A Gentle Man is movingly stark, from start to finish. It’s the coldest I’ve felt these rooms at Bluecoat in a long time. Becky Beasley shares a story of a normal life, in stages.
Not actually in the exhibition, but in the planning for it, was a line from Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Introducing Myself’ (1992), that is probably how this show ended up where it did:
“I am a man… Not maybe a first-rate man. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I may be in fact a kind of second-rate or imitation man, a Pretend-a-Him.”
There’s an obscure calmness here. Absolute in its confidence. It’s not funny, like an intentional moment in some painful stage comedy. It’s just beguilingly normal.
At literally no point in this exhibition do you need to take a breath from excitement. The imagined man, representing gentleness, is just a normal, unnotable human. The type of unnotable human that doesn’t typically get mentioned in galleries.
Not notably gentle. Not outgoingly caring. Just genuinely gentle. Russel Tovey voices over the exhibition, and even he isn’t gentle enough for what I’ve got in my head by the point I heard his voice.
I can picture someone kind, but not so kind people notice. Someone who would take a pigeon to a vet, but only if no one was watching – not because they we’re afraid of judgment, but because they were afraid of praise.
The character, created for A Gentle Man is a combination of Bernard Malamud, and the artist’s father. It draws on intersections in the lives of the novelist, and the relationship the artist has with her father. As the character is built, an early, mid and future closing of life are drawn up. Time ticks on, and the exhibition gives you masses of seemingly open, empty space to meander through that time. At some point, you enter a future, where death is part of it. You don’t know you’re there, but you are. And at that point, you’re in a moment of reflection, from the artist, and this imagined character, where they understand the inevitability of this figure they’ve chosen to know.
Benches, with alternate seats pointing south east and north west, allow interaction. They force it to an extent, because this is a lonely exhibition, or at least it is when you see it by yourself. Another pair of visitors, using those benches, sat completing a cryptic crossword in the corner.
There are notes given by this exhibition, on how to own and disown being labelled a gentle man. How to understand a label of Highly Sensitive Person, and how that differs from an anxious person, or how the two intersect. But mostly, it’s a secure assertion that being gentle and unintentionally affecting your world is acceptable; no matter how lonely that might be.
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Becky Beasley: A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029) is open at Bluecoat until 3rd January 2027
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
