Also at the Hepworth, it’s not all that modern art, (by which people usually mean anything after 1830). This was inspired by looking at a Grimshaw in the Hepworth and wondering, again, how art might be a means of making life better.
lyrics
Jerusalem 2019
(Staring at an old painting of Wakefield in the Hepworth).
“It’s shit.”
“Why’s that?”
“Just is,”
she said.
How might Westgate become like this?
Grimshaw’s oils turned cobbles into the scales of fish,
Though his nicotine sunset never let slip
About cots where kids hacked blood-sulphur in grey spit.
Could JD Sports ever glow like this?
Our rough sleepers will never shine
With tricks of the light
Or twists of a palette knife.
Hepworth’s face, thoughtful as her mallet head
Sucked on this like a Woodbine, then left.
Now, look at the weather:
Fire, flood and monkey chants.
Everyone’s in their pyjamas, faces beaten
By algorithms that flatten
Everything in sight. The big questions
Are Yes? or No?, not What? Or Why?
“Don’t you just serve coffee?” She said.
Grimshaw’s sky, like when we’d read
You could age a treasure map with Nescafé,
fools no-one who’s waited up Westgate
for the taxi home in knock-kneed sleet.
But, maybe, we could start to build it;
Inside an exhausted viewer’s head,
Right at the point where they stop saying
“It’s shit,’
and ask instead
“What is it?”
credits
from State of That,
released January 18, 2020
Loop: Cattle & Cane by The Go-Betweens
If you like the loop, buy a copy of the whole song. It’s a lost classic.
Words: Jimmy Andrex
Poet Douglas Kearney and composer/producer/drummer Val Jeanty link up for a a compelling LP that feels like the written word come to life. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 30, 2021