ARTS
Making friends in the North
The arts establishment is famously London-centric. But is this changing? asks Rosie Millard According to the gallery café staff it was the preference for smoked salmon sandwiches over ham and pickle that gave it away. And the fact that 'people asked for salmon without wincing'. That and the sud- den popularity of Cumbrian Crystal from the little gift shop down the road. Clearly posh Londoners had invaded in force. Meanwhile, the hotels were full, the restau- rants enjoying several sittings and Kendal was having the time of its life. The pull? The Lucian Freud retrospective at the town's Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Over 11 weeks 26,000 people trooped through Abbot Hall to see 41 pictures by the master; the gallery normally attracts as many visitors in a year.
'I actually had thank-you letters from local restaurants and hote- liers,' says the director of Abbot Hall, Ed King. 'People come to Kendal from all over the country and the world; we had people jet- ting in from as far as Athens. The spin-offs for the town were spectac- ular. It even affected dinner-party conversation around here. People started talking about modern art.'
The presence of an international luminary in a place which hitherto had focused primarily on the best of local art puzzled some. Mr King became used to dealing with bizarre telephone enquiries. 'No,' he would say, most politely, 'we are not on the Northern Line. In fact, we are not on the Tube. We are not inside the M25. Kendal is in Cumbria, and, no, the exhibition is not trans- ferring to London. If you want to see it you will have to transfer to Kendal.'
It must be said that Freud's pres- ence in the Lake District did not come as a total surprise to the famously London-centric arts estab- lishment. Since the beginning of the year, critics, journalists, curators and art aficionados have been charging up and down the country as a matter of course. Visual Arts UK, the Arts Council-sponsored year-long celebra- tion of art in the 'Northern Region' (an invented name for an area stretching from Cumbria to Cleveland), produced over 3,000 separate arts events, shows, residen- cies, new galleries and installations.
As a result there cannot be one journalist or art lover who has not witnessed one or more of the varying charms of Newcastle Airport, Carlisle BR station, the Tyne Bridge, Helvellyn, Gateshead Town Hall, Durham Cathedral and any number of museums, site specific' sites, windy hill- 'Bella', by Lucian Freud, which was recently on show at the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal, Cumbria tops, bleating sheep, dry-stone walls and eight-lane motorways.
And what column inches the whole multi-media pound spectacle has pro- duced! Never before have editors jumped on the presence of an 'arts story' with such enthusiasm; never before has the arts world found itself on quite so many front pages and bulletins. The Birmingham Post com- plained about the 'parochialism' of the press; in the words of its arts editor, Terry Grimley, it was guilty of 'wide-eyed wonder that anything of cultural note should be stirring beyond the M25'; but it wasn't so
But what about next year? The £60 million worth of new capital investment drummed up this year by Visual Arts UK will soldier on in the form of galleries and contin- uing work; but most of the artists, if not all, will go back from whence they came, which was not from within the Northern Region. Some have suggested the year's astonish- ing crop of creators might like to stay up in the North. Well . while Bill Viola's naked man is still bobbing around in his pool of water on Durham Cathe- dral, Viola himself is back in Cali- forma, having root-canal treatment. Antony Gormley is directing the engineering of the controversial 'Angel of the North' from his Camden base. It's North all right, but only in terms of the river Thames.
'I wouldn't mind living up in the North, and I will always have a long-term relation- ship with Gateshead,' says Gormley, possi- bly to the horror of his critics. 'The North has an ,openness, and an interest in ideas from elsewhere due, perhaps, to its proxim- ity to the North Sea and the Baltic. But I have three kids under fifteen and moving them now simply isn't an option.' It's not an option for Lucian Freud either, presumably. 'These people were parachuted in,' says the sculptor William Pym, an indigenous artist living just north of Hadrian's Wall in Hallington. 'Of course, there's a trickle-down effect, and the way the whole year has been promoted and managed in the news is a spectacular achievement.
'But what has angered people is that the year has failed to highlight what people could do who were already here. Visual artists have not been looked at as a resource. We suggested lots of things we could do here, such as putting an artist in every school in the region. It wasn't even considered; Visual Arts 96 hardly produced as much as an education pack. Money has been put into galleries but not local artists. The headline shows all originated from London; they were just wheeled up to be exhibited here.'
'Oh come on,' says the Observer's art crit- ic William Feaver, who invited Freud to show at Abbot Hall and himself lives for part of the year in Northumbria. 'I don't think you can expect artists to live in the North any more than I do. They simply can't make a living up there. The key to the year is the curators; if galleries and muse- ums use their imagination, they now have proof they can get anybody they like to show. There are twenty million people in the North and not much art up there. A tremendous possibility has opened up for exhibitions and shows; the whole region has been galvanised.'
The abstract artist William Tillyer, who recently moved from London to live on the North Yorkshire moors, agrees. 'One is keenly aware of how explosive the whole year has become,' he says. 'There are fea- tures in newspapers and exhibitions on all the time. People have now got used to the idea of going out to see art shows. I think it will have some lasting effect; it's now plain- ly not true that London is at the centre of all things.'
The Year of Visual Arts still has three months to go; but as far as the hill farmers in Cumbria or thousands of commuters along the Ml are concerned, the explosion will continue well into 1997, with Andy Goldsworthy's 100 dry-stone sheepfolds and Antony Gormley's vast metal 'Angel' slowly taking place on their designated sites. Goldsworthy is currently working in Mt Kisco, New York State, sculpting a dry- stone wall. To him, the issue of staying in the North or not is parochialism indeed. 'I've brought a Cumbrian wailer over to the States with me to do this piece,' he says. 'We're reviving traditional walling in America. The whole point of the year is that it wasn't confined just to the North, to one piece of land; it's made connections further afield than that.'
From Carlisle to Cleveland, taking in New York State on the way, Visual Arts 96 has scored more than a home run.
Rosie Millard is arts correspondent of the BBC.
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