- Venue
- Lighthouse (Poole Arts Centre)
- Location
- South West England
Bournemouth and Poole are separate and separately administered towns. However, on most practical terms they form one large conurbation. One set of suburbs runs straight into the other with no noticeable gap. I was easily able to fit in trips to both of these shows in a couple of hours on one Saturday afternoon.
To put things in context, Bournemouth-Poole is large enough to have takers for a broad spread of cultural outputs. However, what galleries there are in the area are mostly upmarket art chain-stores or local outlets that try to emulate their style, and what you see here is what you see in every English town that has a sufficiently large, sufficiently wealthy middle class to sustain it: sunsets, safaris, boxing hares, elongated dancers, whimsical cows, idealised Parisian streets and Venetian canals, pseudo-Lowrys and Wallises, Time Square, Ayres Rock, rolling Tuscan landscapes, street urchins and endless bloody sailing boats. Lifestyle art, available in ‘original oils’ or factory-made prints. You can imagine heated debate raging at a Sandbanks dinner party over whether Rolf Harris or Jack Vettriano is the world’s greatest contemporary artist.
Meanwhile, the work of contemporary artists trying to make something thoughtful, exploratory and original is all but invisible. In an earlier review – that on Chris Fraser’s solo show at The Artworks in Poole, back in April – I reported the artist’s dismay at the almost total lack of visitors to his exhibition. The fact that Artworks’ next event was a group show called ‘What IS the Point?’ seemed to sum up a broader sense of despair felt by the whole collective at putting on a show that would be ignored by everyone except other artists.
Against this backcloth, I think readers will understand that the overwhelming emotion I felt on arriving at these two shows was relief. At last, here was something both visible (give or take a bit of persistence – see below) and non-corporate.
Show and Tell was trumpeted as a ‘pop-up shop’ rather than (or as well as) an art exhibition. It took place in a one-time church meeting hall better known for many years to locals as ‘Crank’ nightclub. The club closed down some time ago leaving the place empty and redundant, and Show and Tell’s organisers were able to persuade a helpful landlord to let them open the building for a 3-day period for this event. The chief obstacle was the council: they wanted business rates for every moment Show and Tell was there. The fee overall would have been £34,000. That required just for the time needed to sweep up and get the place ready was set to be £5,000. They were eventually talked out of it, but it’s not hard to see why, when faced with taxes based on imagined rather than actual income, it is almost impossible for any but the most commercial of arts outlets to flourish. I began to see both why the non-corporate arts are almost invisible here and why High Streets are becoming corporate where there’s money and dead zones where there isn’t.
The show itself seemed to be populated mostly with work by recent and quite-some-time-ago graduates from the local art school, and those who had come to Bournemouth from elsewhere because, well, it’s Bournemouth. There was work by illustrators, photographers and graphic designers, as well as fine artists. Musicians played, there were sculptures and artists’ books, and the crafts were represented in the form of handmade cards, clothes and jewellery. The gorgeous whiff of handmade soap wafted up from a corner trestle-table. The place was a breath of fresh air in more ways than one. Readers from London and other enlightened places will be wondering what all the fuss is about, but this is almost unique here.
I drove across town: to the Lighthouse. The Lighthouse is a full-on arts centre. It shows art-house movies, has a theatre and is home to Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. However, it is rather tentative where the visual arts are concerned. ‘Landscape and Industry’ was on the second floor. I struggled to find it and then couldn’t get to it because the door was locked. The lady manning the box office had to consult Lighthouse’s website before she would believe me that the show even existed. Once convinced, she asked someone in the back office to unlock the exhibition space for me. I followed him upstairs. He never spoke and I only ever saw his back. Even when he had let us in, he made his way across the room without turning and left by another door.
The work comprised photographs by a group of local people who call themselves ‘The Happy Snappers’, led for the purposes of this project by arts professional, Joe Stevens, aided by photographer Paul Russell. This was a spin-off of a larger project by the same team which analysed via vox-pop and pics-pop the experience of working life in Poole in the period from the 1950s to date.
The Snappers – all amateurs and mostly retirees – had evidently taken Berndt and Hiller Becher’s method as their model. The assorted, multi-coloured stores along the High Streets of Poole’s suburbs were shot one at a time, deadpan. The snaps were first laid end-to-end and then stacked on top of each other to make a grid. True to their name, the photographers had cheerfully made their way along each road, making unpretentious snap-shots as they went. You wouldn’t really expect the profound observation and refinement of a set of Becher photographs. Nevertheless, there was something compelling about the patterns that had formed as the images had been fixed together in one large, co-operative work. Moreover, like the Bechers’ South Wales pithead photographs, these soon may well become a record of thing made obsolete by economic change.
Work by The Snappers’ mentors, Stevens and Russell, was also on show nearby. They had tackled similar themes: the use and aesthetics of the street. Interestingly, although it was clear to me which was the work of the pros, there were no labels; there was no hierarchy.
Ultimately, what is so vital about both of these shows is that they exist at all. That was what gave me that sense of relief. I wanted to punch the air and shout ‘at last!’: at last, something bottom up, not top down. Something from and by the people. Please let this be just the start.
Ends – 1052 words
Show and Tell, St Peter’s Hall, Hinton Rd., Bournemouth 29-31 July 2011
Landscape and Industry, Lighthouse Arts Centre, Kingland Rd., Poole 15 April – 10 September 2011