Port Glasgow
Mitchell Miller
Seinfeld made the definitive statement on coffee table books in its recurring plotline where the ever-ingenious Kramer authors a coffee table book on coffee tables (with fold out legs for those who don’t actually have a coffee table to put it on). The shallow publishing genre of the coffee table book has been rightly associated with "Hipster Doofuses" before and ever since.
So when Glasgow-based film artist and photographer Mark Neville gives us Port Glasgow, a glossy book of photographs, we immediately recognize an element of pastiche. There are no folding legs, landscapes of Machu Pichu or bronzed models but very ordinarily looking people in very ordinary settings. Nor can it be bought in the shops; it exists in a limited edition print given only to the community that inspired it. Explaining the premise, Neville reveals a mild element of class warfare: "I was always fascinated by the way in which the kind of hardback ‘coffee table’ book of images I produced for this project always ended up on the coffee tables of English middle class people, and not in the homes of those depicted in them."
Located just outside Glasgow itself, Port Glasgow is one of Scotland’s most impoverished communities, suffering the long-term detriments of industrial decline, under-investment and enduring sectarian divides. Port Glasgow is a public art intervention in a proud yet battered community. Neville sums up its fall from grace: "Only 50 years ago it was the world centre for shipbuilding, now only the Ferguson’s yard remains."
Making much of its mise en scenes of pubs, boxing clubs, local shops, vandalised bus shelters and workplaces, Port Glasgow deliberately challenges perceptions of both public and "high end" art through its carefully realised images. Artists have long "appropriated the poor" for artworks that are frequently vicarious and viewed from a point of smug security. But the Port Glasgow images intrude upon bourgeois conventions and assumptions. Mark’s new flat poses a young man and two girls–the very image of the suburban ghetto–with a rather dainty bunch of flowers.
The Port is a place many Scots, particularly those from the neighbouring city, fear to tread. But Neville–English, middle class, an outsider–possessed a degree of neutrality, that magic ability displayed by many documentary makers to finesse as intimidating a prospect as a working man’s pub. But unlike many "social documentarians" his role was not merely parasitic–the book was distributed to all of the 8,000 households by the boy’s football team (one of whom coined this article’s title) who used the postage money for new strips and equipment.
Which makes Port Glasgow more than just a pastiche but an implicit attack on the soul-stealing tendencies of a media that habitually swoops into such places solely in search of bad news. Neville’s Port is rich, dense and complex, with numerous narratives, grim or uplifting, at play. Now that the book is finished, the project has evolved into a touring exhibition. "I really agonized as to whether I should show the work outside of the Port in any form at all," Neville says. "Initially I thought it might ‘damage’ the meaning of the work, but I thought it would be fascinating to do a show that presented the community response to the project, including letters, e-mails and newspaper articles, as well as the original photos used in the book."<
This response was negative as well as positive, and almost always passionate. Some felt the Port’s "drink culture" to be overrepresented in the book, others greatly enjoyed seeing themselves given such hi-fidelity treatment. Some objections were on sectarian grounds–some Protestants felt the Catholics were over-represented and burned their copies in protest.
Sinister as this is, it at least indicates there is some life in public art, which is all too frequently kitschy, condescending or just plain boring. Neville’s images admirably reflect such sorely untapped potential: part celebration, part investigation, part elegy for a working-class culture in deep crisis. The "Town Hall Christmas Party" shots are in many respects Port Glasgow’s signature theme. Neville’s ingenious lighting freezes the dancing bodies on the floor–would-be lotharios, jiving grannies and women in the regulation little black dresses–in spectacular tableaux. At first glance, they appear statuesque, heroic–then they look desperately, perpetually isolated, individuals alone in a crowded room. But gradually, we dispense with the melodrama and appreciate their collective moment of release and self-expression; inhibitions gone, guard dropped, it’s a scene that stays with you much longer, more profoundly, than your usual coffee-table fare.
Port Glasgow will be exhibited in venues in Scotland (The Dick Institute), and England (Modern Art Oxford), later this year.
