LOCKDOWN JOURNAL: COVID-19.52 (BasementArtsProject)
Keith Ackerman, John Barber and BasementArtsProject measuring out the plot for the eventual siting of Jacob’s Ladder
There is something rather disheartening about opening up my computer each day to a raft of reminders and notifications telling me that I should be installing, opening, taking down yet another exhibition that has not happened.
Donna Coleman: The Screen will Not Fill The Void being rescheduled for 2021
I am considering that I should be able to postpone my 50th Birthday, which should be in 2022, for a year based on the fact that this year just has not happened.
Sharon McDonagh: Resonant - being rescheduled for 2021
Having spoken to all of the artists due to exhibit at BasementArtsProject this year I can confirm that they will all be going ahead in 2021 and 2022, all things being good by then. We can but hope!
ArtCouple: Title TBC - being rescheduled for 2021
A number of artists due to exhibit have in the meantime supplied posts about their work for inclusion in the Lockdown Journal, with more to come. We will in the meantime keep posting. You can find them all at https://www.basementartsproject.com/studio-journal as part of the Lockdown Journal.
Lina Bentley: When I Grow Up I Want To Be A Nurse - being rescheduled for 2021
CONGRATULATIONS GO TO NICHOLAS VAUGHAN who should have been exhibiting with us this Nov / Dec (now being rescheduled for 2021) who has in the meantime had one of his collages accepted for the John Moores Painting Prize this year. Well Done Nick!
Nicholas Vaughan: Tunnel of Tusks - being rescheduled for 2021 SELECTED FOR JOHN MOORES PAINTING PRIZE EXHIBITION 2020
REOPENING: A TENTATIVE MOVE
From Monday 10th August we will be reopening BasementArtsProject in line with government guidelines as they stand at the moment. From this date you will be able to book visits as households (No mixed groups) for 1 - 6 people. This must be done by appointment and there will be a gap of 1 hour between appointments. Appointments will be made for 1 hour. (eg: 11am -12pm GAP 1pm - 2pm GAP 3pm - 4pm . . . ) Evening appointments are available also. We hope you will re-join us as we open once more the exhibition that we were forced to shut in mid-March: Lou Hazelwood | Landscapes Of The (Un)known
We will be wearing masks at times when the public are visiting and we would appreciate that visitors do so as well.
Please do not visit if you have symptoms of Covid 19
Please do not visit if you are from an area that is under Local Lockdown at the time that you wish to visit
To Book e-mail Bruce Davies at basementartsproject@gmail.com or text/phone 0750 672 1504
Lou Hazelwood: Landscapes Of The (Un)known - reopen by appointment only from Monday 10th August 2020
Finally we have two other exhibitions on the cards for the programme who will now be happening in 2022 by Timothy Forster and Edward Mortimer. But more on all of these as soon as we have the specific dates set in the diary
Edward Mortimer: TITLE TBC - being rescheduled for 2022
Timothy Forster: A Space At The Side Of The Road - being rescheduled for 2022
BASEMENTARTSPROJECT: DECADE
Despite this years programme having gone south very quickly after being set in motion, we will be beginning the 2021 programme with the return of Kimbal Quist Bumstead, the first artist to work with BasementArtsProject ten years ago - almost to the day if had not been easter weekend. So be sure to join us for this celebration of a decade of being an arts project here in South Leeds; and Manchester, London, Liverpool, Sweden the USA and all of the other places that we have spread our wings taking exhibitions to.
ON THE CORNER UPDATE
Back in the normal days of mid-2019 BasementArtsProject set in motion a public sculpture project as part of the Index Festival of Visual Art and the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. Whilst we were able to realise three of the five projects during the 100 days of the festival are were still two projects which are ongoing. Jacob’s Ladder by Keith Ackerman and Nature of Balance by Dominic Hopkinson had been reluctantly set aside, for obvious reasons, but are now slowly being resumed. More on this soon . . .
Jacob’s Ladder’
Also in relation to ‘On The Corner’: whilst work may have had to stop at the quarry, work has been able to continue on the associated publication documenting the process. This will be available to purchase at the very end of all five projects. We will keep you up to date as we go on this project.
Ongoing work on the next BasementArtsProject publication
Pandemic Musings
To suggest that the UK government ever had a handle on the coronavirus outbreak is at best fanciful, at worst reports suggest that it has been nothing short of shambolic, with members of their own ranks, very quickly and with alarming regularity, breaking the rules that they themselves were responsible for making in order to control the spread of disease.
I am currently four months into furlough from my paid employment, which goes right back to four days before the government announced the closure of schools, pubs and non-essential shops. The fact that it took until the 23rd March for them to take the most basic of measures is strangely incomprehensible when the direction of travel had been there since early January, some sources and news reports suggest November or December 2019.
Liverpool Catholic Cathedral. Fri. 31st January 2020 Photo: Bruce Davies
Back on Friday 31st January, which seems like such a long time ago now, I was staying on the Wirral overnight after attending a conference at Liverpool John Moores University. As I sat and watched the local news that evening the main reports concerned a plane load of people being brought to the UK from China to be placed in quarantine at Arrow Park Hospital, not far from where I was staying.
This measure which seemed far-fetched at the time, the stuff of dystopian sci-fi or disaster movies, now seems strange as it is something that has not been kept up since, despite the rapid worsening of the situation beyond this point. In the weeks leading up to the UK Lockdown 18.1million people entered the UK by air with only 273 of those quarantined. It certainly seems like this was the cause of a large number of cases of the virus being imported from many other places. At the height of the UK Lockdown, it is reported that there was still, on average, 15000 people arriving on flights into the UK every day without quarantine or testing. These arrivals were then able to disappear back into the general population.
Leeds Pandemic Dystopia 2020
So how have things been going in South Leeds? From a purely observational point of view on my daily socially distant wanders it would seem that on the whole many people have taken guidelines more seriously than certain members of government. In the first weeks of lockdown, the two main streets that intersect where BasementArtsProject stands were so quiet that every day did feel, as Morrissey once put it, like a Sunday. The kind of quietness was one that made me think of Birkenhead in the 1970's when the population was a lot smaller and cars were not as common place as they are now.
In some of the backstreets it was a different matter with people mixing in groups where they probably shouldn't be and similarly so a regular group of drinkers that I would see in the park when out running. Even with all of this though, the general feeling was one of people obeying the rules as they stood, and were understood, at the time. Understanding was of course quite difficult with such seemingly vague and whimsical sketches to go on. I suppose this could have led to those with the means to undertake 270 mile journeys to try and remain safe but this is unlikely as the rhetoric was to 'Stay Home Save Lives', a statement as unmistakeable as 'Strong and Stable'. Okay, bad example!
Reading Nov19-July20
Since the point of being sent home I have managed to use some of the new found time to pursue another avenue that I have been working on for the last decade here in South Leeds; this being the production, promotion and dissemination of information about art and the artistic community. Being fully aware of my privilege in this situation in comparison to many others it is hard to bear the idea that sometimes, even in this position, the reality of the situation can still get too much and I find myself staring at computer screens trying to summon up the mental strength to work out what I need to do. This has led to me actually being able to take up reading again as a way of resetting my focus.
Atop a Welsh cliff
We (all of us here at Basement) managed to get a holiday just at the point at which the lockdown was being loosened. Having already had to get our original holiday, booked before coronavirus, refunded, we decided that we would try to get away anyway. In doing so we managed a week in Wales. It was as you would imagine lovely being able to swim in the sea, walk in the hills and visit small villages, but the stark choices of what coronavirus means to our future were in evidence all over the area in which we stayed. Many shops in the towns, and even in larger cities such as Caenarfon had signs in the windows stating that they would not be open again. The streets were deserted, like a ghost town as the lockdown in Wales has been much stricter than in England.
Thursday afternoon on the High Street in Cricieth, north Wales
It feels like we are living in a permanently twilit world, perched on the edge of reality; a knife edge in which the recent past lies below us on one side and a recognisable but empty version of that landscape is below us on the other and we have no idea on which side we are going to fall. Walking these streets, which I remember as far back as the 1970’s, I see the ghosts of a bustling and industrious seaside past fading like traces into a future which is virtually silent and stifled with paranoia. An unseen enemy walking amongst us, picking off the unwary until we forget what life before it was like. Society becomes but a memory, painted on a fragile skein woven into the fabric of a world no longer accessible to us.
But what is ‘the new normal’? A phrase which has come into play a lot since March this year. Although having watched several series’ of Marvel’s ‘Agents of Shield’ during lockdown I can say that the phrase cropped up in an early episode back in 2013. Do we want a new normal and what might it look like? Do we want the old normal back? Despite its faults we recognised it! Many things have happened over lockdown; pollution levels have decreased significantly, wildlife has returned to places that it had not been for many years, people rediscovered the outdoors as shops shut their doors, some people took up hobbies, some people rested, some re-created famous artworks, album covers, celebrity styles on social media and people started doing online quizzes. Other’s had to carry on and work whilst a vast swathe of the country’s populace were sent into isolation and the nurses, doctors, supermarket workers, delivery drivers, previously unsung heroes of the western economy, took on the mantle of humanity’s saviours. Now, as our Prime Minister tries to reinvigorate the economy, having given large stimulus packages to various multinational corporations that avoid UK Tax on a grand scale, those people are once more abandoned to fate, having to petition for pay rises that should really be granted automatically without delay, and inflation based increases year on year as an absolute minimum rather than a goal.
But, four months after our late entry into the lockdown world circus we find people queuing to get back to shopping or for a drive-thru coffee. The idea that a permanent change in the way that we might conduct our lives seem as far away as those hippy pipe dreams of a sustainable world in which GDP is not an indicator of the wealth of nations. If there is one thing that this Pandemic has proved, it is that all of the naysayers who felt that the climate change emergency was a hoax were wrong. Our climate is hugely affected by our presence on the planet. Those people will no doubt cling to their beliefs but ultimately the proof is in and their argument is in tatters. The question is, do we have the gumption and the nerve to pursue that path as it would require a radical rethink as to what is important to us as a species, and not just in terms of our survival, but about how we improve the life chances of those negatively impacted by the previous mode of economic delivery and what a different future might look like.
Another point that seems to have emerged out of this crisis is that the wealth creators, who we are meant to believe are essential to the wealth of the country, are not. Their wealth is inherently worthless. During the good years they go around hoovering up vast sums of money and hiding it in tax havens. Of course we know that this is what they do but our government tell us we need them and their entrepreneurial spirit to keep the economy going. During this time many pay minimal wages forcing employees to require in-work benefits which come from the UK tax payers pocket not that of the company owner. The unpaid wages of the workers then become what is known in economic terms as company profit. Then comes a time of national crisis, and where are the billions that define these companies as the most profitable in the world? Strangely it is nowhere to be found. Those same companies come cap in hand to the worlds governments asking for stimulus packages to see them through the hard times, happily taking money from governments who should be supporting those who have been fleeced in the name of economic growth. Money has not been linked to the gold standard since 1931 in the UK meaning that ever since, the value of money is purely notional. Paradoxically worth nothing if you possess it and everything if you don’t! This goes completely against the idea of entrepreneurial spirit as promoted by our government and business leaders.
Anyway as I sign off for this entry into the journal I shall put my mask on, strangely late in the game, to go and get the weekly shop and ponder what the government is playing at by discussing shutting pubs in order to open schools in September.