Off the rails

Last week, I took a wee trip to the big smoke to rendez-vous with the editors of The Literateur literary magazine and to attend the launch of the latest issue of Ambit. While I was killing time between meetings near Euston, I decided to see what was going down at the British Library, and lo, there was the scroll of Jack Kerouac's On The Road, in the Folio Society* Gallery.

The 120 foot-long scroll was banged out in three famously frenzied weeks and, though small, the exhibition is very interesting in providing information on the background of the manuscript and its context in terms of the Beat Generation, and there are some great photos of Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg et al. The show runs until 27 December and is free, so if, appropriately, you have a bit of time before catching a train, bob in.

*The Folio Society, btw, republish classic books with unique illustrations, and their version of On The Road, above, has black and white photos throughout and is £29.95. Other tomes include various by British authors, such as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which is on my reading list for winter...

Down and out in New Orleans

When Imogen Stubbs last appeared at the Royal Exchange, in Noel Coward's Private Lives, I couldn't stop gushing about it: it was brilliant; the best thing I've seen there, possibly even the best thing I've seen at the theatre. I was therefore not surprisingly awaiting this production of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending with some degree of giddy excitement, so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be nowhere near as good as the Coward.

The play opens mid storm, represented by thunder clashes and four large screens pouring with water. It's a pathetic fallacy, of course: the characters, inhabitants of a small town in the Deep South, all harbour poorly veiled mistrust of each other and even more poorly veiled mistrust of anyone from outside their community, and tonight, in particular, tensions are running high. A bunch of dislikeable women minding a shop are soon joined by a bunch of equally dislikeable men and, eventually, the couple they are waiting for: the store's owners Jabe Torrance, just discharged from hospital, and his long-suffering wife, Lady, an initially unrecognisable, but ultimately scene-stealing Stubbs (pictured).

    
There are other arrivals, too: the wayward Carol Cutrere, who's friends with voodoo types and is not supposed to darken the town's door after being falsely accused of vagrancy, and Val Xavier, who is a guitar-toting drifter (and the titular Orpheus), but, being good-looking and having one of the local loony bible-bashers on his side as he does, is allowed to stay, at least for the time being. Val and Carol seem to have history, and there's more than a whiff of David Lynch's Wild At Heart about the pair, not least with the importance given to a particular snakeskin jacket. It turns out Lady is an incomer too, with her Italian heritage (though it took me a fair while to work that out), and this is what leads to the play's dramatic and tragic crescendo.

Unfortunately, this crescendo is a hell of a long time coming, and there are so many tiny scenes, with the lights going up and down for the briefest of appearances and random snippets of blues music punctuating the action, that I lose interest quite quickly. Another weird lighting effect, which indicates the early evening sun and, I'm assuming, aims to emphasise the increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere the script is out to portray, manages to be too subtle to make its meaning obvious, yet annoyingly nausea-inducing at the same time. There are other odd lighting choices, too, though I'm presuming these are to reference the importance of light and shadow, good and bad, white and black in a racist era and area. My final criticism is that there are way too many characters, which simply adds confusion and slows the pace down even more, and these extras seem there mostly to shoehorn in the minutest details of back history. You start to wonder if this wouldn't work better as a film, though whether that's the fault of the play or the production, I can't say. 

Photo by Jonathan Keenan. 

Orpheus Descending continues until 24 November. See the Royal Exchange website for full details.

Words and pictures

David Shrigley is a ruler aficionado. He is also a collector of found ephemera, including maps people draw for their friends to show them how to get to a particular pub or some such destination of choice. I am a dictionary aficionado and collector of discarded lists, so I instantly feel a certain affinity for this tall man standing somewhat self-consciously on the stage at the front of Cornerhouse’s Cinema 1 on Saturday 13 October, to give a talk relating to his current show, How Are You Feeling?.  

He likes the “gestural” - without words - though I come away from this show and tell lecture, called, um, Show & Tell, thinking how important words actually are to him; as integral to his work as the pictures or installations. There are neon banners, lost pigeon posters, spoken word albums, tattooed phrases, stuffed animals holding signs, the trademark cartoon combinations of stick drawings and scrawly captions.

He’s not interested in representational drawing, he says, and he says he can’t draw very well anyway. He’s interested in “economically delivered narratives”, communicating things as efficiently as possible, so with the cartoons and short films such as New Friends, he creates a simple image and a snappy slogan that go together - or a slogan and an image; the order is not always the same - usually with “some odd slippage”. The slippage was unintentional in a series of plates that ran in The Independent some years ago, when the art director unilaterally decided to cut off parts of the image in some cases, and the words in others, essentially publishing an end result that was incomprehensible and pointless. Not surprisingly, Shrigley took his talents elsewhere.

Sometimes, of course, the experimentation is totally conscious in terms of not knowing what the outcome might be: a giant unending sausage of clay at a German gallery, for example, that cracked apart as the medium dried; or filling things (tents, waders...) with expanding foam. “It doesn’t always work,” says Shrigley, “but it’s kind of fun.”

The most fun I’ve had in ages* is watching Shrigley’s slideshow from a break in France with his wife. This is David Shrigley, so obviously we’re not talking sunsets and chateaux; his holiday snaps are of the gite owner’s obsessive labelling, from her surname on the dustbin (within the bounds of reason) to “do not move” on a completely portable object. How do you know if it’s not already been located elsewhere to its original position? Light switches are labelled light switches, and, inspired, Shrigley sculpts a big egg, paints it white and daubs on EGG. Does writing “egg” on a big egg make it more of an egg, he queries. Well, in the context of an art show, perhaps it does. In the context of a kitchen cupboard, maybe not.

I come away from the show with a lot of newfound knowledge about David Shrigley and conceptual art, and I’ve had a good laugh. I’ve heard how a mural he painted at a skatepark in Malmo, Sweden, was too distracting and had to be removed after the skaters kept falling off their boards. I’ve learnt more about the giant ceramic boots I saw at the Haywood exhibition; they’re a response to an old suit of armour on display at a museum in Scotland. I’m interested in Shrigley’s creative process (he has a stack of recycling) and thoughts on success: “If you make stuff that’s not rubbish, that’s a good criteria.” And I leave with his final idea buzzing around my brain: show, don’t tell.

(*This might not technically be true.)

David Shrigley's How Are You Feeling runs at Cornerhouse until Sunday 6 January 2013. Galleries are open Tuesday-Saturday 12-8pm, Sunday 12-6pm (closed Monday).

Who's in charge here?

I've been shouting loud and proud about a great literature project currently underway in Birmingham, as part of the annual Book Festival there. It's called Reliable Witness and is on until Saturday night, so if you're in the area, please do go and check it out.

It's very innovative and not something I've come across before, and, as a writer, I think it's a wonderful way of telling a story - get the audience to do it themselves! Using social media platforms in the run-up to the Festival, the group behind the project built up an audience - and a buzz - for a site-specific installation, where individuals are encouraged to interact with a variety of prompts and choose from various options to take them to different outcomes. Everyone comes away with their own version of the story - I've been describing it as a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure for grown-ups with smart phones.

Anyway, you can read more of my words along these very lines here and here.

Reliable Witness is open daily until 13 October in the Pavilions Shopping Centre (Unit 10, Level 2 Lower Ground Floor, Birmingham, B4 7SL): Monday–Saturday 10am–6pm. Admission is free.

Print charming

This new print mag for Manchester looks great and features a piece of flash fiction by yours truly... Keep your peelers eyed for copies in such wonderful environs as the Manchester Craft & Design Centre!

Open publication - Free publishing - More art