North and South - Cat and Mouse

MADFERIT ARR KID

One of the ways in which I have reconciled the different strands of my background over the years is through geography. As the limited oral history of my father’s family suggested that he had been brought up in Salford as Harry Johnson - and my stepfather’s family were long-established in not so distant Cheshire, there was a link there.

As for my mother’s family, although her maternal grandparents were immigrants to Nantwich in Cheshire in the late 19th Century, strong roots had developed such that their offspring regarded themselves as true locals or ‘Dabbers’. And, on the other side, grand-mother Clarke was a Kenyon from Oldham – you can’t get much more North Western than that.

Cheshire of course is a bit dodgy if you want to be a Northern Nationalist. It is on the edge and can equally be counted as part of the Mercian Midlands – it is somewhere between Maryland and Virginia in its standing.

Anyhow, if a prominent Irish Republican who started life as John Edward Drayton Stephenson (born Leytonstone, London, 1928) can reinvent himself as Seán Mac Stíofáin, I don’t think that you can argue too much about the rights and wrongs of my case.

Years back, when I was a lecturer at the University of Bradford, I had a firebrand spell in the Liberal Democrats and gave a wildly implausible speech to the Annual Conference on regionalism and the need for the South to give greater respect to the North – I sat down to resounding whistles and yells of support.

I guess the main reason for the acclamation was that, unlike most of the other speeches, mine was not that boring. And I think that people were genuinely amazed to be told that the Yorkshire and Humberside Region had a GDP that was larger than that of New Zealand.

[Incidentally, modern New Zealand has a population that is larger than that of the free population of the core states of the Southern Confederacy at the onset of the US Civil War – something I’ll pick up in another article].

Anyhow, having spent more than half of my life now in exile, I have largely given up on the possibility of being invited back to the Independence Celebrations in Harrogate.

But I still follow the subject and have been amused at the row that has broken out about the artistic merits and cultural standing of L.S. Lowry. To me, it is really rather simple. He probably wasn’t all that good an artist but he is ours’ – and, chuck, as they say in Cheshire, ‘a cock fights best on his own bank’.

So I’ll let Gandalf lead the charge.

IAN MCKELLEN LEADS CHALLENGE TO TATE OVER L.S. LOWRY ‘EXCLUSION’

[by Mark Wainwright, The Guardian, 17 April 2011]

The Tate has been challenged to put its collection of paintings by LS Lowry up for sale if it intends to continue to exclude them from its London galleries.

The actor Sir Ian McKellen threw down the challenge in a joint attack by leading figures from the art world which questioned whether the "matchstick men painter" has been sidelined as too northern and provincial.

Although many artists from the north of England enjoy metropolitan critical acclaim, including David Hockney and Damien Hirst, none assert the character of northern people and landscape with Lowry's dogged persistence.

"Over the years, silly lies have been thrown around that he was only a Sunday painter, an amateur, untrained and naive," said McKellen, who narrates a highly critical television programme about Lowry's "exclusion" to be screened by ITV1 on Easter Day.

"His popularity needs no official endorsement from the Tate, but it is a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others."

The film sees others line up to condemn the fact that the Tate has shown only one of its 23 Lowrys – Industrial Landscape, painted in 1955 and owned by the gallery for 50 years – and then only briefly.

Noel Gallagher, of the Manchester band Oasis, said: "They're not considered Tateworthy. Or is it just because he is a northerner?"

The controversy reached a crunch point when the Tate was refused permission to copy Industrial Landscape to form part of a temporary mural on the work of landscape artists. Lowry's estate, which has donated much of his unsold work to the Lowry centre at Salford Quays, has made no secret of its irritation at the continued storage of his work.

The Tate denied any deprecation of "northern-ness" in Lowry's work, pointing to its record of establishing Tate Liverpool and supporting new Hepworth Wakefield gallery, which opens next month. Henry Moore, the Yorkshire sculptor and contemporary of Barbara Hepworth, has also been much feted by the gallery, whose founder Sir Henry Tate, the sugar mogul, was one of Lowry's fellow-Lancastrians.

The Tate said it planned to give Lowry space when its galleries are extended in 2013, but Tate Britain's head of displays, Chris Stephens, said in the television programme:

"What makes Lowry so popular is the same thing which stops him being the subject of serious critical attention. What attracts so many is a sort of sentimentality about him. He's a victim of his own fan base."

McKellen said: "If the Tate feels no responsibility to give the art-viewing public their favourite painters to view, perhaps they could let their stash go elsewhere. They could pass them on to a gallery like the Lowry, which shares its visitors' tastes. Or perhaps a touring retrospective, with a twist – the exhibits would be for sale."

NOT MUCH SENTIMENTALITY AT THE TATE



SENTIMENTALITY, SENSIBILITY AND MICKY MOUSE

Of course, Chris Stevens is just the sort of poncey Southerner who we of the flat vowels love to hate.

I looked him up and found his comments on Tate Britain’s 20th Century Memorial by Michael Sandle:

"As you walk into the gallery, the skeleton-ness and the Mickey Mouse-ness and the machine gun are all immediately apparent, and I think the aggressive tone of the piece is obvious even before you properly discern what it is and what it’s about. It packs a visual punch first of all, and then it’s compelling because there’s enough to it that you stop to think, 'what’s going on here?’

It’s a very confrontational sculpture – it really does stop people in their tracks. Well, apart from children, who seem to have an urge to walk straight across it.

I've met Michael Sandle, and he’s very passionate about this piece. He conceived it in response to the Vietnam War, and was originally going to call it ‘Mickey Mouse Machine Gun Monument For Amerika’, but he changed the title to make it more general after learning the extent of British culpability in that conflict. He sees that as a sort of precedent for what happened with Bush and Blair in Iraq.

Changing the title to ‘Twentieth Century Memorial’ makes it much more about a century of conflict. A century of conflict nevertheless dominated by the US – the mouse is unavoidably a symbol of a rotten and decayed America.

I like how Sandle uses the contrast between the materials – the beautiful polish on the gun, the black skeleton and the head. It all works particularly well in a huge space like the Duveen Gallery, with its shifting daylight. He worked on the sculpture over the best part of a decade, casting each part himself. The gun is not simply cast from a gun, because it’s larger than life-size, so he’s cast the individual components in bronze from moulds.

I’m not sure whether we should call Michael a traditionalist or not, but certainly he believes in painting and sculpture as a craft. He’s very hands-on and proud of the fact that this sculpture is hand-cast”.

Well that’s all very well – but how about the Tate commissioning a new work called a ‘Memorial to the Nineteenth Century North of England’?

It could be built up from shuttles shone by underage mill girls and old coal pit machinery plus a Blackpool Pantomime Cat.

Or, heaven knows, it could draw upon some locally painted images of homely stick people dwarfed by a ghastly, ghostly heimat.