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| From Marx to Brexit: Tyneside's AV festival paints the whole world red | From Marx to Brexit: Tyneside's AV festival paints the whole world red |
| (5 months later) | |
| We live in terrible times: straight off the street and plunged into a very dark room in Gateshead. Maybe I’ve been kidnapped without noticing. It is black as a coal-hole in here. Snagging my trousers on a busted wooden clothes airer, colliding with an oil drum, mangling my knee on the hulk of an old television lying screen-down among unnameable junk, almost tripping on a clutter of stuff on the floor. All this wreckage, as well as the floors and walls, are covered in tarry black paint. The only visible light is spilling through little holes in a painted drape sagging above my head. | We live in terrible times: straight off the street and plunged into a very dark room in Gateshead. Maybe I’ve been kidnapped without noticing. It is black as a coal-hole in here. Snagging my trousers on a busted wooden clothes airer, colliding with an oil drum, mangling my knee on the hulk of an old television lying screen-down among unnameable junk, almost tripping on a clutter of stuff on the floor. All this wreckage, as well as the floors and walls, are covered in tarry black paint. The only visible light is spilling through little holes in a painted drape sagging above my head. |
| Who knows what this place is. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for Britain today. Perhaps it is Britain today and we don’t need metaphors. Through a low door and up some stairs are paintings of dinosaurs, with titles such as A Kind of Sinister Magnificence and A Frightful Feeling of Impotence and Despair. I know that feeling, though I think the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas is quoting French 19th-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Misery, along with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and George Orwell’s thoughts on the links between poverty and dirt. | Who knows what this place is. Perhaps it’s a metaphor for Britain today. Perhaps it is Britain today and we don’t need metaphors. Through a low door and up some stairs are paintings of dinosaurs, with titles such as A Kind of Sinister Magnificence and A Frightful Feeling of Impotence and Despair. I know that feeling, though I think the Portuguese artist Hugo Canoilas is quoting French 19th-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Philosophy of Misery, along with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and George Orwell’s thoughts on the links between poverty and dirt. |
| “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is impossible to be honest and to remain alive,” wrote Orwell, in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. “Meanwhile, what about socialism?” Orwell’s question returns, as the title of the month-long AV festival, staged in venues across Newcastle and Gateshead. Well, what about it? | “We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is impossible to be honest and to remain alive,” wrote Orwell, in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. “Meanwhile, what about socialism?” Orwell’s question returns, as the title of the month-long AV festival, staged in venues across Newcastle and Gateshead. Well, what about it? |
| The AV festival brings together past and present, history and archive, art and documentation from right across the world. Here, everywhere is local. As we wade through piles of rubbish, we are dinosaurs on the road not to Wigan pier but to extinction. Photographs of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade meet the documentation of Tim Brennan’s 1996 walk, in which he retraced the 298 mile march from Jarrow to London. Along the way, Brennan met Tony Benn, and marched the last half mile to parliament with Ken Livingstone. | The AV festival brings together past and present, history and archive, art and documentation from right across the world. Here, everywhere is local. As we wade through piles of rubbish, we are dinosaurs on the road not to Wigan pier but to extinction. Photographs of the 1936 Jarrow Crusade meet the documentation of Tim Brennan’s 1996 walk, in which he retraced the 298 mile march from Jarrow to London. Along the way, Brennan met Tony Benn, and marched the last half mile to parliament with Ken Livingstone. |
| In the Lit and Phil, home of Newcastle’s Philosophical Society, are the tokens of 18th century radical Thomas Spence, little coins he distributed as political propaganda, now in vitrines in the library. Spence was expelled from the society for publishing a speech attacking landowners. The coins rail against tyranny and unfair taxes, against war and slavery. Their little pictures of asses and pigs and a starving man gnawing a bone in jail are now barely legible, sorrowful little things. | In the Lit and Phil, home of Newcastle’s Philosophical Society, are the tokens of 18th century radical Thomas Spence, little coins he distributed as political propaganda, now in vitrines in the library. Spence was expelled from the society for publishing a speech attacking landowners. The coins rail against tyranny and unfair taxes, against war and slavery. Their little pictures of asses and pigs and a starving man gnawing a bone in jail are now barely legible, sorrowful little things. |
| The 50 volumes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s collected writings run the length of Vane gallery in Newcastle town centre, like an errant Carl Andre floor sculpture. The book jackets contain only bricks. You can’t read them, but they’d be handy in a fight down at the New Left Book Club. | The 50 volumes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s collected writings run the length of Vane gallery in Newcastle town centre, like an errant Carl Andre floor sculpture. The book jackets contain only bricks. You can’t read them, but they’d be handy in a fight down at the New Left Book Club. |
| This is the work of Claire Fontaine, a pair of Paris-based artists who name themselves after a French stationery chain, and part of a series called Brickbats. Submachine guns lean casually against the walls, along with a taser and a bunch of Motorola radios. They aren’t real, but red-coloured replicas whose weight and heft correspond to the real thing, and are used, we are told, for “training purposes”. The phrase has a horrible ring. | This is the work of Claire Fontaine, a pair of Paris-based artists who name themselves after a French stationery chain, and part of a series called Brickbats. Submachine guns lean casually against the walls, along with a taser and a bunch of Motorola radios. They aren’t real, but red-coloured replicas whose weight and heft correspond to the real thing, and are used, we are told, for “training purposes”. The phrase has a horrible ring. |
| Claire Fontaine’s 2011 Situations is an instructional DVD of unarmed combat moves. This is fun, a tutorial in how to crush an assailant’s face, break people’s limbs and knee them in the groin. The violence all looks so effortless and clean, a choreography of major injury. The tutor never breaks into a sweat, even as his hired muscle set about him, in what looks like a white-walled gallery. He takes them apart and interrupts the action to give us handy tips and observations. I cannot stop fantasising. What about socialism, I ask, idly deflecting a sucker punch by clapping my cupped palms over my imaginary assailant’s ears, making his eyes roll up into his skull and his brains ooze out through his nostrils. | Claire Fontaine’s 2011 Situations is an instructional DVD of unarmed combat moves. This is fun, a tutorial in how to crush an assailant’s face, break people’s limbs and knee them in the groin. The violence all looks so effortless and clean, a choreography of major injury. The tutor never breaks into a sweat, even as his hired muscle set about him, in what looks like a white-walled gallery. He takes them apart and interrupts the action to give us handy tips and observations. I cannot stop fantasising. What about socialism, I ask, idly deflecting a sucker punch by clapping my cupped palms over my imaginary assailant’s ears, making his eyes roll up into his skull and his brains ooze out through his nostrils. |
| That’s the idea, anyway. Dan Perjovschi is well known for his little cartoons and agitprop graffiti, which he has scrawled on gallery walls and windows around the world. He started doing them on his apartment walls in Ceausescu’s Romania. He has run riot in the NewBridge Project Space, a retail unit in Newcastle town centre, but the passing shoppers don’t seem to notice. He is at heart more genial than biting, I think. | That’s the idea, anyway. Dan Perjovschi is well known for his little cartoons and agitprop graffiti, which he has scrawled on gallery walls and windows around the world. He started doing them on his apartment walls in Ceausescu’s Romania. He has run riot in the NewBridge Project Space, a retail unit in Newcastle town centre, but the passing shoppers don’t seem to notice. He is at heart more genial than biting, I think. |
| One wall is covered with his annotated newspaper pages. “Everybody bombs Syria,” he writes on top of one front page, “its like a global sport.” It goes on. “Cap Capitalism” and “Brexit Brex my heart.” Well OK. Perjovschi’s drawings are a modern equivalent to Spence’s tokens. Both proceed by a kind of stealth, like a rumour. | One wall is covered with his annotated newspaper pages. “Everybody bombs Syria,” he writes on top of one front page, “its like a global sport.” It goes on. “Cap Capitalism” and “Brexit Brex my heart.” Well OK. Perjovschi’s drawings are a modern equivalent to Spence’s tokens. Both proceed by a kind of stealth, like a rumour. |
| In the Mining Institute Library, on a collection of monitors, voices tell stories of a world that’s gone, though in Newcastle, its traces are everywhere. Here’s T Dan Smith, firebrand socialist and councillor, who was done for corruption through his deals with architect and businessman John Poulson. Between them, they carved up the city. Other elderly men talk of fighting in the Spanish civil war. There’s hours and hours of this footage, recounting memories of political struggle and fractious meetings in the Socialist Cafe in the Royal Arcade, demolished in Smith’s redevelopment projects in the 1960s. | In the Mining Institute Library, on a collection of monitors, voices tell stories of a world that’s gone, though in Newcastle, its traces are everywhere. Here’s T Dan Smith, firebrand socialist and councillor, who was done for corruption through his deals with architect and businessman John Poulson. Between them, they carved up the city. Other elderly men talk of fighting in the Spanish civil war. There’s hours and hours of this footage, recounting memories of political struggle and fractious meetings in the Socialist Cafe in the Royal Arcade, demolished in Smith’s redevelopment projects in the 1960s. |
| At Tyneside Cinema a man in a hi-vis jerkin swabs black rubber boots with blue and yellow paint. Row after row of boots. Another man in a furry jacket and red gloves wipes the paint off again, with a rag and a bucket of water. Both these absurd actions take for ever. Coming in part way through the film, I have no idea what’s going on. Shot in a former Soviet paper factory in Moscow, the two protagonists perform a number of similarly dismal rituals, swabbing and sweeping and lining things up, putting on wretched old shoes and taking them off again, then trying other pairs, pair after pair after pair. | At Tyneside Cinema a man in a hi-vis jerkin swabs black rubber boots with blue and yellow paint. Row after row of boots. Another man in a furry jacket and red gloves wipes the paint off again, with a rag and a bucket of water. Both these absurd actions take for ever. Coming in part way through the film, I have no idea what’s going on. Shot in a former Soviet paper factory in Moscow, the two protagonists perform a number of similarly dismal rituals, swabbing and sweeping and lining things up, putting on wretched old shoes and taking them off again, then trying other pairs, pair after pair after pair. |
| The work of Russian artist Haim Sokol, Testimony goes on for two hours. There is a great deal of emptiness in the dark beyond the spotlit actors. One, I read, is the Angel of History, the other the Migrant, but which is which? It feels like a lifetime and I suppose it’s meant to. If I watched at home I could cheat and fast-forward, looking for the juicy bits. There aren’t any. But you need the big screen, the thunderous echo, to get the requisite sense of portent and time lost. The film ends with a cratered and bullet-holed army helmet, a light going on and off under its dome, with an almost festive air. | The work of Russian artist Haim Sokol, Testimony goes on for two hours. There is a great deal of emptiness in the dark beyond the spotlit actors. One, I read, is the Angel of History, the other the Migrant, but which is which? It feels like a lifetime and I suppose it’s meant to. If I watched at home I could cheat and fast-forward, looking for the juicy bits. There aren’t any. But you need the big screen, the thunderous echo, to get the requisite sense of portent and time lost. The film ends with a cratered and bullet-holed army helmet, a light going on and off under its dome, with an almost festive air. |
| More frightening, and compelling, was Oleg Mavromatti’s film made from YouTube footage by Moscovite blogger Sergey Astahov, produced with Boryana Rossa and shown among one-off screenings and performances taking place every weekend of the festival. These are probably the most vital part of the festival. Living with his alcoholic parents, Astahov is a profoundly confused pro-Putin activist, an Orthodox Christian and a gay man struggling to reject his sexuality. Cooking and eating, wandering supermarkets and the streets, Astahov’s blog grows ever more unsettling. | More frightening, and compelling, was Oleg Mavromatti’s film made from YouTube footage by Moscovite blogger Sergey Astahov, produced with Boryana Rossa and shown among one-off screenings and performances taking place every weekend of the festival. These are probably the most vital part of the festival. Living with his alcoholic parents, Astahov is a profoundly confused pro-Putin activist, an Orthodox Christian and a gay man struggling to reject his sexuality. Cooking and eating, wandering supermarkets and the streets, Astahov’s blog grows ever more unsettling. |
| We watch a terrible accident on the highway and a woman dancing in a square. We see someone die horribly and listen to the blogger praising the state and living in fear of returning to psychiatric care. And then more cooking, and talking and performing to camera. Sometimes he wears an Orthodox cross on a chain around his forehead. Sometimes he wears lipstick. No Place for Fools is an accidental testimony, revealing far more even than it intends, as we watch a life and a world unfolding before us in Russia today. | We watch a terrible accident on the highway and a woman dancing in a square. We see someone die horribly and listen to the blogger praising the state and living in fear of returning to psychiatric care. And then more cooking, and talking and performing to camera. Sometimes he wears an Orthodox cross on a chain around his forehead. Sometimes he wears lipstick. No Place for Fools is an accidental testimony, revealing far more even than it intends, as we watch a life and a world unfolding before us in Russia today. |
| Meanwhile, what about socialism? What about everything, I ask. | Meanwhile, what about socialism? What about everything, I ask. |
| • The AV festival is in Newcastle and Gateshead until 27 March | • The AV festival is in Newcastle and Gateshead until 27 March |
| • This article was amended on 6 March to correct the name of Friedrich Engels – he was previously referred to as Joseph. Artist Haim Sokol is Russian, not Ukrainian. | • This article was amended on 6 March to correct the name of Friedrich Engels – he was previously referred to as Joseph. Artist Haim Sokol is Russian, not Ukrainian. |