Pick up a Guardian and go to Starbucks for a coffee and a bacon buttie that doesn’t really taste of anything. Throw away most of the paper – the sections on sport, travel, cooking, families, the TV guide and all the advertising junk – and speed read what’s left, catching up on all the grim news that’s happened out in the real world. Then I begin my nostalgic walk down Oxford Road. The architecture is a lot like Liverpool and most other northern cities, with it’s backdrop of solid Victorian megaliths, built when the local statesmen were bulging with civic pride and saw themselves as custodians of an empire to rival Rome. Mixed in with this Neo-Classical pomp is a dash of 60s Modernist steel and glass, some concrete Brutalism and now the deliberately quirky Post Modernist follies exemplified in Manchester by its first skyscraper, the anorexic Beetham Tower.
There’s an undoubted vibrancy about both cities but in Manchester there’s also a disturbing number of young beggars – dispossessed youths sitting down in doorways covered with rough blankets each holding his own crude, handwritten card asking for money, the ink getting smudged in the pouring rain. Without wishing to sound like Friedrich Engels, I’d have to say that the prevalence of these signs of poverty and hopelessness seem to me to be decidedly more widespread in Manchester than either Liverpool or London.
Having once lived in Manchester, when I’m walking along looking at the buildings I suppose the thing that strikes me most are the landmarks that are no longer around. The bridge over the Precinct Centre, the Maths Tower, a couple of cinemas, the old Conti club, the plesiosaur that used to sit in the Williamson Building – all gone. Almost as disconcerting are some of the places that remain but have shape-shifted or reinvented themselves – Johnny Roadhouse, an old junk shop that’s now a smart musical instrument shop; the Eighth Day a scruffy vegetarian café that’s now a trendy whole food shop; and both the Prudential insurance company and Free Trade Hall which are both now hotels. And then there’s all the unfamiliar new stuff ranging in scale from the refashioned Arndale Centre to the Aquatics Centre and the whole of the Curry Mile.
The Students’ Union building – scene of much youthful carousing – looks pretty much the same and then, a little further along, comes the Whitworth Art Gallery. This was one of the places I used to visit quite regularly as a student, and where I heard George Melly give an interesting talk about his friend Rene Magritte. It, too, has had an upgrade, with extra display space added on and some general refurbishment that makes it now look very smart and functional. The architectural work has been carried out sensitively and is appropriately subtle enough to be almost unnoticeable which is a definite plus, although it does encourage one to look at the art – and this is a bit of a problem.
Maybe all this extra display space came as a bit of a shock to the curatorial team as it seems to me that it’s giving them a bit of a problem trying to fill it all up. By my count, currently there are eight temporary exhibitions currently running and, it pains me a bit to say it, I didn’t find any of them particularly interesting, attractive, stimulating or satisfying.
So, there are New Acquisitions which are all a bit dull or, since I can’t really remember any of them, perhaps unmemorable is a better adjective. And it wasn’t just me looking past them and out the windows at the rather more glorious arboreal display in the park beyond. Then there are three one-person shows: Johnnie Shand Kydd’s party photographs; Richard Forster’s drawings and Bedwyr Williams’ cosmic installation. Finally, four thematic genre shows: Watercolours, Portraits, Art Textiles and Abstract Landscapes. You’d think there would be something amongst this lot for everyone and maybe there is for everyone else, but just not for me. It’s all just a bit dull. Worst of all, I think, is the Portrait show which isn’t just bland but pointlessly, provocatively irritating being a sterling example of the boringly predictable Post-Modern doctrine of display that says you must jumble everything together and stick it randomly on the walls. So the show has portraits from all different styles and periods plonked together in an incoherent collage. Whoever is responsible for this ghastly mash-up presumably has one eye on a career move to Tate Liverpool, dreaming of becoming a star in one of the galaxies of Serota’s Constellations.
It’s all a bit dispiriting, so I retrace my steps back up Oxford Road stopping off for a bit of protein at McDonald’s. Some desperate no-hoper is roaming round the tables looking for other people’s leftovers to eat. The last time I saw anyone do that was also in Manchester, during the dark days of the early ‘70s at the famous Plaza curry house where you could get a double biryani (well, an enormous plate of orange rice and chicken with hot sauce) for about 30p. Back then a bunch of the backroom staff, having sized up the situation, came running out from the kitchen, roughly escorted the tramp outside and head-butted him to the floor. Today, everyone just seems to pretend not to notice – even when the man starts to grumble and complain that there aren’t any leftovers for him to snaffle – which I suppose is some sort of progress.
Years ago, when I was a student eating cheap curries in dodgy places on Upper Brook Street, Tony Wilson was just a chirpy newsreader on Granada TV. Then he somehow transformed himself into a very groovy music producer, club owner, entrepreneur and all-round celebrity Mancunian before, sadly, dying a bit too young. He’s remembered in a film starring Steve Coogan and also in a place – Tony Wilson Place – site of Home the city’s centre for contemporary art, theatre and film. I’m on a bit of a tight schedule so haven’t really got time for the theatre or film and, disappointingly, the art doesn’t take too long to see, either. Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe was about a housewife who becomes allergic to everyday life. Apparently it’s a metaphor for everything from AIDS to climate change and is the inspirational starting point for a series of new commissions – the results of which are now on show at the Home art gallery. It’s a familiar combination of bits and bobs and videos – a bunch of MDF tables, a film of a woman having an asthma attack, Sunil Gupta’s photographs of gay life in the ‘80s and so on – that exemplify a certain very particular style of curation that’s meant to be cutting edge, risky and very now-ish. They do similar stuff all the time at the ICA and it seems to be deliberately designed to appear worthy and intellectually profound but also wilfully visually pretty tedious. It’s the kind of show that’s hard to summarise in a couple of paragraphs and crucially cries out to be commemorated in a long, pretentious thesis – but it’s not one that I’m ever going to write. The exhibition poster daringly poses the question: Are you allergic to the 21st century? And if this is going to be the art of this century then, sadly, the answer has to be in the affirmative.
It’s been a grim start to viewing the art and culture of Manchester and I’m wondering whether maybe I should have followed the suggestions of the official tourist guide and had a look at the ice rink or the greyhound racing, but gamely I decide to press on through the rain, which once again has started to chuck it down. Last stop is Manchester Art Gallery which has also had a successful makeover and a complete rehang of the permanent collection. This now provides a comprehensive overview of British art from Reynolds, Gainsborough and Turner through to the wild boys of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rooms are themed – Landscape, The Grand Tour, Scottishness, Romanticism and the like – and accompanied by explanatory wall panels that are surprisingly well written and informative. The works are similarly, surprisingly well chosen and, if you’ll pardon the expression, well hung. Favourite for me was the room with Etty’s enormous, magnificently daft, soft-porn extravaganza The Siren and Ulysses, adjacent to an almost equally impressively soppy Landseer lion. The final room of Pre-Raphaelites is also populist good fun with some well-known stunners on display, prominent amongst which are Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, The Scapegoat and Shadow of Death.
After that lot I feel quite enthused again, even to the extent that I find myself looking favourably on the Matthew Derbyshire display in the contemporary section, titled An Exhibition for Modern Living. I suppose Derbyshire’s ‘sculptural environments’ are in the tradition of collage that started with Picasso, adding scraps of newspaper to his paintings, which then evolved and became abstracted in Schwitter’s collections of urban detritus. Post-wars, Rauschenberg expanded these into three-dimensional sculptural assemblages but, whereas he found his component parts amongst the discarded junk and trash on the pavements outside his studio, there are no rules when it comes to trouving your objets nowadays and Derbyshire gathers his materials from Habitat and Heal’s or the Science Museum. Basically, he seems to collect nice new bits of furniture, household goods or appliances and stack them in neat collections in order to suggest a sort of overall atmosphere or philosophical ambience or somesuch sentiment. Maybe I’m being too generous and perhaps there’s not much more to his art than recreating up-market shop window displays. Anyway, on this occasion, after enjoying the triumphant British section rehang, I’m in such a good mood that I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The final night sampling Manchester’s international cuisine means a pleasant evening eating Italian and talking trivia. After discussions on breakfast and beer, an analysis of the day’s best snooker breaks and a comprehensive report on the travails of Aston Villa, there’s a lull in the conversation. I try introducing the topic of Post-Modernist developments in the architecture of Liverpool and Manchester but I can sense eyes starting to glaze over so I switch to retelling a few droll anecdotes from my art memoir. Sadly, by this time, quite a few litres of wine have passed under the bridge and the rest of the conversation yields few insights into art or anything else. In fact, the ribald nature of some of the remarks, while the cause of a good deal of amusement at the time are, in the cold light of day, on a level that would embarrass a scriptwriter for a Carry On film. And at this point I think discretion determines that it’s best to draw a veil over the rest of the proceedings in the restaurant and, indeed, in the grand city of Manchester, itself.