The People’s History Museum currently holds a great exhibition of Sam Fitton’s weekly cartoons for the union newspaper ‘Cotton Factory Times’. Fitton worked cotton machinery himself. A group of Manchester Metropolitan University academics have curated the selection. The last show there, ‘The Altogether’, by Chris Coekin, had exactly the same issues as the Red Saunders work in Bradford (see my thoughts on that below) and so I didn’t bother writing about it. Charlie Meecham’s Oldham Road work will replace the Sam Fitton exhibition when its time is up, so I hope there are plenty of guides left, with my essay in it, for when it gets there. It’s really exciting to be able to contribute to The People’s History Museum, in however small a way.
At the City Gallery, I had another look at Grayson Perry’s ‘Print For A Politician’, but was cheered to see an original Steve Bell on the opposite wall, depicting a queue of workers waiting to go up a ladder, then straight into a black toilet, looming large on the Manchester landscape, with Beetham Tower in the background. Beetham is aloof, a place to view and dis-engage. Steve Bell was commenting on the loss of 2,000 council jobs in Manchester, using Lowry’s work as an aesthetic quotation. Bell later attended the Tory conference in Manchester. The first ever Occupy encampment in this country began during that event, as an offshoot to the protest march (again, see my photographs and writing on that below somewhere). Manchester has never been backwards about going forwards, in radical terms.
