The Turnpike Gallery in Leigh is celebrating 40 years of contributing to local culture with an exhibition entitled The World We Live In. The gallery is situated in the Turnpike Centre on Civic Square, just off the main street. The Centre, which also houses meeting rooms and the town’s library, was purpose built in 1971, just at the time when the area’s main sources of employment – coal-mining and the cotton mills – were beginning a rapid process of decline.
There is certainly something to celebrate here – especially in a week when Brent council closed half its public libraries, part of the wider destruction of public services that is the price being paid for bailing out unscrupulous and incompetent banks. The Turnpike is exactly the sort of public asset at risk in these desperate days. So it was good to discover that it was bustling with life – a party of school children with worksheets were noisily engaged in recording their responses to the exhibits, and a steady stream of adults strolled in to view the exhibition (some, perhaps, after changing their library books downstairs).
The exhibition focusses mainly on contemporary art, a mix of local, regional, national and international art work, some of it quite challenging. It consists of 26 works selected by the Turnpike Gallery from the Arts Council Collection to celebrate the history of the gallery and reflect something of the place in which it is situated.
Some of the artists in this show are represented in the gallery’s small print collection, including Victor Pasmore, William Scott and Tom Phillips. Several of the artists have previously exhibited at the Turnpike over the last 40 years, including L.S. Lowry, David Hepher, Frank Auerbach and Rachel Whiteread.
The title of the exhibition is taken from the painting by Carel Weight, one of David Hockney’s tutors at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s. It’s a painting that speaks of the loneliness and isolation that can be a part of urban life. Speaking of his painting in 1991, Weight said, ‘It’s just two people. They may have been in love with each other, I don’t know. But they’ve been very close but it’s all come to nothing. They’re just two solitary figures. That’s very much my theme. It’s similar to my diploma picture in the Royal Academy, The Silence [shown below, but not in the exhibition]. I think love and all that sort of thing is rather superficial. You can love people, but it doesn’t bring you any closer to them’.
The curators of this show have brought together works that, in very different ways, tell us something about living in an urban post-industrial environment, particularly in the north-west of England in a town like Leigh. There are works which have local references (such as Ian Walker’s Little Chef, Astley) and those which in some way depict the industrial landscape and heritage (such as William Scott’s Slagheap Landscape). More generally, there are those artists who reflect upon the built environment of towns and cities (David Hepher, George Shaw). Others focus on the banal or overlooked elements of the everyday (such as Richard Wentworth or Rachel Whiteread).
Little Chef restaurants, with their distinctive red and white signage, appeared along the roadsides of Britain in the 1980s. Walker began photographing them in 1982 and saw the restaurants as one aspect of the increasing Americanisation of British culture. He commented, ‘When I first started photographing them, they seemed to be merely a Disney-ish pop-culture phenomenon. Now I have come to see them more and more as representative of a society where the car-owning, meat-eating family unit is the norm and deviation is frowned upon. So I hope these pictures are both funny and significant at the same time’.
William Scott was largely known as a still life painter but began to develop a looser, more abstract style in the early 1950s. The drab colours of Slagheap Landscape evoke a landscape scarred by the spoils of the mining industry. The loose, painterly brushstrokes create a sense of the painting being somewhere between a figurative representation and an abstraction.
David Hepher’s paintings examine the urban and suburban, seeking to reveal how buildings change according to how they are lived in. Always working from life in his South London neighbourhood, Hepher began painting suburban house fronts in 1969 before moving on to the architecture of council estates. The exhibition caption notes that Hepher once said, ‘I would like to think that the pictures could make people look differently at the flats around them, to see beauty in objects that they normally dismiss as ugly’. Yes, I thought, as I looked at his painting, but I bet you’d think differently if you lived there.
George Shaw, who is shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2011, grew up in Tulse Hill, a council estate in Coventry. His paintings are inspired by memories of that place and depict empty playing fields, bus stops, lock-up garages and run down housing estates. He paints using Humbrol enamel paints, usually associated with boyhood Airfix kits, which give his works a glossy, impermeable finish.
I wrote about George Shaw earlier this year, and it was the knowledge that a painting of his was on display here that brought me to the Turnpike. The painting is The End of Time, which shows the site where a local pub, The Woodsman, stood before it burnt down. Years earlier, when it was called The New Star, his mother worked there and his father had the odd drink there. Shaw recalls it as being post-war British modern — ‘which is a longer way of saying it was shite’. He doesn’t know why it was renamed The Woodsman, but suspects it was a marketing gamble. Shaw remembers it not so much as a place where he drank, but as a place he passed by every time he went to visit his mother. The title of the work is inspired by a line in the Eliot’s The Wasteland – ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’ – and it is part of a sequence of works that explore the passing of time.
I like George Shaw’s pictures and I hope he wins the Turner Prize. These are truly images of the world we live in.
A photo of a plastic cup skewered on a fence spike might not strike many punters as constituting ‘art’. But Richard Wentworth wants to fundamentally change the way we think about art, sculpture and photography. Avoiding anything monumental, he finds his motifs in the everyday world instead. His photographs record little actions of human intrusion in the natural environment that he has noticed. So when Wentworth sees somebody has stuck a polystyrene cup on top of the spike of a metal street fence, what is significant is the evidence of the deed. It’s the significance of the unintentional: where others may have simply seen a polystyrene cup on a fence – or not noticed anything at all – Wentworth records the minutiae of some passer-by’s inconsequential act.
The Rachel Whiteread work that features in this exhibition is also the kind of thing that annoys some people. It comprises six resin casts of the spaces beneath domestic chairs. Each cast is a different shade – indigo, slate, tea, lime, antique gold and rose – and they look a bit like a row of fruit gums. The casts are individual, reflecting the different designs of the chairs that she selected. Presented in a straight line, each cast makes present an absent space for one person.
Euston Steps – Study is one of several paintings made by Frank Auerbach in the train stations, building sites and streets around his studio in London’s Camden Town. This is one of a series of paintings depicting the steps at Euston Station. While the word ‘study’ suggests that this is a preliminary experiment for a larger or more polished work, in fact this is a finished painting. The expressionist, thick impasto brushwork and the palette of browns, greens and oranges are typical of Auerbach’s painting of this period.
Chris Killip started out as a commercial photographer, but in 1970 gave up working in advertising to concentrate on the photography he really wanted to make. In 1977 he helped found the Side Gallery in Newcastle and was the director for 18 months. Rocker and Rosie Going Home is part of a body of work produced in the North East which focusses on those living on the margins of society – the unemployed, the homeless, the dispossessed. Rocker and Rosie Going Home was taken at a sea-coal gatherers’ camp at Lynemouth, Northumberland, where Killip lived and photographed regularly in 1982-4. The sea-coal was part of the waste jettisoned by a National Coal Board pit and washed ashore. Killip exhibited 70 ‘Seacoaler’ photographs at the Side Gallery in the early months of 1984, when Britain’s most testing struggle of loyalties since the General Strike of 1926 had just begun. The Miners’ Strike of March 1984 to March 1985 divided families, communities and the nation at large.
LS Lowry is pretty much the local lad here: he lived and worked just down the road in Manchester and Salford all his life. He worked as rent collector, a job led to him walking all over the city. He saw children playing in the streets, people returning from work, going off to work, gossip on the front steps, incidents, market places and Whit-processions. ‘I saw the industrial scene and I was affected by it’, he said. ‘I tried to paint it all the time. I tried to paint the industrial scene as best I could. It wasn’t easy. Well, a camera could have done the scene straight off’.
The Park features the stylised ‘matchstick’ figures which he was so well known for, and is painted in his familiar palette of ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white. Lowry said that his land and townscapes were composites – ‘made up, part real and part imaginary … bits and pieces of my home locality. I don’t even know I’m putting them in. They just crop up on their own, like things do in a dream’.
Two pieces by Michael Landy face each other across the gallery. They are angry works. The intricate drawing (above) relates to his installation, We Leave The Scum With No Place To Hide (below), which draws attention to the impact on people’s lives of making workers redundant in order to cut costs and improve efficiency. Landy has said of the piece, ‘Most of my works come out of anger. That’s difficult for me to formulate visually, and in trying to visualise it I came up with Scrapheap Services. It’s principally about people being discarded and the loss of human potential’. Scrapheap Services featured thousands of small figures made by Landy from litter he collected every day as he walked from his home to his studio. In the installation the figures were destroyed by passing them through a shredder with rotating teeth. The words ‘We Leave The Scum With No Place To Hide’ can be found in the drawing Scrapheap Services.
Leaving this stimulating exhibition, I noticed, above the door to the toilets, this quotation from Pablo Picasso: ‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life’. That could well stand as the mission statement for the Turnpike Gallery as it forges ahead for what will, I hope, be another 40 years.
As I noted earlier, the exhibition at the Turnpike comprises works chosen from the Arts Council Collection, the contents of which can be viewed online. This is one of at least three websites that I know of that allow anyone to view works of art in public collections. The Google Art Project is the result of Google collaborating with some of the world’s most acclaimed art galleries (MoMa in New York, the National Gallery and Tate Britain in London, the Uffizi in Florence and the Hermitage in St Petersburg to give just a few examples) to enable people to view more than a thousand artworks online. You can’t view all the works in a particular gallery, but where Google Art Project wins hands down is in the astonishing resolution at which the works have been captured, and the application of Google Street View technology, so that you can literally walk through galleries and turn and look at paintings.
But to my mind the most welcome project is the BBC’s Your Paintings which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It will be made up of paintings from thousands of museums (including those held in store), as well as paintings held by other public institutions (such as NHS Health Trusts) but not necessarily on public view. It’s an excellent concept that’s still under development.
That's How The Light Gets In 
I intended to comment on this post earlier, because I love the art you chose to feature. (Rachel Whiteread’s “fruit gums” are particularly evocative for me, and I loved “The End of Time” and “Rocker and Rosie.”) I was reminded to come back and take another look today when I read this post by Andrew Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/10/can-brutalist-architecture-help-explain-the-london-riots.html. “Arrangement in Turquoise and Cream,” indeed.