The Life Imperative by NOUS

The Life

Imperative An Interview With Una Baines by David Wilkinson

Published by Team Trident Press in Salford, U.K. June 2016 Typeface Nassim by Titus Nemeth ÂŠ All rights reserved with the artists. Please, do not use or reproduce without written consent of the authors. The views and opinions expressed might not reflect the publisherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s position.

Printed on recycled paper. No eggs have been harmed while producing this publication. Find out more about the project: cjh-cracked-egg.tumblr.com

The Life Imperative An Interview With Una Baines by David Wilkinson

Commissioned for Cracked Egg by Lauren Velvick and the CJH Collection

A founding member of legendary Mancunian band The Fall, Una was also a psychiatric nurse at Prestwich Hospital in the 1970s. She currently volunteers at BlueSci, a social enterprise based in Old Trafford offering mental health and well-being support. In the 1980s, Una reappeared with the Blue Orchids, Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico and feminist avant-folk outfit The Fates. Their lost gem Furia was recently re- released by Finders Keepers Records.

As part of my work on the residency, I decided to interview Una Baines. Why did Una1 spring to mind? When I first looked at Christopher Joseph Holme’s output, what struck me about it was how personal and emotionally invested it was, whilst also evoking a very particular strand of history, place and ideas. Counterculture; the arts; popular music; mental health; anti-psychiatry and how the North West dealt with all this in the 1970s and 1980s – these were exactly the kind of topics I’d discussed with Una when I spoke to her for my book Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain. I wanted to explore these themes further, since they all resonate in some way with Holme’s life and work. I also wanted to see if comparing experiences might be helpful, potentially offering collective ways forward - especially given the continuing isolation and loneliness faced by many people with mental illnesses and the current crisis in care provision. Una and I meet in a new café that’s sprung up in the pavilion of Alexandra Park, Whalley Range. Looking out over the stark outlines of leafless trees silhouetted against the January sky, I’m reminded of Holme’s depictions of similar Victorian parks in Preston. It also makes me think about how important landscapes can be in conveying mental states and changing senses of self. Curiously enough, a direct geographical link exists here. There’s a mysterious early CJH painting of a classical-looking archway surrounded by greenery. Although the Preston park paintings were done from memory with some artistic license, this one didn’t seem to correspond to any recognisable location. After a bit of collective family detective work and Google image searching, we realised it was the Grand Lodge entrance of Heaton Park in Prestwich, North Manchester. Holme must have painted it during his art foundation year at Manchester School of Art in 1971. Two years later, a 16-year-old Una Baines would meet Mark E. Smith at a fair in Heaton Park. The embryonic Fall soon began gathering at Baines’ flat, a few streets away on Kingswood Road. Here, these working-class teenagers made and discussed art, music, poetry ☞

and ideas, inventing their own autodidactic countercultural curriculum and experimenting with consciousness expansion – just like the ‘kids on acid’ of Holme’s diary reminiscences. �Nature’s a pretty awesome thing�, Una says as we discuss Holme’s landscapes and a diary entry in which he wonders how benevolently an advanced alien civilisation might treat humankind, given our record on animal welfare and ecological sustainability. �You can lose sight of that, with all the people who are anti-nature.� We consider the organic geometries of Holme’s work, the alternately intense and impassive facial expressions of his portraits and ‘masks’: �You can see a lot of pain in some of them. But I think art’s a brilliant way of getting stuff out.� On the subject of therapy, Una is keen to discuss her time working at Prestwich Hospital. It leads us to talking about the way that mental health provision has changed and what still needs doing differently. Her views are forthright and articulate, strongly informed by the anti-psychiatry movement. At its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, anti-psychiatry fed into the New Left’s focus on culture and the personal by emphasising the social, political and historically specific factors of mental illness. The movement’s critique was based on the argument that the dominant theories and practices of psychiatry were repressive, exploitative and often counter-productive. Advocating more humane and co-operative forms of treatment and support, anti-psychiatry also stressed that mental illness is not a fundamental, unchanging or purely biological feature of the individual. It is a shifting product of its times, which means that people’s psychological suffering is often linked to various forms of social inequality and injustice. Tackle these issues, and there may well be a positive knock-on effect on the overall mental health of society. Let them fester, and things will get worse. Holme’s family recall his affinity with anti-psychiatry. He often expressed the belief that society was sick, for instance, and that the world couldn’t handle the way in which he perceived it. A diary acknowledges that ‘madness is unintelligible’ but goes on to reflect: �perhaps the effort of conditioning destroy[s] more than it achieves�. ☞

When I mention this to Una, she sympathises. �I just think it’s the world that’s the problem, not people. People suffering because of a harsh reality. Isn’t it the harsh reality we should be trying to change?� We discuss poverty, depression and the ominous ramifications of relentless government cuts for the mental health of British society. In this context Una’s pleased and proud to work for BlueSci, which she says is �like my fantasy! This is what I would have loved Prestwich Hospital to be like. Never did I think I’d see it in my lifetime.� It’s largely with a sense of horror and anger that she recalls how different things were at Prestwich Hospital in the 1970s. �[The patients] became completely institutionalised. And the staff were equally institutionalised. There was definitely a �them and us� divide. They were seen as lesser and weak because they had a mental health problem.� Unwilling to tolerate this situation, Una became involved with a local anti-psychiatry organisation. A kind of union and unofficial advocacy group for patients, the group would inform them of their rights and take people out for trips as a break from confinement. Many years later, Holme would be accompanied by social workers on supervised trips, reflecting the influence on existing institutions that anti-psychiatry would go on to have. Describing the military-style routine of the hospital, Una recalls the stultifying and sometimes distressing effects of excessive drugging of patients. She also notes how vulnerable and isolated many of them were, arguing that patients were effectively guinea pigs for pharmaceutical company experiments and controversial practices like electro-convulsive therapy. ☞

I observe that in the same period, institutions often combined such treatments with very different practices epitomised by the �art room� – a pragmatic, if sometimes incoherent, approach. �They had occupational therapy [at Prestwich too]. People used to sew, weave, paint. Then they had people doing things like packing tampons…really just exploited labour.� �Then they closed the hospitals. Care in the Community,� Una remarks sceptically. We talk about mental health policy under Thatcherism in the 1980s: how a growing anti-psychiatric consensus on more personalised treatment of mental health conditions was exploited by a government ideologically intent on cutting public expenditure and privatising health and social care. Care in the Community promised humane de-institutionalisation, but what it often meant in practice was a reduction and fragmentation of available support. During this era, Holme was relatively lucky. With numerous siblings who could offer practical help, he had a strong support network. Amongst his extended family there were also a number of artists who understood the role of Holme’s creative output in his wellbeing. Yet he also struggled for a long time with �joined-up� health and social services, and was placed in a flat on the fringes of Preston where he was subject to bullying and intimidation from neighbours. A journal drily notes, too, that �money continues to be a problem�. It was around this point that Holme seemed to have developed something called �active therapy�, possibly in collaboration with an older friend called Colin who he had met during a period of institutional care. Lu, Holme’s younger sister, remembers Colin as a mentor figure to him and �a bit of a philosopher.� The pair would listen to records together and discuss all sorts of topics late into the night. It’s difficult to work out the details and the chronology from fragmentary notes and sketches. Active therapy, though, appeared to involve a form of lateral thinking expressed in made-up language, Dylan-esque lyrics and curious diagrams. ☞

Reflecting on everything from modernism to Marjorie Wallace (of mental health charity SANE), the practice combined countercultural, anti-psychiatry ideas with an almost post-punk �Do It Yourself� attitude towards treatment that also included tapes of Holme covering songs by his favourite artists such as Leonard Cohen. �I think a lot of people have had to figure out strategies to cope�, Una says in response. Delving into her own past, she illustrates the way that successive countercultures, anti-psychiatry and second wave feminism came together around �the revolution of everyday life� - and the depth of their everyday influence. �When I was in a women’s group in Wythenshawe in the 80s, we did a play – Psychodrama, it was called – where you acted out a situation you didn’t like and then you acted it out how you would have liked it to have happened.� Una tried to re-enact the moment when she herself was sectioned and committed. �It was a bit too close to the bone for me at the time, because I’d not long come out of hospital. But it would have been really useful to try it at a later date. It would have been me at the hospital and then me at BlueSci instead!� Given our mutual scepticism over the mental health reforms of the 1980s, it’s ironic that the set-up of BlueSci – a community interest company – reflects the privatising after-effects of Care in the Community. Like so much nowadays, its survival is precarious. BlueSci needs volunteers and Una notes the vast amount of time the organisation has to spend on fundraising for projects that are often only guaranteed in the short-term: �There’s a lot of insecurity and vulnerability in a place where you need security.� Yet alongside practical support on issues such as benefits, BlueSci embraces a creative and holistic approach to psychological wellbeing that differs from the old impersonal set-up. �It’s got a café with computers that are free. You can come in, have cups of tea and sit and chat or access any of the creative workshops that are going on. There’s a great art department there. They use the centre as a gallery and you can buy the work.�

The specific role of the arts in relation to mental health is interesting here. For Una, �being creative is probably the best remedy for mental health issues.� At a certain point in his life, Holme too saw his art as �about making an ideal to stave off the horrors of schizophrenia.� By the end of the 1980s, however, his view seemed to have changed: �After ten years painting mental illness now a new way and new aims… My active therapy is to disengage from mental illness as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.� ☞

This did not mean disengaging from art, however. Rather, it seemed to involve building on the idiosyncratic engagement with the world that runs throughout Holme’s entire life and creative output - and which, like many people of this era, he developed from countercultural influences and the postwar expansion of educational opportunities. Humorous sketches explored sexuality and reproduction (�procreation: good on you, dad�), notions of �control� that echoed William Burroughs and geopolitical change like the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ultimately, Holme wanted to capture all the �chaos and violence� alongside �the ongoing beauty of creation�. In doing so, he has left behind rich resources for helping others make sense of the world, not just himself. �Anything we create, there’s got to be compassion,� Una reflects. �Intelligence without compassion is rather meaningless.� ∙

Christopher Joseph Holme (1952 - 2010) was born in Preston, Lancashire, and studied Fine Art at Newcastle University. It was in his second year of study that Holme first became seriously ill, and was diagnosed with and treated for Schizophrenia, a disability that would go on to influence the course of the rest of his life.

Dr David Wilkinson is Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan University. His work has focused on the figure of the working class autodidact, with a longstanding interest in psychogeography. He is the author of Post-Punk, Politics and Pleasure in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and has collaborated with Manchester District Music Archive on the digital archiving of the fanzine City Fun. In 2014, he co-founded Manchester Left Writers, whose first exhibition The Powerhouse Liberation Movement was shown at Castlefield Gallery in May 2016.

�I just think it’s the world that’s the problem, not people. People suffering because of a harsh reality. Isn’t it the harsh reality we should be trying to change?�