Arts seen

It's one of those points in the year when, just like buses, all the art shows come along at once. Dark Matters just launched at the Whitworth (with pieces - from Bacon to Whiteread - exploring shadows and illusion, so I'll make it down Oxford Road at some point before 15 January), the same day Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer opened at Manchester Art Gallery until 29 January.

Much anticipated, this is the first major exhibition of the former Manchester-dweller's work, and it's definitely very comprehensive. I was treated to a tour by curator Julian Treuherz, who pointed out all the themes and styles and gave a potted background history of the paintings and painter. I found Brown's perspective somewhat naive and some of the colours rather on the kitsch side, but it wasn't not interesting and I did like the stained glass, the cartoons and the furniture he designed for William Morris. It's £8 or £6 concessions - head down on Tuesday 18 October, and you'll also get some poems about the show courtesy Jean Sprackland who has been specially commissioned by Manchester Literature Festival. See here for more on that.


On Saturday, Cornerhouse flung wide the doors to the first major public solo UK exhibition by one of the most prominent contemporary artists working in South Asia today, Rashid Rana. Everything Is Happening At Once is part of the Asia Triennial Manchester II festival, which is running concurrently across various venues in and around the city until 27 November.

Back to Rana, though, and I thoroughly recommend you catch this free show over all three of Cornerhouse's galleries (it goes beyond the festival to 18 December). Gallery 1 explores comparisons, and I was taken by the study of time versus space illustrated by The World Is Not Enough and Dis-location I, a pixellated image of a street scene made up by the mosaic of tiny snapshots of life in Lahore. Gallery 2 offers up some more controversial themes, from the blood and gore of the Rothko-like series What Lies Between Flesh And Blood to Veil VI, a collage of miniature jazz mag photos worked together to create a full-size piece and make a statement about the role of women in both Western and non-Western cultures. On the top floor, the montage of shop signs, ads and graffiti of Language Series II is almost Impressionistic in colour and abstractness, but the real treat in Gallery 3 is Desperately Seeking Paradise II (pictured). Approaching this huge, almost architectural, structure, you see yourself reflected in its mirrored surfaces, then as you move round the room it dominates, you can see behind the separate tiles and a whole new view becomes available - again from the small-scale images to the bigger picture: in this case a skyline not unlike a pre-9/11 New York, another political message, one presumes.

Got an "aks" to grind?

Oh looky here: it's a shiny new blog. It's called Ask Ben & Clare. It's nice, isn't it? Subtitled "What's your problem?" (ha!), you can send in any "contemporary conundrum that needs contemplating", and some nice people called Ben and Clare will offer a succinct solution to cheer you up while you chow down on that tasteless cold wet sandwich you made the mistake of buying for lunch. Again. You never learn, do you? Perhaps you should email Ben and Clare for some hot new ideas, fresh out the kitchen.

Clare, now that's a name I recognise... oh, it's me, isn't it? Quelle coincidence!


So, this is the soft launch of mine and Ben's new blog. (Don't worry, dear reader, I'll still be blogging independently and just as often here on Words & Fixtures.) Maybe one day we'll have a proper launch. If I have anything to do with it, it will be in a pub. It won't be anywhere la-di-da or in a "special bit" of somewhere that makes it sound like we hired it out. There won't be free drinks. In fact, we'll probably be hoping that you buy us drinks; after all, ABC is the brainchild of two poor writers on the breadline (as tradition insists). We'll let you know.

In the meantime, here's a direct quote from Ben about our collaborative project: "We think it is dead dead good and that." I think that just about sums it up. Tune in every week (or so) for regular fixtures and fill your boots with happiness and goodwill. Stick with us - you never know what life-saving tips and interesting information you might pick up along the way.

Us and Lemn

Poet, playwright and performer Lemn Sissay has many ties with Manchester. He moved to the city when he was 18, worked at Commonword publishers on Mount Street, and has made his mark on the place quite literally, with poems like Flags embedded as tiles in the pavement of Tib Street in the Northern Quarter and Hardys Well and Rain painted on the sides of buildings marking each end of Rusholme (I regularly got my tea from Gemini when I was a first-year student and couldn't cook, by the way. Don't tell my mum). Back in 1991 or maybe 1992 - a long long time ago, anyway - my friend Matt and I took one of those magical-mystery-tour-buzzes-that-go-all-round-the-houses-and-take-about-half-a-day out to far-flung Wythenshawe to hear Lemn do a poetry reading at the Forum. I've never been back, but that's not Lemn's fault; I seem to remember he was pretty good.

At the moment, Lemn lives in that there London, where he's artist in residence at the achingly cool Southbank Centre. In fact, he set up the Centre's GPS Global Poetry System, which is a bit like the rainy city's own Rainy City Stories (featuring a poem by yours truly), only on a grander scale. His other recent activity includes accepting an MBE in the New Year's Honours List. Hark on him.

Lemn is currently in Manchester on a flying visit, touring his new John E McGrath-directed solo performance Why I Don't Hate White People, on at Contact today (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday) at 8pm. There's also a special performance being recorded for Radio 4 on Sunday at 6.30pm, which you can get tickets for by calling 0161 244 2455.

The show is quite good, too. Nothing to do with poetry (although there is some poetic language), it's a personal account of Lemn's "journey of discovery" exploring the race-related issues of being deserted by his birth family, shunned by his foster family, alienated by social services and sidelined by society, but coming out the other side pretty well adjusted. There are thought-provoking moments, uncomfortable silences, serious internal discussions, documentary snippets. There's a stark white stage with three barriers, one a door. There's the use of white noise, the fuzz of a TV screen after the programming ends and the national anthem has long since droned away. There are some clever projections and creative sound effects, even if the timing was a bit off on the first night. But, importantly, it's not preachy or painful; it's all done with a huge dose of cheeky humour, self-directed fun-poking, silly impressions and daft accents, winks to the audience and potentially offensive jokes. And that's part of the point: Sissay is highly critical of political correctness, funded projects to tackle so-called problems, and the whole language of equality, diversity, integrity... All in all, it's an interesting hour that leaves you entertained and educated in equal measure.

Flash point

Bumbling around in the snowy dusk on my way back home from the Cornerhouse on Saturday, I decided to take a slight detour to check out CUBE artist-in-residence Andrea Booker's off-site installation; the SOS sign I was telling you about last week. Plugged in and slowly flashing away, it will be sending a subliminal message to drivers fighting their way along the Mancunian Way until 5 January. I was slightly underwhelmed, but now I hark on't, I must've seen it before as I seem to remember thinking it was a bit odd. And then instantly forgetting about it. Subliminal, indeed...

Entitled Apollo Theatres (for why, I can't say), it's up near the top of the squat white Art Deco-style box that used to house web company Moonfish and is currently undergoing a "rebranding" as part of the seemingly stalled First Street development to become EASA HQ; headquarters for the European Architecture Students Assembly 2010. So now you know.


This isn't my pic, by the way. It is neither snowy nor dusk.

What's your sign?

Popped over to CUBE earlier to check out the third annual Open show before it gets tidied away on Friday. Can't say I was blown away by it, but there were a few entries that stood out as being more than just a Blue Peter project (Paul Haywood and Maxine Kennedy's Salford Red 2007 paint chart being one and Norbert Francis Attard's colourful building-specific installations, including some in Liverpool, being another. Huh, perhaps I have an obsession with colour as well as books this week). Mr Words&Fixtures seemed to like Brian Rosa's Palimpsesto Urbano: Mexico City 2008-9; a series of urban landscapes showing the reappropriation of various materials (including old election posters, billboard ads and roadwork tape) as screens and shelters. But if Mr Words&Fixtures wants to tell you about it, he can do his own blog, right?


Downstairs is a special corner set aside for work by CUBEOpen 2008's winner and current artist-in-residence Andrea Booker. This is where the words come in: last year, it was her bright orangey-red SOS submission that caught everyone's eye. The three new installations are perhaps more subdued being white or clear, and use (I quote the blurb) "reclaimed and abandoned commercial signage salvaged from buildings in Manchester and Salford" to spell out a lit-up ONCE; SPILT MILK in glossy white (you might even say milky) enamelled letters, and a purposefully bent and damaged FRAIL. Apparently, "Booker supplants the original and intended message whilst retaining its connovative one, and in doing so makes a statement about social identity and displacement". Oh yeah. The exhibition also includes mock-ups of delapidated sites around the city which she aims to liven up (albeit temporarily) with her messages; keep your eyes peeled over coming months...

A few little words about art

One of my Manchester Literature Festival chums has been busily adding to the Southbank Centre's GPS Global Poetry System project (to which we'll return at a later date), and her latest posting is most interesting to an arty-farty Francophile word lover like myself.


It's about an installation by the artist Ben Vautier, known simply as Ben, who lives in Nice en la belle France. It says "Il faut se mefier des mots", which means "beware of words". Well, I say.

So I've been doing a little wider reading on Monsieur Ben, who seems quite an interesting chap. There's a bit here on his life and work (nice ski goggles, Monsieur. My friend Julian has some suspiciously similar). I've learnt that some of his sculptures are not unlike Jean Tinguely's machines, an exhibition of which is on at Tate Liverpool right now and runs until 10 January: Joyous Machines: Michael Tandy and Jean Tinguely.

(When I first heard about this show, BTW, I got all excited because I thought it had something to do with the director of The Science Of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and, I just learnt, the first episode of The Flight Of The Conchords, although I was just saying yesterday how I'm not really into that, if I'm totally honest. Too much singing. Anyway, I was wrong, obviously. That's Michel Gondry. Obviously.)

So back to Ben, and you see a lot of cartes postales of his phrases on sale in trendy shops in Paris. They always remind me of Magritte's Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe, from The Treachery Of Images series (La Trahison Des Images 1928–29). Just thought I'd share that.

Give us a sign

The Times has been running a competition of funny signs over the past few months, entitled (who'd've thought it?) Signs Of The Times. Having selected their favourite 50, it's now up to you to pick your number one. Some are very funny, some are obvious, some are puzzling, and some are thanks to some minxy graffiti artists, so I'm not sure they count. Nonetheless, they're worth checking out over your morning coffee.