Where were you when it was shit?
Bido Lito | November 2020
Locating
the mythical nature in pride of place, Stephanie Gavan speaks to visual
artist Nick Smith about his latest work which displays Liverpool as a city of
contradictions following a cyclical path of unrest and reinvention.
“It’s
not that special” recalls NICK SMITH, the Bootle-bred artist behind Output
Gallery’s latest exhibition, Where were you when it was shit?, “at
least, that’s what I used to think”.
He’s talking about the collective enchantment
of a city and his once lone disbelief; about myth, pride and distance. “You
grow up here and everyone tells you it’s the best city in the world, but you
don’t quite believe it, or at least I didn’t,” he continues. “But when you come
away from it and look back, there’s something there, it’s a very special
thing.”
It’s that thing, in its
capricious ambiguity, which lingers at the core of
Smith’s newest work. Perhaps too, in the psyche of a city at large, where the
creeping presence of history is always already cemented in the present.
Even now, in a somewhat cyclical turn of events, it teeters ever so cautiously
along the sharp edge of the future.
Where were you when it was shit? consists of a split screen video
charting Smith’s youth against the social and political turbulence of the city
between 1974-1996. A surrogate Bildungsroman told through found footage, it
draws upon the social realist scenes of Lowry to trace a shift from a Liverpool
that was, to the city that exists today. “It’s about how a city can programme
your character, a way to understand more about myself through the context in which
I grew up in,” Smith elaborates. Located somewhere in between a landscape
painting and a DJ set, the film evokes the spirit of a place by summoning the
brittle fragments of memory that come to constitute identity. It marks a return
for Smith, who debuted the film at Output Gallery in November month after 15
years away from the city. A space that works exclusively with creatives from or
based in Merseyside, supporting the artists still here while beckoning others
back.
Dry, cool and fairly clear. The
uncanny crackle of old Granada forecasts usher viewers backward. The elements
are at odds with the atmospheric pressure of advancing scenes, as 1974’s Kirkby
rent strike unfolds beside the stringy lights and blurred faces of Quadrant
park, the city’s first superclub in it’s unlikely Bootle home. There’s a
mirrored sense of restlessness as streets lined with agitated police and
equally tense protesters clash against jittery bodies on the edge of ecstasy,
both anticipating crescendo. Where one dances itself into an oceanic abandon, the
other is direct in its political resolve, but where method differs, the core
desire is matched. In each frame, a throbbing duplication of will as people
grasp at the potential to transform and transcend material reality in the face
of hostile social circumstances. “It’s about the shift in generations. The rent
strikes felt like the pinnacle of things being shit, whereas Quadrant Park came
at a point when Liverpool was beginning to understand it’s modern identity more
through youth culture.”
It’s a shift disclosed here in the
move from traditional forms of activism to a renewed kind of pleasure politics.
Rave, especially, emerged as a counterpoint to Thatcherism, for which the
squandering of time and wasting of economic potential figured as the ultimate
taboo. As ego melts into the borderless collective, staying up all night in
defiance of the working week, and refusing to pay rent start to look strikingly
similar. A familiar repudiation of conservative politics that has come to
define an ongoing era of this city’s history; a resistance through communal
ritual.
Smith’s pairing of events mirror,
reflect and distort meaning. At times they slide into one another through
replicated gestures and ‘beat matched’ editing, while other clips stutter into
contradiction, revealing a disparity of worlds. “Liverpool is very strong in
how it represents itself, though it’s not a straightforward place, it’s full of
complexities,” Smith suggests. When Michael Heseltine was sent up to Liverpool
as the ‘Minister for the Mersey’ the city was at boiling point. By 1979 it was
described as an ‘Imperial mausoleum’, and over the next two years, as
unemployment shot up to 51 per cent, tensions between the police and L8’s
minority communities also continued to swell, underpinned by a worsening
socio-economic situation. Then came the riots; an inevitable rupture.
Smith’s film shows buildings
hemorrhaging smoke, the silhouette of helmets and riot shields lit up against
flames, a disenfranchised Black teenager pleading: “We don’t want no riots, all
we want is jobs, employment, justice.” Bloodied faces and bodies on stretchers
sit uncomfortably next to footage from 1984’s International Garden Festival,
where well-dressed people stroll through a botanical utopia complete with white
marble sculptures and grecian columns. The contrast is stark, order and chaos,
light and dark, enhanced more so by the stern RP voice of Kenneth Oxford,
Merseyside’s then head of police, whose presence hangs above the two scenes
with a cold detachment from the eruptive desire of the crowd.
Built upon a former oil terminal,
Festival Gardens was Heseltine’s attempt to clean up the Mersey in order to
stimulate new investment and economic growth. “Apparently a lot of money that
was meant to be used to develop Toxteth was used for the garden festival. It's
that relationship between the reality of the city and it’s outward projection,”
Smith explains.
Despite its proximity to L8
(situated on the border of Dingle, though more at home in the leafier suburb of
Aigburth and L17), the gardens were of little benefit to its unemployed
population, leading to a wide-held suspicion that the initiative was little
more than a token gesture within a city in need of serious economic
regeneration.
“Liverpool has always been a city
of contradictions for me”, Smith recalls, reflecting on childhood outings with
his gran where they’d venture from the worldly grandeur of the Walker to the stench of raw
meat and harsh strip lighting of St. John's[RE3] . The contrast of the sleek surface
and underlying reality is a potent metaphor throughout. In the final pairing,
Richard and Judy sip champagne amongst a host of producers to celebrate their
last broadcast in Liverpool’s Granada studios, while five miles along the
river, the dockers had initiated what would become one of the longest strikes
in UK history – lasting just short of three years. “They were happening at the
same time, showing a shift in what Liverpool is built on, from the docks as an
import/export hub, to this rebranding as a shiny new city, with Granada being
the main cultural output on screen for the North West.”
As the trade unions collapsed and
their power diminished, Richard and Judy became symbolic of a move from hard
power to soft power. “They were sort of the monarchy of Liverpool at one
point,” he jests. The city was forced to reimagine itself over the coming
decade, placing tourism and leisure at the heart of its new post-industrial
economy.
Where were you when it was shit?beams into the past while carrying an undeniable
urgency in the current moment. “If you look at cycles of history, every 20-30
years big shifts happen,” Smith notes. And it certainly feels like that time is
upon us.
In September, Liverpool became the
first region to move into ‘Tier 3’ restrictions, slipping back into its
well-worn costume of the outlier. Speculation of a second ‘managed decline’
unfurled as the city was once again left to fend largely for itself, far away
from the orbit of Westminster. Liverpool city council was forced to initiate a
crowdfunder to pay for the school meals of 20,000 children in the region, where
the child poverty rate exceeds 20 per cent, as hospitality staff were cheated
out of full furlough subsequently offered to the rest of the country.
Now, as the cultural venues our city
has rebuilt itself upon lie shuttered and lifeless, Liverpool may be forced to
re-imagine itself once more. Smith reminds us of something that Scousers
have always known; that transformation is impossible without the integration of
traces leftover from the past. The past of a city that refused to give up on
itself when everyone else had. A city which, in her tender spirit of
resilience, offers hope of a future to believe in.