Utopia

Trackie McLeod

Factory International
18 – 21 February 2025 [FREE]

“I want magic and miracles,” says the despairing Louise in Jim Cartwright’s Road. First performed in 1986, her words were a bold rejection of destructive Thatcherism – the utter pulverisation of working class aspiration. In the play’s final scene, Louise dares to dream of something beyond the drudgery of her bleak existence in a Northern town, to transcend the life apparently destined for her. Bravely, in the face of what seems utterly certain, she considers whether something exists for her, beyond class and culture.

Any such bravery is absent in Trackie McLeod’s Utopia, a gallery-cum-sitting space dressed as a 1980s working men’s club. To McLeod, the purpose of working people is not to define themselves, but allow themselves to be defined – whether by food, dress, or a particular fondness for Sky TV.

In Utopia – exhibiting in Manchester’s Factory International – visitors can drink, chat, and admire various multi-media artworks created by the Glaswegian artist: a holographic print of Only Fools and Horses; a Louis Vuitton high-vis jacket; prop magazine headlines about Oasis; and fruit machines that spit out chocolate coins. The title asserts itself as an idealised version of the working men’s club, brought to the modern age without blemish. But McLeod’s bleaching of any uncomfortable truths about decades-old working class culture robs the audience of any discomfort or challenge. The result is a cherry picked smorgasbord of things that “feel” working class, “look” working class, without any examination of why – and if – we should venerate them in the first place.

Marrying Utopia’s location in Manchester with McLeod’s history of Glasgow is an appropriate one, each city currently experiencing surging rents and gentrification. Manchester is a city plagued with its own self mythology, the everpresent bees and Hacienda black-and-yellows make this abundantly clear. In many ways Utopia is perfectly suited to the city, a place that increasingly operates in slogans, symbols, and gestures towards a working class culture while its citizens experience some of the highest deprivation in the country. It feels like a set up to a joke that amidst all this sits a flat-roofed simulacrum inside a £241mil venue. The punchline, one assumes, would be McLeod pulling pints behind the bar in allotted three-hour sections.

Utopia lacks the palpable, place-based frustration of similar works, such as 2021’s Turner Prize winner The Druthaib’s Ball – where contradictions between Ireland’s colonisation, queer history, and trauma butted heads in an installation designed as an unlicensed pub. McLeod’s work shares more in common with high-end fashion designers aping pub culture as a kind of aesthetic provocation, rather than some attempt to reflect from within.

To McLeod’s credit, there are necessary attempts to bring this working men’s club into a modern context, references to queerness, a proudly-declared goal to make space for “everyone”. But it seems Utopia is too busy congratulating itself for including Margaret Thatcher’s face on a dartboard that it forgot to include the modern alchemist of far-right racist discord – and frequent abuser of pub aesthetics for political gain – Nigel Farage. Something that only stings more when hundreds of fascist Britain First supporters flooded Manchester city centre on Saturday.

In similar cynical fashion, McLeod borrows heavily from long-trodden stereotypes of working class culture, a kind of pale, male and middle-aged selection of tropes that buckle and creak like a well-worn bar stool. The result is neither comforting nor confronting, but a hyperreal exaggeration that uses many things to say very little.

Aesthetically, all the signifiers of working class culture are present – wood panelling, rainbow streamers, pies behind the bar – but Utopia never interrogates the usefulness of these symbols, taking them as immovable and inherent. It’s this circular logic that stymies the imagination of what working class art can be. Utopia skirts any acknowledgement that the pub setting has been stripped from its political and historical context, and instead opts for pastiche kitsch that hopes you won’t notice the cracks for the rainbow DJ lights. 

In many ways, the most interesting parts of McLeod’s theme park is where the facade falters. Before the audience even has a chance to pass under its glowing door sign, there is an hour-long queue that snakes along the entrance stairs. It begs the question: why not go to the pub down the road instead? A similar effect is conjured when attention is given to the roof’s ceiling tiles, where the guts of Aviva Studio’s mega-venue cast shadows of steel beams from above – a reminder this is all just pretend.

It has been 40 years since Louise dared to dream, and we have never needed magic and miracles more. But instead, all we have are cheap parlour tricks.