'A Basket Of Roses'

This evening, after work, I went to the Manchester Art Gallery to see the 'True Faith' exhibition. Having arrived, and in the absence of any clear directions to the exhibition, I first wandered into the gallery showing Shirley Baker's amazing photographs. God, I loved them and I need to go back again and take a longer look. I did like this statement by her, though: "These are my pictures, they are the observations of one person and they tell only a fraction of the story..." There's a Blipfoto value, right there.

Anyway, conscious of the time, I made my way up to the 'True Faith' show, which, loosely, is about Joy Division, New Order, Peter Saville, and art inspired by them. I must say that it started uncomfortably for me; a museum exhibit of album sleeves that I owned. But I guess I am that old. 

I did enjoy the exhibition, even if my primary takeaway was just how lucky Peter Saville was to meet Tony Wilson and vice versa, but the single exhibit that had the most impact on me was 'A Basket Of Roses' by Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour. This was not because of the sheer bravado of Saville - "Have you done the cover for 'Power, Corruption and Lies' yet, Peter?"- "Yes, I've just lifted someone else's painting" - but because it took me back to the intellectual isolation of the early eighties. (I am speaking subjectively, of course.)

Back then, there was, of course, no Internet. OK, arguably there was an Internet but there was no World Wide Web and, anyway, I had no access to it. At school we learnt about literature by the books we read but we didn't learn much about writers generally or get much context. Our music and art lessons were similarly uninformative and I only began to learn about ART when I started buying albums and reading the sleeves and also the interviews in Record Mirror, Melody Maker, and NME.

And so it was from artists/musicians like Robert Smith, Nick Cave, David Sylvian, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Nick Rhodes, Ralf Hütter, and so on that I began to explore that world and slowly join the links and form a picture of 20th century music, writing, and painting. And it wasn't just the musicians, themselves, but also the journalists (Chris Roberts springs to mind). 

Looking back, the slow exploration seems like a wonderful adventure but when I think about specifics, I remember how frustrating it was. For example, when Japan released their (terrible) live album 'Oil On Canvas', the sleeve was "Head of J.Y.M II" by Frank Auerbach. There was not only the difficulty of finding out anything about the painting or the artist, there was also the fact I had never term 'oil on canvas' before and I assumed Sylvian had created the album title. 

So seeing 'A Basket Of Roses' today brought all of that back to me and reminded me that amongst my doubts about this hyper-connected, privacy-lite world that we live in, there is also a lot to be said the Web.

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