Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday June 26, 2005
The Observer
Do more people now come to Tyneside to celebrate a hen night or to see an avant-garde art show? This week one of the north east’s more notorious sons is to argue that, despite all the expensive innovations along the banks of the river, visitors are still much more likely to come for a drinking session than for a dose of Brit Art.
Chris Donald, co-creator of the influential Viz comic, is accusing the cultural revolution in his home town of being phoney. It is, he suggests, hypocrisy to tell tourists that ‘NewcastleGateshead-upon-Tyne’, as it is now known, is suddenly Britain’s answer to Bilbao or Barcelona. It remains closer to Blackpool, he believes. ‘The majority of money still comes in through beer tourism,’ he says, ‘and, if you ask people who live here, lots of them haven’t been to any of the new arts centres.’
As the man who first gave the nation the popular Geordie stereotypes Sid the Sexist and the Fat Slags, Donald welcomes the jobs that have come with the new investment, but disputes the idea that Tyneside has become a haven for culture-lovers overnight. He has made his point visually, too, by inventing fresh comic-strip characters to illustrate the ‘fault line’ he sees between the old and the new.
Updating his iconic Fat Slags, who inhabited the pubs in Bigg Market, Donald has come up with the ultra-slim Classy Slappers, who dress up and go out looking for footballers in wine bars. But the new creation that really epitomises the culture clash Donald detects is deluded aesthete Art Carbuncle, who sees artistic statements in the everyday trappings of working-class life. Although Donald left Viz five years ago, the cartoonist has submitted his first Carbuncle strip to see if the editors want to make the character a regular feature of the comic.
Donald’s provocative views – to be broadcast in a BBC documentary tomorrow – have already prompted a defensive reaction from those who support the publicly funded attempt to bring elite art to Tynesiders.
Television presenter and art historian Dan Cruickshank says that using art and architecture to regenerate an area is an old and noble tradition. ‘The idea of bringing working men the best of art was around in the 19th century too. And while it is easy to be cynical about it, it is surely an entirely admirable aim,’ he argued this weekend. ‘It is better to raise people’s expectations than to just pander to what they already like, which really would be patronising. Change may not happen immediately in Newcastle, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.’
The playwright Alan Plater, who grew up in Gateshead and whose father worked in a shipyard, is also in favour of the changes. ‘In the past I would have used the idea of a Gateshead Hilton to get a cheap laugh. Today there is one,’ he says, although he agrees with Donald’s claim that Newcastle’s makeover has diminished its essential ‘Geordieness’.
‘If you cover your waterfront with wine bars, you will make it look pretty much the same as anywhere else,’ says Plater. ‘There are now more art galleries than shipyards. But this is not necessarily a bad thing – after all, the industrial revolution is over and the beauty of shipbuilding has gone almost entirely. I think Tyneside needs Chris Donald as much as it needs [new arts centre] Baltic, and there should be room for both.’
Over the last decade, the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and its neighbour, Gateshead, have all been joint lottery winners. Derelict wastelands, formerly national emblems of post-industrial decline, have been transformed by a succession of high-profile, and largely highbrow, new landmarks since the sculptor Antony Gormley first placed his rusty Angel of the North on the hills above Gateshead in 1998.
‘The ultimate and beautiful irony is that it is Gateshead that has taken the initiative in all this by commissioning the Angel of the North,’ says Plater.
Southerner Gormley’s creative vote of confidence in the north east was followed by the arrival of the award-winning Millennium Bridge, then the redevelopment of the old Baltic Flour Mills into a vast contemporary art gallery. Most recently, Tynesiders have been asked to applaud the opening of The Sage – a huge glass concert centre described by Donald in his BBC3 film as taking the ‘familiar shape of a bloated condom floating down the river’.
As if to underline the argument Donald is making, this month sees the preparations for Baltic’s most daring project yet. Spencer Tunick, the installation artist renowned for persuading large groups of strangers to take all their clothes off in public, is organising his biggest UK installation so far on 17 July at the art gallery. Geordie men, famous for wearing nothing but T-shirts in all weathers, should be hardy enough to rise to the challenge.
www.balticprojects.org/tunick
· Picture of Tyneside, BBC3 11.25pm, Monday, 27 June