TOM DALE Skewwhiff First the anecdotes. Mid eighties, the young ones TV show is at the height of its student subversion. There’s a sketch featuring two actors playing policeman. One of them delivers a lengthy, rambling, bigoted speech about the state of the nation. He finishes his insight into law enforcement philosophy with the remark "well that’s how I look at the world". The other policeman, who has stayed mute and gormless throughout the lengthy tirade responds by tilting his head 45 degrees to the left, and after a comic pause responds "this is how I look at the world". Then there’s this archetypal story about the jazz pianist Thelonius Monk. Apparently Monk would go around his apartment tilting all the pictures hanging on the wall. His wife would then go round straightening them. When Monk saw them straight, he’d go back and tilt them all. Then she would go and straighten them. Then one day, after this had gone of for months, she gave up, and all the pictures stayed tilted. Its easy to imagine Tom Dale tilting his head 45 degrees to the left and living in a flat with irregularly hung pictures. Like Monk he shares a determination not be restricted by the preset order, to follow the standard order for playing the white and black keys. This is not to say his work is chaotic or unintelligible. He is after all playing all the right notes, but not necessary in the right order. Although the large imposing, incongruous sight of a six-foot high doorstopper is the obvious point of engagement with Dales twisted domestic world, the small, relatively ‘normal’ photograph opposite is perhaps a more useful place to start. Titled "Civilisation" its serene, winter image of muted washed out grays and whites bears the trace of reflected light bulb on its surface. In a show which delights in disturbing and playing with the seemingly mundane objects of domestic, interior life, this is the only straightforward exterior glimpse of the world. And it has to be said its fairly bleak, soulless one. The row of flats receding into the distance alludes to infinite lives experiencing boredom and frustration, of quiet solitude and loneliness. The piece is important in that it grounds all of Dale’s playful invention, imaginative reconstruction and general non- – sense in the realities of existence. This isn’t just playing with the laws and order of your surrounding for the sake of it. This is about survival. Andy Medhurst the entertaining polemical film theorist once remarked that "to use the term escapist as a put down reveals that anyone who does so leads a comfortable life that requires no escaping from". In Dale’s world his reimagining of reality, where light bulbs swing of their own accord and doorstoppers inflate, is a defiant act of resistance against the constrictions and brutalities of the external world. It is escapist, but this doesn’t mean it’s light. If anything Dale’s attempt to repossess the objects and reality of his immediate environment, is propelled by despair. In Keith Waterhouse’s classic Billy Liar book, William Fischer the ‘hero’ manufactures a fantasy world to house and protect his dreams of liberation from the grinding monotony of his existence. Precisely because it was so grim up north, was it necessary for William to embrace fantasy. Billy Liar was influential as a play and film because it was one of the first depictions of working class life that moved beyond the simple ‘realist capturing of the brutal surfaces of life into the interior mental landscape that such conditions produced. Importantly just like Dale’s work, Billy Liar was also painfully unsentimental in highlighting how although playing and twisting with the dull conventions of reality could offer salvation, there was also the real possibility that escapism could lead to enslavement. Dales work is similarly adept at hinting at the duality and tension of escapism. When he peers at tower blocks through his trouser legs, the act comes across as playfully childish, but also slightly neurotic and disturbed   John Beagles 2002

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