Middlesbrough Art Weekender – can be an outlet to ponder the situations that fall at our feet.
Creative Factory offered two writing bursaries to report upon the Middlesbrough Art Weekender. Jonathan Tait writes about the event and how Boro ‘becomes a cultural meeting point’.
Upon visiting Middlesbrough, William Gladstone pronounced “this remarkable place, the youngest child of England’s enterprise, is but an infant, but if an infant, an infant Hercules”. Middlesbrough in the 1840s burgeoned promise. Known for fortitude in manufacture, Teesside steel curried favour internationally. Almost one-hundred-and-seventy the ‘Infant Hercules’ pervades. Ian Horn’s claim that “we built the world” is evidenced in the steel that made Sydney Harbour Bridge, One World Trade Center, and Heathrow Airport. The ‘Infant Hercules’ image remained, for many reasons and in various permutations, a rhetorical totem for the character of Middlesbrough. Pubs, flags, charitable enterprises, Middlesbrough unified itself in this industrial identity, perhaps regrettably so. I have always thought we focused too much as a local culture on the practical implications of steel-making rather than its metaphorical wonder. Middlesbrough did not simply build the structures of the modern world, but in doing so, connected it. Waters were traversed, expanses were travelled, and the world’s riches were there to be seized. Gladstone made his remarks in the 1860s. Around the same time Matthew Arnold wrote that modern Britain laid before “us like a land of dreams, / so various, so beautiful, so new”. Middlesbrough as a hub of connectivity cannot be understated, and its part in creating and house the various, the beautiful and the new, is evidenced in the Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2018 (MAW18).
In trying times, togetherness has kept Middlesbrough reconciled with itself despite the Herculean labours it faces. Economic downturns have wracked the area numerous times over recent years. The SSI closure, the farcical Northern Powerhouse, and now that EU funds are to be divested from Tees Valley enterprises, trying times loom large again. Middlesbrough is undergoing another metamorphosis into a valuable cultural, artistic, and technological hub. It is not quite there yet. The inchoate butterfly is yet to wrestle free of its chrysalis. Middlesbrough Art Weekender 2018 (MAW18) embraced the diversity, beauty and innovation of artistic expression in numerous delivery media. It proves that we need not no longer solely unify behind our industrial past. One festival will not solve our problems, but it became an outlet to explore them and ponder the situation that falls at our feet.
The festival’s opening night took place inside the Warehouse and Bazaar spaces on Station Street which housed the festival’s principal collection. Disused buildings are repurposed as galleries. MAW18 asked “what connects a community?”. Evidently, the answer may well be beer. As I arrived, hands were occupied with plastic glasses and conversations were flowing. Along the wall running perpendicular to the entrance was a living sculpture of Martin Boyle’s creation. The bundles of what looked like golden foil, which rotated clockwise and counter-clockwise. I read the curatorial context of the festival and saw some similarity between Boyle’s work and the idea of each event as a “node[s] that form a networked web” in the arts scene. The communicative difficulties of interacting in the digital age felt immediately prevalent. Benedict Drew’s video installation was particularly arresting. With rhythmic insistence and instructive statements, his work represented to me a unifying exploration of how sensually oppressive first-world consumer-capitalist life has come to be.
Giles Bailey, in collaboration with Sophie Soobramanien, Jamie Hammill and Nellie Saunby performed “Islanders”. The performative triptych closed proceedings in the Warehouse before Moran Sanderovich’s ‘Ruler of one hill’ began in the Bazaar. In a rapidly globalizing world, the UK’s political isolationism and geographical identity crisis is a matter of profound intrigue. In a political site like Middlesbrough, the piece was prescient. The performer’s frantic movements reiterated the cabin fever and insanity that he spoke about prior to the piece’s beginning. The piece’s first section ‘Escape’ was accompanied by Jamie Hammill’s rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock”. The song was modulated with vocoder and truncated lyrically, shedding its chorus. I inferred this part of the performance as an indictment of British delusions of economic and political grandeur.
There were many salient artistic contributions to the MAW18 festivities that functioned similarly. Many of this year’s pieces focused on British multiculturalism and when viewing the offerings as a collection, MAW18 functioned in a dialectic manner of how to interpret division and reunify communities in modern Britain. Inside the subway of Middlesbrough railway station was ‘Face Value’, an exhibit of postage stamp portraits by Suzie Devey. Careful to highlight with individual specificity the identities of local people in the North East who have offered various forms of assistance to refugees and asylum seekers, Devey tries to connect the community. The words and phrases that adorn each stamp came from the hands of people assisted by the kindness of Teessiders. The faces were enshrined in candour, without the emotional deadening or stoic gaze of the royal aspect. These faces were depicted instead with gaiety and gentleness. Their likenesses shaded exuberantly under stark tunnel lights.
MAW18’s influence on the town and a variety of clientele was apparent through my travels this weekend. I took a brief sojourn into Base Camp to Saud Baloch’s exhibited drawings. Base Camp became for me, the social hub of the Art Weekender. It played host to the FEED/Opal Tapes/Skizze collaborative evening, and Doron Sadja’s arresting “Colour Field”. The social geometry of MAW18’s footfall was varied. Football shirts and scarves could be seen wandering around The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA). Timeliness summed up MAW18’s programme. The ‘Open Call’ initiative gave opportunities for artists to house their work alongside esteemed artists such as L.S. Lowry in the Middlesbrough Collection and throughout MIMA. Ostensibly, connecting the works of Lowry and Eduardo Paolozzi with Jeremy Diggle and Janice Downs is a means of bridging old and new. By the standards of most eyes these are all ‘modern’ artists, irrespective of the fact they were produced several decades apart in wildly different circumstances. The total of the MAW18 offerings was apt.
Just as Middlesbrough gradually divorces itself from its industrial image, it becomes a cultural meeting point on the precipice of artistic novelty. MAW18 is where old met new, east met west, and culture met industry; Lowry’s Middlehaven connected with Tim Etchells’ neon. For if only an instant, it all seemed to make sense.