Joy For Ever is an exhibition currently on at the Whitworth Gallery celebrating the 200th birthday of the arttist,critic and social reformer Joun Ruskin. How to use art to change the world and its price in the market, is the subtitle and as normal I asked for a leaflet at the desk. I was told that the exhibition would be self explanatory. It was much more than I expected. This exhibition centered around the life’s work of John Ruskin, related to his beliefs that art could help us to change our relationships with the world. Ruskin believed that art and craft were social practices but living during the industrial revolution had changed the way that things were made as factories mass produced goods. Ruskin also believed that workers, factory owners and consumers became detached from the object and no one individual made something from start to finish. The exhibition creates 10 points of interest in Ruskin’s career and expands on them with art work and documentation such as letters written by Ruskin. It begins with the long talks he delivered during the 1857 Exhibition of Great Britain in Manchester, in which Ruskin made his opinion quite clear. During these talks he went beyond his ideas of art for local and personal use and began considering it as a means for citizens to rethink and remake their roles in society. This is linked directly with the ethos of the Whitworth. The collection is opened up to school children and to Friends of the Whiworth to choose artwork that they can relate to. The first image is one of my favorite of the show,it forms part of a project by Jorge Otero Pailos, The ethics of dust, Westminster Hall, London 2016. Using specialist cleaning latex he recovered an image and the dust from the wall and hung this beautiful impression with interesting possible comment on smears and cleaning up in politics. I spent hours at this exhibition, each of the 10 stations opened up so many diverse elements.
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