admin | Peter Kalu

I love Hockney and I hate him. I went to see his Bigger and Closer exhibition at Aviva Studios. True to form, his art there shines with joy, brightness, playfulness and innovation. It’s not ordinary oil-on-canvas paintings. Instead, it’s a giant light show. Film and images are channelled onto four giant screens that scroll through his work in fifty minutes – landscapes, his opera backdrops, his California evocations: it all rolls over us -sometimes even showing him in the act of creation. As we watch we are piped classical music else Hockney’s own, rolled Yorkshire voice provides commentary. I went with my nonagenarian mother, and initially she was irritated. Where are the proper paintings? she asked. She has a point. We lose the ability to pause where we want, to examine a particular element at the speed we want, to obsess over some detail or other. Instead, at Aviva, we march to Hockney’s chosen beat. I realise that, with the disembodied voice and the huge scale artworks, Hockney here is God and we are in Hockney’s church – this viewing chamber is like an Evangelist tent for Hockney worshippers, pitched up at Aviva. We crane our necks, gawp at the friezes as the disembodied God, Hockney himself, delivers sermons on how to view art, what his art means. The collection plate (tickets £24) has already gone round and shucked the shillings out of each of us (there are concessionary prices too*). The choir is the raised viewing platform within the chamber. They don’t sing, just look down on us lesser beings as we sprawl on the floor else sag in our fold-out chairs and benches, or prop up the walls. Hockney radiates sunshine. Born in Yorkshire, he escaped the driving Yorkshire rain (unlike his doom-mongering Yorkshire compatriot, the poet, Ted Hughes and the equally bleak, trapped-in-Hebden Bridge poet, Sylvia Plath). Hockney slipped away to California in 1964 when he was in his late twenties, and hit all that Cali sun and light and blue swimming pools, and loved it and you can see that love in the art. Bigger and Closer showcases Aviva Studio’s excellence at huge, immersive installation art – where else in the Northern England can you put this bright cinematic four-screen show the height of two double decker buses? You know too, how adverts come at you at higher volume and in brighter colours? Same here with Hockney. I was enlightened by some of Hockney’s voice-over analysis. For instance, he points out how Chinese paintings employ multiple perspectives unlike singular Western perspective techniques, and he incorporates this into his art; this observation helped me understand some of the fascination I have with Hockney’s work – I have a print of his on my wall — it’s partly how he shifts perspectives within a painting so that ‘you don’t just view them you walk through them,’ to paraphrase Hockney himself. A dream of Hockney Good art stays with you. The night after visiting the exhibition, I had a dream of Hockney. He came to Aviva to be interviewed by me. I know he is deaf now and would be lip-reading. In the dream, I was at Aviva with one of my daughters and about to interview him when the lights went down for a film screening by some professor. I quickly approached the professor and explained. She laughed and agreed to bring the lights back up but by now Hockney had wandered off with my daughter to do the interview elsewhere. I’m trying to ring my daughter to tell her to record it, but she’s unreachable and I know she’s having a whale of a time with Hockney. What does all this mean? I don’t know. The Salford-Manchester Hockney corridor Next day, still under the influence of loving Hockney, I was in a taxi going from Salford to Manchester and kept G.L.I.M.P.S.I.N.G. brilliantly** bright lcd advertising hoardings through the rain — the hoardings were being made to flicker by the speed of the car and the foreground of leafless, young Winter trees planted in Salford roadside verges — the effect was totally Hockney — the illumination, the flickering, the colour — I realised it would take a hacker ten minutes to reprogram all the hoardings. Then everyone across Salford and Manchester could jump in a car and drive through the Hockney exhibition for free! Hockney, Walker and Basquiat By night, I’d flipped and I was hating Hockney. For his erasures. There are no black people in his exhibition: we are not ‘seen’ by Hockney. I contrast this to the Barbara Walker exhibition, (‘Being here’ at Whitworth, 4 October 2024 – 26 January 2025)*** and I imagine the Walker exhibition all neon-ed up, scaled up and transferred to Aviva. We are seen by Walker. Totally. We are seen by Basquiat – even if his seeing is through his mirror. And this is why I hate Hockney. He never sees non-white people. I’m thinking, Jeez, he never takes any political stand, does he? What if Hockney suddenly clenched his fist and said, “Black lives matter!” Wouldn’t that be great? But he’s a no-politics painter. That’s a choice. There’s a sixteen -panel Gilbert and George back-lit artwork at the Whitworth gallery in Manchester of a young black man. That’s a choice. Hockney by contrast — or at least all the Hockney I’ve seen so far — has no black people...

‘Your words flow like water’ by Jasmine Gardner – art review (Pete Kalu)

Jasmine Gardiner “Your words flow like water’” Esea studio, Manchester August 2024 I enter the gallery and find the artwork installed in the high ceiling of a corridor. I’ve had problems with my roof and my mind is very much in that mundane, worldy, jumpy frame, and so my first thought is it resembles a roof leak. I settle and the writer in me -another first instinct I have- imagines the squiggles make up shapes that could be writing in an unknown script. It’s in the colours of my team – Man City – sky blue, with a touch of Yves Klein Blue, and it’s a blue that, I recognise, is a favoured colour in Chinese culture. The installation has a fluid, clean feel to it; it is and yet it is not rainfall: rain does not fall in such playful shapes; or does it? I stare and settle, and it starts to feel like a spill and suddenly I’m seeing Kandinsky and his swirls. Then I switch to blue menstrual blood; I notice that, taken as a whole, the installation has a vaguely heart shape. In the next breath, it’s moving, some form of migration, a steady trickle downwards. I imagine hair tresses, they suggest some fairytale, maybe smoke dragons. It’s vertical, vertiginous — pinned to those steep, stairwell walls — it makes no claim to be central, to occupy the whole of the gallery. “I am ‘noises off’” the installation says, “I am the subaltern voice; I am also beautiful.” I’ve visited Esea gallery with a visual artist friend; one other person is here – the gallery attendant, sitting unobtrusively behind a small reception desk. I sit and absorb, it’s how I like best to be in galleries, to let my mind and heart continue to wander with the image. What comes next to mind is a complete and sudden shift in scale to the microscopic: the pieces become mitochondria – the dyed interior of cells. Then, in another jump, they become springs, sprigs, some rococo music score, a disorderly textile. I imagine programming code – the installation is too beautiful for JavaScript, it’s closer to Python, but too human even for Python. My mind springs again and I land on the thought of a silk textile, loosely woven, bunched, handmade, without algorithm, in the raw, blowing in the wind with all its flutter and backflow. The artwork is actual material – i.e. it is not something projected onto the wall, nor etched, nor stencilled. Not Banksy-d. I get up close and see it is held by pins. The DIY-er in me calculates six hundred and fifty 2.5 cm steel pins are keeping these blue drips approx. 2 cm from the wall. The lowest drip is pinned fully onto the wall: nailed flat. The material is tissue paper not textile – like the red dragon designs of Chinese New Year in Chinatown trinket shops. I’m astonished to see close up that each piece must have been cut individually — they are too unique for anything else surely? — the sheer intensity this knife-wielding requires, the focus for each incision, the many hours spent. Up close, you see shadows thrown on the wall by the gallery lights. The light source is from up high and the shadows fall downwards. I avoid the little cardboard square that holds the gallery’s (or is it the artist’s?) interpretation. I feel more at ease with only the title as a frame. In my heart, ‘Your words flow like water’ expresses something like beauty in fragility, and in flow. I imagine there is something there too about how such beauty is hard-earned: a thousand cuts and more, produced this art. Ceramics Cermaics The wall installation is accompanied by a set of ceramic moon flask vases called, ‘‘Take your Chinese and shove it up your ass, you chinky pig!” This is a jolting disordering of Ming Dynasty ceramic traditions; the vases are beautiful-ugly. They will age as well as the original Ming vases....

My Life as a Chameleon – a short book review by Pete Kalu

A brilliant debut novel by Diana Anyakwo, My Life as a Chameleon is written in beguilingly simple prose and evokes what it was like for the author to grow up Irish-Nigerian in Lagos, Nigeria in the 1980’s. Anyakwo’s mother was a ‘nigerwife’ – the name given to white women who lived in Nigeria with their Nigerian husbands. I am Danish-Nigerian, and much of this novel had me gasping with the surprise of recognition. Chameleon also forms an ‘alternative life’ for myself: what if my parents had chosen to live in Nigeria and we had grown up there? There are laughs in the novel, but the overwhelming feeling is a yearning to protect the young protagonist from the harsh circumstances and people she encounters, not only In Nigeria, but when, after her father’s mental breakdown, she is sent to live with an Irish ‘aunty’ for a number of years in Manchester, UK, too. Tender and beautifully written, if Chameelon does not move you to tears by its end, check yourself – you are probably stone. PS. Chameleon forms an interesting complement to the ‘The Strength of Our Mothers’ (ISBN: 978-1-78972-129-4) collection of writings edited by SuAndi featuring interviews of white, Mancunian mothers who had children by African men and raised them in...

Promise, novel by Rachel Eliza Griffiths – a writerly review

Noises Off: Notes on Promise the novel by Rachel Eliza Griffith, and some writerly thoughts inspired by it. Promise by Rachel Eliza Griffiths Promise is a historical novel set against the backdrop of Jim Crow America circa 1957. At the novel’s centre are two black teen sisters, Cinthy and Ezra; the story is narrated by the younger Cinthy. They live in Salt Point, New England, USA. Promise is an excellent novel, both in its characterisation and its drama. Other reviewers will no doubt expand on this – my notes here are more a reflection on how I read the book as a writer (including where it sits with other novels I’ve read), rather than a standard review. My knowledge of Black America of the fifties and sixties comprises all the big names and headline sounds – the Black Panther party, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Rosa Parkes, Bessie Coleman, the Jim Crow racial segregation laws, and soul & blues music. What is harder for me to get a sense of, is the lives of ordinary African-American people– the ones not in the headlines or the history books but going about their lives at the time of momentous civil rights events such as the 1963 March on Washington. How was it for them? Promise is in this territory. The novel takes a number of literary risks. The opening is poetic, lavish and beautifully done albeit those readers who like action -plot- may get a little restless. After the setup, the plot quickly kicks on, and there is a formidable, high-risk, high-reward early scene that goes on to fuel myriad reflections on the cross-currents of race and gender in 1950’s/60’s America. In this aspect, it reads like precursor of eg. Attica Locke’s Pleasantland. I grew up with three sisters, and the dynamics of sisterhood has always fascinated me. Griffiths’ Promise is one of the best portraits of the relationship between two black sisters I have read. There is a white teen character too – Lucy, who joins them early on in the novel and is prominent in the first chapters. Yet Promise is the inverse of To Kill A Mocking Bird because white heroism is dialled down to zero in this novel: the plangent friendship the two sisters have with Lucy withers in the winds of virulent racism. All three girls in Promise actually survive. In that sense, you might call Promise upbeat, if upbeat is allowable as a descriptor when you have murder, racial humiliation, and grisly death by burning woven into a novel’s action. Cultural Studies theorist Stuart Hall argues that artists cannot ignore racial stereotypes, they can only negotiate them through their work, and in Representation, Hall lists three ways artists enter into these negotiations. Invoking that list, the weight of characterisation in Promise adopts the second, counter-narrative approach in Hall’s list of three. The main character, Cinthy is a thoughtful, precocious soul whose instincts are always to do the right thing. There is a gun in black hands in Promise, but it never goes off. This set me wondering, is it possible to have a flawed, ‘doing the wrong thing’ yet still heroic main black character in a novel? Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Jennifer Makumbi’s The First Woman (both novels featuring similar age black girls) have engagingly errant lead characters who yet don’t plunge into killing others. Richard Wright’s Native Son and the harrowing, brilliant Beloved by Toni Morrison in which Sethe kills her own child, spring to mind. Outside the literary genre, there are the surreal, hyper-violent crime novels of Chester Himes. It is a conundrum of the novel as a form that its aesthetic heart is individualistic: conventionally, it concentrates on the consciousness of one individual (here, Cinthy) as they act to change their world. Yet, by definition, racism means being held in a static situation where the greater agency lies with whites. Black characters in such scenarios can have a temporary agency – they can ‘shoot the white motherfuckers’ – but it is in the knowledge that the overwhelming racist apparatus of the state will crush that individual and extinguish that individual rebellion. The ‘noises off’ of this novel are the collective actions of the civil rights movement seeking to overthrow the 1950’s/60’s segregationist social order. Clearly, such collective action is more powerful than any isolated acts of resistance or heroism. Promise eschews the guns-blazing doomed but high-agency pathway of a Chester Himes novel, and shows instead the strength of collective resistance and how it inspired individuals and African-American communities across the USA – the great power of those ‘noises off’. Moreover, through the eyes of the Cinthy, the novel signals the promise of a better future. It is a fabulous novel – so good you’ll read it twice. ...

Welcome to the Bloods – Twine Game

Click on the link in green below. The Game runs on your browser using html – no download needed. What’s the Game essentials? A quiz. You read the testimonies of other Bloods’ recruits then take the quiz. You can also join the Resistance (those opposed to the Bloods) if you can find the right pathway within the Game. I intend to expand this Twine Game but, so far, it ends with the quiz. It’s kind of eerie. You are being recruited to join the Bad Guys and the ‘correct’ answers may not be what you benevolent instincts push you towards! Welcome to the Bloods (v2) Credits: Narrative based on ‘One Drop’ novel by Pete Kalu – out now, everywhere! ‘Game text by Pete Kalu. Except ‘Jasmine Fletcher story’, by Ellie Andrews Coding: Pete Kalu/Ellie Andrews/Visioning Labs Visuals/Avatars: Remi Rabillat Music: Naomi Kalu...