The Manchester Bees documentary: Shrieking Violet interview

I enjoyed being interviewed for an excellent radio documentary about the history and presence of the bee symbol in Manchester, past and present, from the industrial revolution to co-operatives and co-operation to the annual Manchester Day Parade, by Salford University student Matthew Beckwith, alongside other Manchester writers, photographers and tour guides among others. Listen online:
 

Histories written in metal: UHC's Tin Town at Campfield Market

From the late seventeenth century up until his death in 1758, the Second Earl of Warrington amassed a large silverware collection at his country home in Dunham Massey in Cheshire, encompassing everyday household objects ranging from plates, cutlery, candlesticks, bread baskets and chamber pots to large water cisterns.

More than 250 years later, Manchester artists' co-operative Ultimate Holding Company has used this precious collection – much of it sold off over the years but now being returned to its original home – as the starting point for a project to refashion these glittering, valuable objects, at once functional and decorative, in one of this century's most ubiquitous materials, common domestic tin foil. With only an hour to spend with the collection at Dunham Massey, some of UHC's works copy the design and decoration of the Earl's silverware, approximating the scale and complexity of items in the collection, whereas others are entirely new constructs inspired by the history of the time and the webs of stories woven by the industrial revolution, which formed the backdrop of the Earl's lifetime.

The resulting exhibition Tin Town, currently on show in makeshift structures in the centre of the vast, underused, functionally ornate space of Campfield market hall just off Deansgate in Manchester, meditates on how we place value on materials and which objects we hold dear. UHC's tinware collection, moulded, engraved and held together with metal tape, is both beautiful and fragile, comprising lightweight yet fully formed replicas of the solid, heavy pieces which inspired it, made all the more impressive by the objects' underlying delicacy and transience. The product from which UHC's tinware is made, today commonly known as tin foil is, in fact, aluminium foil; tin was superseded in the mid-twentieth century both because aluminium is more flexible, and because tin slightly tinged the taste of food in kitchen use. Once a rare and expensive material, today aluminium is both readily available and highly sought after for recycling. Far from being disposable in the way we understand the word (ie, implying a lack of value), part of the value of aluminium comes from the fact that it can be recycled easily, and used again and again and again.

Tin Town also refers to one of the lesser-acknowledged aspects of the industrial revolution, temporary, overcrowded settlements of navvies, the undersung (often immigrant) labourers who built the infrastructure of the industrial revolution, such as canals – including Britain's first canal, the Bridgewater Canal, designed as a way for the Duke of Bridgewater to transport coal to Manchester from his mine at Worsley (begun shortly after the Earl of Warrington's death, the Bridgewater Canal eventually extended out to Dunham Massey). Tin towns grew up alongside major building projects such as these, a fact acknowledged both by the show's title and presentation and by the painstaking engraving of a typical navvy settlement on one of UHC's decorative tin plates. Like the Earl's silverware, which over the years has gone from existing as objects of use to becoming ornaments in glass cases, the value and role of the canals which powered the industrial revolution has changed too – from places of industry, toil and commerce to quiet backwaters and pleasure spots, part of the repackaging of the sites of our industrial history as destinations of as much interest for daytrippers and historians as the elegant stately home or traditional country park.

Tin Town is at Upper Campfield Market, Liverpool Road, Castlefield, Manchester, M3 4FH until Sunday February 24, open daily from 11am-7pm, and is free to visit. There are also a number of drop-in art workshops on Tuesday 19, Thursday 21 and Saturday 23 February from 1pm-3pm. For more information visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/local-to-you/north-west/things-to-see-and-do/article-1355767317799/?campid=tintown.

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.