05.09.1996

Anti-propaganda propaganda

Helen Ellis reviews the new Labour exhibition (Riverside Artists Group, Riverside Studios Gallery)

Mark Fisher, shadow minister for the arts, and not the most talented politician in the world, opened the new Labour exhibition at the Riverside Studios Gallery. His uninspiring rallying cry to New Labour was received warmly though unenthusiastically by the assembled loyal Labour critics.

The absence of enthusiasm should hardly have been surprising to the shadow arts minister given the whole purpose of the exhibition. The Riverside Galleries display the paintings, sculptures and installations of 10 contemporary artists and Labour supporters. Their work for this exhibition was intended to be an analysis and critique of ‘new Labour’ and its road to power.

Curiously the press release stated that, “The exhibition is anti-propaganda; it breaks down and fragments, analyses and disfigures.” But just exactly what it was the individual works were disfiguring was not clear.

The importance of the exhibition was the pervasive cynicism towards the Labour Party which is common to many Labour voters throughout society. This cynicism needs to be given positive expression. Most of the pieces expressed a despair at the complete lack of positive solutions to the decay which pervades today’s society and which the paintings and sculptures depicted.

Rod Judkin’s ‘Little Man’ shows a crumbling city through an office window with a model of an identical city where stands a tiny model man. He is looked over by one of the men in blue suits who appear throughout his paintings. Blue and red were favourite colours.

C Morey de Morand showed us red and blue thick-painted ovals and one red and one blue Pepsi can, marketing being the theme and “how to get elected” Morand’s concern. For politicians, “To do their jobs, fulfil our dreams and ideals, and make a society that will care for our needs, they have to get elected,” he asserts.

The curator, Peter Kennard, was delighted by Brian Deighton’s contribution - the words ‘working class’ painted on the floor in red and black. Deighton’s press notice stated: “In New Labour’s (necessary) appeal to win the middle class vote in the coming general election the working class have become unmentionable.”

The main concerns of the artists therefore were how to get the Labour Party elected and how it was going to “fulfil our dreams”. The main criticisms of the Labour Party amongst the artists I spoke to was of its lack of answers for society as a whole, the working class being still (perhaps) a part of that, but certainly not the motor force of history, as far as they were concerned.

Here lay the problem with describing this work as art in any real sense, certainly as inspiring or engaging art. Some of the paintings are certainly witty - Stephen Carter’s black and white life-size copy of an issue of The Times with its name taken from the sports page, ‘Second-rate England crumble’. G Calvert’s ‘Mick Molloy’ was the only work that came close to displaying the vital human power of passion. From such passion art draws and extends its sensuous uncovering of the motive forces of the world which lie below our everyday conceptions.

‘Mick Molloy’ is the hard square face of a suited man drenched in a burgundy and black background. Blood red streams fade on his face and his angled eyes stare into nowhere, full of yearning or perhaps despair.

Crumbling and despair again the major themes. But themes which lacked the passion of art with its sense of our individual active struggle with the world. In acting as advisors for a Labour Party which has very little to do with our everyday struggles, the work presented lifeless emotions beyond our control. This came out in the commentary around the pieces that mainly searched for a way in which the Labour Party, as a distinct and separate entity from the population, could do something for us.

Art by its nature under capitalism is political, to the extent that it is about humanity and our relations. But propaganda so often is not art because it makes assumptions about what exists without dissecting everything in the search and exploration of unfolding truths about society. Propaganda at its worst devolves power from human society to idealised living gods. When used in art it strips it of its very essence and life force.

The cynicism and despair about the Labour Party however should not be ridiculed or ignored. But these artists must go beyond propaganda and take on the task which is so urgent for the whole of the working class - to change history. That requires an active, engaged, intelligent and visceral understanding of the underlying forces of society, rather than a passive and disempowering observation of the consequences of those forces, such as the Labour Party.

Helen Ellis