May 1st, 2005
May Day & Labour in Art
Today is May 1st which is not only Beltane, a pagan spring festival, it’s May Day, a day marking the efforts and achievements of workers around the world. It’s only in the last few years that it’s become a bank holiday in Ireland though and generally anyone trying to mark the day has, in the past, had to contend with the Garda happy to weigh in physically, but thoughtfully removing their identification numbers first.
It’s also the anniversary of Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations which took place in 1851, at the height of the industrial revolution. Tomorrow Rattlebag are broadcasting a show celebrating representations of work, art, labour and industrialization in Art.
There were just too many to pick from but here’s a few in no particular order:
1) LS Lowry - has anyone ever captured an industrial landscape like him? The masses of people in his paintings are indistinct from each other and inseperable from the landscape.
2) Surely there’s no greater contemporary red flag waver than Billy Bragg ? I love his song ‘Between the Wars’ and his updating of the classic ‘The Internationale’.
3) When I think of the best scenes in The Hudsucker Proxy, I think of the ones in the post room, with the workers scurrying about like ants, aspiring to climb up the corporate ladder to an Art Deco office of chrome and glass art above.
4) I’m a late discoverer of BS Johnson, but who else, apart from Dickens, captures the embittered pen pusher as well as he does in Christy Malry�s Own Double Entry.
5) What about Yeats’ ‘September 1913′ with those immortal opening lines: “What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till, And add the halfpence to the pence, And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone?”
There are too many more to mention but Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses deserves a nod as does Tennesse Ernie Ford’s version of ‘Sixteen Tons’ but I’d have to include Ewan McColl’s ‘Manchester Rambler’ with the best two-fingers-to-the-boss line ever:
“I may be a wage slave on Monday
But I am a free man on Sunday.”