In this text Charles Esche, curator and director of Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, propose a few visions brought to us from Joy Division and their New Dawn Fades

A CHANGE OF SPEED, A CHANGE OF STYLE,
A CHANGE OF SCENE, WITH NO REGRETS

1984.
It happened almost overnight. My passion for the place suddenly left. “And on the eighth day god created Manchester” the T-shirt said but I didn’t believe it anymore. It was a shock to wake up and find your sense of place out of the window. But it was also a little bit fascinating to understand that I could abandon so swiftly years of vitriolic argument over the unsurpassable benefits of the north of England. If, fifteen years later, I am asked to engage in “backwards translation”, I can only think that it has to begin here, over the sounds of the distant, tunnel-echoing drums of Joy Division and New Dawn Fades, the song that I listened to every day throughout the whole of 1979 before going to school.

This could be a classic story of art as the individual’s redeemer. I could even write it like that because it wouldn’t be entirely untrue. But I won’t. Instead, you have to imagine some more complex motivations, beginning with Joy Division and still working themselves through. Joy Division were never just a band, at least not to me. They manufactured an idea, not in their music (we all knew it was not as good as The Fall or even the Buzzcocks), but in the atmosphere they carried with them, onto stage and into record. They brought the gift of change to a place where everything seemed locked in place – struggle, strife, strikes and failure (this was before Thatcher, after all). Even more importantly, the seed they planted wasn’t a party line, political dogma, but just a suggestion, unconfined by any directional sign – a change of speed, a change of style, continuous and constant – though I didn’t (quite) become an anarcho-syndicalist.

A CHANCE TO WATCH, ADMIRE THE DISTANCE,
STILL OCCUPIED, THOUGH WE FORGET

Watching Ian Curtis (J.D.’s lead singer) from just below the stage was the nearest experience I have had to the religious. Not out of worship, or even great respect for him as an individual, but because my mind was merged with his, feeling him sing, sensing him dance (the caged butterfly/epileptic), tasting the drums and the bass. I thought this had to be something like the old religion at work – shamans, shape-shifters, the whole heathen pantheon of magic makers. Later, I came to know about synaesthesia, but it only stayed a word until I made the connection. And now, I can still recapture a part of that rapture. It isn’t quite forgotten because it started me on my way. You see, from this distance out I can see what Joy Division did very clearly – they forced me to be intelligent because they gave me things I could only comprehend through thought. Thought that led me naively to a little gallery in St. Peters Square where a work by Kitaj was so inexplicable that it kept me thinking, kept me following clues and seeking that synaesthetic snap where mind and body lock into phase. And no question, the search still occupies my time today.

DIFFERENT COLOURS, DIFFERENT SHADES
OVER EACH MISTAKES WERE MADE,
I TOOK THE BLAME

When it comes to creating an exhibition, which is what I do some of the time, I try to think about me and Ian Curtis or Ron Kitaj, and later (in visual art) Helen Chadwick, Richard Long, Stephen Willats, Piero della Francesca. All these people puzzled me; I didn’t understand what they were doing but it got under my skin. How do I account for that irritating curiosity in exhibitions I am working on? I know that it was neither encouraged nor hindered by ‘interpretation’, ‘education programmes’, ‘group show themes’ or any of the now familiar armoury of visitor strategies used by the public museums. It came about through straight encounters with the work, followed by conversations and finally going back, looking, thinking and reading everything from Gombrich to the most impenetrable catalogue text. Perception, conception, reflection - to put it another way.

So, when I have responsibility for it. I don’t want to do projects that become ‘blanded out’ by the application of these identikit audience friendly techniques. The problem with them is partly that they try too hard and partly that they are relentlessly exploited. Wall texts, workshops and endless explanations of context, site or material feel, in the end, a bit desperate. Why not be a little arrogant, miss things out, make mistakes, give a specific flavour and colour to a show? It offers us something to fight against. And often that’s what matters; having to imagine things differently because they don’t work for you. After listening to Unknown Pleasures, I remember feeling compelled to take all the posters off the wall, get rid of the old colours, stop watching the TV and get back to blankness. That’s when something else could come in and when it began to be possible for me to look at art, however, ‘inaccessible’. The chance came through music because that was my only reference but I am sure it could start with art. I speculate what it would have been like to go to 24 hr Psycho as a sixteen year old. No text, no guides, not even any light – just a film placed at excruciatingly slow speed. I think I know it would have worked for me.

DIRECTIONLESS SO PLAIN TO SEE,
A LOADED GUN WON’T SET YOU FREE, SO YOU SAY

Of course, all of this only provides the motivation to be curious about the alternatives. The rest is up to the individual and that freedom makes it hard to justify public exhibitions in utilitarian terms. I left Manchester is 1984, came back in 1988 and left again in 1990. Those final two years, when the passions had gone, were a little wasted. The Cornerhouse was up and running by then and I spent a lot of time there educating myself because by now I knew art was where I wanted to be. It wasn’t much good though, in all honesty, and I was soon drawn to the south. But somehow being there always seemed like a tacit admission of failure for the place where I had learned to be critical. I left England on 1st April 1993 for Edinburgh and it was the best thing I did. Arriving in Scotland at a time when the old order might really be about to change was and is an energising compulsion to try new things. We carry our baggage with us and that commitment to a geographic site and to a small metropolitan perspective leaks over from the Manchester days. Almost the first day in Scotland, someone showed me the following text by Lawrence Weiner:

1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK
2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED
3. THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT
EACH BEING EQUAL AND CONSISTENT WITH THE INTENT OF THE ARTIST.

THE DECISION AS TO CONDITION RESTS WITH THE RECEIVER UPON THE OCCASION OF RECEIVERSHIP.

That’s it, I thought, the equivalent of New Dawn Fades.

WE’LL SHARE A DRINK AND STEP OUTSIDE………