Display links historic poet with student riots
A NEW exhibition at Touchstones draws comparisons between 18th Century Lancashire dialect poet Tim Bobbin and the notorious 1968 student riots in Paris.
While England Mourns, by Magnus Quaife is on show from May 4 to June 30.
It marks the 50th anniversary of the protests in the French capital, and Quaife examines the sloganeering of Atelier Populare, alongside the satire of Milnrow’s Bobbin who set politics alight two hundred years prior.
A series of ‘paintings’ repeat a defining slogan from the press of the Parisian protest movement, La Beauté Est Dans La Rue (Beauty Is In The Street), represented on sheets of industrialgrade insulation board. Each slogan is reproduced in near-faithful likeness to the original by painstakingly peeling the external layer of foil from the board, yet the approach destroys the structural integrity of the boards forcing them split and warp.
In doing so, Quaife develops striking contrast between the perceived glamour of the images connected with Paris ‘68, famously produced in the occupied print room of Ecole des Beaux Arts, and more functional, proletariat reality.
Quaife’s careful material choice presents artwork that nominally ‘insulates’ the gallery itself, suggesting the possibility of painting finding a new kind of usefulness and goading the viewer to look elsewhere for an aesthetic fix.
A Touchstones spokesman said: “At first glance the two worlds are wildly disparate, yet Quaife convincingly forges links between the deceptive simplicity of Collier and the Paris students’ shared visual language, their poetry and pointed political critique.”
Pages from Bobbin’s poem, While England Mourns, from which the title of the show is taken, its accompanying illustration will also be shown and three portrait busts of Bobbin will be set on bricks from the gallery’s own social history collection will also be shown.
Born in Urmston and buried in St Chad’s, Rochdale, Bobbin was a self-anointed ‘Hogarth of the North.’
His satire targeted corrupt political figures and pompous ‘celebrities’ of the day and captured social events, including ‘the Shudehill Fight’ in central Manchester during November 1757, as food shortages forced the local population to riot.