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by Graham Taylor

“Mosley noticed too that, like Germany and Italy, Britain was suffering widespread discontent due to high unemployment, with its attendant hopelessness and starvation-level poverty. The situation therefore looked very exploitable, and Mosley decided to make the leap.” – Fighting fascists: Battling Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts – By Morris Beckman

This quote felt particularly resonant in terms of the contemporary relevance of this topic, with how gripes and discontent can be weaponised for ideological gains masquerading as solutions, and how we might benefit more from wariness about things that seem almost too simple and easy in terms of solutions for historic problems (wealth inequality, for example).

I want to play with gripes and the idea of a moan to guide the work for the karaoke element of this work (tentatively under the working title Not A Very Peaceful Protest), uniting through moaning as a specifically/culturally British thing to do… (perhaps that could be the element that I work with charities on?) How we can find unity in our strife, rather than it being fodder for dividing us…

I have been considering the historical implications of this work, working from the Mosley rally at the Pannier Market in 1933. I am circling around and back and forth between forms and ideas, as is the nature of research guiding the work, and have been considering the role of interpretation in regards to historical situating. Both in terms of the attendees at Mosley’s rally at the Pannier Market (the number, 2000 attendees, keeps reverberating at the moment, so is something I am keen to research more) and whether some might have been curious or seeking information, rather than card-carrying fascists (although Todd Gray’s talk last week did note the wealth of documentation that has survived about members of the British Union of Fascists in Devon, being part of the reason for his study there). Similarly, I am cautious about the role of art in rehabilitating public images for people, and the notion of commemoration without celebration, and the way of framing that in a way that does not discredit the history, or monumentalise it. Trying to make work that can whisper loudly, can confide in an audience rather than bombard or overly instruct them into a singular reading of it… I am thinking, in this regard, both of Susan Hiller’s Monument from 1981, where she gathered photographs of Victorian plaques commemorating heroic actions of everyday people, and the holocaust memorial in Berlin – Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It feels like a lot of the way that our history exists in public spaces is in the way of celebration, the statue on its plinth, the naming of building after philanthropists who funded their establishment… The actions of protestors in Bristol pulling down the statue of Edward Colston in the June 2020 George Floyd protests might be relevant here, and the way that Bristol museums have included that legacy in the history of the object itself.

What is our temptation to label people/things – is it part of an attempt to find order and structure amongst the chaos of the world? This in relation to that Alan Moore quote: “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.” (found online in various places, including here - I don’t know the original source of it though…)

Praise and blame elements of satire – at least in its “canonical” form/interpretation – “Satire therefore relies on the concepts of laus et vituperation, praise and blame; by praising and blaming it neatly separates the world into good and bad.” (pp. 13, Jonathan Greenberg, The Cambridge Introduction to Satire, 2019) … This relating to being subjective observer/commentator, this work isn’t rooted in the neutral and I am not pretending to have a neutral stance about fascism, which really shouldn’t feel like a big deal/controversial position to take… Also trickiness of dichotomies of good/bad and how that can over-simplify complex things, and create tribal responses to critique, an identification with a side, not wanting to be criticised only wanting to criticise – in the following section in the book, Greenberg notes, “[Jonathan] Swift observes elsewhere, readers have an uncanny ability to deflect satiric criticism away from themselves and onto others: ‘Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own’.” (pp16 ibid)

Using money raised by National Lottery players, The National Lottery Heritage Fund supports projects that connect people and communities with the UK’s heritage. Thanks to National Lottery players, we will be able to deliver a year-long project that provides research opportunities, fun activities for the community, and the chance for people to think more deeply about what the Pannier Market means to our area.