What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?
You could never know what doing a job is like by doing it for one day. Reflecting on ‘The Last Cage Down’, an exhibition of the survival of miner’s memories with the help Of Andrew McMillan’s Pity.
This blog comes from many other prompts that were contingent to that provided by WordPress in my experience yesterday. That is because yesterday I revisited The Mining Art Gallery at Bishop Auckland, which is marking the history of the decline of the Northern Coalfield works on the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike under the title: The Last Cage Down. This blog partly acts as a brief reflective introduction to that exhibition, rather than reviewing it.
Once a bank, the mock-Gothic features of the Mining Art Museum forms the venue for collecting together on its upper floors, works that raise conversation and comment on the fate of a mining district where every mine has now been as actively ‘disappeared’, or reduced to minor mementoes. They call it The Last Cage Down.
A cage is the cramped high-velocity lift in which transport from surface to access to the underground seams happened. But even something that looked, and must sometimes have felt, like a prison and a trap can be celebrated in memory of its passing away. On visiting the Coal Mining Museum in Yorkshire I did once go down in a cage and toured the mine and its exhibits of the history of mining but I cannot really feel I have experienced mining, though I say so without disrespect to the staff of that tremendous asset in national memory.
I suspect doing the job for a day, would have the same effect. For a job bounded by short duration is never THE JOB, but a representation of it within boundaries with visible access and exit points. Thus travelling a cage, whether in a museum of mining. Let’s turn to fiction then. Good fiction can often be tested for quality by the way it endlessly imagines other people’s lives – Emile Zola’s Germinal or Sid Chaplin’s The Thin Seam are fine examples of doing that job for mining though for an earlier day.
Andrew McMillan published his novel Pity this year (see this link for my bog on hearing him read it) which focuses on the town of his birth, Barnsley, and the memories of families touched by work in mining, but it is work recollected in the event of the industry’s disappearance, as is the Bishop Auckland exhibition. In one of the many beautifully written moments capturing the lives of members of families two generations back from the contemporary stories of people who stay to live in post-mining Barnsley, the ‘day’ of a miner is captured through the experience of entering it via the ‘cage’:
Reading this means my point hardly needs making. A day, even the access to the work of that ‘one day’ is experienced truly only in the repetition it prompts of the many other days past, and coming in the only future one can see. Time is sensed in the sensation of the body crushed in with the embodied memories excreted from other bodies crushed in on you – even their wives, children and their digested or already digested supper, in the prospect of the day ahead and its end, and even its repetition. The purpose of these short returns to the past is emphasised in the use of repetitions – of words and phrases as well as the experience they convey of waking each morning and treading the pit road from village to pit with neighbours trapped in the same ritual. And the work is something that never seems to get done such that ‘one day’, as I am requested to imagine, makes no difference to its burden on body and spirit – ‘the black wall they eventually meet, which never seems to recede no matter the hours they put in with their tools’.
The Mining Art Gallery uses the image of a miner releasing a white pigeon (see my opening collage) – is it a dove? – from its own collection to show that images of freedom or release also formed part of this life, but it is time outside of the ‘job’. This is an exhibition in which many paintings known to me appear but I don’t intend to name the painters and let images speak about the day of men who either were or were family members of miners. The concern of The Miner’s Strike of 1984 – 85 was the attempt made by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) to save the pits from closure, for, however entrapping the life it was experienced too in moments of individual or communal joy outside work – the Durham Miner’s Gala appears often and this is as much a celebration of a political as well as a social community, which felt each other’s presence, very closely, in mixed circumstances – close in the real sense but in every other sense too.
Before we visited the exhibition we enjoyed a change in the main exhibition downstairs, win a selection of pictures collected together of the Pit Road, the pre-cage access to the mine and the link between communities and the pit, at least for the men in mining, with a poetic wall-quote from Sid Chaplin about the quote: it is something McMillan captures thus: ‘Nobody waits for the, they jut keep on walking. The village, on their shoulder now, still asleep, not watching the migration of tired bodies’(McMillan op.cit: 5).
The press generally haven’t massively covered the exhibition, though The Guardian sent its Northern arts correspondent, Mark Brown, who picked out this picture, called Orgreave after Guernica and largely ignored the rest rather than in citing a few names:
There is a joke as well as a serious point behind the attempt to absorb the terrible events at Orgreave with the Nazi bombing of Guernica, and, of course, the artist likening himself to Picasso as the respective recorder of another scene of mass social injustice. And I love the picture – though I had seen it before in the Gallery’s retrospective on that artist. But the joke is really one about community and the means by which community gets represented in its death struggles. The police form the fence and boundary now of a community hemmed in and the stress is on the total inappropriate imbalance of power and social validation. By far the most impressive abstraction of figures goes on to show how ill-prepared and looking for violence were the men subjected to it. The distortion of form and face is a representation of this tragedy in front of a faceless imported police force trained as riot managers in a scene that was NOT a riot but a protest.
This is an art that loves its community and yet nothing of that is mentioned by Mark Brown, who rather places the art only in the lens of art tradition =- and takes the easy path of concentrating on one painting. What of another painting of Orgreave (one that was focused by The Northern Echo, in the same room as the one above, in a peaceful alcove. I prefer it I think without truly losing any love for the Guernica pastiche.
In this painting the capture of a rural community landscape is divorced from a picture of a seated, and largely young male community by the same fence of police. I prefer the way this comments on genres in representational art in a low key. I like it because you have o keep reminding yourself that the line of police, batons and shields are not yet in violent use. Indeed the community seem a long way from expecting such us. There is a holiday mode in the semi-clad young men with sun hats, in some cases, taking the chance to air bodies that would have been encaged in the work day. It is the obverse of the work day, a holiday- but for me this heightens the tension and horror of our expectations, as if the thin black line will tear up the men from the housing estate they defend, as well as cut off their access back to it.
Of course, countless attempts have been made, though neither of the pictures above acknowledges that, that because this was as a fight around community, women and children too were involved (which does get represented by Picasso), but the following picture did it subtly, taking a moment of street protest, which emphasises the colours of community activism and of its banner art, and the presence of women as a strength in the fightback.
Most other of the art – and you just HAVE TO SEE IT YOURSELF – picks out the locales of a scarred post-mining community during the period some monuments to it still existed in County Durham and paying little heed of the toytown mementoes that replaced the mining, miner and miner family memories.
A beautiful collage painted on the remains of press-cuttings of the strike evokes a whole history of almost incomprehensible waste and memory slippage in this period.
Others took up the ‘scrap -heap’ metaphor used to describe the fate of miners were the strike to fail, as it did, of the men put out of work and the communities that would be piled into decimation. It is a thing shown in the printing Old Mean at the Heap in a fine way, but it speaks too from the photo-realism of an artwork where the frame seems filling up with waste mechanically tipped into it. Yet even here, some of the discarded coal-rock looks individual and carefully captured.
You will not have an experienced one day in mining. Neither did I. But you will have a strong sense of why we can never ‘taste’ a job. If it matters, it involves endurance and extension, together with repetition of some cycles that are not just those of pleasure. That they contained pleasure and meaning though should not be forgotten.
All my love
Steven xxxxx
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