Archive for September, 2009
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
The Gustav Metzger retrospective Decades 1959-2009 is the most extensive single exhibition of auto-destructive art ever to be held in London. Not just the work, but also the head-on collision between the Serpentine as a chic white cube space and Metzger’s decidedly funky left-field practice is in itself interesting. The good news first, and that is Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment has never looked better! With the walls inside the North Gallery painted black, and very effective blackout curtains, the colours are really luminous. This piece was also a highlight of the otherwise lousy Tate Triennial earlier this year, but at the Serpentine it looks even better than it did there, or at the Summer Of Love exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2005. There are scatter cushions on the floor, so you can just lie back and trip out to these light projections. I could easily spend several days in this installation groovin’ on the ambient vibe.
The rest of the exhibition highlights Metzger’s varied practices of the past 50 years, with many pieces realised in new ways. For instance, his series of Historic Photographs are now easier to view than in earlier incarnations, although in most cases there are still obstructions to prevent these works being gazed at from a comfortable and familiar distance. Moving on, Metzger’s trade mark displays of old newspapers and waste materials are too cleanly and neatly laid out. Although this highlights Metzger’s grunge aesthetic, I still found it surprising that a series of car scrappage adverts torn from recent newspapers should be evenly spaced along the walls as if they were somehow equivalent to a series of Jeff Koons pictures. Personally I’d have preferred less space around these and all the other works, anything but the white walls on which they were displayed (light grey would have seemed more appropriate), and considerably dimmer lighting.
Much of Metzger’s oeuvre deals with the ecological destruction wreaked by capitalism, and while hanging it as if it is decorative does provide a neat counterfoil to its ugly but urgent message, inevitably such a mode of display runs the danger of blunting its impact. That said, it still provided a fantastic contrast to Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s expensive and wasteful folly in the Serpentine grounds; a temporary pavilion made from brightly lit aluminium, designed to look impressive in photographs but which is extremely unpleasant and impractical for human use.
Metzger has always excelled at drawing out the contradictions of the art world and exposing the many ways in which the majority of those active within it uncritically serve capitalism. Unsurprisingly, there were fewer rich socialites at the Metzger opening than I’ve come to expect at Serpentine private views. Instead the event was littered with those dedicated to marginal and oppositional aesthetic practices, ranging from Sarah Andrews to Alastair Brotchie, Bronac Ferran to Martin Sexton. Rut Blees Luxemburg to Peter Suchin, Kristine Stiles to Bruce Gilchrist, Sarah Sutch to Matt Hale, Jo Joelson to Clive Phillpot, and Ilze Black to Tony White. There were plenty of Serpentine regulars in evidence too – Nicola Lees, Sally Tallant, Rose Dempsey, Sophie O’Brien – but I could see no sign of co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, although his current artist-in-residence Hilary Koob-Sassen, and unofficial writer-in-residence Tom McCarthy, were both present and correct.
Despite my surprise at the tasteful installation of work that really isn’t pretty and shouldn’t be treated as such, this is still a great and important show, so make sure you check it out. And look closely at the labelling, which I’m told Metzger went through word by word, since you won’t see it bettered in any other London museum or gallery. Gustav Metzger Decades is on at The Serpentine (Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA) until 8 November 2008.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alastair Brotchie, Auto-Destructive Art, Bronac Ferran, Bruce Gilchrist, Clive Phillpot, Decades 1959-2009, Gustav Metzger, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Historic Photographs, Ilze Black, Jeff Koons, Jo Joelson, Kazuyo Sejima, Kensington Gardens, Kristine Stiles, Liquid Crystal Environment, London, Martin Sexton. Rut Blees Luxemburg, Nicola Lees, Peter Suchin, Rose Dempsey, Ryue Nishizawa, Sally Tallant, Sarah Andrews, Serpentine Gallery, Sophie O'Brien, Summer of Love, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Tate Triennial, Tom McCarthy, Tony White
Posted in exhibitions | 15 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Yesterday I travelled to the far-north of London to catch the world premier of the Class Wargames film The Game Of War at the HTTP Gallery, close to Green Lanes. Divided into five segments of five minutes, the individual parts of this movie can be viewed in any order. While appearing to heap extravagant praise on Guy Debord, the film actually undermined his vanguardist positions by massively exaggerating the problematic self-promotional aspects of his film-making and other cultural-cum-politico activities. The spoken word Game of War soundtrack repeatedly exhorted viewers to play Debord’s game in order to make themselves more effective proletarian revolutionaries, and did so using the most blatant techniques of (post)-modern advertising. In their Communique 7 of 27/09/09, the Class Wargames collective put it this way:
“When Debord was working on the film adaptation of The Society of the Spectacle in the early-1970s, making a movie out of movie clips was very difficult. Buying celluloid stock, hiring editing suites and organising cinema screens had required serious money from a generous sponsor. Fortunately, over the past three-and-a-half-decades, digital technology has caught up with this Situationist technique. Class Wargames only needed a small grant from the Arts Council to fund a film constructed on a Mac laptop with Final Cut out of video from our performances and excerpts from our DVD collection. Best of all, we are now able to distribute our cinematic creation to a worldwide audience for free over the Net. Detournement is no longer the privilege of a minority of avant-garde artists. Media communism is now embedded in everyday life. Become a 21st century Debord – a director of remixed movies. Sweep away the anachronistic barrier of intellectual property. Switch on the computer, start up the video editing software, plug in an external drive filled with rendered DVDs and begin making your own film. Everyone is a practical Situationist. Ludic Labour!”
And while on the visual level The Game of War film appeared somewhat retro in its aesthetic (and this was clearly worked at and intended, because it isn’t typical of other pieces by director Ilze Black), the spoken script written by Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett gave it a distinctively contemporary twist. Proletarian post-modern variants on the hoary tradition of mock praise are a groove sensation! “Guy Debord had the total revolutionary critique” (for the benefit of those not familiar with the genre of mock praise, this is a joke)! So look out for this movie once it hits the net, and if you are nearby check out upcoming Class Wargames events in The Hague (10 October), Newcastle (14 November) and Helsinki (14 November).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Arts Council, Class Wargames, detournement, Fabian Tompsett, Final Cut Pro, Green Lanes, Guy Debord, Helsinki, HTTP Gallery, Ilze Black, London, Mac laptop, Newcastle, north London, Richard Barbrook, situationist, Society of the Spectacle, The Game of War, The Hague
Posted in film | 21 Comments »
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
I finally got around to adding my banned YouTube video 10 Erotic Movies to my Vimeo account. Check it out and marvel at the fact that after 21,442 hits, YouTube banned this for inappropriate content:
<http://vimeo.com/6740722>
Despite this, I’m continuing to post the odd video to YouTube, since that platform has a larger and more active user base than Vimeo. My most recent YouTube posting is Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJELyF3yrSs>
But if the countdown from 10 to 1 in 10 Erotic Movies is inappropriate for YouTube, then we really do need to concentrate on building our own sites well away from corporately owned Web 2.o franchises, in order to avoid such blatantly stupid censorshit. The YouTube user base has a reputation for running on a low level of collective intelligence, but my feeling is this simply reflects the way the site is managed.
I’m not a member of YouPorn, RedTube or PornTube or indeed any ‘adult orientated’ Web 2.o site. This is in part because it would be genuinely inappropriate to upload works of mine such as 10 Erotic Movies to platforms dedicated to the free sharing and distribution of hardcore pornography. However, it seems to me that YouTube could resolve some of the issues it has around inappropriate content by plugging YouPorn – so that those searching for or wanting to post hardcore pornography on YouTube went elsewhere. Doing this would demonstrate that those managing YouTube have matured a little, and until the censorship crazy zealots running this platform learn to behave a little bit more reasonably, they can hardly expect a broad swathe of their members to use their ‘service’ in a sensible manner.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 10 Erotic Movies, censorship, censorshit, hardcore, hardcore pornography, pornography, PornTube, RedTube, Shoreditch Shredding Machine Massacre, Stewart Home, Vimeo, YouPorn, YouTube
Posted in film, porn, Web 2.0 | 27 Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
I was hanging with a mate the other day who’d just acquired a pile of vinyl from a friend who was emigrating to the US. You could tell by the content of this record collection that the former owner had been born in the 1950s. I’d never heard Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra and by listening to it I discovered I hadn’t missed anything at all. I had heard Mountain at some point in the seventies and one track of their generic blues rock was enough to remind me of why it was instantly forgettable. Moving on, when I was about twelve me and my mates at secondary school used to wind up older kids from a nearby grammar school by telling them that bands like Gentle Giant and Pink Floyd were commercial cop-outs, and if they were hip they’d have been groovin’ to Greenslade. Actually we preferred old soul records but one kid in my class shared a bedroom with an older brother who listened to both northern soul and Greenslade, so we not only knew about this latter act, we’d even heard their records.
One prog band whose name eluded me until later in the seventies was Gryphon, and then I only came across them because I knew they had an association with ‘new wave’ act The Banned. Viz, The Banned emerged from a combo called Precious Little which featured two ex-Gryphon members Graeme Taylor and Malcolm Bennett, while another Gryphon member Richard Harvey got Banned drummer Paul Aitken work doing jingles, which led to Gryphon’s last label Harvest (they were on Transatlantic Records for most of their career) signing this musician as a ‘new wave group’. The Banned turned out to be a one-hit wonder with their cover of Syndicate of Sound’s mid-sixties single Little Girl (the recording features Gryphon members Richard Harvey and Jonathan Davie). That release wasn’t bad, although it wasn’t nearly as good as The Dead Boys simultaneous cover of the tune. When Cherry Red released a Banned retrospective CD five or so years ago, it revealed just how shit The Banned really were, due to the fact that any attempt to ditch their prog roots was purely cosmetic – an ‘image’ far more than a ‘musical’ make-over!
The Banned Little Girl CD in Cherry Red’s Best In New Wave series actually kicks off with four Precious Little tracks, the first being a prog style cover of The Olympics Good Lovin’, a tune that is unfortunately better known in the form of an inferior cover by The Young Rascals. With a constantly changing line-up, The Banned even managed to incorporate the two ex-Gryphon members who’d been in Precious Little before they finally broke up, which makes you wonder why Cherry Red didn’t promote their Little Girl CD as a Best In Prog Rock effort. Beyond the cover of Little Girl there is nothing on the CD to appeal to anyone with a taste for power pop, let alone punk rock. Which isn’t to say that all prog musicians proved incapable of making decent records in the late-seventies; personally I’m rather fond of the smutty pop issued by The Pork Dukes, with a line-up featuring two former members of Gnidrolog.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, a few days ago I finally got to hear Gryphon’s eponymous first album from 1973, well not all of it, since two tracks of their pseudo-medieval folk crap was more than enough for me! I absolutely hated it! On their later recordings I understand there is more electric instrumentation and so these are less folk and more prog sounding. That said, if The Banned CD is anything to judge by, I will be happy if I never hear anything else by Gryphon. I guess The Banned’s cover of Little Girl is the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is: ex-Royal College of Music students can’t rock! Gryphon even wrote and recorded the music for a 1974 Sir Peter Hall National Theatre production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and it would seem lacking any kind of pop sensibility would be a prerequisite for being entrusted with this sort of task….
And to kick away the cobwebs after listening to Procol Harum, Mountain and Gryphon, we put on Slade Alive! That was from my mate’s own collection, not the one he’d inherited from the older emigrating friend… The first side of Slade Alive! is what 1970s rock and roll oughta sound like!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Cherry Red Records, Gentle Giant, Gnidrolog, Good Lovin', Graeme Taylor, Greenslade, Gryphon, Harvest Recods, Jonathan Davie, Little Girl, Malcolm Bennett, National Theatre, Paul Aitkin, Pink Floyd, Pork Dukes, Procol Harum, Procol Harum Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Richard Harvey, Sir Peter Hall, Slade, Slade Alive!, Syndicate of Sound, The Banned, The Dead Boys, The Olympics, The Tempest, Transatlantic Records, William Shakespeare, Young Rascals
Posted in music | 19 Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
I was in Glasgow over the weekend and the new arts buildings and galleries in Trongate look extremely impressive, but the area around it is one of most impoverished in Europe and there are junkies galore hustling on the streets. I went into T. J Hughes to acquire some discount shit and was hugely impressed by a very blatant shoplifting technique being used by one thieving prick. This particular skaghead chose a relatively expensive but discounted designer item and took it to the pay desk to ask for a refund. He was, of course, asked for the bill of sale he’d never acquired, and so picking up the leather handbag he announced his mother was waiting outside and he needed to get the receipt from her. The addict shot off into the street, while one of the two girls working the tills told the other that this showed why they needed a security guard on the door. Presumably the entire incident was covered by CCTV but to anyone watching that, it probably looked like the junkie had paid before walking out. One of the till girls lazily followed the shit-faced scammer out, but by the time she got to the doors he’d already disappeared. I’ve witnessed some blatant shoplifting in my time, but this really took the biscuit. Glasgow’s miles better!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: CCTV, Glasgow, junkies, scamming, Scotland, shoplifting, skaghead, T. J. Hughes, theft, thieving prick, Trongate
Posted in deep topology aka psychogeography | 20 Comments »
Sunday, September 20th, 2009
My mother Julia Callan-Thompson didn’t publish very much during her lifetime, but anyone who has read her diary and letters will know she was a natural when it came to putting pen to paper. What follow are a couple of pieces by my mother that appeared in issue one of an underground publication called Shoestring put together by Sonya Perry in Harlech, north Wales, crica 1974. Cutting to the quick, here’s my mother’s humorous essay from that Roneoed journal:
STILL IN THE SAME KICK
Hippies usually come from families which suffer from ‘status mal-integration’ – inter-ethnic or mobile families, or families whose economic and cultural status are not on a par. In such families, the children have difficulty in knowing what is to be their social role, and often have difficulty in adapting ‘normal’ sexual roles. Jewish people, girls for example, have an upbringing which prepares them for a world no longer in existence.
Hippie Society is attractive to such young people because:
1. It emphasises tolerance and practices ‘mutual appreciation’ (!)
2. Boys can enjoy quasi-homosexual relationships with impunity, e.g., ‘potheads’ – or affect an exaggerated ‘virility’.
3. Boys are not required to seduce. They can treat a girl as a mother, while she can treat them as a child. Often the girls support the boys, while the boys cultivate the ‘feminine’ attributes of affectivity, self-expression, proneness to moods and… being ‘beautiful’.
4. Mentally ‘abnormal’ phenomena are tolerated and even constitute a status symbol. Secondary anxiety is avoided, because these experiences can always be attributed to the drugs.
One should not dismiss immediately this subculture, as Hippie Society can serve as a kind of civil hospital, and may save disturbed people from psychosis and homosexuality.
I really like point 4, but I’m not sure about all the others… especially as point 2 and the final statement render the entire piece extremely ambiguous. My own position is, of course, that homosexuality and all other forms of consensual sexual expression are a groove sensation!
Moving on, the poem my mother contributes to Shoestring 1 mirrors my own fascination with silence and the aporetic – and prefigures my recent blog strike by about 35 years!
THE WORDLESS
I shall proclaim
a Wordless Day,
Placing a
loaf on my lips.
There will be
a festival of the wordless -
songs without words will be sung,
plays without words will be performed.
Some new clouds will be proposed,
filling up the skyline,
Critics will be sworn to silence.
All day we shall go
In and out through each other’s eyes,
In and out, in and out.
Towards evening will come
an easing of the mind.
The singing of the mad
will fall to a whisper.
One wordless day a week -
that should do it.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Posted in counterculture, humour, Julia Callan-Thompson | 17 Comments »
Friday, September 18th, 2009
For a couple of years at the end of the sixties hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas financed a series of films by a group of young artists and writers with little to no cinematic experience. The end result was the French equivalent of US underground movies, which is hardly surprising when you consider that Andy Warhol and The Factory had been a big influence on this informal group of around a dozen hipsters. When I saw the Zanzibar short Vite by Daniel Pommereulle screened at Tate Modern as part of a 1968 movie season in London last year, I got the impression that very few of those in the audience were aware of Zanzibar films: most seemed to have turned up to see the 1968 newsreel shorts that were screened alongside Pommereulle’s fabulous 37 minute freak out that takes you from the north African desert to outer space.
When I first heard of Zanzibar, quite a few years ago now, it was via whispered tales of a freaky heiress who would write cheques for hippies who wanted to make films, and then never asked them to account for the money she very freely handed out. Vite is actually the shortest Zanzibar flick, most are an hour to two hours in length, and with one exception they are filmed in 35mm, not the cheaper 16mm format that was so typical of American underground movies. Likewise, little effort was made to distribute Zanzibar material, so it isn’t nearly so well known as transatlantic improvisations by directors such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Connor, Jim McBride or Jack Smith. Reflecting Warhol’s Factory aesthetic, Zanzibar films are full of beautiful people, non-actors, a number of whom were high-fashion models. Likewise, the technicians and directors who made these movies were predisposed to formal experimentation because they had little if any film training. The results are on the whole much more interesting than the self-consciously commercial recuperation of letterist cinema by the earlier and older French ‘new wave’ of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (but not as good as Alain Resnais or Chris Marker when they were firing on all six cylinders).
It has always been difficult to see Zanzibar movies outside Paris, and at least four of the sixteen Zanzibar titles Shafto lists in her pamphlet appear to have been lost. Philippe Garrel is the only film-maker from this group still working as a director today, and he is now well known for more ‘mainstream’ material such as his 2005 movie Regular Lovers, starring his son Louis. Garrel Senior had a ten year relationship with Nico, the model turned drug-icon and pseudo-singer (she also appeared in seven films Garrel directed), and so his name should also be familiar to those with an interest in mock-rock and substance abuse.
The Zanzibar group took their name from a part of Africa that boasted a Maoist regime in the late-sixties, and which some saw as a crossroads between the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’. An attraction to Maoism is merely one factor that makes it difficult to take the group’s political and mystical pretensions seriously. It should go without saying that despite their deployment of ‘communist’ rhetoric, virtually everyone whose political inspiration can be traced back to Lenin is a moderniser attempting to effect a shift from the formal to the real domination of capital in societies still largely characterised by agrarian modes of production. However, and as I’ve already said, aesthetically Zanzibar represent a real continuation of letterist experimentation in the cinema. Likewise, the fact that two of the Zanzibar films were made by women directors (Un Film by Sylvina Boissonnas and Deux Fois by Jacqueline Raynal) at a time when it was unusual for women to helm French movies, serves to further underscore the way in which the group’s practice ran ahead of its theoretical positions.
Sally Shafto’s pamphlet on Zanzibar consists mainly of an extended essay about the group and its dissolution during a journey through Africa that fell far short of its original geographical and artistic goals. This is appended with a ‘who’s who’ of the group, credits for sixteen Zanzibar films, and sleeve notes for an album of music recorded on the trip that put an end to this loose collective. There are a lot of really groovy photographs illustrating the text too, so despite an ungainly academic prose style quite an odds with the elegant subject matter, this is a good introduction to the Zanzibar group. What I’m reviewing here is a 64 page pamphlet put out by Zazibar USA (AKA Jackie Raynal-Saleh and Joseph J. M. Saleh) in 2000: there is also a dual French and English language book of this material with additional interviews issued as Zanzibar: Les films Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968 by Paris Experimental Editions in 2006. Neither publication appears particularly easy to obtain but if you put a little work into getting your mits on this shit your efforts will be well rewarded!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1968, Africa, Alain Resnais, Andy Warhol, Bruce Connor, Chris Marker, Daniel Pommereulle, Deux Fois, François Truffaut, Jack Smith, Jackie Raynal, Jackie Raynal-Saleh, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim McBride, Joseph J. M. Saleh, Ken Jacobs, letterists, London, Louis Garrel, Maya Deren, Nico, Paris, Paris Experimental Editions, Philippe Garrel, Regular Lovers, Sally Shafto, Stan Brakhage, Sylvina Boissonnas, Tate Modern, The Factory, The Zanzibar Films & The Dandies Of May 1968, Un Film, Vite, Zanzibar, Zanzibar: Les films Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968
Posted in books, film | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
The Pompidou Centre in Paris has rearranged its collection to highlight women artists. Looking through the material now on display I was left with the impression that the French Musee National D’Art Moderne has an acquisition problem. Given the material the curators had to work with, they probably did a reasonable job of selecting it; it’s just that looking at pieces ranging from relatively recent photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg to much older work by Niki de Saint Phalle, the acquisitions seem to have been poorly made in terms of the choice of works by those artists who merit being in this collection. There are notable exceptions to this such as the utterly talentless one trick pony Rachel Whiteread, whose ‘sculptures’ of domestic spaces are far too literal to be of any interest me. But the curators have cunningly managed to make Whiteread’s very large work disappear. They’ve performed this conjuring trick on Whiteread’s ‘negative space’ by placing her primo example of schlock at the entrance to the show, and all the visitors I observed ignored it; those I spoke to about it said they’d thought it was as an architectural feature rather than a work of art. It thus qualified as the most ignored work on display.
The highlights of elles@centrepompidou include Touch Cinema by Valie Export (a film from the sixties showing a woman allowing men to come up from a crowd to grope her tits), various films by Carolee Schneemann and photographs by Hannah Wilke. Overall this ‘permanent display’ creates the impression that it was in performance works that women artists have been able to create the greatest impact over the past 50 years. There are some good artists on display, and a lot of bad ones too, making it very much like any large show, since 99 percent of all art is utter shit.
Dominique Gonzalez-Forester has made better work than the films on display here, and she delivers a rather pathetic slap to the public’s face when she prefaces them by saying this was the best work she was able to make over a two years period because she’d been so engrossed in reading books she hadn’t been able to concentrate on her own work. Patti Smith is represented by a diagram, when a piece of her music would have seemed more fitting: there are also sections given over to female furniture designers, which is a nice idea although the displays aren’t too hot. All in all the Pompidou deserve ten out of ten for their focus on women artists, and about one out of ten for execution; the work is badly installed and very poorly organised, rather than being displayed by theme, it would have worked much better being organised by artist.
To conclude, looking at the work of Marina Abramovich once again provided a stark reminder of just how bad her live art is, since her ungainly movements mean that she is never convincing as a performer, while her narcissism renders her twitchy locomotion much uglier than it would appear in someone less self-absorbed and self-obsessed. Her work is truly awful, and thus for me her name offers a counter-term to The Stendhal Syndrome. The Abramovich Syndrome is thus the feeling of being underwhelmed and bored shitless by seeing a huge amount of art; and that’s just the way I felt after viewing elles@centrepompidou. My feelings on this score were underlined when I went upstairs to look at the mainly dead white males from the French National Collection. As Duchamp observed, works of art die and museums are their graveyards – and my visit to the Pompidou Centre left me with a bad case of The Abramovich Syndrome.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Carolee Schneemann, Centre Pompidou, Dominique Gonzalez-Forester, elles@centrepompidou, Hannah Wilke, Marcel Duchamp, Marina Abramovich, Musee National D'Art ModerneMusee National D'Art Moderne, Niki de Saint Phalle, Paris, Patti Smith, Pompidou Centre, Rachel Whiteread, Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Abramovich Syndrome, The Stendhal Syndrome, Touch Cinema, Valie Export
Posted in art criticism, exhibitions | 23 Comments »
Monday, September 14th, 2009
1. A situationist skinhead is a skinhead who engages in the construction of situations. This means the construction of concrete momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a passionate and superior quality based on the principle of a permanent revolution of every day existence, from which, several of the principles below evoke a number of observations linked to the study of the situationist skinhead in his/her natural environment. If s/he realizes it by reading this, all skinheads can become situationists. All situationists can become skinheads for the same reasons, but not from one day to the next. As we know, even if all roads lead out of Babylon, the situationist hacienda will not be built in a single day but will in fact be a project of ongoing transformation. An intense cultural curiosity is necessary and must be accompanied by the sensation of a quasi-orgasmic osmosis, an effect well appreciated by situationist skinheads due to their enjoyment of skinhead reggae. Let’s state with candour that an authentic situationist skinhead, regardless of the way s/he first became involved in beating down Babylon, will recognize him/herself in what follows. In fact, a true situationist skinhead won’t care much for this manifesto because it is something they will want to move on from. A dyed-in-the-wool situationist skinhead is suspicious of manifestos, of anythings fixed, and thus this text is is 100% dispersible but nonetheless necessary. This manifesto does not prescribe; it dissects the situationist skinhead so that s/he might renew his/her attack on the Babylon, and finally destroy the false idols of capitalism.
2. The situationist skinhead is above all else working class by filiation or affiliation. Whether s/he is employed, working or not, whether his/her work is artistic, salaried, illegal or not, the situationist skinhead identifies with all attempts of his/her class to create a new, emancipatory and revolutionary situation. The situationist skinhead loves strikes and knows of nothing better than a good factory occupation.
3. The situationist skinhead absolutely rejects all isms –and for that reason all definitions of so-called “situationism” or “skinheadism”- which are nothing more than revisionist and reductive transformations of his/her culture into sterile stereotypes, and thus another reactionary set of doctrines. Therefore, s/he escapes all reifications and refuses to become invisible in the manner profit and bureaucracy demand. The situationist skinhead rejects authoritarian so-called “communism”, since all Bolshevik and Maoist regimes were in reality capitalist states. Isms are the instruments by which the dominant society transforms the proletariat’s endless reforging of the passage between theory and practice into doctrines. Thus certain “thinkers” define “anarchism” and thereby reduce its possibilities to the reproduction of individualist and western consumerist patterns of behaviour and thought. The situationist skinhead does not wish to replace one reductive system with another. S/he will destroy false representations or will be destroyed by them.
4 . The situationist skinhead has no leaders (not even Joe Hawkins); he is not a Marxist – indeed, Marx himself was the first person to deny he was a Marxist. The situationist skinhead is not a Leninist, Trotskyst, Guevarist or Buddhist either; and most emphatically not a Castrist or Maoist. S/he does not raise statues, temples or churches and does not put corpses in mausoleums. S/he says let the dead bury their dead while we blaze a trail to new modes of being. In brief, s/he does not idolize, does not pray, does not implore and does not even ask but takes what is his/hers as a member of the class that will abolish all classes.
5. The situationist skinhead stresses that the fundamental characteristic of this society is its division into classes. Therefore s/he is skeptical of the perfidious attempts of the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) to recuperate her uncontrolled rebellion. The situationist skinhead rejects the trajectory of petty bourgeois mods, or worse, that of those former revolutionaries who landed jobs in academies, whose writings are now studied by postgraduate students and recuperated by his/her enemy the bobo (aka “bohemian bourgeois”). For the contemporary situationist skinhead, this rank breed of socialite recyclers is far worse enemy than its ancestor, the baba cool (hippie). The bobo recuperation of elements of skinhead culture (shaved head and Dr. Martens), an attempt to “hipsterfy” a sterile vision of the world, has a far more deleterious effect than the baba who merely took drugs and attempted to withdraw from the material realities of capitalist exploitation.
6. The situationist skinhead rejects cults such as the “spirit of 69″ because, aside from rejecting all nostalgia, s/he knows that the skinhead movement, as a youth rebellion against the ruling order, is demographically much older today than during those years (but then we follow Isidore Isou in seeing youth as essentially a function of social position rather than age). Nevertheless, the situationist skinhead still refers to “the spirit of 69″ since it expresses the triolectical nature of his/her movement. To that effect, and leaving aside the delights of this egalitarian sexual position, the number 69 expresses the contradictions and semantic inversions that characterise the situationist skinhead. Let’s note that Sham 69 are and remain one of the seminal bands of situationist skinheads, since they helped purge punk rock of its socialite hangers-on. Furthermore, 1969 was marked by some of the most enthralling rhythms of skinhead reggae, including the mighty Liquidator. Likewise, in 69 the last issue of the Internationale Situationsite review appeared.
Communiqué of the International Situationist Skinhead, Combative Cell Yul Brynner In Sta-Prest
As far as I can tell this first appeared as a printed text around 2002 and can now also be found as a comment to a post on the L’En Dehors blog (scroll down to find it). Translated and adapted into English, there were a couple of points I wasn’t in complete agreement with in this section, so I modified them (I still don’t agree with everything here). This represents roughly 25% of the French language manifesto, I may or may not run more of it on future blogs. You can always go read the whole thing in French! I’m not in complete agreement with everything in the rest of this either, but it is amusing and curious, so I thought it more than worth running an adapted part of it here.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Internationale Situationiste, Joe Hawkings, Karl Marx, L'En Dehors, Liquidator, reggae, Sham 69, situationist, skinhead, skinhead reggae, Yul Brynner
Posted in counterculture, humour, politics | 31 Comments »
Saturday, September 12th, 2009
Going to my post box the other week, I found within my haul of letters a small collection of stories entitled Chomsky And The Kultigator by Graham Nowland (Clear City Press). The title piece about a man who is mistaken for the linguist Noam Chomsky is very good, but another story called Some Of The Times I Have Died is even better: “How can I be writing this if I am dead? Well, I can think of at least three novels with dead narrators and I’m not even trying. Take it from me, you can write when you are dead..”
Graham Nowland is a name that will be instantly recognised by those familiar with London’s beatnik hipsters of yesteryear. He turns up alongside the likes of Grainger “Don’t Call Me Malcolm” Drake in newspaper pieces on ‘longhairs’ dating back as far as 1962! Nowland has been living in Australia for some years, and this is where much of his recent fiction is set, but he knows the hippest and most hidden aspects of the London counterculture of yesteryear the way only an insider can.
Clear City Press is not only the publisher of Nowland’s collection of short stories, it is also this hipster’s latest venture: and he plans to publish more of his own work as well as that of associates including R. Frederick Finlayson, anail nathrach and Liz Elliot. The latter’s as yet untitled book is being promoted with the following blurb: “A London poetry and prose writer, she is also writing an autobiography. She has long been active in London underground networks and her associates have included LSD guru Timothy Leary, novelist and king junkie Alex Trocchi, neurologician Brian Barritt, and archetypal London hipster ‘Grainger’ aka Malcolm Drake.” All of which makes Elliot sound like Liz Cooke’s double to me!
Moving on, one poem that has entered into oral legend from this particular circle of people, runs as follows:
I am a pot plant
That instead of being watered
Has been pissed on by a cat.
My impression is that Clear City Press are concentrating on quality writing, but I wonder if Nowland would consider doing an anthology of lesser unpublished pieces by people from within the circles Grainger frequented. The above poem is often quoted by those familiar with this milieu precisely because it is funny, memorable, and thus ‘so bad it is good’!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Alex Trocchi, anail nathrach, Australia, Brian Barritt, Chomsky And The Kultigator, Clear City Press, Graham Nowland, Grainger, Grainger Drake, Liz Cooke, Liz Elliot, London, Malcolm Drake, Noam Chomsky, R. Frederick Finlayson, Some Of The Times I Have Died, Timothy Leary
Posted in books, counterculture | 23 Comments »