Monuments of the People

The patchwork is made up of sequins, leather, appliqued short shorts and rainbow thread. Each of its forty-two composite panels is distinctive, their colours jostling side by side in a pattern that immediately overwhelms the viewer, as deep magenta rolls into sunburst red and cobalt blue into funereal black. Together, they represent more than five hundred truncated lives. One of the personalised memorials, for a man named Andy, features defiantly unsentimental tributes from dozens of friends: ‘I’ll miss you always from a fellow BITCH!’; the one beside it is obscured by an austere notice which states that ‘The Parents do not want this panel shown anywhere’.

The UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, now on display at the Wakefield Exchange, with some panels at neighbouring cultural venues, captures a complex form of communality. Lining the walls and floor of the 1,200 square-metre hall, it is a tribute to those who died — mostly in the UK, many at a very young age — from AIDS-related illnesses in the 1980s and 1990s. Put together by friends, relatives and community members, this polyphonic work spotlights the intimate details of some victims while preserving the anonymity of others, turning emblems of individual loss into a collective monument. Everyone is presented as equal, and as part of a devastating whole.

It’s not easy to think of any piece of comparable political and aesthetic significance made by a disparate group of ordinary people. Some panels, like the rhinestone-clad memorial for dance artist Sylvester, are meticulously wrought; some are strung together from old bedsheets and collaged with souvenirs, printed photographs and scraps of clothing. Famous names like Bruce Chatwin, Mark Ashton and Freddie Mercury neighbour unknown ones, along with homages to the hospices and care centres that looked after them in their final months. The panels’ creators are rarely credited beyond occasional stitched signatures. As I move through the room, I wonder if some of them might be among those walking alongside me.

When it was announced that Wakefield would be the exhibition’s first destination outside London, it seemed to reflect how much my hometown’s cultural life, and queer life, had improved over the past two decades. I left Wakefield in 2006. At the time it seemed impossible to set up a creative practice there or find a queer community outside my existing circle of friends. There were some arts foundation courses and music spaces in the city, and a small number of cultural institutions like Bretton College and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park formed a creative enclave on its rural periphery. But to sustain any kind of artistic aspirations one had to seek out the more populous world of studios and galleries in Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester — or further afield in Glasgow, where I went to art school.

This began to change in the early 2010s with the opening of the Hepworth Wakefield, a new gallery named for the Wakefield-born sculptor, which now houses temporary exhibitions alongside the city’s municipal collection. Two years later, an accessible arts charity called The Art House got funding to create public exhibition space and studios for over fifty artists. Other initiatives began to take off, from a studio collective on the main nightlife street to a specialist neon art workshop, and eventually the council’s ‘Public Art Framework’ to build on the city’s reputation as an important destination for sculpture. A vibrant grassroots arts scene, spanning bimonthly open studio events and an LGBT community gallery in Kirkgate railway station, brings the city’s pockets of creative energy into the culture at large. With the rose-tinted view of an outsider looking back at their hometown, Wakefield suddenly seemed to be thriving, to a degree that would have been unimaginable when I was a teenager.

Yet it was impossible to see the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt this summer without feeling that this progress was tainted. A month earlier, Reform UK were elected to run Wakefield Council after more than five decades of continuous Labour control. Wakefield handed the right-wing populist party the largest council majority in the UK, with fifty-eight Reform councillors to just five from other parties (although at time of writing two Reform councillors have since defected from the party).

It felt like a parasite had been brought into this delicate ecosystem. The vote was a protest against the sitting Labour government, and against the incumbent council which had cut services — including the arts — in the wake of the pandemic. The multi-venue festival Long Division closed down after twelve years, as did the queer cultural centre Our House. It’s a pattern that has played out across Britain’s urban centres, as piecemeal attempts to rebuild creative civic life have come up against the juggernaut of austerity, ensuring that local cultural revivals are short-lived, especially in cities with pinched budgets and fragile infrastructure. 

The quilt was made at a time when the two intrinsically connected worlds of marginalised people and the arts were both suffering from a lack of public provision. Now Farageism promises to deepen this institutional neglect. The party that claims to defend ‘British culture’ has no plan for the industries that sustain it, which didn’t get a mention in any of Reform’s local elections literature, apart from the suggestion that museums should be forced to present its approved version of national history. It is waging a uniquely cultureless kind of culture war, via the hollowest forms of popular media: crankish podcasts, late-night comedy, rolling news broadcasts, social platforms. The recent decision by the Reform council in Kent to sell off over 700 publicly owned artworks epitomises its numbness to aesthetic life.

It’s unclear whether places like Wakefield Exchange — a multi-use, council-operated arts venue on the site of a former market — can survive under a Reform-led council. In the foyer of the building, local HIV and AIDS groups set up stalls and conducted pop-up tests: the kind of services that are already endangered in a country where queer and specifically trans people are denied basic healthcare. Access is likely to be even more restricted under a Reform regime, which may well target the sites of solidarity where those on the wrong side of its cultural onslaught can seek out mutual support.

 The far right’s gambit is to present arts institutions and the communities that cluster around them as symbols of an ‘elite’ that is remote from the general public. But it has no clear image of mass British culture to offer up as an alternative. Reform’s so-called populism is a purely negative politics; an ideology that makes an enemy of learning, joy, connection, unfamiliar experiences: everything that exposure to properly funded culture can bring. The party’s assault on the supposed excesses of cultural progressivism damages the local spaces that are essential to people’s sense of place — undermining the very sense of belonging that it claims to represent

It might seem strange to describe the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt as a great work of populist art, but that’s precisely what it is: an organic, collective project that elevates craft and folk skills over professionalism, and constructs a people in opposition to a queerphobic state. It makes for a telling contrast with the false populism of Reform, whose rhetorical anti-elitism is betrayed by its real record. Viewing the work is a curious experience. It feels at once like sombre introspection and collective celebration. The state failed all these people, but others came together — the creators of the panels, the culture workers who preserve them, the visitors who gathered in Wakefield — to build something in their honour. This is populism as communal creative expression, a force of expansion rather than insularity. Even in Reform’s supposed heartland, there are reminders of what a genuine movement of the people looks like.