Radical for who?
A reflection on the galleries rural.
Who gets to make radical landscapes?
It was a thought that first struck me when the exhibition ‘Radical landscapes’ was announced at Tate Liverpool. Slowly press around the show came out, it was seemed an urban rhetoric around the contested countryside. It can be rare I make it to art shows, the fees are often over £15.00, they are in cities usually far from my home in the North East Yorkshire Dales and I am a member of the rural working class. I usually work 7 days a week combining farming and arts. I ordered the book instead and witnessed the work through reviews and printed pages on a neon green so far removed from the colours of familiarity.
I worry about people, you dear reader, interpreting this wrongly. The countryside is such an interesting place, I love much of the work included in the book. It’s the opening text that made me want to chuck it.
The middle class and lower middle class are a big part of society. They have left wing views, they have right wings views and they aren’t afraid to share them or make you feel stupid about yours. (Lack of education tee hee hee). I find my place jarring, removed from my rural setting through 9 years of study and work in bigger cities. I saw my home as a green prison. At 16 I had to leave due to a turbulent family life and I didn’t come back for ten years. I occupy this strange void. It feels as though I’ve fallen in but stuck between these two lichen covered furry walls finding it hard to breathe. Like Lichen and moss my two identities fight each other. Pulling and pushing.
Enough about me…Back to the show.
“It (The exhibition) offers the rural as a site of artistic inspiration and a heartland for ideas of freedom, mysticism, experimentation and rebellion.” From the opening Essay by Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool.
The rural IS all of these things but it IS NOT Tate’s (It’s not anyones). place to be offering up a place…Communites and homes as a site for very wealthy artists to do what they want. The rural has a problem, a swelling uprising of middle class elites both liberal and let's say not- so liberal, wanting to pack up and move for a better life. These people are often the ones setting strict rules about who can and can’t live in the countryside and what it should look like. (The life often doesn’t fit with their dream and they want to change it). They sit on local board meetings after two weeks of moving in and want to change everything because everyone is soOooOoo uneducated and backwards here. This is not the life people who grew in these places. The rural has always been migratory, people coming and going, shifting and passing through. In that opening text it reads as though this is the place for artists to do what they want. It doesn’t really speak of peasant revolts, of rebellions, of trauma of the landscape, of manual labour. That it can be hard, fuel poverty is rife, theres a ‘Heat or Eat?’ mentality, people work multiple jobs often seasonal, often for less then minimum wage, travel is a must, or that hospitals are an hour away . . . It is also NOT a perfect place. Like in towns and cities across the UK there are opinions and lack of care towards diversity and inclusion, a real misunderstanding and misplaced fear or dislike of what people like to call ‘Wokeness’ (I’m still not sure what that refers to, surely its better to be aware, awake than asleep?) There are elements, factors, people whose behaviour and views I find difficult. Class is mentioned in the book, briefly, but seen as an outside experience. I find this odd anyone who has spent 5 minutes studying rurality could place the working classes at the heart of rural experience, the migratory trends, and the industrial revolution. Perhaps the answer lies in who gets to curate shows, who gets to be a cultural decision maker?
The book talks about “who has the freedom to access, inhabit and enjoy green spaces.” Whilst not really looking for artists who have struggled to live in them and don’t have the freedom to make work. Many of my favourite artists are in the show, who have made groundbreaking work about these issues. Green spaces can be isolating and hard to access, unfriendly places. That work is important.
There’s this big chunk of contemporary issues missed out. Is that subconscious, a misunderstanding through lack of lived experience, or purposeful and harmful? The whole exhibition is based on the idea of a dream of a place to do whatever you want to and that no one will suffer from that. On reading that first page my excitement wilted. That anger, and disillusionment rose up. Yes this is a place to (🙄 wild) swim, to walk, to make, but it is also a place people work, live, love, and grow. It feels at odds with the ultimate artist vision to expel and ignore these landscape stories. Is that because they are built from neoliberalist agendas and do not care about those who suffer at the hands of that? Is it so much to hope, and such a demand that we look at issues from a lived experience POV even in a small way, a tiny chapter in the book?
This opening text. It brings important often unconsidered aspects to the table. It also champions the idea of working class erasure, let’s rewild rural Britain and get rid of all the poor folk who live in fuel poverty. The countryside is not just an empty green space. People live and work there. Too often I see this complicated debate as town Vs Country but there’s so much more to it than that. A circular journey has brought the countryside back to commodity, fields parcelled off to be sold for carbon offsetting. Land to the wealthiest in society. The workers slowly pushed out to some edge lands town because this idea of a green and pleasant land is only for the few not the many. The few that can afford to up and move. To commute. To fly for meetings (ironic). To work from home. The few with opinions and voices much louder, more well spoken and therefore more important. The few on both sides that have more in common than they think.
P.s An update. I went to see Re/sisters at the Barbican and it was much of the same, no vision or talk of these issues.