The Art and Craft of Politics

Exhibition by Alex Corina
The Gallery Liverpool, 41 Stanhope Street, Liverpool, L8 5RE
Mon – Fri, 10.30am – 4pm, Free
Extended until 24th April 2015

Reviewed by Tom Calderbank

This is a great exhibition – if you know where to find it. My mate Bob struggled to locate the venue, and gave up in the end. I found it thanks to the clues he left me (it’s The Gallery on Stanhope Street, opposite Cains Brewery, next to the sign writers shop). I’m so glad I did, and I’ll be bringing Bob back before the current exhibition ends on 24th April to show him what he missed. You should see it, too.

This is celebrated Liverpool artist Alex Corina at his wittiest, and like the best satire, his humour come with real bite. The bite of a poverty trap. He has created a series of new works, based on the familiar iconography of road signs prompted by five years of the Cameron and Clegg Coalition. At its centre is The Coalition Cycle – a potent symbol of the contradictions and competition between different ideologies contained within the Coalition’s term in office. Visitors to his Lark Lane Artworks gallery will be familiar with the bike, which is often seen outside the shop, going precisely nowhere. Seeing it here was like seeing an old friend on tour. I get the sense that future generations will find this object and treat it like an artifact in some bizarre cosmology.

Alex says: “The cycle is a bike heading in two directions at once and is a surreal response to the all too real and damaging consequences of a Government pulling in different directions.”

Alex is probably best known for his work ‘The Mona Lennon’, the image used to brand and promote Liverpool’s status as European Capital of Culture 2008. Here, he has also adapted the familiar Highway Code to create new road signs which highlight the impact of austerity measures and the Coalition’s economic policies on the NHS and the Welfare state. It’s an exceptionally timely exhibition which combines art and politics to tackle the impact of austerity. It’s taken Alex and his team 2 years to put together, and its overall effect is surreal and mesmeric.

As soon as you enter the room, you sense DANGER. You’re confronted by a…tyranny of road signs (well, what is the collective noun for them..?) The red triangle of warning is everywhere. It’s utterly familiar, and yet not. Each sign comes with a twist. For a start, each is branded with the all pervasive logo of ‘Coalition Cycle Co, Cameron and Clegg, est May 2010’, with the picture of the two of them pulling Alex’s impossible bike in different directions, outside Number 10). Most contain the immortal quote: “We’re All In This Together” signed by David Cameron. The iconography of road signs has been detourned, in a situationist-style attack on the Society of the Austere Spectacle. It reminded me of something The K Foundation would do. Jimmy and Bill would love this show. It contains gems such as:

‘Poverty Trap’, with a family in the jaws of a mantrap.

‘Listen up Plebs’, with Cameron on a billboard, pointing one way, Clegg pulling the other.

Best of all, for me, ‘Britain Isn’t Eating’, with a queue heading for the food bank, recalling of course the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster that helped Thatcher into power in 1979.

Scissors cutting the NHS logo, with sign saying ‘Privatising Ahead’.

Elderly couple crossing the road with ‘for sale’ sign on their house, and an arrow pointing them to ‘care home’.

Power symbol icon, with ‘Energy Companies Overcharging’.

‘Get a Job’, being a leg with ‘Atos’ written on it, kicking someone in a wheelchair.

Pound symbol with ‘Permit holders only’.

A genuinely sinister work is the one based on classic renaissance work ‘Madonna Litta’ by Leonardo (The Madonna and Farage - see right). Cameron is Mother Mary, suckling a baby Farage at his teat. On one level, it simply skits Farage’s crass comments about breast-feeding mothers doing it in a corner. We must avoid scaring the horses or servants, after all, what? But on another level, the piece genuinely unnerved me. I went cold with insight. It reveals a fundamental political truth: despite their ‘outsider’ posturings, UKIP suck from the Tory teat. The image should go viral, just in time for election day. In that sense, the exhibition also raises fundamental questions about our democracy. Are we now condemned to be ruled by a series of coalitions? Is Westminster where real power resides now? Does voting matter anymore, anyway? If there is no meaningful difference between these men and their parties, then on the day you don’t vote, imagine a Tory/UKIP government, then try and have a good night’s sleep….

‘The End 07/05/15’, with figures falling off their coalition cycle down a hill. Hooray! Nice touch, this. I laughed, but in a bitter, ironic way. It’s not just that ‘The End’ marks the end of the exhibition, or indeed the end of the grim farce that has been The Coalition; it leaves us with a smile that this, too, will pass, and the baddies will get their comeuppance. The 7th of May for a party, then. BUT the angry understanding which the artist brings us, in the rest of the exhibition here, leaves no room for false hope. It’s not The End, of course. Whoever gets in, they’re just cheeks on the same arse. There’s no solutions offered, except perhaps ‘will you lot just bloody pack it in?’ Alex isn’t offering us a manifesto, but he is pointing out that all of the wannabe Emperors are stark bollocko.

Someone once said that “all art is propaganda” (who? Answers on the back of a spoiled ballot paper, please…), and Alex definitely has a strong point of view and campaigning message. His is a call to action, a howl of indignation over what’s gone on throughout the Coalition’s time of misrule. It’s not subtle, and very in-yer-face. The cumulative effect of the work is overwhelming, angering, sobering. The people are reduced to little icons, trapped within the red triangles of unjust laws and reduced circumstance. Dehumanised. Belittled and beset at every turn, suffering the death of a thousand cuts. The only human faces in the piece are Cameron, Clegg and Farage. We’re invited to laugh at them, bumbling away on their road to nowhere, on their crazy bike, but there’s a sinister edge. There’s a body count attached to these men. As there is with all rulers. The rest of us have just become signs, symbols and logos, living in a dystopia. I left feeling blasted.

I’d love to see a screening of First Take’s ‘Big Society – The Musical’ taking place in this lovely space, before the show’s end. That film shares this exhibition’s fundamental empathy at the human cost of political failure and cruelty. Taken together, they would arguably make the definitive artistic response to the last 5 years. The combination might just break our hearts, yet unify our souls.

Can you see the signs?

9/10

The Exhibition has been extended to Friday 24th April by popular demand and will finish with a celebration night at the Gallery Liverpool, Stanhope Street, from 7pm onwards.

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Comment left by Redskye on 21st April, 2015 at 12:48
A very interesting art exhibition, the subject matter is right on target and the artist has hit back hard for those of us who've been ground down by three decades of welfare benefit cutbacks, long term welfare abolition and the evermore extreme scapegoating of all claimants particularly the recent punitive sanctions regime. The subversion of road signs to make strong political statements is most thought provoking especially for those who don't enough. Great review and though the gallery is hard to find, head for the old Cains Brewery gates and it's on the same road looking towards the waterfront on the right.