February 25, 2012
The New Art Gallery Walsall
Laura Oldfield Ford at The New Art Gallery Walsall
Join Laura Oldfield Ford, author of Savage Messiah, as she discusses her new work inspired by her walks or 'drifts' in and around Walsall and presents an alternative view of the town.
Her work forms part of a larger exhibtion called There Is A Place, that brings together a group of artists who explore our psychic connectivity to landscape. The drawings, paintings and prints within the exhibition reveal 'a sense of place' as seemingly generic urban and suburban views evoke personal and collective memories. The reverie of teenage hideouts, suburban housing estates and motorway junctions, each depicted in painstaking detail, are at once familiar yet unnerving for all.
The artists in this exhibition capture the most overlooked and peripheral spaces of our towns and cities, those unremarkable and unclaimed spaces that we each make our own
The exhibition will run from 20 January to 14 April 2012.
To book advance free tickets for Laura Oldfield Ford's talk please call 01922 654400.
2.00pm – 3.00pm
The New Art Gallery Walsall
Gallery Square
Walsall, West Midlands WS2 8LG UK
01922 654400
Authors
Books
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Savage Messiah
The acclaimed art fanzine’s psychogeographic drifts through a ruined city.
Blog
'A prophetic apocalyptic sublime' – Savage Messiah reviewed in Times Literary Supplement
Reading Savage Messiah, Roz Kaveney finds moments of “inchoate skinhead anarchism,” sitting alongside moments of mixed-media art that, “approach the condition of poetry.”
Kaveney admires Savage Messiah for its ability to, “see in the scruffy and semi-derelict a sort of beauty, a prophetic apocalyptic sublime,” but worries that Laura Oldfield Ford’s London is,
a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory.
Kaveney, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, describes the content of Savage Messiah as a series of, “collages, fragments of text, dingy-looking photographs, sketches of buildings, deliberately stylized portraits. She interprets Oldfield Ford’s low-tech approach as, “in part a deliberate rejection of the sort of psychogeography she associates with Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home, and sees as a deliberate packaging of the bizarre for middle-class consumers.” She highlights the ways in which the apparently derelict and run-down areas of London that are depicted in Savage Messiah become symbols of struggle against urban and political hegemony, writing that
[Oldfield Ford] sees temporarily occupied drinking dens, factories where alienated workers sabotage the machines that fill cheap chocolates with nasty fondant, high streets full of kebab and pound shops, as sites of resistance to the squeaky clean consumerism of contemporary Britain.
'This unknown territory has become my biography': Iain Sinclair reviews Savage Messiah
Iain Sinclair has been out walking in the footsteps of Laura Oldfield Ford. Sinclair opens his review of Savage Messiah, Ford's cut-n-paste zine of psychogeographic drifts through London, with a description of his own walks through the city's changing landscape.
Writing for the Guardian, Sinclair documents his own experiences of journeying through an East London altered irrevocably by Olympic construction and the "fork-tongued instruments of global capitalism, hellbent on improving the image of destruction." Such dramatic change has, he claims, spawned a counter-reaction of 'Sentimentalists of every stripe' seeking to capture a landscape on the verge of disappearance: "raiding parties bearing cameras and notebooks, the tattered footsoldiers of anarchy: retro-geographers, punk Vorticists." Walking alongside these lone chroniclers of a lost London, Sinclair ponders the violent collision of new money and old city:
Old Stratford, transport hub, retail cathedral, birthplace of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew me back with its intimations of a new England, a city state outside time and beyond culture. Compulsory diversions have been arranged, systems of barricades and cones, to funnel random pedestrians through chasms of glass and steel towards the shimmering illusion of the Westfield oasis. It took something special to make me reach for my camera, all the evidence had already been logged and relogged. Just as my futile presence, in its turn, was captured on hours of security tape, scans from overhead drones.