Yoko and The Miners

My TV doesn't work when it rains which is a real fucker. when do you want to watch TV more than when it's pissing with rain outside? so, although i really longed to see my friend Alastair make his debut on The Culture Show a few wednesday evenings ago, the watery fates conspired against me, and i ended up watching it on BBC iplayer as i did my makeup the following morning. He was talking about Yoko Ono's bonkers show Between The Sky and My Head at Baltic in Gateshead and was TOTALLY FAB - clearly slightly bewildered by her complete insanity, while left a bit cold by the dated and pretentious audacity of her art. v insightful and funny. i L.O.V.E.D him. The rest of the programme, meanwhile, looked at the blossoming of Newcastle as a cultural epicentre, of which Baltic is obviously key. As it turned out it was the perfect opening bookend to the day as that evening i went to see The Pitman Painters at the National Theatre, a play about the true story of the Ashington miners who, in the spirit of 1930s self improvement, took art appreciation classes only to become nationally critically acclaimed (for a time) artists. The play is by Lee 'Billy Elliot' Hall, so definitely has a slightly saccharine edge to its humour, but still manages to make brilliantly strong points about culture and class. the first half of the play, which sees the miners introduced first to their hired university teacher, then a glamourous patron of the arts, and then the art world at large, is full of misunderstandings, cock ups and faux pas due to pronunciation, and clunky class differences, prejudices and points of view played for laughs. but the second half really gets its teeth into the meat of the issues at play: the gimmicky vs genuine nature of the sensation - the fact that the men were a phenomenon, working class artists, men in fact who continued to go to the coal face every day even while they painted as oppose to bourgeois artists afforded the luxury of choice, beholden to patrons; the value of their work both as art in its own right outside of its class differentiation, and independently of one another's pieces - in isolation from being a Pitman Painting; the emerging importance of the men's class and jobs to their identity and art, their refusal to be stripped of that identity; their reluctance and resistance to be swept up by the critical maelstrom, and their humorous attitude to the furore; the fickle pretentiousness of the art world; the impact of war on aesthetic sensibilities - all things that strike you during key scenes and make you at once uncomfortable, think, and laugh. i'm not sure if i've made it sound as easy, enjoyable and funny to watch as it was, the points raised are far less issuey than they seem on paper. probably something that Yoko could take note on.