Red Pepper » Culture

Into the Fire: a different picture of Greece

admin — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 15:14:02 +0000

Photo: Guy Smallman
Into the Fire is an important film. As the UK media and government teach the population to hate and mistrust immigrants and asylum seekers, this film takes a look at the situation in Greece and tells a story that is not inconceivable here. The initial backlash against the Woolwich murder in June should serve as a bleak reminder of the possibility of a sudden surge in racism.
Austerity holds Greece in a gruesome stranglehold. Predictably, at a time of crisis, a polarisation takes place. Readers of this magazine will be familiar with the basic story of the rise of the left coalition Syriza and that of the fascist party Golden Dawn, the two sides of this huge rise in political stakes. Rather than focus on the characters involved in the different sides of politics, Into the Fire looks at the plight of those on the receiving end.
As the EU’s south-eastern corner, Greece is an obvious destination for many fleeing from conflict, economic hardship and human rights abuses outside its borders. Yet these refugees often find themselves in a similar, or sometimes even worse, predicament. Thanks to the EU’s restriction on asylum seekers moving country within the Union, many find themselves trapped in Greece. This restriction, the Dublin II Regulation, was drawn up in February 2003 with the declared intention of stopping EU countries ‘offloading’ asylum seekers onto one another.
It is a classic example of legislation intended to achieve one thing but actually hitting the most vulnerable in society. It means anyone seeking asylum in the EU must do so in the first country they arrive in. Yet the situation is so bad in Greece that the UK is no longer returning asylum seekers who arrive here via that country. As one refugee says to the camera in the film, ‘let us leave Greece’ is the simple wish of many of these people.
Although Into the Fire makes for uncomfortable viewing at times, it is not just full of despair. The fledgling anti-Golden Dawn movement is getting itself organised and onto the streets. Dimitris Katsaris, a lawyer representing anti-fascists, puts things succinctly. He issues a call to arms and declares ‘Fear is not an option’ – a necessary maxim for anti-fascists the world over. There are familiar traits on show in Greece: sympathy, if not pre-meditated collusion, between police and Golden Dawn; an asylum process that is intentionally intransigent and hostile to the people it is meant to serve; and inflammatory language used to scapegoat migrants for the economic woes of society.
The film is not highly polished or slickly edited; obliquely that’s a strength. This is a film made by video activists, and makes up for technical rough edges with a passion that shines through in every scene. That same passion has featured throughout the making and distribution of the film. Funded by donations, shot on a shoestring and edited on home computers, it is a testament to determination and dedication.
The distribution of the film is also notable. There have been a number of public screenings that have attracted good audiences. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has organised three such screenings in the UK – in a café, a university and a barristers’ chambers – all with excellent discussions afterwards. Many other groups across Europe are putting on similar screenings and most are being well received.
But the remarkable thing about Into the Fire is the online reception it has received. The film-makers organised a synchronised launch on a number of different websites, through YouTube and Vimeo. In the first two months, the film had just under 100,000 views – an extraordinary figure for a 40-minute documentary made with no budget for filming, let alone promotion.
This is a film made for the movement by a small part of that movement. It is shocking, it is unsettling, but it is essential viewing.
Into the Fire has been released under a Creative Commons licence and is free to show in any non-commerical setting. Watch it online or find out more about organising a showing at www.intothefire.org

Revolutionary rehearsals

admin — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 20:53:52 +0000

Zawe Ashton in Clean Break’s recent production There Are Mountains
Stepping under the hot lights of a stage in front of an audience and performing, as yourself, a dramatisation of your personal experiences of oppression, trauma or conflict would strike most people as a terrifying prospect. Yet several theatre groups around the country are doing just that in order to ‘give a voice to the voiceless’, create forums of debate and compassionate communication, and ultimately to advance social change for those whose stories are usually invisible or marginalised.
One of the most prominent examples of empowering theatre approaches is Theatre of the Oppressed, founded by the Brazilian playwright, activist and theatre pioneer Augusto Boal, who left a worldwide legacy after his death in 2009. Forum Theatre is one form of Boal’s work, along with Invisible Theatre and Image Theatre, which were designed to create democratic arenas for interaction and growth. Forum performances involve dramatising an oppressive situation familiar to the cast’s real‑life experiences in a small play. The play is then performed a second time, during which audience members – ‘spect-actors’ in Boal’s terminology – can shout ‘Freeze!’ and take to the stage themselves, improvising alternative courses of action in the hope of taking the play to a less oppressive ending. The degrees of success of different ideas are discussed by the audience.
The new strategies can be used to empower participants in their real lives. For social movements the exercises can highlight potential strategies, developed in a collaborative and community-led setting. Performances are not the only aim of the form – Boal also developed drama exercises encouraging openness, exploration and the building of trust.
Forum for change
Forum Theatre is widely studied and ‘study-able’, with Boal’s books full of catchy quotes such as the famous statement that: ‘Perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!’ Yet its application in a pure form is rare in the UK. One exception is Cardboard Citizens, which has become an established charity working with people affected by homelessness in London. It is one of the leading practitioners of Forum techniques (Boal visited frequently over the course of 15 years) along with offering more traditional services such as workshops and training. It takes Forum plays, performed by members who have experienced homelessness, straight to the doors of the ‘hard-to-reach’ audiences, on an annual hostel tour – a mode through which many new members end up becoming involved.
Catherine Pinhorn, a trainer and practitioner of Forum Theatre with training organisation Change-X-Change, who has studied under Boal and is currently working with homeless groups herself, points out that Forum Theatre exercises are used in many educational and corporate settings. Although Boal himself encouraged adaptation of the form to suit particular participants, she sees the use of Forum to impart predetermined messages a dilution of the strengths of the approach, which essentially centres on truth and human agency.
‘I think it literally provides a forum in which [the individual] can be heard,’ she says. ‘Lots of people in our society are not listened to. That they don’t feel heard is actually a reflection of what’s going on. There is far too much glossing over everything. And people then turn in, and they don’t bother to communicate.’
Although local authority budget restraints are hindering the chances of setting up groups in hubs such as community centres, which Pinhorn is a proponent of, the potential of Forum Theatre to redefine conversations in communities from the grassroots is being explored by groups such as the Brighton Forum Theatre Collective. The collective is now into its second season after forming last year. Dee O’Halloran is one of the co‑founders. Like most of the group, she does not have a drama background, but was ‘really inspired’ after taking a short Forum Theatre course out of interest.
‘We just thought, this could be really beneficial to people,’ she says. The collective’s last performance, Beyond Care, explored issues of disempowerment in the workplace and concerns about attitudes towards social care for the elderly – a story based on the experiences of one of its members. Its next project is still in the early stages of development and may be performed to a wider audience in the city’s next Fringe Festival.
Activist stance
Other theatre projects have a more overtly activist stance, such as Clean Break, an organisation established by two female prisoners in 1979. They sought to ‘bring the hidden stories of imprisoned women to a wider audience’ and highlight injustices in the criminal justice system’s treatment of women. Their plays have explored themes of addiction, trafficking and the difficulties of reintegrating into life outside the prison walls.
Imogen Ashby, who has worked with Clean Break for more than 10 years and is now its head of engagement, directed its recent production, There Are Mountains, about the theme of release, which was written by Chloë Moss and performed by eight prisoners alongside actor Zawe Ashton, known for her part in Channel 4’s Fresh Meat. She explains that although there are both theatre professionals and offenders/ex-offenders involved, the heart of the stories is always about real experiences of the criminal justice system: ‘It’s why we do what we do.’ To begin the process of producing There Are Mountains three days were spent with women in Clean Break’s founding prison, HMP Askham Grange, asking what they felt it was important for audiences to know about the theme of ‘release’.
Clean Break has taken its political message on tour by performing at events such as Scotland Yard’s trafficking conferences and as part of the White Ribbon Campaign events in Scotland, which highlighted violence towards women. Another tour was directed at magistrates and sentencers, focusing on the impact of short-term sentences and alternatives to custody.
The performances have a unique ability to challenge preconceptions. Ashby quotes the reaction of the governors who had watched There Are Mountains and said after that ‘even though they had worked in the prison service for over 20 years, they learnt things they hadn’t thought about.’
Peace-building
In Northern Ireland, theatre is being used as a method of healing, reconciliation and peace-building by giving a human voice to the Troubles from both sides of the conflict through Theatre of Witness, a form developed by Teya Sepinuck. Since 1986 Sepinuck has been creating performances in her native US with diverse groups such as homeless people, refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, victims and perpetrators of domestic abuse and prisoners, including ‘lifers’. Four years ago she began a residency at the Derry Playhouse, during which she has produced plays addressing the burden of the conflict’s legacy for those whose lives have, in one way or another, been shaped by it.
Although the Troubles have long been a subject of theatre, the Theatre of Witness plays were set apart by the directness and honesty of its performers, who perform personally rather than mediated through playwrights and fictionalisation. Her process is based on extensive interviews with participants, from which a script is developed. This is designed to mirror their own words, which they then perform on stage as themselves. The goal is not just to tell stories of people that wouldn’t normally be heard, but also ‘to find the medicine in the stories, which for me means, “Where is the point of healing? Where is the point of transformation, the point of redemption?”’ says Sepinuk.
The emphasis on openness, in the context of post-conflict Northern Ireland, was ‘ground-breaking’, according to James Greer, a former combatant who performed in the 2009 production We Carried Your Secrets. The experience, he says, was deeply challenging, confronting his fears to speak of a past that felt ‘taboo’. In the end the performances had a lasting positive impact on him and the other performers: ‘For all of us it lifted a weight off us, lifted the weight of the past off our shoulders.’
Audiences too were deeply affected. ‘It was medicine for the soul for a lot of people,’ says Greer. He recently took part in a delegation for Theatre of Witness to the European parliament, where extracts of the productions were performed to assembled heads of state.
The profound impact is one Sepinuck has seen repeatedly in her experiences of doing Theatre of Witness, and her appraisal of the art form could be applied to many other empowering theatre projects. ‘I think the beauty of theatre is that it’s a group process of bearing witness. It’s almost like a group catharsis and there’s something very powerful about witnessing together,’ she explains. ‘It’s different from opinions, it’s different from discussion, it’s different from political discourse, it’s different from the news, it’s different from facts. Hopefully it’s penetrating at a deeper, more complex nature.’

Classic book: Things Fall Apart

admin — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 10:00:45 +0000

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was a simple act of revolution. Published two years before Nigeria’s independence, it set out its clear and controversial mandate: that black people can define themselves and, crucially, define their own history. In critical race theory terms, it can be seen as one of the first ‘counter narratives’.
With Achebe’s recent death it is worth looking back at the novel that led him to be considered the father of African literature. In it Achebe did the unthinkable: he presented a Nigeria, and specifically a pre-colonial African society, that had never been seen before.
Things Fall Apart describes Igbo traditions, rites and rituals as well as linguistic customs. It explores the old versus the new, while treading the tightrope between judgement and explanation. It wonders at an internal life in combat with daily necessity. And it examines in detail one man’s descent from power.
Informed by his intense desire to be unlike his drunkard, lazy father, Okonkwo is driven by a hunger for validation and status. A farmer, he lives in a village with his wives and children. Through the strength of his determination and wrestling in his youth, he has risen from the lowest to the highest ranks of his region, Umuofia.
But Okonkwo has two major flaws. The desperation to rid himself of his father’s legacy motivates nearly everything he does, and his uncontrollable rage makes him a good warrior, but brooding and difficult in peace times. He is a strict father, a brusque and demanding husband, continually dissatisfied with his life and what he feels are his lack of achievements.
As he is grappling with the struggles of being father to a boy he doesn’t understand, Okonkwo adopts a boy from another village, who has been given in forfeit. The boy fits well into his family and is the son he wishes he had. When the elders decide, after three years, that the boy must die, Okonkwo is shaken to his core but refuses to listen to advice to not have any part in the boy’s murder. The thought of appearing weak is more than he can bear and this sets in motion the events which will finally lead to his fall.
The ‘scramble for Africa’ heralds the beginning of colonial rule. Achebe presents it as inevitable, pointing to the mutually dependent relationship between racism, religion and greed. The new force uses commerce to gain the trust of the village. Whereas the white man’s religion embraces all and has different hierarchical structures to that of the Igbo, to the villagers it seems almost childlike in its simplicity. That is why it appeals to Okonkwo’s son, Nwoye, who is struggling to understand his place in his community and family. Christianity gives him an ‘answer’.
The juxtaposition of the old and the new, where traditions and customs become a site of struggle, is demonstrated by the conversation between a village elder and the missionary. White religion is cold and removed, whereas the Igbo gods live among them and through them. When it is apparent that some of the old customs are antiquated and the new religion gains ground, Okonkwo is left dismayed and disappointed.
In an accident Okonkwo shoots someone and is exiled for seven years. He dreams of a triumphant return but instead he’s hardly noticed. This and the fundamental changes that have taken place in his absence whittle away at him. The missionaries have arrived and like a tick under the skin, have taken a strong hold of Umuofia. Okonkwo laments the passing of the old ways. His is saddened daily by what he sees as the erosion of his customs, beliefs and way of life and he is furious that no one wants to fight this new religion.
The pre-colonial Igbo world is finally a lost one. The disintegration of the social and psychological structures of pre-colonial Igbo life and the forceful impositions of new ones defeats Okonkwo. All the foreboding and doom that fills him about the future turns out to be prophetic. It is Okonkwo’s disempowerment that leads to the book’s tragic end. He knows has no place in this new world.
Chinua Achebe, writing under the gaze of Discourse on Colonialism (Aime Cesaire, 1950) and Black Skin, White Masks (Frantz Fanon, 1952), popped the white supremacist bubble. He dared to be open with his criticisms of literary ‘blindness’ to racist writing. His reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness caused great controversy at the time. Could a literary classic be racist? He argued a resounding ‘yes’ and forced white literary theorists, uncomfortably, into thinking about racism and literature.
Okonkwo ends as a footnote in the story of the white coloniser, but with Things Fall Apart, Achebe created a novel that is embedded in the history of the continent. It is a part of literary thought and practice; it is part of our collective history.

Personal critique – Why are We the Good Guys?

admin — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 10:00:31 +0000

Established in 2001 with the aim of ‘correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media’, MediaLens uses a ‘propaganda model’ analysis inspired by Noam Chomsky to argue that mainstream newspapers and broadcasters are systematically incapable of challenging business and state power. In his latest book, the website’s co-editor David Cromwell offers both a critique of the ways the powerful convey propaganda through the media and a personal memoir.
Cromwell addresses several topics, including Iraq, climate change and the financial crisis, highlighting the narrow scope of media debates that rarely question the assumption of a benevolent if fallible west. He intersperses this with several formative moments of his life and his development as an activist.
Sometimes eye-opening information is uncovered. Consideration of the post-second world war Marshall Plan reveals how it was used as a cold war weapon to dissuade the Attlee government from nationalising industries. Chapters on the Iraq war and Iran expose both the media’s dissimulation of bias and distortions and the selective amnesia and hand-waving of many journalists when confronted on it.
That said, the book has weaknesses and its view of the world does not escape the good/bad guy dichotomy, with certain self-styled anti-imperialists left unchallenged. Cromwell denounces ‘the British media’ for trying to ‘silence or vilify’ Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, but does not address the rape allegations against him.
The final two chapters are the weakest, unconvincingly merging together existentialism, Buddhism and psychology to set out a personal philosophy in which social change seems to derive more from individual enlightenment than collective struggle. The result is an eclectic romanticism, in which enlightened individuals who have freed themselves from selfish indifference to others use compassion to overcome the egotistical corruption of civilisation.
This offers little obvious guidance as to how people constrained not by ‘indifference’ but by oppression can emancipate themselves. And strategic considerations as to how journalists can work within the limits of the capitalist press to speak out against power and ensure audiences receive accurate information are sidelined. Sadly, given the useful information compiled elsewhere in the book, this leaves political strategy sidelined in favour of empty moralism.

State of mind – The Invention of the Land of Israel

admin — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:00:46 +0000

In his much acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009), Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argued that the idea of ‘the Jewish people’ was a contradiction. Most Jews did not originate from ancestors who lived in Judea and Samaria. Rather, Judaism was a highly successful proselytising religion in the centuries shortly before the rise of Christianity and for some centuries after. Jews were united by religious belief rather than a common ethnicity; most of them always lived in ‘the diaspora’. There simply was no mass exile in 70 CE. The idea of ‘the Jewish people’ is no less problematic than that of ‘the Christian people’ or ‘the Buddhist people’.
But Zionists see the Jewish people not just as a nation, any old nation, but a chosen one, with a homeland given to it by a jealous God in far-off times. Even secular Zionists appeal, in some sense or other, to the bible and historical right as a legitimation for today’s Israel as ‘the Jewish state’. This is the subject of Sand’s second, equally iconoclastic volume of demystification, as he now dissects the invention not of the people as such but of its homeland.
The core of the Zionist dream as expressed today is for Jews to ‘return’ to Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel. Sand is unsparing in showing how the ambiguities of the term are exploited ideologically, for this term is found nowhere in the bible before the new testament and only emerged, hesitantly, in the rabbinical tradition after the final incorporation of Judea into the Roman Palestina. It developed as a theological concept, referring to a certain sacred space, never a geopolitical area.
Something like modern day Zionism was a Christian evangelical notion before it was a Jewish one, and the idea that real Jews should actually go to live in Palestine was condemned by rabbinical Jewry, even as a yearning for Zion featured as a centrepiece of the Jewish religion. How this was transformed, and how the war between nation-state Zionism and traditional Judaism was played out is told in great detail by Sand in this fitting complement to his first volume.

Fighting a plague

admin — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:00:41 +0000

At the peak of the AIDS crisis, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) developed an innovative model of social movement organising, featuring provocative direct action, striking visual propaganda and the use of a range of new technologies to document and disseminate its actions. It was also influential in transforming understandings of healthcare, drug testing methodologies, corporate profit motives, mass media reporting of the experiences of the marginalised and attitudes to queer people themselves. Given its major significance in social movement history and its abundant archive of audio-visual material, that ACT-UP had not been a subject for documentary film-makers had been a major source of frustration. With two major features out in 2012, however, that historical anomaly has begun to be corrected.
The better known of these films is the Academy Award-nominated How to Survive a Plague by journalist David France, which has also been optioned as a mini-series. The other is Jim Hubbard’s United in Anger: a history of ACT-UP, which he co-produced with prominent queer scholar and long-term collaborator Sarah Schulman. Both centre on the story of ACT-UP New York, draw on similar footage and interview subjects, were funded by similar sources and feature both filmmakers in each film’s credits. However, the documentaries diverge in tone, style and in their central case for the historical significance of ACT-UP.
For France, the lasting legacy of ACT-UP emerges from its early demand to ‘get drugs into bodies’ as a means of curtailing the dramatic effects of the ‘plague’ on New York’s gay male population. His film centres on the efforts of a small subset of ACT-UP, the Treatment and Data Committee, which later split off from the main group as the Treatment Action Group (TAG). This body transformed people’s relationship to the virus through radical self-education, revolutionising the relationship between healthcare providers, medical scientists, government regulators and the affected. France is not wrong – TAG’s activities in many ways transformed HIV care. However, watching his film leaves the viewer with the sense that the history of AIDS activism is one in which a group of (self-) educated New Yorkers, largely white gay men, stopped the plague in its tracks through forcing engagement with major drug companies and government regulators.
A more complicated history is told in Hubbard’s film, which sees the group as an object lesson in social movement organisation. Hubbard’s focus is on the tactical and strategic decisions of ACT-UP, including its use of weekly mass meetings and affinity groups. This dual structure allowed for collective decision-making, as well as autonomous organising in trusted small groups. United in Anger also places a much greater emphasis on visual imagery, graphic design and video, documenting the collective Gran Fury, whose iconic designs transformed the nature of social movement art, the Damned Interfering Video Artists Television (DIVA-TV), which recorded and distributed footage of ACT-UP’s actions, and the later ACT-UP Oral History Project, which Hubbard and Schulman coordinated.
Hubbard is also concerned that his film records not only the experiences of white gay men. Lesbians and other women were central figures in ACT-UP, as people who understood through their own experiences of organising against the unjust nature of privatised healthcare and inadequate public infrastructure. The impact of these injustices on the poor became more prominent as the virus increasingly affected broader populations. Hubbard’s documentation of the roles of IV drug users, people of colour, women and homeless people reveals that ACT-UP was much more than just a drug access movement. It saw that the institutions that governed US society – corporations, the state and the church – were all in need of radical transformation.
As a queer man who is just a few years younger than the central figures in this story, I am fortunate not to have had to live through the deaths of hundreds of lovers and friends. As beneficiaries of the legacy of ACT-UP, we must honour this history as a history of collective resistance to a virus that resulted in the radical transformation of treatment and health care for many people living with HIV. It is also essential, however, for us to honour this history as one that shows that access is an insufficient demand; our movements must be willing to demand structural and social change. Sometimes this requires us to literally put our bodies on the line.
As long as there is no cure for AIDS, as long as access to human needs is conditional on wealth and privilege, and as long as injustices remain in the world, ACT-UP’s battle is not over. These films remind us of those who struggled, achieving partial wins and suffering many, many losses. They also call on us to continue to ‘ACT UP, Fight Back, and Fight AIDS’.
Find out how to get hold of the films at www.surviveaplague.com and www.unitedinanger.com. Additional interviews with ACT-UP members can be viewed for free at www.actuporalhistory.org

Dictating the agenda – Murdoch’s Politics

admin — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:00:02 +0000

‘I have never asked a prime minister for anything,’ Murdoch told Lord Justice Leveson in one of the most memorable moments of his inquiry into the British press. And perhaps there is some truth in it: he simply did not need to ask.
The story of Murdoch’s obsession with politics and behind-the-scene details of his manipulative operations on the global political stage are told in David McKnight’s latest book. Differing from many preceding volumes on the magnate, McKnight’s book demonstrates that politics for Murdoch was not just instrumental to his business interests and that spreading his fervent devotion to neoliberal ideology was his foremost personal ambition. As Murdoch himself admitted: ‘I am not just a businessman working in a very interesting industry. I am someone who’s interested in ideas.’
The book elucidates how the magnate communicated and infused his political credo within his crusading News Corporation and far beyond. It illustrates how his loyal executives were chosen and groomed within a deeply political corporate culture aligned with the supreme boss’s right‑wing values. McKnight demonstrates that, despite Murdoch’s efforts to create a personal image of himself as a rebel and a rival of dominant elites, he and his loyal management have always been part of the same establishment that dictates countries’ agendas and destinies. Far from being outsiders, they shared dinners, country clubs, yachts and policy ideas with prime ministers and MPs.
Besides presenting a lucid account of Murdoch’s influence, the book has another undoubtedly momentous merit: it reveals how unchecked, concentrated, and unaccountable media power can alter the conduct of democracy. It was this disproportionate power that secured Murdoch his unprecedented political leverage and led to the numerous journalistic abuses documented by the Leveson inquiry. McKnight’s account of Murdoch’s role in shaping the values of the world we live could not be better timed or needed.

The people’s painter

admin — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 12:00:59 +0000

L S Lowry, Going to the Match, 1953. Professional Footballers Association, © The Estate of LS Lowry
Growing up in the mill towns of north-west England, as I did, it is hard not to see the work of L S Lowry with a particular affection and familiarity – as though something of ourselves and our surroundings has been magically encapsulated in the medium of paint. But this very ‘situatedness’ of Lowry has seen his work celebrated as part of the northern heritage industry – a parochial art of merely regional interest, devoid of major importance in the nation’s treasury of significant artworks. For the jet-setting metropolitan art world, Lowry is nostalgic, sentimental, slightly primitive and, worst of all, popular. Despite this enduring popularity, Lowry’s work has not been the subject of a solo-artist exhibition at any major gallery in Britain since his death in 1979.
The art historian Anne Wagner, co-curator with T J Clark of Tate Britain’s forthcoming Lowry exhibition, is unapologetic in dissenting from the prevailing consensus. ‘The national art scene is wrong. This view of Lowry as regional or irrelevant gets his ambitions and contribution as a painter wrong,’ she says.
‘The Tate has bought into this view of modernism in painting as being about the successive stages in the international rise of abstraction,’ she continues. ‘That’s one way of seeing modern painting, but it’s not the only one. What is modern painting? That’s still to be contested; it’s not a done deal. Has figurative painting any role to play in the depiction of modern life? It’s present even in artists where abstraction is so pivotal, like Picasso. Lowry offers something this country – as a nation rather than a set of regions – would be poorer without: the great achievement of actually having painted the effects of industrialisation.’
Political charge
There is clearly a political charge to this re-evaluation. ‘Lowry doesn’t paint from the perspective of the victors; he paints “life from below”, to borrow a key term in the emergence of social history. Seen in the light of the work of other contemporaries – socialist realism, commissions from US industrialists such as Henry Ford, or the iconography of national socialism – Lowry is remarkable for the way working class life is not represented according to the schema of one mode of propaganda or another but simply in its own right. So the act of representing the Hawker’s Cart or the Fever Van registers the aspects of life that would have been foreign to those unfamiliar with the daily realities of ordinary life in working class communities.’
Where we see crowds, we are not confronted with the ‘violent mob’ or the ‘noble proletarian struggle’ but simply people going to see the match, or some other scene of daily life. ‘From a formal point of view, how to paint the crowd is a difficult question. He portrays aspects of working class life without flinching but without reducing the scenes to tragedy or soap opera. But nor is it an affirmative picture of contented communities. It’s not kitsch, by which I mean it doesn’t do your thinking or feeling for you. He was well aware of this danger and became more and more aware of it in representing, in the later work, la comedie humaine, the shared deformity of our condition.’
Lowry spent decades working as a rent-collector – a side of his life that he hid from critics – whose rounds of the streets saw him encounter people on the threshold of the domestic and public spheres. But the view of Lowry as a technically unsophisticated or untutored painter working in a parochial idiom is very far from the truth.
Modern painter
‘We make no bones about this idea of what it means to paint modern life coming over from France and Lowry’s awareness of that,’ says Wagner. Lowry was taught to paint by emigre French impressionist artist Adolphe Valette at the Manchester Municipal School of Art. Wagner remarks on Lowry’s ‘difference from the impressionists but also his relation to the likes of Pissarro in attending to aspects of modern life such as the city-in-transition and the no-man’s land of industrialisation.’
Far from being a naive painter, Lowry was visually literate in the idiom of modern European painting. His work shows notable parallels with other varieties of 20th-century modernism. The angularity of intersecting lines and planes in depicting the excavation of the site for the Rylands mill in central Manchester are reminiscent of Soviet constructivist theatre designs of the 1920s. And there are striking echoes of the work of German expressionists such as George Grosz and Otto Dix after the first world war in The Cripples (1949).
Wagner explains that the exhibition is organised thematically but with a sense of Lowry’s development as an artist in mind. So rooms are devoted, for example, to the ‘Industrial Gothic’ (the dark side of the urban landscape, of human and industrial dereliction); the ‘Social Life of Labour Britain’ (the post-war lightening of the mood where we witness the interior of a hospital, recalling the newly universal access to healthcare, or supporters off to watch the football); and the big industrial panaromas of the 1950s and 1960s, which see Lowry synthesising elements of his work to that point.
Short of totality
But the curators make no claim to represent the totality of Lowry’s output. The dream-images of the fantasy girl/woman simply known as ‘Ann’ do not appear; nor are his private fetishistic/bondage drawings included, which depict a feminine figure trussed up into a sexualised ‘mechano-morphed’ form, or ‘made to submit to the torture of geometry’, as Wagner puts it. The latter are far removed from the conventional avuncular quality of Lowry’s public image, and approach the highly disturbing surreality of Hans Bellmer’s work.
I suggest that this was perhaps an opportunity missed to further unsettle the conventional ‘heritage industry’ view of Lowry. But the curators felt this would have distracted from the core theme of the exhibition, and – particularly in the wake of the Savile scandal and Operation Yew Tree – would have almost exclusively dominated its reception in a media currently dominated by stories of the abuse of young women.
Also missing are the seascapes, which Lowry considered among his best work. Wagner concedes that some of the late seascapes are ‘fascinating’ but proved too hard to integrate, and raised technical difficulties from a curatorial point of view.
Where the posthumous Royal Academy show featured 350 works by Lowry, Tate Britain will exhibit 95, an avowedly selective choice very much focused on his depiction of the north, industrialisation and working class life. But it’s precisely what is most ‘familiar’ in Lowry that we are being encouraged to observe afresh, to see what the prevailing assumptions and traditional genealogies of art history have occluded.
‘Lowry makes such an important contribution, making an honest visual record of all that “industrialisation” – which, together with empire constitutes Britain’s most world-historic legacy – has done to shape our modern lives. He shows something crucial. No-one was painting this stuff. He brought truth to the painting of it. That’s no mean feat.’ And as Wagner herself reflects, the importance of contesting the marginalisation and disparagement of working class experience in British culture takes on a wider relevance in the current economic climate.
‘Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life’ is at Tate Britain until 20 October 2013

Marching on to war – The March That Shook Blair

admin — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 10:00:01 +0000

The argument about the significance of the 15 February 2003 anti-war march in London has been going on ever since – and got serious again with a flurry of polemics to mark the 10th anniversary earlier this year.
Peace News journalist Ian Sinclair’s oral history is part of that argument. The very fact that he spent years producing this book shows that he thinks the demo was very important, a point he makes explicit in his introduction.
He has put in an impressive amount of work – more than 70 face-to-face interviews, dozens of email exchanges and a trawl through the clippings – and The March That Shook Blair provides fascinating insights into the thinking of a lot of the key people in the anti-war camp. This includes several who are critical of the role of the Socialist Workers Party in the Stop the War Coalition, which organised the giant march. Future historians of the British left will mine this book shamelessly.
It isn’t perfect. It could have given more space to demonstrators who were neither involved in the organisation of the march nor old hands in the peace movement and the left. The left pro-war argument gets a look-in only through reproduction of old clippings. And there’s no room at all for waverers or people who fell out with Stop the War (of whom there are quite a few).
There could also be more to contextualise the anti-war movement of 2002–5. Yes, it was primarily a reaction to the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ after 9/11 and Tony Blair’s support for it – but that’s not the whole story. Most of the key players interviewed by Sinclair had been around for ages before, but few talk about their previous formative experiences – the collapse of the Communist Party and the Labour left and marginalisation of CND in the late 1980s, the 1990–1 Kuwait war, the giant left bust-ups over Bosnia and Kosovo, the Socialist Alliance.
All the same, this is an important document of political and social history. It deserves to be widely read – even if it’s not the last word.

Two brains to rub together – Genes, Cells and Brains

admin — Sun, 25 Aug 2013 17:06:19 +0000

Hilary and Steven Rose’s new book is about the politics of biology, but it’s also about themselves. The Roses are professors of sociology (her) and neurobiology (him), both with a long-standing and vocal commitment to the left. They’re married, as the book quickly informs you with a touching reference to their meeting in a new left club on Oxford St. Such anecdotes reflect not just ways in which the personal is political but that the history of biology is both of these things too.
As junior academics in the 1960s, the Roses received an extra £50 a year on their salaries for each of their children. This was due to the influence of William Beveridge, who, as a eugenicist, wanted to encourage such bright young academics to breed. Ideologies, bodies, science and administration wrap together in the Roses’ life history, just as their book argues such matrixes of techno-science affect us all.
The book is both about the large and important abstract entities of its title – genes, cells and brains – and the institutions, people, ideologies, offices, publications and, above all, money that not only help bring such entities into human understanding but direct what we do with them. It is critical, pointed and clear in its explanations of the political economy of modern biology, and how this is significant not only for our understanding of how the world works, but how we imagine ourselves in it and how we choose to engineer it, including engineering ourselves.
The spectre of reductive materialism haunts the book, as one might expect from a Marxist take on biology. I remain unconvinced that Victorian ideologies that influenced early Darwinian concepts of evolution really explain that much about the politics of biology today. There is nothing ‘inherent’ in the sociology of science. Humans are just not so mechanically simple. Still, the Roses offer several useful lines of critique. There’s a neat passage on the ‘outsourcing of ethics’ through the structures and uses of specialist bioethicists. They raise a sceptical eyebrow at Lord Sainsbury’s £11 million of donations to Labour and oh-so-generous refusal to take a salary when he got the job he so coveted as science minister.
They also note the influence of the Wellcome Trust as ‘the ten-thousand-pound gorilla in the genomics room’, not only significantly bankrolling their own science but lobbying the government to follow their lead too. They could probably be more critical of the trust, which may have done an enormous amount of good but should not be above criticism. As Stella Creasy MP has asked, how does it justify its investment in the high-interest lender Wonga?
In some respects the Roses depict society sleepwalking into significant and dangerous changes to the life sciences. Science journalism is partly held accountable, failing in its role as fourth estate with an over-reliance on ‘churnalism’. There’s also a finger pointed at the architects of the new left for simply not paying enough attention to science.
I’d personally cast some blame on the sociology of science for a lack of public engagement, although these issues are complex and the interests that have ‘outsourced’ and obfuscated public debate on the politics of science, for neoliberal ends, have been a force to reckon with.
In some ways, I was left with a sense that the Roses feel it’s too late to save science for the people. There’s a tempting whiff of truth to such pessimism, but I’m more hopeful. For all its socialism, the story told by the Roses seems rather preoccupied by big names. Arguably this is appropriate for a book about science, which is a highly hierarchical business dominated by loud personalities, despite occasional posturing otherwise. But I suspect more social history/ethnographically-inspired empirical work, talking to the middle-ranking workers of science, would have produced a different picture. I think it’s through the building of horizontal networks between such workers that we’ll see positive change.
The book also felt slightly dated in places. It’s all a bit old-new left. What about the newer-new lefts, the ones that write blogposts, not books, that build and break networks online, make internet memes to parody Dawkins and are increasingly more worried by environmental sciences than biology? Where do these new monsters of techno-science fit into the scheme of science in society? Are there ways they might occupy scientific spaces, reclaim areas of knowledge and the very notion of techno-utopianism? Might they break the institutionalised nature of much so-called citizen science and public engagement, ignore the publication relations messages of groups such as the Science Media Centre, pick constructive fights on Twitter with Ben Goldacre and make new social movements for the 21st century all their own? I think they might. Or at least I think they have potential.
If you’re interested in science in society (and you should be, because those who are hold the keys to our futures), read this book. But don’t be taken in too deeply or depressed by its neater stories. Let it make you angry enough to want to learn from more than just the good Professors Rose.