Factory Fun

Almost too good to be true: this, from Whore Cull: 'my agent in the Republic of Mancunia says that soon after Anthony H Wilson’s death somebody went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. A tribute of sorts. A statement, of sorts.' In a sense, Factory was gentrifiers against gentrification: the romanticising and resettlement of the post-industrial for the purposes of Art, the process that has led to the colonisation of too many formerly proletarian areas to list, from New York to Barcelona to etc etc.



The difference maybe with Factory was how much, even if the ball was set rolling by bourgeois folk like Wilson or Peter Saville, it was a working class creation. Before a talk by Tom Vague on Monday, sundry oldsters were talking about the arty wing of the terraces: phrases like 'Situationist Casuals' and 'Acid Teds' were bandied about, and the claim made that casuals with mobile phones orchestrated the Poll Tax riots...Regardless of Wilson's being an Oxbridge buffoon, post-Situ poser, telly presenter or whatever, maybe this actually helped facilitate these alliances: he never assumed that football fans, ex-dock clerks and so forth wouldn't 'get' such far from 'upbeat' ideas or artefacts as Durrutti, Fortunato Depero, the SI.