john-tyrrell-SPIN

Portrait of Ann, 1957

Over the years I have made a number of visits to the Lowry Centre, "a monstrous memorial cultural centre in Salford" according to the art critic Brian Sewell, and before that to the University of Salford where the collection used to be housed. Each time I seem to have focused on something different.

On my earliest visits it was the paintings my young daughters found amusing, most notably the man sleeping on top of the wall, or "the man going to University" as my youngest daughter always called it. More recently it was the seascapes and the haunting self portrait.

The Man With Red Eyes, 1938

This time, perhaps influenced by revelations about Lowry's dark side, it was the stylised portrait of Ann, whose identity is unknown, and may not have existed, although Lowry always claimed that she did, or at any rate once had. This painting surprised the London art world when it was exhibited in 1957, and it probably would have surprised most of the people who flocked to see the recent exhibition at the Tate Modern which focused primarily on Lowry's representation of the industrial landscape.

I missed that exhibition, but have looked with some interest on the feedback on the Tate Modern's website. Most find their preconceptions about his matchstick men and identification with late Industrial Lancashire confirmed, some appear to believe that his work was a faithful even photographic representation of how the North was, or maybe still is, and some find it hard to believe that Lowry was a political conservative. Others, who appear to be in a minority are underwhelmed and sometimes scathing about his work, perhaps echoing Brian Sewell's acerbic review:

The myth of Lowry as a great painter will be given momentum by this unsatisfactory exhibition and the sentimental mush that it has already generated but we should treat his work with some art historical severity if we are ever to settle the debate. Lowry was not “a Wiganish sort of Corot”, nor a Boltonish sort of Goya, nor the Pendlebury Bruegel, nor any other grandee painter, nor was he Manchester’s recording angel. I do not share John Berger’s view that his pictures document the collapse of Lancashire’s industrial heritage between the wars and express the workers’ stoicism in the face of continuing decline, nor even that Lowry was trapped in the grim ethos of the Great Depression. His paintings were not about the nation’s economy; nor were they about pity and sympathy. Indeed Lowry denied that he had any feelings at all about the figures that he painted: “They are symbols of my mood, they are myself … made half unreal.(1)

Although I don't share Sewell's view of Lowry's work, I think he makes a good point. When I look at Lowry's paintings I am always aware that this is the unique vision of one human being, a man born in the late Victorian period who lived through the swinging sixties, detached, voyeuristic even, a man who always suppressed his own feelings and probably failed to connect with a single other human being throughout his entire life. That for me makes him and his work far more fascinating than if he had set out to document the misery of the industrial working class to support a social change agenda. Whether he is a great artist is not something I would consider myself competent to judge, but I think Manchester, or more strictly Salford, is quite right to be proud of him.

The Funeral Party, 1953 On my most recent visit I found that the gallery's current "Picture in Focus" is the Funeral Party, which was apparently inspired by Lowry's fascination with Pirandello's play "Six Characters in Search of an Author". This picture is the choice of the cleaning supervisor at the Salford Arts Centre who is probably far better acquainted with Lowry's work than any one else on the planet. In her explanation of why she liked this painting she pointed out the high heeled shoes, unusual in Lowry's paintings, and the woman with the smile on her face. "Perhaps she knew she was in the will" she commented.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Brian Sewell on Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, Tate Britain - exhibition review Evening Standard, 4th July 2013

I have just managed to catch The Talawa Theatre Company's Production of Arthur Miller's "All My Sons", now nearing the end of a very successful run at Manchester's Royal Exchange. Performed by an all Black cast, with the wonderful Don Warrington playing the lead role of Joe Keller,it was an engaging and powerful performance from start to finish.

The Talawa Theatre Company, founded as long ago as 1986 to provide creative opportunities for Black performers and directors, is now Britain's primary all Black theatre company. There is no special ethnic reason for the production of "All My Sons" by an all Black Company,its themes are universal: individual responsibility, conscience, and the relations of individuals and families to society in the large. Set in the latter part of the second world war, the play portrays the disintegration of a family amidst the sacrifice the profiteering and the criminality which coexist in modern war.

As always the Royal Exchange's Theatre programme is thought provoking, and this one carries a piece written by Arthur Miller in 1958 in which he acknowledged his debt to Ibsen,

If his plays, and his method, do nothing else they reveal the evolutionary quality of life. One is constantly aware in watching his plays, of process, change, development. .. dramatic characters and the drama itself, can never hope to attain a maximum degree of consciousness unless they contain a viable unveiling of the contrast between past and present, and an awareness of the process by which the present has become what it is.

Elsewhere in the programme Don Warrington and Director Michael Buffong explore the play's relevance to the the present, to the collapse of "turbo capitalism" and the need to find a way of living together that is not based on pure greed. "All My Sons' was written at a time when free market economics and individualism were widely considered to be an extreme ideology responsible for the pre-war economic breakdown which led to mass unemployment, fascism and to war. It was a time when many shared a belief that it was possible, out of the ruins of war, to create a better, more socially responsible world. I don't detect such optimism now, simply a cynicism about the politicians' demonstrably absurd claims that "we are all in it together," but that perhaps makes Miller's play even more relevant.

Anyway I hope this production is staged elsewhere, it deserves to be seen by a wider audience. I also rather selfishly hope that the Talawa soon return to the Royal Exchange.

June 2nd was the occasion for the Manchester Parade, the 4th such event, and the sun shone again, which it is not supposed to do in Manchester. You used to be able to buy a tee shirt from the tourist office proclaiming "ON THE SEVENTH DAY GOD MADE MANchester" so perhaps God is a Mancunian.

The parade began on a solemn note with a commemoration of drummer Lee Rigby, four portraits followed by a mass of military drummers.

Manchester remembers drummer Lee Rigby - one of its own

Then came a celebration of modern Manchester, in all its colour and diversity.

Having long dispatched its former glory as the world's first industrial city to the museum, modern Manchester would be unrecognizable to De Tocqueville, Marx or Engels, keen observers of the miseries of Manchester in its heyday. Unrecognizable too to more recent visitors, Turing and Sebald, who for a time made decaying, bomb damaged Manchester their home, but never felt at home here.

Towards the end of the parade a float by the Home Ed Arts group struck a different, perhaps more authentic Mancunian note, a post apocalyptic vision of globally warmed Manchester by the sea in a thousand years: a giant hermit crab in a spent nuclear shell case is paraded along the promenade surrounded by a Peirrot troupe, a kind of fourth millenium freak show to shock an unshockable audience.

Another lunch with the globe trotting Grimshaws. I wonder how many people can have visited both Pitcairn and North Korea, let alone in the space of less than one year? That honour belongs to our friends the Grimshaws, who have posted the photos they took of their recent trip on Flickr.

I particularly liked the image of the man fishing. A superb photo taken by a gifted but very modest photographer, capturing a slice of life in North Korea which few are able to see.

Another that caught my eye was the photo of the Pyongyang Metro, modern, clean and uncrowded, claimed to be the deepest in the world, and designed to provide shelter from a nuclear attack that the Korean authorities apparently regard as inevitable.

The image of people cycling to work in front of nondescript apartments chimes better with western views of this inscrutable country, albeit with a touch of Lowry about it.

Finally I have added a view of which the authorities would approve, a huge monument to the Korean Workers Party, consisting of three 50 metre towers depicting the hammer and sickle, and in the middle a rather phallic writing brush.

We were fascinated to hear about their travels to the Demilitarised Zone, the empty roads and their two visits to the amazing Arirang Mass Games. Surprising was the revelation that visitors may spend a short time staying in the homes of ordinary families, a privilege not extended to those American citizens who find their way to North Korea.

I was also surprised to hear that the UK has an embassy in Pyongyang. I imagine that it is not a highly sought after posting!

Perhaps most surprising of all was the account of the young Norwegian in the Grimshaws' party, fascinated by North Korea and making his third trip. One wonders how far he has managed to delve below the surface of this most impenetrable of countries. Unlike the young Norwegian the Grimshaws do not intend to make a return visit, but they had no regrets about going. I wonder where they will go next?

The exhibition focuses on Munch's twentieth century development, and on the impact which photography and cinema had on him. I was particularly attracted by the Yellow Log, which creates an almost kinetic effect. A similar effect is apparent in The Workers Returning Home, which reflected his engagement with the trends of the early

twentieth century,and his belief that the time of the workers had come. The middle class pedestrians are sidelined, mere observers of history.

The painting which has probably attracted the most attention was the last

of a number of self portraits, showing the subject standing between a grandfather clock,its face obscured, and the bed, on which presumably he expects to die, surrounded by some of his life's work. The painting was completed in 1942 or 1943. Munch died in January 1944, refusing to the end any association with the collaborationist Quisling regime in Norway which tried to convey a different impression at his funeral.

I found this a fascinating exhibition, and hope before too long to visit the Munch Museum in Oslo, to learn more about him, and yes, to look at The Scream.

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, whose theoretical work before the war provided much of the conceptual framework for computation and the yet unheard of discipline of computer science. Perhaps the most distinguished achievement of a short but glittering career was his secret war time work on cryptography at Bletchley Park, which saved countless lives in the battle of the Atlantic and some believe considerably shortened the war.

After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory where he produced a design for what he conceived of as an artificial "brain". Frustrated by bureaucratic politics in which he never excelled, Turing abandoned this work and in 1948 accepted a readership at the Victoria University in Manchester, where Professor Williams and his team of electrical engineers had already constructed the world's first stored program electronic computer, the Manchester Baby.

In Manchester, he worked with the engineers on the development of the new Manchester Mark 1 computer, although his only contribution to the hardware design was a random number generator on whose inclusion he insisted. Unusually for a theoretical Mathematician, a gentlemanly profession, Turing had always been willing to get his hands dirty, and had his own laboratory at his semi-detached house in a leafy road on the outskirts of Wilmslow, where he often preferred to work rather than in the smokey industrial city of Manchester which still very much bore the scars of war time bombing, and must have seemed very unappealing after previous academic posts at Cambridge and Princeton. In March 1949 he wrote to a friend,

I am getting used to this part of the world but still find Manchester rather mucky. I avoid going there more than I can avoid. (1)

The Victoria University, described not totally accurately by Turing's biographer as "the technical University of the North, producing doctors and engineers, rather than abstract ideas", was certainly a step down socially from Cambridge. (2) It was precisely that of course which enabled it to produce the world's first stored program computer, which was patently beyond the capabilities of the gentlemanly world from which Turing had sprung.

Nevertheless, as well as the engineers interested only in the practicalities of developing their machine, in Manchester Turing found a number of academics with whom he was able to discuss his ideas on artificial intelligence, among them the Hungarian born polymath Michael Polanyi (1891-1976),the Professor of Chemistry.

Polyani, a critic of positivism and British empiricism, whose writings on the limitations of scientific knowledge were to influence Thomas Kuhn, firmly opposed Turing's view of the human mind as a discrete state machine. For Polanyi the human mind was unspecificable, certainly by human beings. For Turing the fact that it was not yet specified did not mean that it should be considered as unspecifiable. Despite their profound intellectual disagreement the two remained friends.

It is an irony that Turing is probably at least as well known for the circumstances surrounding his death as for his scientific achievements. Eschewing contact with the small homosexual community centred on the University, the Manchester Guardian and the BBC, Turing had little social life in Manchester, but made regular visits to Cambridge and his friends in the south of England. (3)

In December 1951 though he made a foray into the then rather sleazy area of Oxford Road close to the arches under the railway line, where, pretending to look at the posters outside the Regal Cinema, he made contact with a young working class man, Arnold Murray.

Their relationship, across the class divide, was to lead to Turing's conviction in 1952 for gross indecency and, as an alternative to prison negotiated by his legal representative, hormonal treatment to reduce his libido.

Turing kept his job, continued his scientific work, and particularly after his probationary period continued his life much as before, but he lost his Government security clearance and was clearly put under scrutiny by the security services. In mid May 1954 Turing went with friends to Blackpool and, as he had done many years before in Hertfordshire, went in to consult a gypsy fortune teller. After half an hour he emerged, white as a sheet, would not discuss what she had said and did not speak for the duration of the bus journey back to Manchester. In June 1954 he was found dead in his bed at home, beside him a partially eaten apple that may have been contaminated by cyanide.

His mother refused to believe it was suicide, arguing that it was an accident, the result of typical carelessness in his laboratory. A recent paper by Professor Copeland lends some support to this view: the coroner's verdict was based on insufficient evidence; it could have been an accident or even murder. Certainly the apple was never tested for traces of cyanide, and Turing's cheerfulness and plans for the coming days certainly indicate that if it was suicide it was not premeditated. One troubling detail is the fact that his shoes were placed outside his bedroom door as if waiting cleaning, an Oxbridge custom which according to his housekeeper Turing had never previously observed.

The exact circumstances of Turing's death may always remain unclear. It should not be stated that he committed suicide—because we simply do not know. Perhaps we should just shrug our shoulders, agree that the jury is out, and focus on Turing's life and extraordinary work.(4)

Whatever the true cause of his death, it does not excuse the appalling treatment which Turing received at the hands of the authorities, for which, in 2009, after a petition, the British Government formally apologised.

The Turing Centenary Exhibition: Manchester Museum

To celebrate Turing's centenary Manchester University has recently hosted a conference, and has mounted an exhibition at the Manchester Museum.

Board advertising the Exhibition

Board in the Turing Exhibition

Honesty compels me to say that the exhibition, which primarily focuses on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, on which Turing was engaged at the time of his death, is more than a little disappointing. Other than a single machine showing very slow mysterious graphics presumably illustrating Turing's work on morphogenesis followed by a videoed interview with an aged academic who was Turing's postgraduate student at the time of his death and describes the difficulties of using the what now seems archaic Mark I computer, no use whatsoever is made of modern technology. The entries in the visitors' book sadly and rather dramatically indicate that it has failed to stimulate the school children who have been brought to see it. Manchester could and should have done better.

Postscript: The Apple Logo

Apparently Stephen Fry once asked the late Steve Jobs if it were true that the Apple logo was in memory of the death of Alan Turing. Jobs replied, It isn't true, but God we wish it were!

It is perhaps no bad thing to remember Turing whenever we see the logo.

----------------------------------------------------

1. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma,(Vintage Books 1992),p.395
2. Hodges p. 394
3. Hodges p. 396
4. TURING SUICIDE VERDICT IN DOUBT, Jack Copeland, 23 June 2012

He is now among the richest men in Australia. I think he has had the last laugh.