Rotterdam (on living in cities)

Few people, I am sure, would describe Rotterdam as a city that is beautiful or picturesque. Interesting, yes, for its cultural scene and as an example of post-war rebuilding, but nice to look at – no, not really …

Unlike other Dutch cities such as, say, Utrecht, which could be an English cathedral city, on arrival the centre of Rotterdam appears unusually grey and faceless, and has the unrelenting, crammed-in bustle of a big city. It’s dominated by the architecture of corporate power in tower blocks muscling towards the sky. Rotterdam is one of the world’s largest ports, yet the canals and houseboats for which the Netherlands are usually known are less prominent in the layout of the city here. What is prominent are the large rivers that cross the city, particularly the wide Maas, which separates the northern side from the generally poorer southern side, accessible through an art deco tunnel. Like Manchester, there is a marked north-south divide, with many residents of the north seeing no reason to visit (or actively avoiding) the south. Unlike Manchester it is the south of Rotterdam that is perceived as being more run-down, crime-ridden and lacking in investment, although it also offers opportunities for cheaper living and creative spaces. The Dutch people I chatted to (all two of them) mentioned racism, and bureaucracy. They also complained about the high cost of renting and the expense of eating out.

Spend some time in Rotterdam, though, and some sorts of charms reveal themselves. It is the city’s striking multiculturalism, from the people on the streets to the profusion of cuisines evident in its cafes and ethnic grocery stores, which saves it from blandness. Unlike the current fashion for overpriced ‘street food’ in the UK – gourmet snacks sold at restaurant prices – this is street food in the true sense. In central Rotterdam, the air is filled with the smell of doughnuts, batter and Surinamese pastries, with snacks sold from inconspicuous carts. Surinamese cuisine is BIG here. Hailing from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in Central America, it’s very meaty, yet also has much to offer vegetarians, in the form of bread, lentils, spices and vegetables. Imagine a savoury-sweet cross between the spices of Indian cooking and Chinese flavours, textures, stickiness and crunchiness, that also somehow tastes like something you’ve never experienced before.

Rotterdam’s architecture and planning also feels genuinely mixed use, in the way that we can only dream of in many new developments in most English cities. The modernist central shopping area is rather attractive: in the centre, it seems normal to live above shops and the noise of children playing floats down from roof-top playgrounds. In contrast with our English city centres, which remain for the most part places to be passed through, brief stopping places for young, affluent, childless professionals on their trajectory out towards the suburbs or countryside, schools, churches, doctors and other amenities slot seamlessly into the commercial cityscape.

There’s also a sense of fun and inventiveness, perhaps because the city knows it’s not beautiful, and isn’t trying. The best example of this is in the cluster of cube houses, one of which is now a museum with disorientatingly sloping walls and the rest of which include residential dwellings, a hostel and even a laser quest experience.

Public art is abundant, from the big-name pop art and explanatory information boards of the centre to more commemorative and illustrative sculptures which blend into the landscaping in the housing developments of the suburbs. You could be forgiven for failing to notice it, but it contributes to an overall sense of pleasantness.

There may be little in the way of obvious parks or greenery, particularly in the central areas, but the inner residential district of Nieuwe Westen is picturesque, pretty even, a place where you get a sense of the Rotterdam that existed before the city was almost flattened by bombing during the war. Tall, bay fronted, early twentieth century apartment buildings line rows of gently sweeping tree-lined streets, separated by canals populated with swans and geese and crossed by small bridges. It’s idyllic by anybody’s standards. Although each doorway emerges from the pavement into almost impossibly vertiginous, rickety wooden stairs – which you can’t imagine attempting to navigate with a pushchair, let alone a wheelchair, decreased mobility or drunkenness – the paving slabs outside are punctuated with permanent, designed-in, numbered grids for playing hopscotch, and on-street play equipment. Living in such close proximity to your neighbours, noise travels easily from flat to flat. Luxuries such as baths, freezers and even ovens appear to be rare here, and kitchens are on the small side, but it’s compensated for by rooms that are full of light and space.

Also attractive is the city’s municipal brick modernism, particularly in the renovated, sand-coloured Spangen estate, an early example of deck access housing complete with decorative detail and in-built flower boxes. Built around manicured lawns, its centrepiece is a communal washhouse, now converted into contemporary art gallery A Tale of a Tub. It’s also heartening to swim in the warm waters of a restored 1930s pool, the airy Oostelijk Zwembad, where light filters through the glass bricks of an elegantly arched roof.

Reach out towards the edges of the city, and you discover that Rotterdam’s apparent lack of private or public garden space is compensated for, to some degree, by patchworks of holiday plots in areas set aside for weekend visiting. The network of neat, orderly sheds on the banks of canals constitute a city in miniature, a microcosm of Dutch society. Irrigated by waterways, each allotment-esque patch features a home-from-home, a retreat, with space for growing, relaxing or escaping. Something for the weekend. Somewhere for the weekend.

There’s a sense of freedom, too. Notable is the ease with which it’s possible to get around the city, with cars separated from bikes in their separate lanes. Cyclists have priority at roundabouts, and in the main both sides observe the rules of the road. There's still congestion, there's still speeding, cars which jump red lights and fail to stop at pedestrian crossings, but in general there's more politeness. With cycling such a part of life – everyone does it – anyone in Lycra or specialist clothing stands out. Cycling is a different thing here. In Rotterdam, cycling is not about speed, but for getting around. Rather than crouching over the handlebars of a racing bike, ready to be on the defensive, cycling is usually done sitting up and is an altogether more sedate affair: Dutch bikes are wide-framed, heavy, clunky. It’s also striking that children of all ages cross the city by themselves, wandering the streets in pairs or in groups, from an early age. I followed a young boy on a stunt bike, singing to himself and cycling with his arms outstretched, waving like an airplane. He blithely cycled around a motorway roundabout like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Rotterdam strikes me as a city for living in, in a way that makes you feel slightly wistful on your return to the UK. For me, the jewel in Rotterdam’s crown is undoubtedly its large street market, held several times a week and spilling out onto the streets surrounding a glitzy new market building by MDRDV. Whereas the indoor market, surrounded by apartments that face out from giant, lurid images of fruit into a curved atrium, sells artisan produce to those with money to burn, outside you can browse for necessities such as batteries, knock-down toothpaste and fresh produce at the same time as antiques and new shoes, flea-market style.
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This article is based on notes I wrote more than a year ago. I can't claim to know the city intimately, so this content may be wildly off-mark; my last visit to Rotterdam was in April 2015, but it's only now that I have felt well enough to form them into the article I was meaning to write for so long. Although my long-term partner at the time, Daniel Fogarty, moved to Rotterdam to study for a two-year MA at Piet Zwart Institute, it wasn't ever really a consideration that I would move too. I visited him there a couple of times, but whenever I returned to Manchester from Rotterdam it was a huge relief, as ultimately Manchester is where I belong, and where my life is (and, to be honest, it was a relief to be back on my road bike, racing down the A6 side-by-side with the traffic). Other than Dan, there was nothing for me, really, in Rotterdam, but I sometimes wonder whether I could have lived there, and there are certain elements of Rotterdam (particularly the street market) that I certainly wish could be replicated in Manchester.

Introducing the Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books, Salford, opening Thursday May 8

Books are an integral part of our communications and culture, from education and learning to enjoyment and leisure, but the content within them isn't always finished with as soon as the last page has been turned. A new library and publishing project in Salford goes beyond the idea of books as a closed matter, where the author has the definitive last word on the subject, by placing publications at the heart of an ongoing conversation and dialogue around words, images and ideas.

Based at Islington Mill, Salford, in May and June, before it moves on to other venues around Manchester and Salford for the duration of a six-month pilot programme, The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books is part reading-room, part-library and part publishing house, revolving around two-month cycles of collaborative residencies by artists, designers, writers and curators. Visitors will be invited in two days a week – each Thursday and Friday starting from Thursday May 8 – to browse a permanent reference library dealing with “books about books and books about collections of books”, as well as temporary libraries curated by practitioners from different fields, with the space also bookable by reading and discussion groups. This opportunity to read and share ideas will be complemented by information about the books as well as talks and other events which will provide a way to approach the ideas under consideration, as well as an exhibition or new piece of writing commissioned at the end of each residency. “It's a way of building up materials but it's also a feedback loop, rather than just regurgitating content,” explains artist Daniel Fogarty, a co-founder and director of the project. “Publishing takes in everything from the Sun newspaper to academic articles, so it's the perfect tool.”

Kicking off the programme is a library and series of talks selected by Manchester-based writer and promoter Marcus Barnett, which celebrate “all sorts of things relevant to what a 'DIY culture' could mean”. Selections include books published by Zer0 and Unkant, which Marcus describes as “shoestring operations run by really thrilling people who care”, with three books being launched during Marcus's residency: Robert Dellar's Splitting in Two: Mad Pride and Punk Rock Oblivion and Esther Leslie's Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Saturday May 10) and Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy (Wednesday May 14). Marcus explains that each author covers “with palpable excitedness post-punk, communism, cultural clashes and exchanges”, and that “all want another, better world from the mire of the old based on creation and excitement”. For Marcus, part of the appeal of the The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books was helping to address a perceived atomisation among different areas of DIY culture. “We're all in agreement that the type of people who create art, put on shows, play in the DIY music scene, write 'zines or read communist books are rarely in the same rooms and rarely deal with or socialise with each other, when generally speaking all of their creative output stems from similar desires of collective excitement and wanting things to be better,” he explains. Another event taking place is the second annual SPRING conference (Saturday May 17, £10/5), which brings together people from around the country to discuss the current status of leftist politics and provide another experience of the Left than “self-righteous idiot guys being smarmy at each other all day in empty rooms”. Among the speakers are Mark Fisher, Julian Stallabrass and Yassamine Mather, who Marcus describes as “really interesting people with colourful lives and perspectives”.

This bringing together of writers and artists, both from the local area and further afield, to forge connections between often disparate groups of practitioners and creators, is a key aim of the The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books. “Artists and activists usually talk about things in completely different ways, so we hope they can have a more productive conversation,” explains curator, writer and co-director Lauren Velvick. “We're going to be facilitating dialogue and not just waiting for it to happen.” Designer and curator Robert Carter, the third director, added that is hoped that a crossover in interests can be found: “We want to attract an audience based on the content of the books and events, not on loyalty,” he explains. “The first curated library, chosen by Marcus, is about ways of functioning and thinking about things and making things work, so it's going to attract critical writers and people who are politically active – but we are going to be inviting the same people to come to an exhibition of Daniel's work later in the project.”

The Exhibition for the Life and Use of Books initially grew out of a feeling that the Manchester art scene was too 'predictable and safe', lacked an impulse for critical conversation (perhaps inevitably given that exhibitions are often attended, curated and written about by people drawn from a relatively small group of friends, colleagues and peers) and did not provide a place for these kinds of ideas to express themselves. “There is a lot of art in Manchester that is either very grassroots, or museum and gallery-based,” explains Daniel, “but there is nothing in the middle and nothing that is supportive of activity on that level – the Manchester art scene doesn't do a good job at reaching out to other people, groups and institutions. There is a lot of that kind of activity in London but it sometimes doesn't feel like it is an option for people up here. The Lionel Dobie project set a good precedent, but you got the same people there who went to all the shows. We're bringing a critical dialogue to Manchester that's not immediate in some exhibitions.” Lauren added: “We're not afraid to be more politically committed and go beyond art and theory. We're bringing in people from outside who can be more critical and who aren't completely ensconced in the Manchester art scene where you have to support each other.”

The first six months of the project are very much about “a series of experiments to uncover unknowns” so the founders can encounter new people and ideas and “find out what kind of platform we want to make for artists and writers”, before a framework is found for the future of the project. Although one inspiration is London's X Marks the Bokship, which Rob says “created a type of accessible, common space where the material published occupied the grey area between exhibition, magazine, live event and thing you put on your shelf”, the organisers admit they don't know what's going to happen and say it's a case of trying out a number of different things and seeing what works. As Rob explains, “you can't just adopt a model from London and bring it to a different city. Its an excuse to do something different outside all the noise of London.” Lauren adds: “We will set set up a few boundaries and things that are definitely going to happen and the rest is just left to chance and who turns up. Quite a few people have already said they're looking forward to it and have been looking out for something like this.”

There will be an opportunity to get involved in the library at a Hackathon at Islington Mill (Saturday June 7). Also in June, Daniel will have an exhibition at nearby Artwork Salford (Thursday June 19-Thursday June 26), coinciding with a publication looking at design language. Later in the summer the second temporary library will be drawn from the collection of Manchester-based publisher Michael Butterworth and his science-fiction imprint Savoy Books, bringing together visual art and writing to discuss questions around creativity. Alongside this will be a residency by artist and designer Ann-Marie Milward, who uses weaving to translate sound and text into visuals. The final curator will be chosen following an open call.

As the project progresses, it is anticipated that it will move from pure text to more visually-engaged work, with Rob explaining that “people are becoming more sensitive to graphicacy – the visual equivalent of literacy” as people increasingly read online, and that the project is hoping to understand how shifts such as this affect learning. The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books aims to strike a balance between publishing digital and physical material, with Rob observing that even in the digital age publishing is more important than ever. “I know a lot of people who access material online but print it before reading it, he explains. “Everyone has got their own private publishing and editing process and journal, even if it's just bookmarking pages and links. Everyone organises their own collection of books in a way. We are creating a physical space, not just an online archive, and physically our presence will inform that process.”

The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books can be visited by appointment in the first floor common room at Islington Mill, James Street, Salford on Thursday May 8 and Friday May 9, and will be opening on the following Fridays and Saturdays throughout May and June. For more information about how to visit and get involved contact info@lifeanduseofbooks.org, visit www.lifeanduseofbooks.org or follow on Twitter @ECLUB_.

Interview with Huw Wahl, director, To Hell With Culture (free screening at Federation House, Thursday May 1, 7pm)

From poet, novelist and critic to anarchist, educational theorist and co-founder of the ICA, Herbert Read was known as many different things at different times. From the First World War until his death in the late-1960s Read was responsible for a prolific outpouring of books and essays, with many of his ideas pervading the way art, culture and education were seen in relation to society after the Second World War. However, despite being a towering figure at the time, today Read is far from being a household name. A new film by Manchester-based filmmaker Huw Wahl, which premiered at the ICA earlier this month, offers a portrait of that re-presents some of Read's ideas and invites the viewer to consider what currency they might still have today.

While Read wrote on everything from child art and industrial design to existentialism and Jungian psychology, Wahl's film, entitled To Hell With Culture, takes as its starting point Read's 1941 essay of the same name, which launched a searing critique of an elitist notion of 'culture' as something which is rarified and separate from the rest of society. Another equally rousing assertion, 'to hell with the artist', derides the concept of an artist as a special person who stands above other types of workers. Read's message, says Wahl,  “seems quite complicated but can be very simple”: culture isn't something to be collected and set aside to be accessed in museums, but it's there everyday, as an integral part of life, and every person has the capacity for creativity.

It was Read's take on creativity, and the direct terms in which it was stated, which attracted Wahl to the essay. “'To hell with the artist' is a wonderful thing to say,” he says. “It's a very powerful statement. I liked that a very meek and mild man wrote a very strong essay about how culture should be something you shouldn't really have to talk about, saying 'it's just there'.” He adds: “One interviewee in the film said 'he writes very good English', and the the way he writes about creativity is very vibrant and direct. He allows contradictions in what he's saying, but there's also some kind of continuity. It's different from a lot of writing today. A lot of writing now is very embedded in the institution and critical theory, post-modernism, structuralism, etc, whereas Read's was a very modernist, vital, loving way of writing.”

More than seventy years after To Hell With Culture was written, the film presents Read's ideas in aesthetic form, as a visual essay which draws a line from modernism to the present-day. Wahl went back through Read's archives at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, which houses correspondence and manuscripts, and his library, which is now held at the University of Leeds where Read studied, to get closer to the man and his ideas. A shy, bookish figure emerges, who was completely absorbed in his work and avoided the limelight; very little footage of Read exists. “He was a poet so he knew how to communicate, which was probably a good thing as he wasn't a charismatic man by today's standards of mouthy celebrities,” explains Wahl. “Although he has a lovely presence on film, gentle and deeply thoughtful, he wouldn't have been on the Culture Show. He was lucky to be around at the time of men of letters.”

Although Wahl is a member of the Manchester-based Castles Built in Sand collective, which takes an anthropological approach to film-making and culture, To Hell With Culture is his first solo venture into full-length film-making. Wahl embarked on the film at the start of 2013, shortly after finishing an MA in photography at the University of Central Lancashire. As well as interviewing members of Read's family, including his son, the art critic Benedict Read, Wahl spoke with artists who were directly influenced by Read. Among these were Canadian artist Luis Jacob, as well as Wahl's father Ken Turner, a painter, performance artist and co-founder of radical environmental art collective Action Space, which took art out of the gallery and into everyday life; Turner read and was inspired by Read's work in the 1950s.

Something else which comes across strongly in the film is Read's connection with the Yorkshire landscape, and his ideas about the authenticity of nature. “He was very patriotic as a Yorkshireman,” explains Wahl. “He was very rooted to that land and to nature.” The voices in the film are also punctuated by Read's poetry, including a reading by the Mersey Sound poet Brian Patten of 'My Company', a love poem about Read leading his company into battle at a young age during the First World War. “I've never really been into poetry,” admits Wahl, “but I really got it. I was really touched.”

Although Wahl acknowledges that “many of Read's ideas have been carried out”, and he by no means agrees with everything Read had to say, he believes To Hell With Culture can still pose important questions about the way culture and creativity are viewed in society today. “I was told that 10/15 years ago people would laugh at you if you started talking about Herbert Read, but now people are going back to modernism because they want something a bit more solid again,” he observes. “In some ways society is a lot more free but in other ways there are a lot of restrictions. Systems are a lot more closed now.”

At the time Read was writing, and in the years immediately following the Second World War, there was concern that craftsmanship and British culture was under threat from cheap, mass-produced items and imported cultural forms. Educators and critics placed a strong emphasis on fostering skills of 'discrimination', promoting sincerity and honesty in design and attempting to 'improve' public taste. “Read was talking about beauty,” summarises Wahl, and though this type of discourse can seem naïve, paternalistic even, today, post-modern society has seen the culmination of the idea of culture as commodity that Read cautioned against, with creativity recognised insofar as it can be packaged and sold back to us. “We live in a disposable, consumer culture where culture is dictated to us and everything we're surrounded by is ugly,” says Wahl. “There is still a sense that some people know better than others – we place some people on pedestals and say others are scum. Culture is controlled as a commodity and it's all about the free market and what can benefit the market. The artists who do well are those who have a brand or who can shock. It's the opposite of what creativity's about: it's not about being successful or competitive. There is something very basic and human about being creative but it's been corrupted by the idea that money is a good exchange for creativity. Read was saying that culture should be there within society and that a very different society can be created through education and art.”

Wahl considers the three tenets of a natural society Read identified in To Hell With Culture – all production should be for use and not for profit, each should give according to his ability and each receive according to his needs, and that the workers in each industry should collectively own and control that industry – to be “very simple and incredibly relevant”. He also finds the idea of everyone being a special kind of artist to be “still such a strong and important thing to say”, and has been encountering present-day parallels in Ken Robinson's ideas that creativity is “something that is there to work on and something everyone should be given the opportunity for”.

To Hell With Culture has been kept deliberately short – it clocks in at just under an hour – so that space could be left for discussions afterwards where people can create their own conclusions and ideas. As Wahl says, the film is a way to “remember the person but take the ideas”. He explains: “Artists are always questioned about what they are trying to do and their purpose. It is useful for artists to think about what an artist is in society, what they do and what they might be aiming for.”

To Hell With Culture will be shown at Filmonik, 3rd Floor, Federation House, Balloon Street, Manchester, on Thursday May 1, 7pm for a 7.30pm start, free, followed by a Q&A with director Huw Wahl, art historian Danielle Child (who appears in the film) and Castlefield Gallery director Kwong Lee.

Keep an eye on Huw Wahl's blog for screenings around the country this year, as well as at Leeds International Film Festival.

Huw Wahl and art historian Dani Child are organising a screening and accompanying one-day symposium, 'To Hell with Culture? Re-examining the commodification of culture in contemporary capitalism', at Manchester School of Art on Thursday October 30 as an opportunity to discuss some of the ideas raised by the essay and the film further in a contemporary context.

Keywords feature: Art Culture and Society in 1980s Britain at Tate Liverpool

I was recently asked to write this feature for the Skinny about a new exhibition which opens at Tate Liverpool this week (Friday February 28). It was a last-minute commission, and it would have been nice to have spoken to more people involved in the exhibition, but it was good to have an excuse to read more Raymond Williams as his books Culture and Society and the Long Revolution, along with his essay Culture is Ordinary, which concern the development of culture and social change, were among the best things I read last year.

Keywords: Art Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

In 1976, a book was published which offered a new way of understanding and using language, defining and interpreting familiar and inter-related words such as culture, art, revolution, family and society. Written by cultural theorist Raymond Williams, Keywords is a social, historical and cultural guide to the evolution and meaning of everyday words we often take for granted. Taking Keywords as its starting point, a new exhibition at Tate Liverpool continues the conversation Williams sparked around language more than three decades ago. Artworks from the 1980s, the decade in which the book's ideas found particular resonance among a generation of artists responding to upheavals in society, are juxtaposed with a selection of words from the book in a specially-designed exhibition space by artists Luca Frei and Will Holder. Aiming to enhance the visual and conceptual legibility of the artworks, the installation will encourage visitors to ponder the complex and often charged relationship between what they see and the language which can be used to describe it.

“The impetus of the exhibition came from conversations we had about the book with artists making work in the 1980s, who said that at the time they were beginning to be influenced by the growing field of cultural studies and by books such as Keywords as much as by art history,” explains Gavin Delahunty, Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool and curator of Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain. “Keywords is a good read and an easy, not over-academic way for people to engage with key ideas about culture and society. It is one individual's attempt to unpack complex words and what they meant for him and his time, which provides a tool and filter for people to understand the world around them.”

The exhibition uses artwork and language to present a very complex and diverse moment in both British history and British art. “It was an extraordinary decade where there were so many shifts in culture and society that continue to have an impact today,” explains Delahunty. It was also a confusing time. On the one hand was the affluence of the City of London, but elsewhere in the country miners' strikes, the Liverpool riots and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were taking place. “A whole raft of social issues were bubbling to the fore,” says Delahunty. “The old histories were being dissolved and disintegrated, creating a fragmented moment which we have tried to capture in the exhibition.” 

Keywords also aims to showcase the work and ideas of artists who did not necessarily receive widespread recognition at the time but reflected the increasing plurality of voices in the art world. Through provocative and challenging visual and performative acts these artists helped change not just ideas around what belonged in the art gallery, but the vocabulary which was used to describe it. “In the 1980s one of the huge changes was that new voices were starting to be introduced into the art world, often drawn from what had previously been seen as marginalised communities,” explains Delahunty. “Artists were immersed within powerful new movements based around Second Wave feminism, race, sexuality and ethnicity and wanted to point out the historical and social imbalance, which wasn't representative of the diversity of the UK.”

To help the audience engage with the work and messages on display the curators went through the whole of Keywords and chose thirteen words to show alongside the artworks, looking for both their frequency and their resonance today. Among the words chosen was 'materialism', which Delahunty points out “was associated with the 1980s catchphrase 'greed is good', but is also a word that is in people's conversation at the moment and is linked to our understanding of the world and morality”. Another is 'criticism', which Delahunty links to the critical approach artists used to protest gender stereotypes and the invisibility of black and female artists in the 1980s. One word which was quickly agreed on was 'liberation', which Delahunty says is related to the development of identity politics. “A whole generation of artists were making art addressing questions of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, against a backdrop of the horrors of the British colonial past,” he explains. “There was a whole new generation of artists who were touched by that.”

The energy of the 1980s and the desire for artists to tell their stories comes across strongly in the exhibition in a series of very powerful visual statements. The curators asked artists active in the 1980s which artworks they considered to be game-changing at the time. Although several of the artists they came up with are not household names, and some of the artworks in the exhibition haven't been on display in decades, they have had an enduring influence in the art world. These include work by socialist feminist artists such as Rose Finn-Kelcey, as well as Helen Chadwick's provocative 'Carcass', last shown in 1986; this is a work which Delahunty says has “stimulated and inspired so many artists”. Displaying 'Carcass' is a logistical feat, comprising a column filled with food waste which will transform into a living sculpture as nature takes its course over the lifespan of the exhibition. Another key work is Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard', which is grounded in the near-hysteria of the 1980s AIDS climate. The work, initially shown on a slide projector but now updated to a digital format, depicts the central information point which helped thousands of men and women access expert information on the virus. “It had a huge impact,” explains Delahunty. “It shows the day-to-day aspects of the work at the gay switchboard as well as people going out socialising. It demonstrates how, in a time of confusion and fear people still had time to hang out and be friends and get on with life.” If one work sums up the exhibition, it is Donald Rodney's multimedia sculpture 'Visceral Canker', which uses coats of arms depicting aspects of slavery, bloodlines and former colonies to speak of Britain's colonial past.

The keywords incorporated into the show do not directly correlate with or illustrate the artworks, but rather provide a 'jumping-off point' and stimulus for thought and discussion. They ask questions such as 'could you apply the word 'violence' to this artwork, or are they worlds apart?' As Delahunty explains, “the exhibition is more about slippages of language and how it changes over time, just as artworks evolve over time.” He adds: “We live in a world with a strong desire to contain life within language, but artworks can't be reduced to single words. They are complex, nuanced and textured and constantly changing and mutating.”

This is very much in the spirit of what Raymond Williams intended to show with the publication of Keywords; he hoped that the book would provide a starting point for ongoing discussions and prompt further collections of words and meanings. The exhibition at Tate Liverpool perfectly demonstrates this potential. Keywords has been reprinted to coincide with the exhibition, and is as relevant today as ever as language continues to evolve to meet new times and new contexts. As Delahunty says, “The book is so open-ended it still allows the freedom to have conversations about what words are, how we use them and how we make sense of them in everyday situations.”

For more information visit www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/keywords-art-culture-and-society-1980s-britain.