Best of 2013

As I write this I'm coming to the end of the first year of my PhD (technically I'm still at the MPhil stage), which is exciting but also quite terrifying as I don't know where the last twelve months have gone and I feel like I should have more to show for the year. It's been a big challenge going from three years of working almost full-time to being a full-time student without the structure and company of an office job, but it's also been stimulating, exciting and eye-opening. What I wanted to get out of doing a PhD was a challenge, and to be challenged, and I definitely feel a lot less certain of myself and my place in the world now, with certain assumptions of what I was good at (writing, organisation, time management) turned upside down. It's become increasingly apparent how many things I need to improve at.

Nonetheless, having more energy (in theory) because of being able to spend less time in an office, I've been able to get a lot more involved in Islington Mill Art Academy throughout the year, taking part in regular crits, reading groups and outings, which has provided both a really good support network and a receptive audience to talk about and present what I've been working on. When I found out I was going to be a student again, I was also looking forward to being able to join a university orchestra, but my university doesn't appear to have one. Luckily, a short google search revealed that Oldham Symphony Orchestra has the same conductor as the orchestra I was in as an undergraduate. Joining has been another big challenge as I've not played violin regularly for at least five years. It's been a great way of continuing my musical education, though, as not coming from a background immersed in classical music I've always found it difficult to get into a lot of the classical music cannon without actively playing it.

I also spent more time in London in 2013 than I have ever done before, much of it alone. Taking to the streets on foot, with an A to Z, has really helped me overcome my phobia of the city. After many years of finding London grey, grimy, overcrowded and depressing, 2013 is the year I finally found some things to like about it. Mainly, the food-related delights of Drummond Street, Euston Tap (cider branch) and, above all Hampstead Ponds. At Hampstead Ponds the water is warm and calm and there is plenty of space to swim, but best of all student entry is only a pound! I can eat curry and drink cider in Manchester any time, but as far as I know Manchester doesn't have any ponds I can swim in and the liberating experience of swimming in Hampstead Ponds is by far the most enjoyable thing I have ever done in London.

Also in swimming-related news, I finally braved Salford Quays for an open water swimming session in Ontario Basin, once the water temperature had crept above the 14 degrees required to swim without a wetsuit, and it was one of the best experiences I have ever had in Greater Manchester. At 21.7 degrees the water was warmer than the sea, and surprisingly fresh and clean. The 500m course is quite a long way to swim, but feels a lot less monotonous than laps of a pool; it's strange to swim underneath huge cranes, with trams constantly going past. I found the distance of the course to present a mental challenge as much as a physical challenge: being surrounded by a vast stretch of deep, black water, not knowing what's beneath, is quite a lonely experience and a test of endurance, although the atmosphere of the facilities was very friendly and the regulars were a diverse bunch of people.

Some other things I have enjoyed in 2013:

Music 

A good chunk of the last few months has been soundtracked by my standout album of the last couple of years, Light Up Gold by Parquet Courts. A classic punk rock band who channel the spirit of the Saints, etc, and bring to mind Pavement in their slower moments, listening to their record reminds me what a great motivator rock music can be: sometimes it's the only thing that makes you feel like you're fully alive, have blood in your veins and actually want to get up and do something. Highlight: Stoned and Starving.

I've also been enjoying Thee Oh Sees' solid album of spaced out rock, Floating Coffin, particularly Night Crawler. Low's latest album, the Invisible Way, was also a surprise delight. After losing interest in Low around the time of their last album, Just Make It Stop reminded me why I spent so many years bewitched by Mimi's voice and their distinctively sparse sound.

This year I've also heard the best band to emerge from Manchester in a while, Denson, who make really beautiful, dreamlike electronic rock with a slightly surrealistic edge. Unlike most Manchester bands I've enjoyed in the last few years, it's not grounded in the here-and-now (and doesn't hark back to the 1960s) but appears to be transmitted down from another planet altogether and belong to an entirely less-familiar world. For fans of Sleeping States, Cryptacize and Broadcast, my favourite track is Milkismurder.

For the same reasons as above, the best gig of the year was Parquet Courts at Gorilla. They're definitely a band to jump up and down to, and I took part in a mosh pit for the first time in several years, leaving the gig soaked through in sweat.

An early highlight of the year was Dinosaur Jr at the Ritz. I love Dinosaur Jr for the way they make music that is undisputedly noisy, but at the same time incredibly beautiful. J Mascis's unparalleled control of his guitar and the way he makes quite complicated music appear effortless is a sight to behold. It's just a shame that the gig took place at the corporate behemoth of the Ritz, which immediately put my back up by confiscating my bottle of water at the door. As a lone female, I also felt outnumbered by a ratio of around 25:1 by pairs/groups of men of a certain age.

Also enjoyable was ice queen-like, impossible impeccable-looking Molly Nilsson's mournful dance music at Islington Mill in Salford and Franziska Lantz (Saydance)'s weird, atmospheric electronica performance at the Anthony Burgess Foundation to launch the Cacotopia exhibition.

The most entertaining band I saw this year was undoubtedly Joyce D'Vision, a three-piece fronted by a man in a dress which plays joyous and surprisingly musically accomplished covers of Joy Division. I saw them in From Space, a small ceramics studio on Chapel Street, Salford, supporting fun American anti-folk band Cars Can Be Blue, surrounded by artist Liz Scrine's creations, and it was one of the best moments of the summer. Bristol bands the Nervy Betters and Two White Cranes played out the end of a long hot summer in a marquee in a Chorlton garden beneath a tree groaning with apples.

After many years of finding him annoyingly blokey and musically undistinguished, 2013 was also the year I sort of got into Billy Bragg, a bit, after buying my mum tickets to see him at the Bridgewater Hall as a birthday present. The rest of it I can take or leave, but I've now come round to the idea that Milkman of Human Kindness is one of the most perfect songs I've ever heard, beautiful in its simplicity and utterly affecting in its lyrics. I admit that the rest of Life's a Riot with I Vs Spy is pretty great too. Another late highlight of the year was Yo La Tengo at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea who, incredibly had just marked their thirtieth year of playing together as a band.

Film 

I thought 2013 was a very strong year for film. The year started with McCullin, a documentary about the great British photographer focusing largely on his work in war zones. The film is harrowing and incredibly moving, making you question everything around you and really putting things into perspective. The first ever Saudi Arabian film I've seen, Wadja, was also moving and inspiring. Equally uplifting and heartbreaking, it's a real eye-opener. Blue is the Warmest Colour definitely didn't feel like a three-hour film. While it wasn't always comfortable watching I found it to be a bold and honest depiction of love, obsession, adolescence and growing up. It was also good to see a depiction of female sexual desire which didn't present women as passive accessories to male sexuality but as sexual beings in their own right.

On a lighter note, the film I was looking forward to most this year, Pedro Almodovar's I'm So Excited, was everything I could have hoped for: colourful, silly, musical and hilarious from start to finish. 2013 was also the year I saw my first Studio Ghibli film, after many years of assuming they would be cloyingly twee, and I loved everything about Up On Poppy Hill from the style to the animation to the story to the music, which stayed just the right side of retro.

Woody Allen's latest, Blue Jasmine, was surprisingly sophisticated, and I found myself mulling over for a few days afterwards, along with tense American drama Breathe In which provided an unflinching portrait of ordinary human beings deeply flawed in their self-obsession.

I also enjoyed some of this year's documentaries, including John Akomfrah's multi-sided the Stuart Hall Project, which presented his ideas and writing through archive footage and Hall speaking in his own words. I also enjoyed Ken Loach's Spirit of 45. Although it wasn't subtle, I found many of the interviewees inspiring in their attitude and spirit.

I also thought that the annual Viva! Festival of Spanish and Latin American film at the Cornerhouse, which I often find really patchy, was the strongest one I have attended over the last five or six years (unless I have just become better at choosing films!). I enjoyed a moving if depressing documentary of the Chilean folk singer Violeta Parra, Violeta Went to Heaven, with a fantastic soundtrack, along with Spanish film Ali, a simple and touching tale of love, relationships and growing up. However, the stand-out highlight, which was also one of the best films I saw this year, was Catalan teen drama the Wild One, which built a sense of unease and suspense with great effect, before revealing a conclusion that was genuinely shocking, a rare quality nowadays.

Books 

I've hardly read any non-academic books in 2013, but William Mitchell's autobiography Self-Portrait: The Eyes Within, which arrived a couple of days before Christmas, was the best present I could have hoped for. As well as spending several decades at the forefront of artistic innovation and experimentation, Mitchell has revealed himself to be a great story-teller with plenty to say about not just art, but society.

Television and radio

After several years of only watching factual television, I finally found the BBC drama for me, Him & Her. I don't know if it speaks to me because I would quite like to stay in bed all day if I had the chance, or because the characters are so naturalistic and take delight in the mundane (and often gross) aspects of life and relationships, but it's an impeccably acted and cast show.

Grayson Perry's In the Best Possible Taste was an interesting experiment, although I found it a bit simplistic and impossible to relate to any of the class/taste 'tribes' he identified (the resulting tapestries, the Vanity of Small Differences, currently on display at Manchester Art Gallery, are immense, storytelling works of great beauty and detail which are well worth investing time in and bear up to repeat visits). I found Paul O'Grady's take on a similar subject, Paul O'Grady's Working Britain, more nuanced and enlightening. However, Grayson Perry definitely won in the radio stakes, with his series of Reith Lectures which were laugh-out -loud funny, insightful and provocative.

While I find that much of his writing and broadcasting often borders on incomprehensible, I also enjoyed Jonathan Meades' offbeat tour of my parents' homeland, the Joy of Essex, which made me endeavour to explore more of my own country.

Theatre 

Arthur Miller's All My Sons was one of the best productions I have ever seen at the Royal Exchange. It could have backfired, but I thought the all-black cast worked really well and added a whole new dimension to the play.

Art 

The stand-out highlight of the year was Tino Sehgal's installation This Variation at Mayfield Depot during Manchester International Festival. I thought I knew Sehgal's work reasonably well, but was genuinely surprised by the immersive, unexpected and surprisingly intimate performance he pulled off. It didn't hurt that Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, an a capella performance of which featured in the installation, is in my view the peak of twentieth century pop music.

Dan Graham's Past Future Split Attention was also a highlight, as was Graham's post-performance talk in which he offered entertaining insights from his polymath mind on everything from the Shaker movement to psychology and rock music. The other highlight of the International Festival was the Biospheric Project, a mind-bogglingly innovative initiative using an old industrial building and outdoor site to explore sustainable ways of growing fresh, local produce in urban settings.

An unexpected London highlight was Souzou, the Wellcome Institute's exhibition of Japanese outsider art, comprising drawings, paintings, textiles, sculptures and models, much of it made by residents of mental institutions. Much of it was bizarre, imaginative, tactile and intricate, but above all it was bright, colourful and beautiful.

Also in London, Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain provided an interesting overview of the artist and his life and work: several of the works I found most affecting were those made out of unlikely materials in prison camps (also with camp magazines), representing what can be made with all that is to hand.

An early highlight of the year was Carl Andre: Mass and Matter at Turner Contemporary in Margate, which showed how powerful simple materials and forms can be, regardless of concept.

One of the most effective projects I saw was Maurice Carlin's Performance Publishing at Regent Trading Estate in Salford, a printing project and art installation on a grand scale that reconfigured the artist and viewer's relationship with an otherwise bland and vast former warehouse building, and transformed the previously empty space into a carpet of colour.

The Piracy Project at Grand Union in Birmingham was a show that was greater than the sum of its parts: a growing collection of artists' books exploring notions around copyright, appropriation, ownership, authorship and meaning.

Manchester's Bureau Gallery made some interesting use of their new space in a Spinningfields office building, notably Matthew Houlding's miniature, colourful, architectural-style models, which played off the transparency of the space, and the repetitive motifs of Evangelia Spiliopoulou's dot paintings, which revealed more the more you looked at them. It was also a good year for Castlefield Gallery, particularly Nicola Ellis's delicate drawings, Sam Meech's film Noah's Ark, where music complemented archive film of seaside towns to great effect, in Spaceship Unbound, and Joseph Lewis' old-fashioned-looking and furniture-fitting-esque instruments in the current show, Radical Conservatism. Another highlight from one of Manchester's smaller galleries was Anthony Hall's fun and inventive Tabletop Experiments at Untitled Gallery, which brought together science and art to great effect.

I loved the Museum of Everything theme at Venice Biennale, which blended art with anthropology, and felt that it was a far less ostentatious and more subtle and effective event this year than in previous years. Highlights included the Starry Messenger, Bedwyr Williams' immersive film and installation which took visitors on a strange, Jan Svankmajer-esque journey through the off-site Welsh pavilion, as well as the films and wallpapered surroundings of the Slovenian pavilion, based around the unfortunately-named 'failed national icon' of the Anophthalmus hitleri beetle, exploring place, politics, architecture and monuments, as well as Ed Atkins' deadpan exploration of Andre Breton's home, the Trick Brain.

Architecture 

The most impressive new building of the year was the Co-operative's long-awaited new headquarters at 1 Angel Square. I was lucky enough to go on an architect's tour shortly after it opened, and to hear about all the sustainability measures which have been built in to make it one of the most environmentally-friendly buildings in Europe; these encompass not just environmental and technical elements such as the air circulation system for heating and cooling the building, but working practices such as paperless offices and hot desking. The open plan nature of the building means it can easily be adapted for future uses and clients, and the forward-thinking vision behind the building, and consideration of its legacy, particularly impressed me. It was interesting to hear how the architect drew on the Co-operative's architectural and symbolic heritage in the area, from the steel and glass of the 1960s CIS tower to the curved structure of the beehive with its associations with both the co-operative movement and the city of Manchester. Seeing the building from the outside really doesn't prepare you for the scale of the building; apparently the atrium is big enough to park a Boing 747 (should the need ever arise). The building has fantastic views over Manchester and really utilises its position with roof terraces, however the thing which lets the building down is its over-the-top, self-consciously quirky décor, which is probably meant to feel fun and informal but comes across as piecemeal and jarring and I imagine will date very quickly, from the abundance of tea cup-shaped, pop art-style seats to informal meeting areas themed around palm trees. Another design flaw, in my view, is the apparent lack of microwaves in any of the shared kitchen areas: being able to look forward to a big bowl of steaming leftovers at lunchtime is one of the things that gets me through the working day.

Daniel Fogarty's Totem: Work, leisure and the art of being useful

In March 2011, during the Merz Man festival that celebrated all things Kurt Schwitters and related, dance professor Valerie Preston-Dunlop led a walk down Manchester's Oxford Road reminiscing about running away from home to study under Rudolf Laban, who developed a new form of dance notation called Labanotation, which she described as being like a 'grammar' for dance¹. She recounted how Laban helped factories apply his theories of movement to mass production – an example of how the arts can overlap with and be useful to industry. By teaching workers how to co-ordinate themselves in the most effective ways, and making the most of their repeated movements, he could help maximise production in the factories and enable the workers to be productive for longer, at the same time as humanising their labour. She said that workers could also be taught to move in a certain way to do things they might not be used to doing – for example, women could unload heavy goods from containers on the ship canal.

The artwork of Daniel Fogarty is preoccupied with repetition and prolonging production. He applies multiple processes in the creation of one work, carrying on adding layers and corrupting the original until what started as one thing becomes something else and takes on an entirely new medium and existence. Among the works on show at Totem, Fogarty's first solo show in Manchester at Bureau gallery, is 'Cottage industry', a photographic print of an unfocused computer screen displaying a digital drawing. Another, 'and... and... and...', is a print of a photograph of a set of pinned up photocopies of a blow up digital drawing. 'Stammer' is a series inspired by digestive systems which started as sculptures made of unfired clay, which have been photographed and then painted over. Any one of the digestive systems series could be viewed as three works in one – each has elements of sculpture, but also photography and painting. More work is created for the artist, who keeps producing after what could have been taken as a finished product has been created – and, just like the constant, efficient churning of the digestive system, this reworking could keep on going indefinitely. However many times you repeat something, there are endless variations.
However, repetition has not bred perfection. All, rather than achieving a smooth, sleek finish, are roughly done and imprecise. Sometimes, roughness or a lack of precision is seen as a mark of a product being underfinished or carelessly made. In Fogarty's work, it's the opposite: it's the result of a work of being overfinished, or laboured over beyond the call of duty. Several of the works in Totem are made of concrete, including 'Plant Plant Plant Plant', a series of sculptures made by pouring concrete into moulds created using bricks, which were inspired by the patterns of suburban lawn edging and borders. Concrete, which is commonly associated with building work undertaken on an industrial scale, is generally a material that is valued more for its usefulness – its ability to be hardwearing outdoors in public places – than its decorative properties or suitability for craftmanship on a small scale. A concrete plant pot that was produced during Fogarty's residency at Bureau in summer 2011, part of the 'Helmet/shelter' series, is an object that is both beautiful and useful and has a function within and outside the gallery.

Laban tried to standardise ways of moving, or find a way to teach a common way of performing certain movements, despite movements being highly individual and differing naturally from person to person. One of Fogarty's interests is the imposition of standardisation through subtle graphical languages, especially motorway planting and the language of motorways. For example, before standardisation was imposed through road signage, silver birch trees were planted near junctions as a psychological reminder to the car driver that they were approaching a turning point in the road. We're surrounded by these hidden markers and symbols.

Even though Fogarty's works are created using moulds, or repetition of movements, actions and labour – methods typically used for mass production – he has corrupted any standardisation that might be expected to result from these processes and the marks of the artist have slipped through, visible in the finish of the artworks (just as the stammer is a highly individual movement, an involuntary utterance that slips into controlled movements of speech and language). Whatever material is used, whether paint, concrete or clay, there's always some kind of human presence visible, from the artist's brushstrokes to the pinching of clay. Unlike mass production, in which the efforts of the individual are subservient to the whole and are not visible in the final outcome seen by the consumer, the gestures and actions which have led up to Fogarty's artworks are a part of the finished product.

The theme of work (explicitly referred to in the title of the set 'Cottage Industry, Leisure Industry, Modern Industry'), and utility and usefulness, recurs throughout Totem, along with the tension between work and leisure (in cottage industries, this is the fact that production in cottage industries took place in people's homes, thereby blurring the distinction between leisure/living spaces and places of work and labour). In the set of gardening-inspired concrete sculptures 'Plant Plant Plant Plant', similarly, there's a clear crossover between work/utility and leisure (as well as an overlap between the decorative and the useful).

Typically, gardening is an activity associated those who spend a lot of time at home, for example retired people, as they have the time to devote to what can be quite a labour-intensive hobby, or weekend gardeners keeping busy on their days off. At what point does a gardener's labour cross over the fine line between work and leisure and start to become pleasure rather than toil? Production such as gardening is only defined as 'work' or 'leisure' depending on its context. The term 'gardening leave' is used to refer to a time of not-quite employment (it usually means an employee has left their employment but is still being paid by the previous employers for a period to prohibit the former employee taking up new employment), implying that gardening is the next most productive way of keeping busy to employment. Perhaps this is also why gardening appeals to retired people – it must be hard going from being productive eight hours a day, five days a week, for most of your working life, to not being expected to be useful for the best part of the day and not being watched over to ensure a certain level of production is maintained. As with Laban's factory workers, whose movements were made to conform to patterns and certain ways of doing things, work is a form of control and conditioning through repetition and routine.

If the meaning of 'totem' is taken as an emblem or symbol upheld as epitomising the values of a society, work could be seen as a totem of our society. Whatever right-wing scaremongers say about 'benefit scroungers', we are still a society built around the cult of work: a person's social worth, status, and often self-hood, is defined in terms of their employment, productive output and salary, rather than their hobbies, interests or leisure activities (think about how often you're asked what you 'do', and how you go about answering). Indeed, leisure and spare has become an industry in itself, including exercise. Whereas people would once have gone for a walk or a cycle ride (or been engaged in physical work throughout the day), we are now sold gym membership and personal trainers, an example of how work and 'doing something useful' is encroaching into our increasingly regimented leisure hours (going to the gym is commonly a chore or a duty rather than a pleasure).

For many young artists, art is something they are forced to fit into their spare time. Young people often find it difficult to make a career out of being an artist and artistic production has to be squeezed around the pattern of day jobs. In the context of the current economic and political climate, and cuts to the arts, it's time to look again at the value of artists and the arts. It's interesting to look at programmes such as the Federal Art Project, a depression era government scheme in the United States. Artists were employed as part of the New Deal to work painting murals in public buildings such as schools and post offices. The project, part of a wider scheme called the Works Progress Administration, provided accessible, inexpensive entertainment. It also acknowledged the value of artists, recognising professions such as 'artist' (along with 'playwright', 'musician' and 'writer', pursuits supported by parallel projects) as viable career paths, and the potential uses for art and culture to boost morale and be a force for public good.

Totem previews at Bureau, 60 Port Street, Manchester, on Friday February 10 from 6pm-8pm. The exhibition continues from February 11-March 17, opening Wednesdays to Fridays from 12pm-6pm and Saturdays from 12pm-5pm.

For more information visit www.bureaugallery.com.

www.danielfogarty.co.uk 

This text was written concurrently with an exhibition text comprising an exchange between the writer and the artist that took place in January 2012. This exchange will be available at the exhibition and online.

1Laban and Schwitters were both refugees from the Nazis and, in the 1940s, discussed collaborating on a Modern Dance Opera.

Merz Flâneuries: Meeting David Medalla

Artists David Medalla and Adam Nankervis have spent the last week retracing the footsteps of Kurt Schwitters, visiting some of the places associated with Schwitters in the North West — including Warth Mill in Bury, described as a ‘claustrophobic terrifying dungeon’, where Schwitters was incarcerated with other artists in 1940, and Elterwater in Cumbria, site of his famous Merz Barn. Schwitters also spent some time in Salford and Manchester so, acting as flaneurs, in the spirit the nineteenth century French dandies who observed the city, the pair have also wandered around Manchester and Salford seeing what these places throw up. The resulting flaneuries, including text and images, will be shown in Tate Britain in two years time for a Schwitters retrospective.

During their visit, they stayed in the bed and breakfast at Islington Mill in Salford, where I had a chat with David. He explained: “We haven’t had any rest. Flaneurie is a French thing that involves walking around noting things, observing them and initiating actions. The end is organic.” He explains that the flaneurie fits in with his work as: “I do a lot of walking around. I’ve done things in the street all over the world — in the slums of India, in Africa, in Latin America." He added that the unpredictable nature of flaneurie is another appeal: "One oscillates between necessity and choice or a combination of both. I enjoy anything and I say yes to everything. A lot of my work is very ironic and totally unpredictable.”

David was born in the Philippines but went to Columbia University in New York, and has lived and worked all over the world. He met Adam in the Chelsea Hotel and they’ve been long-term collaborators but David describes it as more like a ‘dialogue’ because he lives in Bracknell and Adam is currently based in Berlin.

David’s half-century career has been fuelled by chance encounters and impromptu performances, taking “coincidences and chance and uniting them in a curious way”. Particular favourites he reminisces about are Mr Casanova International, a street performance where young men were asked to read sex adverts from the local newspaper, only realising they had taken part in a performance years later when they looked back and remembered and a toy Bambi shitting (photocopied) $100 bills all over Manhattan — an artwork which nearly got him sued by Disney! Spanning performance, land art and kinetic art, he’s also famous for creating hundreds of machines, including sand machines and bubble machines, and sculptures shaped like flowers that close when it’s cold and open when warm, and respond to favourite smells and sounds, such as lovers’ armpits, birds in the morning and jet planes overhead.

His works are often interventions into cities and places, reacting and responding to what’s around. 'Elegies for bendy buses', for example, was inspired when “babies in prams started making very interesting sounds. They were imitating the closing of the doors like a mechanical lullaby”. For one performance, David walked up and down Westminster wearing boxing gloves. “People were depressed about having to go to work on a blue Monday so I punched them. Some would punch me back which was quite terrifying.” For another work called Salute Roma, undertaken when David was homeless, he slept on a different one of Rome’s seven hills on each day of the week.

He’s made a hat, which he puts on during our interview, that he’s built from found objects during his visit: an alphabet in Chinese and English, playing cards arranged in full houses and part of a Salford University student newspaper with the headline ‘Change that’s just too big to fathom’, because he “liked what it said”, which he found during a visit to Salford Museum and Art Gallery. Across the road, David also took inspiration from a Karl Marx quote on the wall of the Working Class Movement Library, reading ‘Philosophy only explains the world. We have to change it’, although he thinks “Marx should have added three words — ‘for the better’.”

He plans to develop the hat further as a performance — “I will stand in front of estate agents in London saying ‘it’s full house’. I think I will be hated by estate agents — they rent even garages out for £1million”— and eventually visit the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent to create a ceramic version.

David has long been a fan of Schwitters’ work, which also crossed genres to encompass everything from collage to sound poetry. He explained: “My take on Schwitters is personal. I really like his work. I stayed in a cheap hotel when I first arrived in Paris and in a gallery two doors away was a very beautiful work by Schwitters — the rusty wheel of a pram called The Sailor, which I didn’t understand and it didn’t look like a sailor to me but I asked the gallery who it was and later I found out a lot about Schwitters."

He continued: "The Merz Barn has had a great influence on artists and on architects, for example Frank Gehry. Eventually they’ll make a musical of Schwitters’ life. His poems are beautiful when they are recited by him, even with old fashioned, amateur recordings.”

David particularly admires Schwitters’ 'transformation and renewal', explaining: “He thought that with the right spirit we can make a new kind of world, he was very optimistic. Schwitters was from a middle class, comfortable family but they [the Nazis] said he was a degenerate artist. He had to flee Germany and was incarcerated but he had that strength. He had to live in the cold in the barn in Cumbria with his wife and no heating except body heat and that’s admirable. That’s a lesson people can take. Human beings can suffer any form of destruction but with the right spirit can transcend it.

“I have a moment of sympathy as I was conceived and born during the second world war and ninety per cent of Manila was bombed during the war but I had an opinion that you could build a better world.”

David thinks it is important to, as he terms it, ‘surf the angst’. He advises: “There are moments when you get angst, despair, worry and fear. Learn how to use the moment and make the most of crisis and calamity.”

The Merz flaneuries project isn’t the first time David has produced work inspired by Schwitters or visited the Merz Barn in Cumbria. Two years ago he did a performance for which participants were given each other’s phone numbers and told to ring each other at midnight on one side of the barn, and recited their favourite vegetables on the other side of the barn, a response to Schwitters moving from Hanover — the city — to Cumbria — the countryside. David explained: "It was a poem, a choral symphony. It started to have a rhythm.”

David has been invited back to Islington Mill for a residency in October, and is interested in the city’s renewal. He visited Manchester for the first time in the 1960s, and remembers “the mills were closing and it was the end of the industrial revolution. There was a feeling of having been bombed (which it had, during WWII).”

He is looking forward to returning: “The new culture is really rising up. It’s amazing. When I come back I hope to do something about Manchester.”

Merz Flaneuries was part of a series of city wide events celebrating the work and legacy of Kurt Schwitters throughout March.

Find out more at www.merzman.co.uk.