The Art and Life of Dee Ridley: Part Five – Street Pass

Jo Manby

In the fifth and final instalment of a series of creative texts by writer Jo Manby, her character Dee Ridley considers the role of paper in contemporary art and life. Read ‘Part One – Double Face’ here, ‘Part Two – Nettle Sting’ here, ‘Part Three – Fenced up’ here, and ‘Part 4 – Primary Cut’ here.

London Road Fire Station opposite Manchester Piccadilly Station is wrapped in PVC mesh, printed to look like the building underneath. It’s being assessed as a listed heritage site and there are ambitious restoration and redevelopment plans for it – a boutique hotel, live-work spaces, bars and restaurants. I study the mesh wrap for a minute as I walk down the station approach, having just got off the London Euston train. For me right now it feels like a metaphor for hidden suffering behind the veil of gentrification. Or a life of luxury concealed behind a ravaged façade. I see five rough sleepers within the time it takes to walk from there to the Gardens.

I delivered the package and got Perry off my back for a while by bringing his precious painting over from Venice. Back here in Manchester, Tamsin is trying to get me to do an MA, or a PhD or something. I’m thinking about it. When I returned from Italy, it began to bother me that what I was doing was not necessarily ethical. I started to think about my future. Not often I do that. Times are changing. I need to change.

In September, I came across an installation that got me thinking (in greater detail than I would usually) about how things are not always as they seem. I flew to Berne in Switzerland to attend a private auction of works that had belonged to a now deceased collector. I had my upper limit engraved on my mind and I stuck to it, coming away with two pieces that Camille had her eye on. While I was there, I also went to the Zone Contemporaine to see an exhibition by Berlin-based artist Evol (Tore Rinkveld).

He started off as a street artist with a thing for transforming urban objects – utility hardware, metal telecommunications boxes, bollards – into beautifully rendered, miniature painted versions of apartment blocks; edifices from the periphery of the city that became interventions within it. Now he has his own studio and makes more gallery-based work, continuing his explorations of the city using cardboard. Evol is particularly interested in the post-war socialist architecture of the former East Germany. Like Matthew Houlding, whose work I so admire, he acknowledges the fact that these functional buildings, constructed with utopian ideologies in mind, now lie a long way from the original vision. He is drawn to the monumentalism of crumbling brutalist architecture, as the faded glory of the international style appeals to Houlding.

Evol’s exhibition at Zone features his largest installation to date: It is what it isn’t and it isn’t what it is (2019), which uses spray paint and acrylic on pressboard and wood and covers 20 metres of floorspace. He wanted to build a cityscape which, when viewed from a certain point, looks like an idyllic social project – and stays perfect if you follow the main route through it (in other words, down the length of the gallery space). If you veer off the path or look behind you, however, it disintegrates into simply a sketchy series of boxes or thoughts about buildings. From a third viewpoint, scattered letters spell out the title of the exhibition. The piece seemed to speak to the idea of the precariat: the situation whereby too many people live hand-to-mouth, are constantly on the brink of eviction, or are forced to live off foodbanks.

In this work, Evol is playing on the idea of the ‘Potemkin Village’ – a term that’s come to refer to any structure created with the sole intention of deceiving people into thinking the situation is better than it is. It is also sometimes used to refer to architectural structures that are fakes, impostors or clones. The term originates in the myth-like story of the Russian minister and lover of Catherine the Great, Grigory Potemkin, who set up mobile villages on the far banks of the Dnieper River and populated them with his men, dressed as peasants, to give the Empress the best possible impression of recently annexed and impoverished Crimea and New Russia on her six-month inspection trip. Once the imperial barge moved on, the villages were dismantled and set up further along the riverbanks overnight. As Evol himself says, the mythmaking this involved is ‘just how fake news works today.’

+

I arrive back at the city centre flat that Tamsin and I have just let together, ready to begin painting. There’s not much furniture to cover up – most of our stuff is still in cardboard boxes – but I lay old curtains down at the base of the walls as I go around the rooms. When I run out of curtains, I use flattened cardboard boxes. Tamsin and I couldn’t agree on a colour so it’s white. The colours the previous owner favoured take some layering up to get rid of. It’s a bit of a process, but great for listening to podcasts to. When I finally step back to survey the first finished wall, I fantasise about painting fat abstract diagonals across the white-out.

The pots of white emulsion and spattered cover-ups remind me of the cardboard panels from the Manchester Street Poem, which I saw during the Manchester International Festival when I was up in July. Each panel bore white painted transcriptions of the stories of men and women who were living homeless in the city. While I cut in the top of the living room wall, I listen to the audio score that was created for the project. Rick Smith from Underworld produced it, sampling noise from the city streets into soaring bleeps and rhythms, while Karl Hyde organised the team painting the panels.

They were painted at the old Bauer Millet arches and displayed in a daily changing presentation at the Festival Square. You could go down and see them being made, access contributors’ voices via QR or chat to members of the creative team. You could buy the boards as well for a fiver, or more or less, depending on what you could afford. Will bought a couple and put them up in the corridor of his artist studio block.

The poem had so much energy and truth in it; crystal-sharp with agony and triumph in equal parts. Reading it felt like crying inwardly. Stories of where people had come from and where they were headed next painted onto brown corrugated cardboard – the same material that’s sometimes used to make improvised bedding or temporary structures, like in the famous Cardboard City that stood near to Waterloo station during the 1980s and 1990s. I used to walk past it on my way to the Hayward Gallery until the nearly 200 people living there were evicted by the London Borough of Lambeth and the IMAX replaced it. I started thinking about how the material could be made more tough, resilient – and waterproof.

Creaking down off the stepladder I go to make a coffee. I look online and find out about Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who has pioneered the use of card and paper products to make temporary housing for survivors in countries hit by natural disaster. Are the people who find themselves living on the streets here in the UK also the survivors of a disaster? In a lot of ways, they are. A disastrous socio-political system that awards the rich and keeps deducting from the disadvantaged. That’s why the Manchester Street Poem was so important. It attempted to convey some of the many intricate reasons why people come to live on the streets.

Some further digging leads me to look up ‘smart paper’. It’s still at an early stage of development but can already be used to link physical and digital worlds. It looks like normal paper but it’s an interface. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are printed onto the paper in the form of silver nano-particles using conductive inks so that the tags can be detected and interpreted by compatible tech. The ink is the RFID antenna emitting the signal. It has an industrial application as it can deploy an alarm signal if it detects water. That leads me on to waterproof cardboard and I find an FSA approved water-resistant corrugated packaging that is recyclable and bio-degradable has been developed. You can literally fill a box made of it with water and it contains it, holds its shape.

Years ago, before I moved down to London, and when Media City was still in the planning, with nothing higher than old silos and a flour mill on the Salford Quays skyline, I remember going to The Lowry to see an exhibition by the German artist Oliver Zwink. He was showing a series of black and white drawings, which I loved – reams of monochrome stratifications, volcanic undulations set hard and cold, seams of minerals, streets winding round mountains, cliff edges raised miles above sea-level – alongside these small 3D cities constructed out of thin white card. Zwink is concerned with ideas of urban failure and collapsing infrastructures, and slowly destroyed these miniature conurbations over the course of the show using ink and water spray – the artist’s equivalent of paraquat. Over time, the gallery gradually became filled with the pale greyish, wilting remains of these urban settlements that appeared like ravaged, dystopian traces of an apocalyptic occurrence.

I image-trawl him, but it’s difficult to find any trace of what he’s been up to recently. So, I look up Thomas Demand and find a pdf catalogue filled with immaculate photographs of stage managed, pristine cardboard offices and interiors, and a fascinating fictional biographical essay about such an artist in such a parallel world.

+

I close the iPad; the paint fumes are getting to my head. I arrange to meet Will for a pint. It’s dark and wet outside but the cold air is welcome. I start looking at façades of tower blocks, wondering about what’s going on behind the steel and the glass. About gentrification, slum clearance, the disruption of age-old communities in the name of progress. I remember Tamsin telling me about a plan that was put forward by the City Council earlier in the year to fine rough sleepers for refusing to move from doorways, or for occupying a tent or other temporary structure, or for a number of other so-called offences. Thankfully it was shelved, but the discrepancies remain. Soaring tower blocks gleaming with far eastern investment; families at ground level, packed off into unsuitable accommodation due to the shortage of social housing.

As I walk through the recently regenerated streets of Ancoats, I find myself looking up at the mural by Case (Maclaim), created for the Cities of Hope Street Art Festival in 2016 to support the Manchester charity Back on Track, which seeks to enable disadvantaged adults to change their lives for the better. The painting is of a service user, rendered in a place and on a scale that can’t be ignored. A few streets further and I’m in the Northern Quarter, where I find myself faced with the Manchester Lennon Wall. It’s an anonymous intervention in support of the Democracy for Hong Kong (D4HK) Anti-Extradition Movement in the UK, based on rainbow spray-painted versions of the paper messages that adorn public transport interchange sites in the turbulent city and elsewhere. With paper exchanged for paint, what the messages posted around the Hong Kong transport system stand for becomes solidified in a way that seems to symbolise the potential for activism to take root transnationally.

Sitting in the pub, I ask Will if he thinks I’m a fraud.

-        In what sense?

-        In the sense that I’m lacking in direction, in solidity.

-        You don’t owe anybody a direction.

-        But we shouldn’t idle our way through life while others suffer?

-        There’s plenty of suffering to go round. You don’t need to add to it by guilt-tripping.

I sink the pint.

-        What’s got you thinking like this? Tamsin been testing you on your social conscience? Will adds.

-        Maybe.

I tell him I’ve been thinking about his studio block. How it could do with some investment, maybe a change of emphasis.

-        Sounds good, he says. What did you have in mind?

He orders another round and we start mapping out a plan. Our drinks glint in the warm electric light. I tell Will I can invest both time and money. Outside, rain batters on the windows. An idea begins to mutate and transform. Working out ways to be inclusive, to be socially purposeful, to integrate communities rather than partition them off. At closing time I walk home to the flat with our conversation refracted in my head like a fragile, mutable blueprint. I can picture a tentative framework and luminous structure beginning to unfold. I feel like I have found a new sense of direction.