The painting that says

more about us than this

election campaign does

 

A day in Edinburgh: part 2

Kenneth Roy

 

 

In the Scottish room of the National Gallery of Scotland, there is a painting which speaks more powerfully of the state of Scotland than anything I have so far seen or heard during the curiously lifeless Holyrood election campaign. The fact that it is 196 years old fails to diminish its relevance to our own lives. It was topical then. It remains topical today.
     The painting is Sir David Wilkie's 'Distraining for Rent'. It depicts in sombre colours the interior of a farmhouse whose inhabitants are about to be evicted for non-payment of rent. The farmer, head in hands, sits anguished at a table which, like all the other contents of his home, is about to be seized by the landlord. The bailiff, impeccably dressed, dominates this scene of abject misery, unmoved by the humane appeals of neighbours and friends. The family is ruined. All is lost.
     As the portrayal of a personal tragedy, the work is immensely moving. But its larger significance continues to resonate. It was painted at a time when many tenant farmers faced financial calamity because of the fall in corn prices; yet, in the face of this squeeze on incomes, rents continued to rise. Wilkie, a son of the manse, was 30 years old when he completed the work, an established artist, just back from a succcessful tour of the continent.
     'Distraining for Rent' did him no good. It was a bad career move. The painting was unpopular with the private patrons of art who regarded it as political, if not downright subversive. Of course they were right. It was both. So here is the first message for us, two centuries later, as we survey the wreckage of arts funding south of the border and the weasely pronouncements of Creative Scotland about the need for 'partnerships' to supplement declining public subvention.
     If you believe that art should challenge established ways of thinking, that it should be a thorn in the flesh of comfortable society, a greater reliance on private patronage is unlikely to produce such art. It will present us instead with a bland, inoffensive, suburban niceness appealing to the corporate chief executive; art we can 'live with'; the sort that complements the decor in the sitting room.
     'Distraining for Rent' also tells us about the threat to the roof over our heads, the heartbreaking finality of eviction. It was fascinating to discover (after I had seen the painting in Edinburgh last weekend) that some years ago young people from Craigmillar, a deprived area of Edinburgh, were invited to visit the National Gallery's collection and select the piece that connected most closely with their own lives. The idea of this project was to demolish the notion that the works of art on display in our museums and galleries are out of touch with modern Scotland: that they have nothing to say to young people.

 

     The group from Craigmillar chose 'Distraining for Rent'. As one said: 'We all know someone who has been evicted'. But they also identified in the painting the underlying issue of poverty – not the rural poverty implicit in Wilkie's commentary on the fate of a family in the early years of the 19th century, but the material and spiritual poverty faced by young people in urban Scotland in the early years of the 21st. Inspired by Sir David Wilkie, the group created its own piece of art, its own 'Distraining for Rent' – an image of derelict shops in their neighbourhood.
     We need artists to show us how it is. We need an artist to show us the price of bread and circuses in Glasgow, the recent brutal eviction of Mrs Jaconelli from her home to make way for the Commonwealth Games village. Naturally there is a political consensus that these games are a marvellous thing for Scotland – you will not hear a word against them during the present campaign – and that a single thrawn Glaswegian woman must not be allowed to stand in their way. For some reason, Mrs Jaconelli made the Commonwealth Games impossible. So they came in force one early morning and threw her out.
     We need our own war artists to depict such scenes. There is another in the north-east: the rape of the Menie sands and the heroic resistance of Michael Forbes, another Scot who has lived with the threat of eviction. They haven't got him yet. It looks as if they never will.
     These are the high-profile cases. The subterranean majority rarely impinge on our consciousness or our conscience; their invisible lives are unrecorded, by artists or anyone else. Yet, only this morning, the newspapers report the 'shocking' frequency with which Scottish local authorities are resorting to the bailiffs to recover council tax debts. Edinburgh and Glasgow top the list of UK councils for use of enforcement agencies, accounting for nearly one in 10 of all referrals. Suddenly, 'Distraining for Rent' is the hot picture of the week.
     In the gallery next door, the Royal Scottish Academy, the current temporary exhibition, RSA New Contemporaries, is worth seeing. (It closes next Wednesday after an all too short run). It brings together outstanding work by 59 recent graduates of the five degree-awarding Scottish art schools (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee; Edinburgh College of Art; Glasgow School of Art; Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen; Moray School of Art, Elgin).
     The imagination of these emerging artists is impressive and their use of materials stylish and skilful. Kimberley Stewart (Duncan of Jordanstone) works wonders with household dust, Anne Benson (Edinburgh) with sisal rope, Hannah Hewins (Glasgow) with porcelain, Andrew Nice (Glasgow) with simple pencil, Susan Gauld (Gray's) with enamel, Stephen Kavanagh (Gray's) with resin and silicone; and among the installations, the work of Sinead Bracken (Duncan of Jordandstone) with digital technology is both ingenious and beautiful. If you happen to be in Edinburgh, try not to miss Ms Bracken's 'Waverley Station' in what feels like a vault of the Royal Scottish Academy; then step outside and see what the artist herself saw.
     Where, though, was the political work in this exhibition? Where was the 'Distraining for Rent' of 2011? It was nowhere to be seen. I wonder why.

Kenneth Roy is editor of the Scottish Review