Coping

Richie Culver Copistrial Coast Coping. Are you coping? Living? Or Coping? Is this what were you meant to be? What was your given role? Do you know your place? Who do you think you are? Born - Died. Is that it? Industrial Coast, a new exhibition and event space set in a previously disused unit in a shopping centre in Middlesbrough, Teesside, presents "Coping", a site specific exhibition created by the Hull born, now London based artist and musician Richie Culver. Coping, the word, as a statement, gives a sign of where Culver is coming from as an artist. Humor and a visual style, peppered with a little anger, often link the artist's work. Texts on canvas have simple statements, the most famous being his often-repeated "Born - Died" paintings. These are blank canvases where the word Born appears at the top, and Died at the bottom. The blank space between implying a life lived that deserves no remark, an obituary of an everyday nobody. Someone like us? Like the artist? Or just a joke? I guess that depends on how the viewer is feeling that day? Born - when any child is born a set of expectations are often in place. Based on class, economics, geographic location, gender, parental desire, parental crushed desires, historical precedence, the expectations are there before a word is spoken, before anything has been desired, before any knowledge outside the smell of immediate surroundings, the touch of first carers and the needs of brand new bodies have had any effect. It is these outside effects - the things we see, hear, touch and taste that often mess with the born expectations. Do we like or dislike what we see? Are my tastes separate to my sisters, friends and guardians. Do I desire different things? Am I too big for my boots? Do I not know my place? Culture in the broad sense - the human made stuff that we come across - changes our contentment with our given role, the sum of those expectations. Thanks but no thanks. Music, television, fashion, stories we hear, stories we read, pictures we see, places we have been, clubs, towns, beaches, places we imagine. I bet it’s great over there. Once this is in our heads, once those ingredients have been added, they can't be removed. Even a forgotten song is still there in the ghost of your personality. Art and music changes you. Making it changes other people. We have been altered by it. Thank god. Performing it transforms everyone in the room. Showing it remolds those who see it. They might hate it, but they can't unsee it. Thinking and writing about Culver, the exhibition "Coping" and about Industrial Coast, brings up a few autobiographical notes for this writer. So to clarify my personal position - I think of myself as working class. I'm not of course. I was. Born in the north east of England at the beginning of the 70s in a miners village to parents who worked in factories, grandparents who were miners and house staff for the local gentry. Working class through and through, like a Monty Python sketch. Then TV happened Not books (we didn't have any) or museums (where?), but TV. Top or the Pops, BBC 2, then Channel 4 - thank god for Channel 4 in the early 80s. Outsider films, queer characters, pop stars from another planet and these people called artists who seemed to do what they wanted and not have to clock in at 8am and didn't get two weeks in Bridlington in the summer. I saw people who didn't have get injured by machines, whose lungs weren't destroyed by what they breathed in. Other things messed them up of course - mainly what they drank and ingested in other ways - this too would be part of my future story, but my childhood self didn't know that yet. Right then, in the north east, watching TV, all that is a long way off. Friends and cousins would also be messed with culturally. My cousin came back from watching a football match talking about Kappa - it was a brand from Europe. Italy. Abroad. Someone was wearing it - they got it from their friend who had been to Europe on holiday or following their club to an away match. I can't remember which. Just the logo. Was that a naked girl, on your tracksuit top? Jesus. Casual style. Different friends, all deviating from our allotted courses by stuff from outside. It would take a long time to remember how much I loved the stuff I was born with. Loved our two weeks away in the "factory fortnight", the sense of community in the village when there were jobs. Art and music changed me but I had was already good. That took time to realize. Richie Culver was born in Hull and now lives in London and has kids of his own. When you talk to him, being a parent, a dad, is very present. Culver is making art, producing his music and being a parent, coping and surviving, making decisions and living a life. In the exhibition in Middlesbrough he is showing a few different things - one of which is a large wallpaper style print of a photograph of an abattoir. Meat hanging. Culver told me this references one of the jobs on offer to those who, like Richie, leave school with few formal qualifications. So it's there in the background of the show, huge, but behind everything. Hanging meat of course appears in painting a lot. Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst (because he's a fan of Francis Bacon) - Bacon used the hanging meat as a reference to the horror of war. Painting when the world was just coming out of the second world war and de-humanized, industrial level massacre of people being reported in newspapers. Bacon was quite a literal artist in some ways. Humans like meat in a butchers shop. It was Bacons skill that elevated an obvious reference to the state of the iconic. Film is often good at this, at the iconic. There is a scene in the Long Good Friday where all the mobsters are hung in a cooler van amongst the hanging meat. It's a great image. In the original Rocky film, Sylvester Stallones' low-level boxer trains by pounding the frozen, hanging carcasses. Hoodie up. Grey marl sweat pants and little beanie hat, a look that would be copied a million times by Rocky wannabes in gyms around the world. There is something also cinematic about Culver I feel. He has a "look", like a character, and a story, and the spaces he creates can reference a set. The texts on walls, background images and found objects creating a cinematic space to fill the gap between Born and Died. Culver's works often appear fast, a few short words spray painted on surfaces. I like this speed. It's directness. Art and exhibition making is a direct activity at times. The shortest line between the idea in the mind to the outside world of is often to draw it with speed, or note it down, "Buy Milk" written on the back of a used envelope, or "BORN - DIED", a life on a canvas by Culver. Coping is an exhibition of short words, ready-made objects and stark images, a short route, but one that requires a lot of confidence, energy and a sure aim. Coping by Richie Culver at Industrial Coast, Unit 41, Middlesbrough.