I'm getting out
I'm moving on
And from now on
address unknown
I shouldi be difficult to find
So follow me
just follow me.
I'll sell you dreams and new desires
I'm trading hopes
I'm opened
I am the night
I am your fate
So follow me
just follow me.
Faust was right
have no regret
Gimme your soul
I'll give you life
And all the things you want to get
So follow me
just follow me.
I'll give you wings
I'll sell you fame
Merry-go-round
maybe to hell
I am the key to your problem
So follow me
just follow me.
Unbelievable maybe
You'll have a new identity
For a second of vanity
I want to change your destiny . . .
Unbelievable maybe
. . .
Follow me
follow me
I'll give you anything you want
Your wish is my command
If you agree to follow me.
What if The Trafford Centre was seen for what it is, a colossal tick, sucking on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal and the generations of meat formed around it, a vampiric vortex, debriding the lazy sediment of lumpen proletarian dreams, anaethetising revolutionary energy into a slow Sunday promenade around the deck of the titanic or king solomons mines. Shop fronts' gleam: 'Adornos'', 'Brechts', 'Paradise'... they shuffle on, checking themselves against the prosperous bourgeois in mirrored avenues. Public capitalism - celebrity, in Los Angeles, Hollywood - Trafford, capital transfigured into slip-on shoes, industrialised culture, cheap plastic goods piled high in barbaric pyres. Wagner plays.
Not overwhelmed by the music or the actual content but moved by the romantic image of two young lovers traveling to a deserted lake to swim underwater, JG Ballard could have written a good short story.
The Exotic Adrian Street (right) & his Father at the pit, 1973
A friend took me to this exhibition, on at Manchester City Art Gallery, for his birthday. I had heard of Jeremy Deller before but never investigated his work. I found out he had won the Turner Prize and arranged the Manchester Day parade 'Procession' of a few years back.
I really didn't like 'Procession' at the time as I thought it was a bit too irreverent and was stepping on the toes of a proud local history of political activism. In short, I was bitter that people were willing to turn out to celebrate 'Manchester' as is and was but not turn out on other occasions to continue support the working people, the unions or the leftist tradition that made it.
At that time I spent two minutes disappointedly musing that he must be some silly-hand-wringing-loon, or worse, a postmodernist at the end-of-history, in a position of very visible influence, playing tiredly with the spectacle of dissent, rather than voicing it. (Like I do, all the time...)
There lies my unfortunate knee-jerk pessimism...
... All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a phrase taken from the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx/Engles. It struck me that here Deller was explicitly putting forward that his exhibition was about something more than just the industrial revolution, as most press has stated.
On walking around, if it is about any one thing it is about Capitalism, with a big-fat 'C': constantly expanding, constantly in revolution, leaving nothing solid or
permanent in its wake, both destroying and conjuring into existence
everything from cities to human populations along the way. This I found fascinating.
Deller does Alienation
Manchester desperately needs a permanent exhibition like this. One that illuminates the done-to-death-dirge of the Industrial Revolution and reanimates it, with real depth and breath, with Marxian/Post Marxian rigour. The People's History Museum gets close at points, only to turn on it's heels and distract with a plethora of 'funny-hats-wot-victorians-wore', avoiding the question of what is history? and who are these people? and what is class? Historical Materialism never get's a mention, even if that's what its being revealed at points.
Deller does Moral Outrage
Deller manages to raise and interlink a lot of these things by laying out a path of interjecting artifacts, to be read, up down, backward, forward. An arc or narrative is presented but his playfulness in plonking the odd album cover here or the odd faux-plaque there works to break things up, and to widen the viewer's horizon, if only immediately beyond what they expect from an art exhibition.
It may be going too far to suggest that this playfulness is aimed at snapping wide some ideological-blinkers from tired 2013 eyes. Everything in the exhibition is implicitly part of a whole piece of art and historical artifact, but further and most interestingly for me, evidence of Marx's concept of Historical Materialism at play.
We are drawn to collate the preened street gangs of 19th century Manchester with the Happy Mondays, both bourne of alienation, poverty, urban debauchery and hi-jinks. We are shown the dynamic shift of traditional to urban folk songs as response to the pounding soundtracks of new machinery. The simular penchant for artist's to romanticise the grime, darkness and fury of the working, urban landscape is welded from Victorian oil paintings to the heavy metal of Black Sabbath.
So I enjoyed it. Even saw a Busy Bee bus.
Deller does Stockport
Beyond all this. The plainly titled BFI film 'Steel' was awesome.
This isn't 'Steel' but it's as close I could find on the internet.
