Living Today @ Mackintosh Gallery, GSA

Sporting a title of almost limitless possibility, the group show Living Today at
the Mackintosh Museum assembles works by contemporary artists who explore
aspects of the society they live in, combined with material from the Orwell
Archive relating to George Orwell’s 1937 publication Wigan Pier.

Glass-topped trestle tables displaying excerpts from Orwell’s manuscripts flank
the artworks to provide a central point of context. It seems several of the artists
have borrowed their formal conventions from the museum, so that works of fairly
wide-ranging subject matter are each dense in content but barely engaging to the
eye.

Eva Merz’s free publication You, Me, Us and Them (2011) brings together a series
of interviews about women in prison and criminal justice in Scotland, and looks a
promising read, albeit one to take home for later.

A quiet, serious-looking work in the corner, Matei Bejenaru’s documentary video
nevertheless captures the attention and is worth investing fourteen minutes of
your time. Battling Inertia (2010) follows an ex-worker revisiting the library he set
up when he and his co-workers established a literary circle in an industrial plant in
communist Romania.

Meanwhile, a series of works by Ross Birrell and David Harding extend the
exploration into Orwell and Wigan. If you’re hoping for an Orwell-fest that feeds
the imagination, you might be a little disappointed; the amalgam of artworks and
archive material seem to exist in a mental or narrative space that hasn’t quite
translated into the gallery – with the exception of David Harding’s text Orwell
and Wigan Today. This brief A4 handout is witty, anecdotal, and the closest the
exhibition comes to explaining Wigan and its significance. [Jac Mantle]