As part of the festival, local artists Evi Grigoropoulou, and Maurice Carlin present 'Straw Poll'. Showing work on posters; by Caner Aslan, Maurice Carlin, Evi Grigoropoulou, Dean Kenning, and Jonathan Trayner; across Chapel Street.
Most of the poster artworks are displayed from the windows of private properties; a solution that negotiates the gap between commercial billboards, and the level of (semi-legal) fly-posting tolerated by the local authority, by using the only remaining 'free' visible space. Local residents and businesses were requested to select from the works, and display the posters in their windows, in a manner similar to election posters or 'no junk mail' signs, that are often the only conscious, visible, political statement that the majority of people make.
"Straw Poll"; An Essay by David Wilkinson
After reading the press release and viewing the five posters which comprise this unconventional exhibition, there’s little doubt that this is a consciously politicised project. Yet there is not a singular political theme operating here. Some overlap and some don’t, but all are curiosity-inducing; the iceberg tips of massive and vitally important topics a million miles from the current titillating scandal of MPs’ expenses abuse.
Determined to question the mechanisms of contemporary politics, he is intrigued by who or what we choose to represent us in a system of representational democracy, a system which, he points out, is not the best or only form of democracy despite what we may be led to believe. The opportunity to explore this issue came with an exhibition which involved local businesses and residents around Chapel Street in Salford choosing their favourite poster from a selection to display in their window. Trayner deliberately chose a divisive figure to see how people would react. Uninterested in whether his poster was picked or not, he claims to have been motivated more by the process set in motion by the poster’s production. For example, I am told that what I might choose to write about the poster is as interesting to him as the original process of making the poster and offering it for display. This leaves me somewhat stumped. What do I make of it? My parents are United fans, but football isn’t the basis of my tribal loyalties. If the issue is the politics of spectacle, trying to guess what Keane’s potential policies might be is pointless – it’s his public persona which is the draw or the turn-off. Avoiding the question, I displace it onto others. What might passers-by, the attendees of the music festival which encompassed the exhibition, make of it?
Asking this brings me on to another theme of the exhibition, the politics of urban space. Who owns it, and what spaces can we engage with, utilise, and for what purpose? Who do we have to be, and who do we have to pay? What do we notice based on the everyday conditioning of urban life, the semi-conscious filtering out of multiple sensations forced on us over the course of an average day? How does the location of something affect how we receive it, or whether we choose to receive it at all? Did the Straw Poll posters even register in many peoples’ minds during their brief residence? And would they even be given the opportunity to? Many businesses rejected participation in the exhibition for the reason that they wished to remain ‘neutral’ – they couldn’t be seen to be advocating a particular political position. Yet the choice of the same businesses to display advertising throws this argument askew, and should lead us to interrogate the idea that forms of representation which aren’t overtly political are not political at all.
Vested interests were accidentally unearthed when the organisers of the project asked one particular business if they’d like to take part. After initial curiosity, they instantly changed their minds upon seeing Morry Carlin’s reproduction of a poster advertising the miner’s strike dating from 1983. The original is one of a set hidden under Greengate Bridge in Salford ever since they were put up, preserved only by being forgotten about. The area used to be a bus station with a high footfall, explaining the location of the posters. Now it’s neglected and deserted, with moss and pigeon droppings slowly covering the walls.
Morry, however, says he has discovered that the area is due to be cleaned in a few weeks time. As an experiment, he’s taken various people to see the posters, asking what they would do if they had the power to decide their fate. I replied unequivocally that they should be photographed but not preserved. We’re back to the question of urban space and how location affects reception: for me, there would be no point in painstakingly stripping the posters from the wall and putting them in a gallery, or negotiating with the council for their deliberate preservation. They gain their importance from having survived for so long exactly where they are, forming a historical continuum with a fragment of the past which has been deliberately buried for specific political reasons. To turn them into ‘serious’ art objects in a gallery context or to absorb them into a narrative of heritage would be to fetishise and neutralise them. Pleasingly, the poster Morry has picked to reproduce escapes this fetishisation via a piece of graffiti etched into the paper with a knife or a fingernail by a passer-by, which states simply ‘BUSH OUT’. Nonetheless, it didn’t stop some people choosing his poster for display on the basis that the magenta background was pretty.
The themes of class struggle and difference which Morry’s poster point toward are also present in Evi Grigoropolou’s beautifully hand-drawn aspidistra. Inspired by George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in which the plant operates as a symbol of middle class belonging, Evi created the poster as a comment on the changing nature of such class distinctions in the field of consumption. These distinctions vary spatially as well as temporally; in Evi’s homeland of Greece, she claims that the middle class possessed a different character to that of Britain due to its predominant sectors of exploitation being agriculture and services rather than industry.
The issue of urban space comes up once again; class distinctions do not just operate spatially from country to country, but between and sometimes within the subdivisions of a city. In the press release for the exhibition, it is claimed that “new housing complexes around Salford brand themselves as ‘a different class’, having this written on fake bronze plaques on their facades”. Urban space itself, or rather where you live in it, also operates as a marker of class distinction, and the designers’ need to emphasise this difference highlights the inevitable tension generated by the expansion of ‘city centre’ apartments into inner city working class areas. The press release claims that “the class struggle is perpetuated, but in an ambiguous and undefined way”. To me, however, the strength of pointing out such continuing divisions is that it challenges the shibboleth that it is no longer possible to discern clear class divisions and antagonisms in the advanced capitalist nations of the West.
Such social divisions are also transmitted in language, not only via nuances in one particular tongue, but sometimes in the full-on ban on speaking a language in public. Caner Aslan’s fictional advert for a linguistic conference written in deliberately mistranslated Esperanto was partly inspired by the Turkish government’s relaxation on the restrictions placed on the use of Kurdish. When a new state TV channel started broadcasting in Kurdish, the newspapers announced the decision via headlines written in the language. The writers’ unfamiliarity with Kurdish, however, and the fact that it has many dialects, resulted in a series of absurdly garbled phrases.
Caner had also become interested in the idea of a universal language, and the problems of creating a language from scratch and maintaining it as it was originally designed. Both themes hinge around the issue of who has control over language, and how it evolves when its use becomes widespread and dispersed. The image of the shuffled playing cards on the poster suggests an initial order of vocabulary and grammar which may form the building blocks of a language but which cannot and will not remain in a fixed, rigid structure when in common usage. Nor will it avoid interrelating with other languages, something which is perhaps signalled by two different coloured packs being mixed together. We speculate that a local church may have picked the poster for display because the idea of a universal language appealed to notions of universal peace and harmony, before coming to the more likely conclusion that the Esperanto text would have been unrecognisable to them, as it is to most people.
Caner’s poster reveals that languages are not abstract systems, but are, like our identities, produced in particular social contexts. Dean Kenning’s contribution to Straw Poll, an enormous poster of a grotesque featureless pink sculpture with bulging cartoon eyes rammed uncomfortably into a scanner, is captioned ‘Presenting...The Individual’. It’s the most amusing of the posters, and the shape of the sculpture unnervingly reminds me of a butternut squash. Dean claims that the aim is to “ridicule the idea of the autonomous individual cut off from social relations and art’s role as a primary carrier of this ideology.” Asked if this is connected with a still prevalent Romanticism, the artist as one-off genius, outsider and unacknowledged legislator of the world, Dean agrees. He likes the initially anonymous character of French artist Daniel Buren’s flyposting of stripe motifs around Paris metro stations in the 1960s. This partially accounts for the decision to flypost ‘Presenting...The Individual’ rather than include it in the process of choice as with the other posters. Another explanation might be that flyposting fits with its playfully anarchic aim, undermining not only the autonomous individual but also the idea of free, unconditioned individual choice.
The sculpture in the poster is also, however, a statement against over-conceptualising art. Not that Dean thinks that art is beyond explanation – that would be to fall back on the Romanticism which the poster stands against. He describes making the sculpture, though, as a hands-on affair, with the end result possessing a ‘dumb presence’, and the materiality of the process sometimes coming before the ideas which inform it. This deliberate dumbness contrasts sharply with the slickness of the advertising which the flyposted image ends up competing for space with.
What kind of reaction the posters may have provoked from the attendees of Salford’s alternative music festival Sounds From the Other City, of which the exhibition was a part, can’t really be known. The music fans were not the only audience either. Responses would likely have varied massively given the variety of publics passing through Chapel Street, a main road with apartments, pubs, take-aways, estate agents, an architecture firm and the 5 star Lowry hotel at one end, central Manchester on one side and an estate on the other. Morry says he’d be fascinated to know what passers-by made of it, jokingly suggesting that a ‘mystery shopper’ approach should have been taken. Depending on what you take from the project, this could be seen as a potential weakness. Conversely, it could be one of its strengths: though reliant on public sector funding which often comes with its own set of conditions, it is unconstrained by either public gallery feedback forms and attendance figure targets or the appeal to specific tastes in the art market. Manchester, like most of the UK outside London, lacks an art market, offering the opportunity to do something different. Few people would deny that Straw Poll achieves this.