochdale) at :http://museum.co-op.ac.uk/
Anyone fancy commenting on this piece? Let working-class people ingest art (Morning Star Tuesday 19 July 2005) IN FOCUS: Working-class culture JEFF SAWTELL argues that it's not yet time for working-class people to park their whippets outside the Tate.
A native of Newcastle, he outlined his criticisms in Picture of Tyneside (BBC3, June 27). Donald, who gave the nation such Geordie stereotypes as the Fat Slags and Sid the Sexist, thinks that the new wine bar culture is threatening such traditional cultural pursuits as getting bladdered on beer. Tyneside has had a cultural makeover in recent years, with the building of the Millennium Bridge and the transformation of the Baltic flour mill into a modern art gallery. To mark this fact, Donald decided to update his classic characters of the area with the wine-drinking Classy Slappers and pretentious conceptual art critic Art Carbuncle. While he recognises the job opportunities that are offered by such schemes, he rightly bewails the fact that they don't cater for traditional working-class culture. Donald, in fact, has moved out to a more salubrious area. But he still insists that his cartoons are inspired by the conflict "between the working class and the middle class" Naturally, some critics disagree. Dan Cruickshank said: "The idea of bringing to working men the best of art was around during the 19th century too. While it is easy to be cynical about it, it is surely an entirely admirable aim. "It's better to raise people's expectations than to just pander to what they already like, which really would be patronising." Former Gateshead citizen and playwright Alan Plater understood Donald's concern for the diminishing "Geordieness," but he commented: "In the past, I would have used the idea of a Gateshead Hilton to get a cheap laugh. Now there is one. "If you cover your waterfront with wine bars, you will make it look pretty much the same as anywhere else. There are now more art galleries than shipyards. "But this is not necessarily a bad thing - after all, the industrial revolution is over and the beauty of shipbuilding has gone almost entirely. "I think that Tyneside needs Chris Donald as much as it needs the Baltic and there should be room for both." Well said, but it still doesn't explain the nature and scope of an absence of working-class culture, nor how it differs from capitalist culture. Ever since Tate Liverpool, it has always concerned me that we have been transforming former factories into vast cultural complexes. While I'm glad to see the retention and use of the buildings, its true that they have nothing to do with promoting working-class culture. Worse, since the development of the Tate franchise, we have seen copycat cultural centres springing up. They employ workers to curate exhibitions that caricature their own culture produced by former working-class students who think that they are revolutionaries. If such art was revolutionary it wouldn't be bought by corporations to adorn their office spaces. No wonder advertisers take the piss - remember the TV commercial that spoofed an audience believing that a stack of cleaning components were sculptures. As for the cleaners, who mistakenly threw out an installation, it speaks for itself. The revolutionary potential of transforming rubbish into art was rendered irrelevant when Watneys used pictures of Chairman Mao to sell Red Barrel beer. Capitalism can commodify anything and everything - the reason why revolutionary artists have to constantly revolutionise their own consciousness. Not since its opening a few years back has the new Tate Modern displayed anything that could be construed as representing working-class culture, unless you count a tiny installation bewailing the disappearance of the cockney sparrow from the streets of London. On the contrary, it is entirely concerned with the expressions of the self-same artists who figure in the expensive cosmopolitan galleries here and abroad. Sir Nicholas Serota was knighted for his services to art. He's built the Tate franchise in his own image. Almost all of the sophisticates of the so-called "swinging sixties" have also followed his example. Scared by the "revolutionary" happenings of the 1970s, they were confirmed in their prejudices during Thatcher's ruinous reign. Such is the state of the public culture that is paid for by the people - always reflecting the interests of a tiny gang of gurus who have nothing to lose but their gongs. The same can be said for Serota's nemesis in the private sector. Charles Saatchi has played the role of the modern Medici by promoting shock and awe artists and a market that he manipulates until he can cash in on his investments. It's capitalist rules for capitalist culture and it mirrors the minds of those who promote the public-private partnerships that are so beloved of this anti-socialist government. They would simply have us believe that all art and culture is an extension of the entertainment industries. Such a policy commends itself to excluding that art which tackles issues and criticises corporate control of culture. Yes, there is the exceptions to prove the rule - notably Jeremy Deller during the last Turner Prize exhibition - but they mostly remain a mystery to the general public. They don't speak for the average punter, nor do they refer to the practice of those artist who are promoting the art of the resistance. So, what is working-class culture? It is the way that we live, since culture is an expression of social, economic and political activity that we all contribute towards throughout our daily lives. More specifically, at the level of conscious cultural production, it is the ideological reflection of the classes who use their hand, brain or some other part of the anatomy. We are not talking about hobbies. Nor is it a refrain for a renewal of Victorian values as exemplified by those patronising do-gooders who promote work as virtuous. They're well-meaning souls, but they still think that they have the moral high-ground to lecture the workers on the pleasures of bourgeois culture. What I'm concerned about is the absence of real working-class history, not to mention all those others who have been designated as comprising the "other" - those who have been marginalised because of colour, creed or whatever is considered not part of mainstream ruling class culture. I'm not trying to resurrect the image of the traditional cloth-capped working class. Nor trying to revive a time before Thatcher. You can't reverse time, no matter how many heritage museums are built stuffed full of animatronic figures dressed up as sons of toil. Instead of images of working-class life and struggle we have exhortations to consider the merits of professional masturbators. While the bodies are piling up in Iraq, a New York artist Spencer Tunick is inviting people to strip off and stand about naked in the new Baltic gallery. Apart from the shock value of seeing people starkers, it hardly says anything profound about the human condition, still less demonstrating the idea of solidarity. Tunick is not the only one. He just happens to be the latest prankster our puerile intellectual elite consider to be an entertaining crowd puller. In London, they have just unveiled a giant chair and table by Italian artist Giancarlo Neri in Parliament Hill Fields. Supposedly representing The Writer, it's an insult to the intelligence as well as being an environmental eyesore. Apart from insulting the memory of Constable and other landscape painters, it also denies its traditional use as a football and rugby field. I wouldn't care if they put a statue of Karl Marx on the spot. It would still have been inappropriate in the context. In 1971, I created some light drawings of the bowl below Parliament Hill marking out a circle that illuminated the undulations of the landscape. They were neither intrusive, nor did they sacr the landscape. Not to be outdone, up in Liverpool, they have recently sited a series of cast-iron figures staring out to sea by Antony Gormley. What are we to assume from these sightless zombies immobilised by the mud and rusting in the shallows. They certainly don't represent workers, nor do they indicate workers' creativity. Across the country there's an absence of positive images of working class. In the TUC education centre, they even destroyed a mural celebrating a hundred years of class struggle Donald, Cruickshank and Plater have all contributed towards our understanding of the complexities of working-class culture. It's a pity that their concerns are absent from the new cultural centres. Meanwhile, the beer-swilling working class will join in with their wine-drinking comrades in today's equivalent of bread and circuses - McDonalds and Big Brother. JEFF SAWTELL WILLIAM BLAKE IN THE BRIDGE HOTEL by Keith Armstrong
Radio 4 twice today (9 January) featured the Travelling Post Office. [Today and Five p.m.]. They reported that the service was operating today for the last time. The Royal Mail have terminated a service which has operated since the 1830's. It is amazing and disgraceful that with mounting congestion on the roads they should push the mails onto the motor ways. It is another example of the New Labour government yielding to the pressures of industry on so-called economic grounds. The next volume of North East History, due very soon, will feature a long interview with two workers who have done the London-Newcastle run for 30 years each.
*** This is Dave Byrne's response to a couple of articles in the Observer of 9th December. Any other comments very welcome. Submit via email:nelh.blueyonder.co.uk Followed by Keith Armstrong's take And a note by John Charlton on the National Theatre play, Permanent Way by David Hare shown at the Live Theatre 11-13th December. And a poem by Keith Armstrong (30/12/03) Loft Living – Bombay Calling – Culture, Work and Everyday Life on Post-Industrial Tyneside by Dave Byrne The Observer 7th of December 2003 carried two stories which had resonance for Tynesiders. One, illustrated by a photo of three attractive but for night life Newcastle surprisingly fully dressed – only décolletage on show – young women, asserted that Newcastle’s loft dwellers – residents of a place transformed from coal city to cultural capital – lived in the new cool capital– a boom city with a glittering night life and affordable luxury living. The other described how UK based global capital in its continuing search for maximum possible exploitation of the workforce was exporting call centre jobs to the massive reserve army of graduate English speaking labour in India with consequent returns to its profits. I don’t know if the three graces of the first article were call centre agents, but on post-industrial Tyneside there is a pretty good chance that they were. Party on girls but it may be the last chance saloon. There is just so much to rant about here. Contemporary Newcastle as a ‘City of Culture’ – not really I would say. Sure we have some new provision – notably the Baltic which was essentially a product of Gateshead’s desire to do something with a well liked industrial landmark and that borough’s long term old fashioned social democratic commitment to art for the people. Alongside that – even behind it in the case of the Baltic and ruining the impact of that building against the definition of the Tyne gorge – we have exceptionally banal property speculators’ over-priced flats for people perhaps with more expectations than sense. Never forget that the Newcastle – Gateshead City of Culture bid was fronted by Sir Ian Wrigglesworth – SDP turncoat turned property magnate. The bid got kicked into touch exactly because the judging panel saw just how over the top it had gone in kowtowing to the property money and ignoring the people. However, this is not a city which is producing culture – if that word means something which relates the experience of life to the production of artistic representation both ‘popular’ and ‘high’. Rather it is a ‘fantasy city’ - useful expression of the American urban commentator Hannigan to describe the urban core as a corporate dominated bland consumption experience. There was a time not so long ago when Tyneside was a place with a culture producing culture – the city of Sex, Brown Ale and Rhythm and Blues – the title of Pearson’s lovely book about the ‘the world than made the Animals’ - an industrial city full of life, character, music made by local bands who could rehearse in wresting halls, drunken mad poets, an ability to relate people’s own experience to the global music of resistance and just plain hell raising. Burdon is still keeping it up. At his last gig on Tyneside he looked like a middle aged betting shop manager, sang like a boozy angel, and called George Bush worse than muck – that’s the way to do it bonny lad. What do we have really? A city of booze and boozers – not the old industrial boozers with than term covering both the people and the pubs but of new, spangly , bland drinking dens which serve much the same purpose as the beer halls of black Joburg under apartheid – or as Joe Wilson recognized in his later life as the gin palaces of mid Victorian industrial Tyneside – places to keep the proles happy and disorganized whilst capital and capitalists make hay – rooking the workers both at work and at play. I truly hate working men’s clubs but this kind of thing makes me thing that they have a point. And alongside this young people with aspirations to quayside lofts – don’t mention global warming by the way and the River Tyne in the living room in twenty years time. – aspirations based on insecure jobs in a deferential and disorganized – dis – not un – this is an active process – workforce. The new networked society of global helots is here and now and partying fit to drop. Of course there are exceptions – real cultural makers who can put experience and art together - but how much they depend on a sense and sensibility drawn from what has gone before. David Almond is a prime example – a brilliant writer in that most alive genre of fiction – books for children – with a skill and style to knock the typical Booker winner into a cocked hat – whose work is permeated with the very essence of the Felling. AMBER keeps plugging along with the most honourable record of documenting people’s lives and how they change. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen’s wonderful photos of the post coal Durham coastline have been one of the best things in the Baltic – delete qualification, one of the two best because I was very taken with COBRA as well but that is what Fred Johnson – Gateshead’s original Chair of Libraries and Arts - wanted when he started the council’s commitment to art – the best from here and from the world. This is well outside global corporate entertainment and 55 Degrees North in a converted office block!! I am running out of rant and steam
but have one last toot left in me. The Tyneside of my adolescence and
young adulthood – the city of 60s – was a much livelier and
more vivid place than our contemporary facsimile of a ‘city of culture’.
There as just as much booze, plenty of drugs, frankly I think rather more
sex, and a real world whose people still thought that organized workers
had the power and right to change the future. Tyneside could speak out
–in massively popular TV – When the Boat Comes in –
was middle brow and radical – a truly dangerous combination; in
a poetic sensibility which as not the bloodlessness of Bloodaxe –
milky spoon more like – but something which could bring together
the heritage of Pound and Pickard’s howling at the moon; and in
which the main Theatre season could be non-stop Brecht – for the
liberal bourgeoisie OK but Brecht all the same. However, nostalgia is
not the point. What of now? There are surely stirrings. It may be that
it is from exactly the domain of culture and lived experience –
the territory where people make sense of what they are outwith the world
of work – that the next rising up will come. Certainly we do well
to take note of what Jack Grasby – a dramaturge of insurrectionary
resistance in the everyday if ever we have had one – notes at the
end of his The Unfinished Revolution – South Tyneside 1969-76 when
he quotes from Neal Ascherson writing about the 60s in the Guardian thirty
years one. To paraphrase – could it happen again, this defiance
out of nowhere, probably yes. Hears hoping. Because we certainly need
it. 1. The delightful George Monbiot, part of the new ‘anti’ coalition being put together by Galloway, the SWP and assorted other Stalinist and related fragments overdue for a date with the dustbin of history, thinks this is a good thing by the way. New Labour and new whatever seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet here. Trade unionists take note.
A RIVEN RIVER BY KEITH ARMSTRONG Tyneside poet Keith Armstrong, coordinator of the Northern Voices creative writing and community publishing project, goes looking for rebel Geordie voices As a community arts worker, writer, publisher, raconteur and general man about town, I’ve been around a few blocks in my home city of Newcastle. I’ve helped set up a whole heap of projects and every now and then one has worked. Off the top of my head, I can remember Tyneside Street Press, a community broadsheet for alternative opinion, the community directory Tyne Bridge, the rather quaintly named Tyneside Trade Unionists for Socialist Art - TTUSA for short - and the Strong Words oral history publishing series. What these and many another scheme had in common was that they sprang from the grass roots. From Newcastle Neighbourhood Projects, where I once worked, they cocked a proverbial snook at authority, they nibbled at the Lord Mayor’s coat-tails, they promised a slightly better life for ordinary folk, a chance for them to speak in their own words of their own aspirations and problems. working class folk, you might say, and the search was for socialism. Theatre groups performed in clubs and community centres and spoke of resistance to rent increases, cut-throat landlords and council officials. Poets read at housing campaigns and musicians sang on picket-lines. Look at what we’ve got now on the banks of the riven Tyne. A cosy blanket of council promoted culture. Pip-squeak leaders of business and municipal conmen preaching thevirtues of Art and Business-the very types who did not come near cultural projects like TTUSA years ago in their arrant philistinism. No votes in it then you see. And, of course, we had an industrial base then which they pissed away in favour of the new call-centre culture. See where that got them! British rail enquiries based in India! And I can just see the Arts Council people at Central Square downing tools in solidarity with their redundant Lloyds TSB fellow workers! In short, we have cultural opportunism on the grand scale, it is a buzzin’.all around us. Shallow little quango men with shallow little ideals who see money in everything. They lost us the Love Parade, they lost us the Capital of Culture bid and now, ladies and gentlemen, the very same merry crew proudly present: Club 10!Club 10! - the Blairite Reich - more harmless cultural goodies to boost the economy. More New Labour partying – ain’t it just lovely to have them organise our lives for us? What a lovely sight to see our Heads of Culture and Leaders of Council dancing in tights down the Quayside in the shadow of the horrendously ugly Law Court! Except that they never get drunk! Where is the anger? Where is the integrity? I’m sorry but we’ve seen too many cock-ups - not to mention the Dome - to trust this little lot. Let them free the people. Let 50,000 rebel voices sing at St James’s Park - their own working-class folk songs you understand, not written by the Vicar or Tony Flynn. A football club with a say for its supporters. A culture based on an understanding of the history of the North East, its fighting days and its dramatic landscape. A culture which builds on the strength of the indigenous in a cosmopolitan way, that welcomes the input of the world but only if it respects positive local tradition and understands what has made Northumbrian castles and the struggling peasants who still chip away in their shadow. We’re all for new libraries and new resources. What we want is people power, autonomy
for the back-streets of Walker and Scotswood. A resistance to the high-rise
millionaires and the lottery-funded arts class who ride on high in their
conceptual towers and inflict their crap public art on the hapless locals
'Permanent Way' by David Hare. Permanent Way by David Hare has had a short season at the Live Theatre. Its production brings back to the theatre powerful committed political drama of a very high order; beyond agitprop, loaded with nuance and contradiction. The play puts the crisis of the British railway system on the coroner’s slab where a deft dissection is performed. The business men and women, the civil servants, bureaucrats and politicians are generally despicable but with some, including the Rail Track boss, David Hare allows a human side to show making them much more credible. With the survivors and bereaved he brings out genuine pathos and tragedy. It could be felt in the audience. When the play ended there was a stunned silence for a while before applause broke out. There was a sharp reminder that eighteen months after the Potters’ Bar crash in which seven were killed and seventy injured nobody has been brought to book. The indictment of the corruption at the heart of capitalism is total. It is not that the individuals are evil or necessarily incompetent. It is that a system deliberately constructed to maximise financial profit demands wilfulness, and fosters deceit, obfuscation and callowness of spirit. A showing on prime time TV, on say, a Saturday night in the Lottery slot is what is required. Pigs might fly! AN OUBLIETTE FOR KITTY There's a hole in this Newcastle welcome,
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