ART FOR FOLK’S SAKE
At a job centre in Cornwall, Dean Biggs, the person manning the front office, stares at the letters of individual employees explaining the reason for a leave of absence, piling up on his table. It’s his job to take these ‘Sick Notes’ from the front desk to a supervisor. So he doodles a design on the envelope each time a letter drops onto the table, as a way of giving it his personal seal. Or simply to amuse himself during work hours.
‘Zebedee the Tax Cat’, made of an inflatable ball in a tax office by one colleague for another, is another whimsical object, among more than 280 such objects, paintings, installations, videos and posters on show at the Folk Archive exhibition at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), Delhi. It showcases a side of Britain that’s travelled less well to India.
A poster of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip next to a directory of clowns; Princess Diana as a signboard painting in a beach town; a cabinet displaying spectacles mounted with faux eyeballs; plastic severed limbs next to a bottle of ‘instant turd’; a photograph of a motorcycle hearse, a funeral service run at 100mph by a cleric-biker for dead bikers; protesters asking Tony Blair “to listen to them and not his wife” — the line between satire and subversion, comedy and pathos and the quintessential British sensibility of getting on with life helped on by a droll sense of humour, is well in evidence here.
The Joke Shop cabinet is one of the most striking exhibits of the show. It has been sourced from a shop in Blackpool, Lancashire, a popular holiday town, where it would appear that all sorts of digres- sive behaviour are the norm as tends to be the case in places and moments that are removed from our daily lives. “In Folk Archive, we have concentrated on a personal selection of things that caught our fancy; objects such as these particularly appeal to our idea of the ability of people to laugh at themselves and the centrality of humour in human creativity,” say artists Alan Kane and Jeremy Deller who have put together this collection.
Why is it that we have not seen such a portrayal of British life before? Kane and Deller say their aim was to present a picture of the UK from the ground level. “Everyday visual creative energy is abundant in the UK, but is often overlooked or undervalued. The types of things in the show range from examples of signs and marketing material, expressions of discontent and political affiliation, exuberant performances, costumes and activities — almost anything we could find from the streets which had a visual excitement,” they say.
“Tar Barrel Rolling, for instance, a Devon annual event, involves locals running around town carrying huge, heavy, burning barrels on their backs, and is an absolutely crazy event,” says Deller, a conceptual artist who won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2004. “It’s popular with locals and visitors. It is incredibly striking visually, and it very much flies in the face of sensible behaviour and of the current climate of health and safety in the UK. The main conclusion we arrived at from making the exhibition is that people from all walks of life are inventive, energetic, visually sophisticated, and surprising.” Kane, for instance, draws attention to an exhibit, Protest House, a photograph of a tenant who had a longstanding dispute with the city council and used the façade of his house to plaster his grievances on.
The community and the individual, more than the broad strokes of a ‘national character’, are clearly the artists’ focus. This is perhaps why individual and folk politics, oddities and eccentricities have been given the space and respect in this exhibition normally accorded to art.
(Folk Archive is on at
IGNCA, till February 27)