Simple Stories

I woke up thinking about Ruskin.  I was thinking about the world’s problems after catching Banksy's Dismaland covered at the end of the news.  It's a funny piece of work and I wondered if it was in fact ‘good art’?  The work reminds me of Salvador Dali; as a teenager his work seemed so great and as you get older you start to like Max Ernst but Dali was the gateway drug.   The reason I thought of Ruskin is that it doesn't seem enough for art just to show how dismal the world is - the world does a pretty good job of doing that for itself.  

On the other hand, we cannot just look at trees and rocks and bury our heads in the good Earth, neither can we remake roads for the National Trust or, in our slow-transition-carbon neutral-ideologically gated communities, throw daisy cutters at people who have nothing but their futures to hope for.

Our Ruskin project kicks off with ‘ART IS NOT DOING ENOUGH’.  Beautifully printed in gold letter press, it sits with an invitation to take action and is pinned next to choice items from The Guild of St George Ruskin collection.   

Ruskin writes in the Seven Lamps of Architecture;

Inscriptions in churches, in rooms, and on pictures, are often desirable, but they are not to be considered as architectural or pictorial ornaments: they are, on the contrary, obstinate offences to the eye, not to be suffered except when their intellectual office introduces them.  Place them, therefore, where they will be read, and there only; and let them be plainly written, and not turned upside down, nor wrong end first.  It is an ill sacrifice to beauty to make that illegible whose only merit is in its sense.  Write it as you would speak it, simply; and do not draw the eye to it when it would fain rest elsewhere, nor recommend your sentence by anything but a little openness of place and architectural silence about it.  [...] [R]emember that you are an architect, not a writing master.

He seems to be suggesting that words are limited as a way of making sense in the world.  Here is what we said we would try and do through the Simple Stories project, I wonder if it is enough?  Do we rage against the machine that we have become an integral part of?

The simple stories they tell us don’t make sense anymore is a year-long series of Sheffield based events, actions and exhibitions. Curated by the Poly-Technic and in partnership with Museums Sheffield and the Guild of St George it takes, Victorian critic, John Ruskin’s social thinking as inspiration.

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary;

(John Ruskin- Unto this Last)

What can art do here?

What can we do here?

It is difficult to look at the world and not feel angry at what we see. A deep frustration with the current state of things spills into our lives. We are a generation conditioned to think that things will not get better. Our love affair with the future becomes old and bitter. 

John Ruskin was not an easy man. He saw the changes taking place around him and grew angry. He felt that people were disconnecting from the world, makers were becoming like machines; the needs of the world and the needs of people were slipping out of balance. 

Ruskin did what he could with what he had to hand, he helped to set up the National Trust, established a museum for the working people of Sheffield, lectured, canvassed; drawing attention to things he cared about and opting out of the things he didn’t. His writing is visionary and contradictory, insightful and stupid. His thoughts can be followed through history from Tolstoy to Ghandi to Martin Luther King to Shumaker and James Lovelock.

The Simple Stories project identifies five particular interests of Ruskin's that offered spaces for increased wealth in life. By wealth we suggest he meant potential.

1.    Land, with associated air, water, and organisms.

2.    Houses, furniture, and instruments.

3.    Stored or prepared food and medicine and articles of bodily luxury, including clothing.

4.    Books.

5.    Works of Art.

Our aim is to revisit each of these aspects of wealth in the context of Sheffield. The potential sites we have identified are: Abbeyfield House, Regent Court, Ebenezer Elliot House and his monument in Weston Park, Museums Sheffield, Millennium Gallery, Portland Works, Castlefield Markets, the areas around Scotland Street, Chartists House on Paradise Street, Globe Works and Hillsborough Football Ground.