Digital Art Talks

Gillian Wearing & Wolfgang Tillmans Video and Transcript

The two works that I’ve chosen for the Saturday of Pride have an outside theme. Given what’s going on at the moment, with people not being able to congregate in great numbers, and Manchester Pride obviously being digital, I thought it would be quite appropriate to show these two works.

This work at the side of me is by Gillian Wearing, called ‘The Garden.’ In this work, Wearing is challenging peoples’ assumptions on women. Wearing asked three female presenting women to take part in the shot, two of them are cis and one of them is non-cis. The non-cis person likes to play with gender and is gender con-conforming. Wearing was quoted as saying: ‘We all start making up our minds when we see someone, we all get ideas based on how people look even though we know those ideas can be knocked out of us as soon as we get close to them or start talking to them.’

The artist’s conscious decision to capture the image in black and white, and only highlight the slogans on the women’s t-shirts, is once again the artist challenging those assumptions about woman and sexuality and identity. Our eyes are drawn to the colour on the t-shirts rather than the women themselves.

The second work which has an outside theme is ‘friends outside Planet’ by Wolfgang Tillmans, which was photographed in 1992. Tillmans became increasingly interested in the rave scene in Berlin, and was interested in the young people at that time making these spaces after the Berlin Wall had come down into creative spaces, into spaces that they could own, become political, take action within, and these photos of these friends that are outside a club is actually quite a political action as these young people are actually taking control of the politics of that time. Sick of the ideology of East and West, these people are actually becoming political within their clubbing, and this is what Tillmans is capturing within this photograph.

The photograph also captures a coming together of our friends, of three friends outside. Unfortunately, in Manchester at the moment that’s the only thing that we can do, so although it’s Saturday of Pride it does remind me of a coming together of friends.

Pearl Alcock

As the Friday of Manchester Pride is the start of the weekend celebration, we thought we would show you a work by an artist called Pearl Alcock, ‘Celebration of the Night,’ painted in 1987. Pearl Alcock was part of the Windrush generation, and arrived in Britain in 1957, first taking up residence in Leeds, and then moving down to Brixton in the early 1960s. Pearl was a character, having an ambition to open a dress shop – a boutique – had an interest in fashion and shoes, and worked very hard within hospitality, hotels, to get the money together to be able to open that boutique. She managed to open a boutique on Railton road, getting the money together, and underneath in the cellar she opened a shebeen; a shebeen being an illegal bar where people came to have a drink, to have a dance, and to meet other like minded individuals. Pearl Alcock’s shebeen was an anchor place for the black gay community, as they were often unwelcome in many of the other queer spaces in and around London. It was an anchor point and kept a lot of people within the community.

Painted a few years later, ‘Celebration of the Night’ is almost like Pearl Alcock remembering those nights within the shebeen, where people are dancing, having fun, coming together,  and meeting each other. With the patterns and the colours and the textures within this work, it’s almost like Pearl is giving us an insight into some of the things that we’ll be missing this year at Pride.