06.06.1996

Topsy-Turvy

Phil Rudge reviews William Morris (the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington); William Morris: questioning the legacy (Crafts Council Gallery, Pentonville Road, Islington); William Morris (talk by Tony Benn, at WM Gallery, Lloyd Park, Forest Road, Walthamstow)

To commemorate the centenary of William Morris’s death, several exhibitions have been arranged in London and around the country. The biggest is at the Victoria and Albert museum and probably the most critical is at the Crafts Council, Islington.

Visiting the V&A in South Kensington is to enter a zone that contrives to take all the rough edges off life and present a perfectly homogeneous world tourist spectacle. Needless to say, the V&A is laying on the full ‘man as superman’ treatment for William Morris. You know the script: Morris as poet, weaver, printer, Pre-Raphaelite, novelist, cuckold and socialist. All this for the bargain price of £5.50 ... plus £10 for the catalogue, £10 for the CD (Morris’s music - a selection of some of the sounds you might have heard in the big houses Morris decorated), £40 for the book and not forgetting the postcards, badges, videos, keyrings and heaps more besides.

The accompanying text and ‘how we used to live’ sound and video installations carefully refrain from any insight or critical intelligence in favour of a chronological narration of Morris’s achievements, with a dead pan conclusion that it is up to you, the spectator, to decide who this great man was, what were his most important achievements and how relevant he is today. Pick and mix time then, down at the V&A. I left with the weird feeling that it was not so much me who was a spectator but William ‘Topsy’ Morris himself.

The much smaller exhibition at the Crafts Council, Islington, has the great merit of free admission and a genuine attempt at a reassessment. It does not vilify Morris, but suggests he was disingenuous. Its premise is that Morris helped turn the crafts movement in Britain into an arts movement instead, thus cutting it off from its domestic base. It refused to compromise over quality, which resulted in a low turnover of goods.

“We have made of a great social movement a narrow and tiresome little aristocracy working with great skill for the very rich” (CR Ashbee).

It suggests also that, while Morris venerated the ‘mark of the hand’, at the same time he used the most up to date commercial manufacturers. Interestingly though, Morris was primarily a designer, not a maker, and whilst he was dashing off his brilliant, original designs, enjoying the thrills of creative labour, others (often women) were executing the time-consuming and tedious task of repeating again and again the same pattern. It is this frisson that you see in Morris wallpaper which makes it mesmerising, concentrating thought and feeling. Yet today with faster and cheaper production techniques our eyes tend to gloss over a pattern not allowing it to “remind you of something beyond itself” (Morris).

Unfortunately though, the Crafts Council exhibition suffers from a lack of Morris’s own work and has to make up for it by assembling chronologically craftspeople who came after him, ending with contemporary exhibits that suddenly appear with price tags on them.

Tony Benn is the most prominent socialist writing articles and giving talks in this centenary year (surreally, there is also Bill Morris). Benn has this to say on the million dollar question of why Morris is important today:

“As we move towards a new century, people are turning therefore to the roots of their faith, seeing inspiration in those who pioneered socialism, but who are personally untainted by the mistakes made in its name. And that is the appeal of William Morris.”

In days of reaction it becomes increasingly difficult to see life in a dynamic, progressive way. People get religious - nostalgia creeps in, a desire for things to be as they were, with all the bad bits taken out. There is a search for ideas or people that are either new or not connected with an unbearable past.

There is a swamp concealed below Tony Benn’s seemingly well meaning thoughts. A place where life’s real richness and diversity is forced out of the light and made to dissipate itself. Because a real will and drive for truth is not present even a simple tribute to the great William Morris is forced to alienate the subject, remove it from history and distort it.

William Morris was not untainted by mistakes - nobody is. After the violence of the Bloody Sunday march in 1887 he turned away from his consistent and passionate support of revolutionary socialism. Intimidated by the military, he became bitter when he realised he had failed as a leader. But this understanding of Morris should not sully our view of him: quite the opposite, it should enrich it. Morris occupies a pivotal point in our cultural and socialist history. He said:

“Before the uprising of modern socialism almost all intelligent people either were or professed themselves to be, quite contented with the civilisation of this century.”

Morris’s significance is that he was the first artist in Britain to understand that a new society could not arrive from nowhere; instead it would come out of the concrete conditions of the present. And this was only possible through the largest and most active social force - the organised working class.

Read any of William Morris’s political writings and you will see how angry he would have been 100 years after his death to be cast as a socialist who never made mistakes. Our understanding of Morris should be of a man fraught with personal and social conflicts and a man gifted with immense talent and thirst for work. He sought to give active expression to his life and to represent himself and the working class to the best of his ability. He had the courage to confront difficult problems and we should fight any attempt to dilute and isolate his work in the name of profit or reformist politics.

Phil Rudge