Posts Tagged ‘St. Martin’s School of Art’

From censorship to John Latham and back again…

Monday, December 7th, 2009

The oldest of suppressed traditions

In a world dominated by illusion, it comes as no surprise that censorship should be popularly misperceived as a form of social repression. The contradictions which support such an inversion are manifest in every area of daily life; they constitute the apparent “reality” of our “time”. Despite the fact that it has been demonstrated time and again that consciousness is an effect of a closed system of exclusive focus, of censorship, “literate” consensus maintains that censorship and silence are the negation of consciousness. It is clear that Power has a vested interest in maintaining a monopoly on censorship. The “concept of freedom” is an unreachable, collapsing, absolute. All experience becomes equal when exchanged via Capital; with class “privilege” determining how much of this worthless “equality” each person is entitled to.

The negative and its use

Anything can be censored for any reason; start by censoring this text. The censors of the “left”, “right” and “centre”, all do their collective part; despite the fact that they imagine themselves to be motivated by the very beliefs we will ultimately negate.

From originality to ontology: the decline of the text

The possibilities for communal transformation of this world lie in disconnection from imposed notions of progress and democracy. Plagiarism is the “beginning”, the negative point of a culture which finds its justification in the “unique”. Censorship supersedes plagiarism as an “intelligent” negation of “originality” because it suppresses not only (“original”) production, but also reproduction (plagiarism, appropriation &c.) which revalue the “original” and maintain its circulation in “reality”. Censorship is to the present what plagiarism was to history.

The healing power of doubt

Revolutionary propaganda sets itself the task of discrediting all received ideas without offering a single “alternative” thought with which they might be replaced. Kill your desires and live! Erase, destroy and make useless all recorded information. Physically and otherwise attempt to suppress all expression in art, politics, history &c. Resist culture and all other forms of institutional identity. Suppress, by refusing to participate in, interpersonal and mass social relationships. As you see fit, smash the “imagination”, “schizophrenia”, “death”, “sexuality”, “values”, “time” and all other forms of seduction and abstraction. Experimentally break down the frames of reference by which you organise non-valued perceptions into valued entities: i.e. objects, ideas, means of self-perception &c.

An end to social relations

“Self-destruction” is a semantic swindle. The moralism against suicide is reactionary resistance to change. Only total opposition, both theoretical and practical (i.e. silence), is irrecuperable. Anything else must necessarily appear absolutist and contradictory.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

Soho – keep it ‘unreal’!

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the old St Martin’s School of Art campus. The building stretches between Charing Cross Road and Greek Street. The frontage is impressive but the interior takes me straight back to Soho in the 1970s, when London was truly down and dirty. In the main entrance there’s even a ‘blue’ plaque stating the Sex Pistols played their first gig at the college in 1975. A lot of bands played at St Martin’s over the years, and you’d have thought the administration could have found a better group to commemorate than the Sex Pistols.

I’m not sure when the Sex Pistols moved into their Denmark Street rehearsal room, but if they were there by November 75 it would have been literally just a stroll across Charing Cross Road to get to the gig. Not much further away is the site of the old Marquee Club at 90 Wardour Street, the building that housed it is now demolished. The Sex Pistols played the Marquee but I managed to avoid them both there and at St Martin’s. That said, I did spend a lot of time at the Marquee in the late-seventies. Although the Marquee was originally located on Oxford Street and much latter moved to Charing Cross Road, the Wardour Street address is its core location and the club was run from there between 13 March 1964 until 18 July 1988.

When I went to the Marquee in the 1970s, Big John the bouncer would be standing at the entrance, I’d pay between 50p and a pound to see the band, and as I walked down the corridor to the first bar I’d hear Jerry Floyd or Ian Flemming spinning disks as a warm up. The place is etched in my memory, and so is how dirty Soho and the rest of London were at that time. When I walked into St Martin’s yesterday it reminded me of how great London used to be before it was cleaned up and gentrified. The Marquee in the late-seventies was peeling, and so was the rest of London. St. Martin’s is in ruins today and repairs are avoided because this institution was merged with The Central School of Art in 1989, Central St Martin’s is now a constituent college in The University of the Arts London, and is moving to a new purpose built campus in Kings Cross in 2011.

Wandering around St Martin’s yesterday I could feel Soho history wafting through the corridors, and some of it smelt rank. The building was built around 1938 and at the time would have been really grand. Now there are little locked rooms all over the place, and I wonder if when they’re finally opened there will be a yield of dead bodies. No one seems to know what is locked behind those doors. While plodding tourist ‘heritage’ items like the Sex Pistols now form the official history of St Martins, it has a much more interesting subterranean past. To give just one example, beat novelist Alexander Trocchi was employed by the sculpture department on a pretty much a full-time basis between October 1964 and March 1966. As far as I’m aware that episode is still fairly blank in terms of published biographical accounts of Trocchi’s life.

Moving on, I guess everyone imagines Soho was best in whatever state they first got to know it. My real love affair with the place was between 1974 and 1980, from the ages of 12 to 18. This was the era of the dirty bookshops and sex cinemas. The sleazy feel of the place at that time totally grooved me and I hated the way it was subsequently cleaned up. If you read the memoirs of fifties London gangsters then they tend to bemoan the arrival of the sex shops, which they say brought about the decline of the family businesses that gave the area its distinctive feel. What those who first discovered Soho in the nineties are nostalgic about I haven’t a clue… But luckily for me it looks like the credit crunch is taking what was once my favourite part of London back to the state I think it ought to be in; i.e. a dirty rotten mess. Who knows, I might even catch Sohoitis once again! Yes, going into St Martin’s yesterday gave me a real whiff of a London I know is no longer lost forever….

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!