Page 126 - Art Review

The New Poverty

by Stephen Armstrong Verso, £12.99 (softcover)

At the beginning of this year, the Conservative funded art triennials in the case of a town like ‘The UK is fragmenting into enclaves,’
leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor Folkestone). Today two-thirds of families living Armstong writes, ‘divided by income and atti-
and Maidenhead (it’s in England, in case you in poverty are in work, albeit on zero-hours tude, and we are no longer listening to each
hadn’t guessed) demanded that police exercise contracts or worse. For many, the value of work other. The consequences can be devastating
whatever legal powers might be at their disposal and the cost of living simply don’t match up. for all of us.’ The sense of resentment that leads
to clear the local area of homeless people The age of the post-Beveridge welfare state to Brexit is just one of them.
in anticipation of the upcoming royal wedding may have reached its end, says Armstrong, but Like all good journalists, Armstrong mixes
at Windsor Castle. According to Councillor Beveridge’s five ‘Giant Evils’ – want, disease, hard facts with heartbreaking interviews,
Simon Dudley, ‘an epidemic of rough sleeping ignorance, squalor and idleness – are returning. deploying the latter to give weight to the former
and vagrancy’ was blighting his ‘beautiful To experience poverty, Armstrong argues, and to make their abstractions more devastat-
town’. He went on to conjure images of beggars is to experience injustice: poverty is unfair. ingly real. In all this he is informed by George
frogmarching tourists to cashpoints and imply And in an age when people like Dudley, and Orwell’s groundbreaking 1937 survey of poverty
that visible poverty was an offence to royal and the mass media in general, have linked words in the north of England, The Road to Wigan Pier
tourist eyes. Indeed, underlying all this is the such as ‘benefits’ with ‘cheat’ and ‘fraud’, (which Armstrong updated, as The Road to Wigan
suggestion that Dudley (and a great many others language matters. So Armstrong takes us Pier Revisited, on the 75th anniversary of its
like him) believe poverty to be a choice rather on a tour of phrases like the ‘poverty premium’ publication). Having completed his study,
than an imposition, a matter of behaviour rather (things cost more when you have less, because Armstrong notes, Orwell stopped writing
than circumstance, and therefore a matter for the discounted options – online offers, advance and started fighting for what he believed
the police rather than local councils (with whom, payments, etc – are out of your reach), the in (during the Spanish Civil War).
incidentally, responsibility for the provision ‘digitally deprived’ (those without access If ever there was an issue that deserved
of housing in England rests). to an on-tap online connection in an age in to have the much-abused ‘urgent’ appended
The increasing abandonment and demonisa- which social services are increasingly online), to it, this is it. The rich are getting richer, the
tion of people who are in need within British the ‘democratic deficit’ (the closure of local poor are getting poorer: a definition of injustice
society is the subject of journalist Stephen newspapers, for example, makes it harder that goes back, via Karl Marx and US President
Armstrong’s new study of contemporary poverty. for local people to be heard and, according Andrew Jackson, almost 200 years. Much of the
Published at the end of 2017, which marked to analysis, leads to lower voter turnout because problem rests on questions of access. Of people
the 75th anniversary of the Beveridge Report the issues at stake seem not to involve them) who are left behind by digital revolutions
(which paved the way for the establishment and the rise of ‘DIY dentistry’ (it’s simply (not everyone is digital, let alone postdigital,
of the United Kingdom’s welfare state), it looks cheaper). Context is important too: benefit despite what the artworld would lead you to
at the ways in which the nature of poverty has fraud amounts to £1.3 billion per year; the tax believe), house prices and the cost of healthcare,
changed in recent times and how social-support gap (between what’s owed in taxes and what’s for example, and the corporations and govern-
mechanisms designed to combat poverty are paid in taxes) for 2013–14 was £34b. It’s more ments that remorselessly drive those things
either failing to do so or are making the problem popular to make a show of punishing the former on. Read this and you’ll realise that now is our
worse (or are simply ‘replaced’ by privately rather than tackling the latter. time to act. Mark Rappolt

Out of Nothing

by Daniel Locke with David Blandy Nobrow, £16.99 (hardcover)

David Blandy has been in an expansive mood of development, from Ice Age cave-dwellers DNA strands, from planets to basketballs to vinyl
late. The centrepiece of his recent London exhi- carving a man-lion hybrid sculpture (the oldest records. Locke’s drawing style is almost goofy,
bition was the video The End of the World (2017), in known figurative art) to future settlers of Mars. but with thick, clear lines – all the round heads,
which a voice muses on eschatology – the study of Though admittedly a subjective, skipping tour, wide eyes and loping bodies of the characters
end times, the demise of humanity – while view- the pit stops are curiously Western-centric for look like cleaned-up versions of more trippy
ers are given a tour of the solar system, circling such a spaced-out journey: Gutenberg’s printing comic artists like Matthew Thurber or Paper
Earth and Saturn. This collaborative graphic press, Georges Braque’s and Pablo Picasso’s Rad’s Ben Jones. The result is an educational,
novel, made with illustrator Daniel Locke, is the collage paintings, Albert Einstein’s conception slightly stiff tone that, while delivering an
video’s more upbeat sibling, narrating instead a of space–time, Kool Herc’s sampling of imaginative and cosmic tale, gives the book a feel
millennia-spanning fable of the start of things, a UK prog-rock band Babe Ruth to invent what of being aimed at a ‘young adult’ audience.
paean to humanity’s ability to conject, imagine will become known as hip hop. Life, Blandy As Blandy and Locke put it in the opening pages:
and create things that didn’t previously exist. and Locke suggest, is just another remix. ‘All of human history is nothing more than a
Our guide is a wandering blue girl, an The comic form is an ideal medium for such brief moment in the history of our solar system’.
immortal ‘emissary’ who witnesses the creation a story: visual associations and puns can fly And in these times, no matter what age, a bit
of life on our planet and key moments in human back and forth between the sound waves and of perspective never hurts. Chris Fite-Wassilak

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