‘Betterment Spoils The World’(2021)

‘Betterment Spoils The World’ is an unfinished poetic experimental short made during lockdown by Corie McGowan and Allan Struthers.

This work aims to build a narrative between Rivington Terrace Gardens in Lancashire and Port

Sunlight in Merseyside, both once owned by the liberal industrialist William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925), through a combination of filmed site-specific and home-studio performances that explore histories in the production, distribution, and consumption of soap.

We draw from the analyses of Stuart Hall, Roland Barthes, Mary Douglas, and Friedrich Engels to situate William Lever’s idiosyncratic industrial practice within ideologies of management and cleanliness. In playing on the Pre-Raphaelite-inspired marketing devices used by the Lever Brothers corporation (now Unilever), the seductive material qualities of soap, and the gesture of washing, we seek to satirically articulate the co-partnership model of capitalism that sold not just soap, but the image of a better society.

The two selected sites serve as interlinked situational points within art and industry in the early 20th century, which we intend to reappraise through a narrative that leverages historical documentary against the erotic poetics of soap. The work will be filmed on an iPhone and brought together with an original soundtrack produced in collaboration with Timothy Cape (Bastard Assignments).