Creative Times

Manchester’s arts community hasn’t lost its get up and go attitiude, famously displayed in 1857’s art treasures exhibition. CREATIVE Times finds out more.

On the 150th anniversary of the Art Treasures exhibition, Sean Smith looks at organisations still proving that where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The city fathers of Manchester who organised the original Art Treasures exhibition, seeking to emulate the grand collections of London and Paris by cheekily proposing that the great and the good of Great Britain loan their priceless artworks for exhibition to the general public, saw their self-imposed task as nothing less than their civic responsibility as upright citizens of the world’s first industrial city.

Their aim was to educate and inspire the city’s growing population to greater things. As one contemporary commentator put it, if the (presumably ignorant and uneducated) “lads of the loom” were exposed to the work of artists such as Michelangelo, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, perhaps they might “stroll home, strong in a determination to achieve something.”

One million ‘lads of the loom’, and others - including Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens - made the trip through the smog of Manchester into the relatively clear air of Old Trafford to see the exhibition, which was made up of more than 16,000 exhibits in a steel and glass pavilion on the scale of Crystal Palace.

The caring industrialist Titus Salt organised excursions for his workers from Bradford, while the fledgling travel agent Thomas Cook ran some of his first package tours from the north-east. The then only recently-attributed Michelangelo painting, Madonna And Child With St John And The Angels, caused such a sensation among its Mancunian audience that it has been known as the Manchester Madonna ever since.

It was an early indication of the mindset many of the city’s most influential inhabitants have exhibited through the years, that this was a city that wasn’t prepared to play second fiddle to anywhere else, and furthermore, as another proactive, self-starter Ben Franklin put it exactly 100 years earlier, God helps those who help themselves.

Nobody else will do it for you. If you want something to happen, you have to get off your backside and do it yourself.

It’s an attitude familiar to Sarah Champion, Chief Executive Officer of the Chinese Arts Centre on Thomas Street in the city centre, which celebrates its 21st birthday this year. “The Chinese Arts Centre came out of the frustration felt by a group of Chinese artists in Manchester in the mid-1980s,” says Champion. “The Arts Council were pushing the idea of Black Arts and these artists didn’t, - and don’t - consider themselves to be black artists. This was just another way of them being excluded. So they just thought, right, if the public sector and the various support agencies aren’t going to do anything, we’ll do it ourselves. “So they put on a mini-festival, in and around Chinatown. Artists in Manchester were very supportive, the local Chinese community was very supportive, interested and curious - because it was contemporary art, which many of them weren’t familiar with. It was a big success.”

Manchester Artists Studio Association, celebrating it’s 25th anniversary this year, was born from a similar feeling of, if not exclusion, then dislocation. “Manchester was quite a depressed place at that time,” says artist Jude McPherson, who has been involved in MASA and it’s sister organisation Castlefield Gallery for the past decade. “There wasn’t lots of cheap artists accommodation available.” “A group of graduates came out of art college and wanted to stay together, and they saw the opportunity to create something that was like a continuation of art college. They had quite lofty ambitions, they wanted to be an organisation that helped other artists as well, so they did live drawing classes, things like that. It in the beginning it has this very grand remit, this educational aspect.

If you want something to happen, you have to get off your backside and do it yourself.

“There was a complete lack of group studios at that time. MASA was the first in Manchester and it’s the longest running now. There wasn’t a great deal of other stuff around either. The Cornerhouse wasn’t open then, for example. Their aim was to provide cheap studio space and to try and establish an arts scene in Manchester to encourage artists, because otherwise, they all left college and went straight down to London.” Chris Jam, co-founder of the Speakeasy spoken word and music event with Segun Lee French, made the journey the other way round, leaving London for Manchester just as the city’s club scene began to explode in 1987.

“I went to all the clubs then and I noticed there wasn’t really space for - for want of a better word, and I hate using the term - black music,” says the veteran DJ and singer. “And there wasn’t the space for black artists to do stuff of their own.

“I’m from London, so maybe it’s a bit different for me personally, but you’ve got people like Segun, Shirley May, Dike Omeje, they’re Mancunians who’ve had trouble getting the kind of foothold they thought they deserved. We tried to do something about that.” Modelled on the work of the Nu Yorican Poets, the pair came up with a fluid, freeform showcase event for them and their friends, where poets and rappers delivered their work over, under and through music provided by a DJ and eventually a live band.

“It was a real problem trying to find a space where we could have singers, traditional performers without music, and the whole DJ thing together. More than anything, our problem was that people didn’t understand what we were trying to do.

“That’s where North-West Arts Board [now Arts Council England] and the Greenroom came in, because, while there was always a real intensity, there was always a real passion there, as far as numbers go, it wasn’t really that successful initially. Fortunately, the Greenroom doesn’t need that many people in the space for it to work.”

The backing of funding organisations like Manchester City Council and Arts Council England can be a crucial factor in the success, or otherwise, of such ground level initiatives as Speakeasy. But there’s only so much money to go round.

“We’ve always had a tough time being based in Manchester,” says Sarah Champion. “At the beginning we got support from Manchester City Council - I don’t mean just in terms of financial support but also promotional marketing support - and really, since I’ve been in post, we haven’t really had that.

Similarly, in the early days of MASA, according to Jude McPherson, “they pretty much had to make do with what they’d got. MASA has always been a self-financing organisation. We’ve had a grant recently for a publication but we’ve never relied on any funding from elsewhere. It’s a not-for-profit organisation but it’s never been one that’s really needed outside assistance.

“Which is also really important,” she adds, “because it gives artists time to get on with their own work rather than chasing grant funding.”

Even if organisations like Speakeasy, the Chinese Arts Centre and MASA can get the resources they require, they often have a mountain to climb when trying to get press attention for anything that takes place outside the capital.

“We’ve offered to pay their train fare, accommodation, their expenses while they’re up here, and we just cannot get people up here,” says Sarah Champion with weary resignation. “We had an experience where we worked with the National Portrait Gallery, for a community show which was in one of their side galleries and it gave us more press coverage in national papers than we’d ever had before.”

Initially sceptical about Manchester International Festival, Champion says that Alex Poots’s three-week arts and culture beano seems to have turned the situation right around.

“The best thing for us is that, as an organisation, I think we’d got rather complacent,” explains Champion. “The festival managed to sell-out a Mandarin opera which was in every paper and magazine you could possibly imagine. It made us sit up and think, Bloody hell. If they can do it then we can really do it too. It was a good wake-up call for us.

“It has actually made people aware that Manchester has quite a vibrant cultural centre and we’re definitely feeling the glow of that. Now people don’t say, oh Manchester. They realise that we exist.”

Organisations often have a mountain to climb when trying to get press attention for anything that takes place outside the capital.

But the very idea of having to compete with London doesn’t seem like such an issue anymore. Maybe the city fathers who created the original Art Treasures have finally succeeded in their aim after all.

“Now, I think, perhaps people think, yeah, London’s important, but maybe working internationally is more important,” says Jude McPherson.

“There’s always been that idea that, y’know, if you’re any good, you’ve got to go to London, but I think Manchester can be a valid alternative to that - if only as a stepping stone onto international work.”

“They might not be that bothered about having an exhibition in London, but they’d really love to have an exhibition in St Petersburg.”

“Speakeasy,“ believes Chris Jam, “Couldn’t have worked in any other city. It’s intrinsically Mancunian. I think it would be impossible to recreate that passion, that intensity, that dynamism, anywhere else. Combined with the ultra-realness of the vibe, that was strictly Mancunian.

“And that comes from a Cockney,” he adds with a laugh. “I can appreciate it from the outside. And I don’t think it would happen in London, something like that.

“You’ve got that whole ‘London is everything’ idea going on but this this is a very proud place. People realise that if they want something to happen, they have to do it for themselves.”

W:www.chineseartscentre.org
W:www.masa-artists.com
W:www.speakeasymcr.com

Manchester Art Gallery is running the Art Treasure in Manchester - 150 years on until 27th January 2008.

W: www.manchestergalleries.org