Free University of Glastonbury 2011

Lots of last minute preparations for this year’s Free University of Glastonbury which is the name of the festival’s literary strand (not quite as described by the Observer). I did an event for the Free University of Glastonbury for the first time last year and really enjoyed it, so I was delighted to be asked back. All of the Free University events take place in the hula-styled environs of the HMS Sweet Charity stage, in The Park area of the festival site. There are some great people involved this year, see the full programme just received from FUOG instigator Mathew Clayton below (which was definitive as of last night and which differs slightly from the info on the festival website).

I’m performing on Friday lunchtime around 12:15, compering the Saturday lunchtime session, and then in a special late addition to the bill I’m performing with UK acid house legend Richard Norris on Saturday afternoon at 17.30.

I’m really excited about this. Richard has composed a new backing track which he’ll be mixing live as an accompaniment to my story ‘A Porky Prime Cut’, which I first performed at my National Portrait Gallery gig (with bass player Simon Edwards) a month or two back.

In as much as it is about anything, ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ is a kind of collision between Throbbing Gristle’s design aesthetic and the Bournemouth funk, soul and zine scenes of the early ’80s – via vinyl obsession, the history of acid house, art school and the cryptic etched messages of UK record pressing maestro George Peckham a.k.a. the ‘Porky’ of the title. It’s fantastic to be doing this gig with Richard, not least because he is a real pioneer of the British acid house scene: as part of Psychic TV he co-produced their Jack the Tab ‘compilations’ in 1988.

To celebrate the Free University of Glastonbury gig with Richard, a strictly limited edition print version of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ will be available free on the night while stocks last.

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For the Friday gig I’m probably going to be rambling about various things like this,

and this,

as a kind of preamble to talking about this,

and reading from my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO (which I’ve blogged about here and here).

I’ve barely taken in the rest of the festival programme, although my friend Tim Etchells has just posted some amazing photos of his illuminated sign which was installed in the Shangri-La area last weekend (note the moody-looking sky).

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The 2011 Free University of Glastonbury programme (in order of appearance) :

Friday:

12:15 Tony White

13:00 Jon Ronson

14:00 Mark Thomas

Saturday

11:30 Dorian Lynskey

12:15 Suggs

13:00 Emma Kennedy

13:45 Ben Goldacre

Intermission

16:40 Marcus Brigstocke

17:30 Richard Norris/Tony White

Sunday

11:30 Gavin Knight

12:15 Richard King

13:00 Matthew De Abaitua

13:45 Edwyn Collins and Grace Maxwell

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Art in Ruins*

A couple of months ago I posted on here around the publication by the Russian Club Gallery of my short story ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ which was written to accompany the exhibition there by artists Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull. I was very pleased to see that their collaboration has just been reviewed in the current issue of Frieze, though also amused by the over-earnest reviewer taking me to task for trying (he says), ‘to reposition the show […] within the grubbier context of Arts Council funding cuts,’ and apparently dragging it needlessly, ‘into the UK’s somewhat fraught cultural-political landscape.’

Hilarious! As if that is not where it already is!

Anyone wanting to get an idea of what the UK’s cultural-political landscape might look like ‘in real terms’ (as the poets politicians say), when more and more arts organisations lose their funding, whether that comes from local authorities or from national agencies such as the Arts Council, and what kind of impact this might have on communities and the urban environment should visit Farnham in Surrey where such a scenario has been playing out for quite a few years now and the former Redgrave Theatre seems finally about to be demolished.

I grew up in Farnham so know these buildings well. The Redgrave Theatre opened in 1974 and closed down in 1998. There is (much, much) more on the history of the building and of theatre in Farnham here, here and here. It is enough to say here that the Redgrave was built — following a public fundraising campaign — as a red-brick and concrete addition to a listed building called Brightwells House, the grounds and surroundings of which had become from its public acquisition in the 1920s onwards the site of a number of other local civic and recreational facilities: a health centre, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a bowling club and gardens. In other words, it was a space dedicated to the public good.

However at some point Brightwells gardens also became known at local government level as ‘the East Street area of opportunity’. The opportunity in question, it would seem, no longer being for the furtherance of public health, leisure and education but for redevelopment. I was shocked when I visited the town recently for a friend’s wedding to see the widespread and cultivated dereliction of the whole site which this earmarking for redevelopment has created. Meticulous and sustained campaigns by the likes of the Farnham Theatre Association and the Farnham Society seem to have come to nothing or won only the most superficial concessions, so before too long it will be replaced by 239(!) homes in a high-density housing complex, a multiplex, an underground car park, shops and a simulated ‘town square’ — a piece of urban theatre in its own right. Located where it is or was, right in the middle of an ‘area of opportunity’ like this, something as awkward and unremunerative as a theatre would have never stood a chance. The listed part of the actual Redgrave Theatre — the former Brightwells House — will be turned into two restaurants.

The theatre was of course named after the acting family (I blogged about the Vanessa Redgrave film Wetherby (dir. David Hare, 1985) here) and there was a bust of Michael Redgrave in the foyer. Seeing all of this gone to waste, I was reminded that when I was at secondary school a group of us used to hang out there on Sundays, probably more for the fact that we got served at the bar than for the regular Sunday lunchtime jazz concerts in that same foyer, where I’m pretty sure I remember the likes of George Melly performing. There is a whole universe to be explored in the development of the UK Trad Jazz scene, which must have been nurtured by hundreds of such regular small gigs around the country. I was surprised to find that our local pub in Barnes, the Halfway House, hosted weekly gigs until only very recently by Brenda’s Boyfriends, one of the Trad bands founded by none other than artist and writer Jeff Nuttall. (There’s more on Nuttall including some audio here.)

Those Sunday lunchtime concerts at the Redgrave were made more interesting by the fact that our English teacher often sang with one of the regular bands. Her name was Eiri Thrasher and in the late 60s she had been in a band on the Welsh folk scene called Y Triban (that’s her in the centre on the cover of their 1969 ‘Dai Corduroy’ EP for the Welsh language label Cambrian). I don’t know how she ended up in Farnham, but I’m glad she did because she was a good teacher. She brought some of her singles into school one end of term — maybe the Triban stuff, certainly some later ones — and played them on the record player in class.

I met Eiri by chance on a train in the midlands a decade or so (and a lifetime) later by which time I was at art school in Sheffield. She’d left teaching and was working in the music industry again at the time.

Maybe it is not much of a story: theatre closes down! It happens all the time. But for me growing up, the town’s few cultural institutions even if they turned out to be as relatively short-lived as the Redgrave were a life saver, a way out; the route to an education and a livelihood. Places like the art school, the library, or The Maltings where as a hungry O or A Level student I sought out screenings organised by the Film Society or CND.

The importance of a place like the Redgrave, even if only for those half-seen Sunday lunchtime jazz gigs, was not least that it provided access to what now seems an increasingly radical idea, and certainly one that flies in the face of a commercial opportunity such as that offered by the East Street redevelopment area: that culture is something that you can make and not just something that you buy.

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P.S. I’m pleased to discover that some of Eiri Thrasher’s stuff, with Y Triban at least, is now on Youtube. Their version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’ was licensed to the recent-ish folk revival compilation Folk is not a Four Letter Word, Volume 2 (Delay 68 Records, 2006). It’s good.

* With apologies to Glynn Banks and Hannah Vowles.

In the BRUTE! style – OFFICIAL!

I’m looking forward to doing another reading with the mighty Malcolm Bennett of BRUTE! fame, and Melissa Mann, on Wednesday 25 May at The Gladstone Arms, off Borough High Street, London SE1. One of the perks of doing a gig with Malcolm — aside from the fact that he’s a great performer — is that I get an updated version of my flyer ‘in the BRUTE! style’ (right).

There is more on the ‘shocking’ early history of BRUTE! on Mally’s website, as well as information about more recent projects including his new book, I,BRUTE! 

I remember the original BRUTE! paperbacks well, but only met Malcolm relatively recently, via another great spoken word act of the early-1980s, the late great Steven Wells, a.k.a. Swells, a.k.a. Seething Wells, although sadly not until after Swells’s untimely death in June 2009.

BRUTE! had been a big influence on Swells’s ATTACK! Books project of the late 1990s and that’s… OFFICIAL!

(I’m not completely sure which of them first used this parodic exclamation of verbal authoritativeness. I associate ‘the O word’ with Swells’s pronouncements, but I would guess that it was originally part of Bennett’s brutal, tabloid-inspired lexicon.)

I think it is fair to say, too, that the exclamation mark on the title of my debut novel Road Rage! can probably be traced back to BRUTE!’s hard-boiled pulp appropriations.

For Swells, ‘Road Rage’ became my nickname. I could be walking down the street anywhere in London and hear: ‘Oi, Road Rage!’ It would be Swells — no-one else ever called me that — who would then moan about how many boxes of ATTACK! books he still had under his bed. In return I would probably have told him a line that Michael Moorcock once told me: that he hadn’t felt like a real writer until some of his books were available in remainder shops, ‘where real people could buy them.’

Buy Road Rage from the Piece of Paper Press shop using my verified PayPal account‘Oi, Road Rage!’ — the last time I saw him, down by Strutton Ground market in Westminster he was trying not to beam from ear to there with the news that he was moving to the US and getting married (and asking me if I wanted any more books).

Following the terrible news of Swells’s untimely death in June 2009, I was honoured to give brief presentations and readings at a couple of events that were held to celebrate his life and work. First was an ATTACK! Books tribute night organised by 3:am Magazine, where I read alongside fellow novelist and ATTACK! author Stewart Home (who had first switched Swells on to Road Rage! when it came out). Secondly at a much larger celebratory event put together by David Quantick and NME colleagues, at the Monarch Tavern, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1. Here’s a jpeg of the invite (left).

There were many, moving tributes from Swells’s friends and colleagues at the Monarch that night, including Atilla the Stockbroker and photographer Kevin Cummins, who told (via Quantick) how he’d flown to Miami to do the pictures on an interview with the lead singer of Deicide, but also to hire the car as Swells couldn’t drive. Cummins’ description of the ensuing road trip included, hilariously, the arsenal of imaginary heavy weapons — machine guns, bazookas and grenades — that Swells would fire in the direction of neighbouring cars at every stop light they hit during the 600 mile round trip.

I’ve scanned in the scribbled notes I used for those events below. At the Monarch I didn’t read from Satan! Satan! Satan!, my novel for ATTACK! Books, which Swells once gleefully described as ‘the worst-researched music book ever – OFFICIAL!’, but from a gloriously gratuitous motorway pile-up rant on p.38 of Swells’s own Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty. It’s a typical Swells piece, complete with jibes at everyone from New Labour to Loaded magazine and jingly-jangly indy bands. In that context it felt appropriate to hear Swells’s words spoken aloud — even though I had to apologise for reading his blistering prose at 33 and 1/3 rather than the original 45 RPM. My excuse was that I took breaths.

Actually, this was when I met Malcolm Bennett. At the Monarch. He came and introduced himself after I’d come off stage. It turned out that back when Swells had been raving about BRUTE! to me, he’d sent Mally Road Rage! and his manuscript copy of the opening chapter of my novel CHARLIEUNCLENORFOLKTANGO. It was remembering Swells’s enthusiasm and the prospect of doing a gig with Mally last year that made me look again at CHARLIEUNCLE… (see posts here, here and here). The novel has been out of print for a decade, so I’d stopped including it in any of my reading gigs.

Until now.

It is a measure of the very high regard in which Swells was held that when he was setting up ATTACK! he was granted access to the very highest echelons of the UK publishing industry to present his vision for ‘a NEW literature — writing that apes, matches, parodies and supercedes the flickeringly fast 900 MPH ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK! velocity of early 21st century popular culture at its most mEnTaL!’

It would have been great to have been a fly on the wall as Swells preached the destruction of what he called the ‘self-perpetuating ponce-mafia oligarchy of effete bourgeois wankers who run the “literary scene”‘, to those self-same chief executives and publishing industry grandees.

He was calling for, ‘rock stars who think they’re writers,’ and promising that ATTACK! would, ‘make supernovas of […] stuttering, wild-eyed, slack-jawed, drooling idiot-geek geniuses,’ but didn’t get very far. Or so it seemed at the time.

But looking now at the ghosted, celebrity garbage by a legion of slack-jawed idiots that has dominated publishing for the past decade, I think maybe some of them were listening after all.

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Malcolm Bennett, Melissa Mann and Tony White

The Gladstone Arms, Lant Street, London SE1.

Wednesday 25 May 2011, 19:00 – 22:30 — Admission free.

New feature – short story bibliography

I’ve added a new feature/page to the blog: a short story bibliography (click here or find it via the navigation bar above). The list begins with a story called ‘Title Track’ from 1994, and runs to what at time of writing is my most recent short, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, which was published a month or so ago. This bibliography is very much a work in progress and it will be tweaked and updated as needed. I’ve added a brief explanatory note (or list of excuses):

…basic bibliographical information about forty-odd editions of I think twenty-seven short stories published since 1994 […] in roughly chronological order. It does not yet include ISBNs (where these exist), links to publishers’ websites or places where the stories can be purchased, watched or listened to, nor (quite) every online or print edition of some stories. [Where] I can’t lay my hands on a particular physical edition I have been unable to provide page numbers. Asterisks denote that to the best of my knowledge a particular story or edition is definitely out of print.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but the information was so dispersed, the stories published in such varying editions and formats by numerous publishers, art galleries and museums, magazines and journals etc., that it has taken much longer than I thought to get to this stage.

More info as I find it…

There’s a place called London SW14

I went out to buy coffee this morning and found this, propped up against a wall in the Barnes/Mortlake area:

Initially I wondered if it might be a piece of folk art (a relic from a former community centre perhaps, or the conscious work of some Blackheart Man here in White Hart Lane), but while I was photographing it I had a short conversation with the person who lived there and they told me that the map had been a prop for some animation sequences in the 2010 feature film Africa United. But actually what it made me think of was that great Junior Byles song for Lee Perry, ‘A Place Called Africa’, which is featured in numerous reggae compilations including volume 3 of Trojan’s great old Creation Rockers series. The song is also very easy to find online, as is the version featuring toasting from Winston Prince, a.k.a. Dr Alimantado.

Auto-destructive Arts Policy #2 – Metzgervaizeymashup

I was surprised and honoured — and in the event, not a little moved — to be asked to speak at the 85th birthday celebration of the artist Gustav Metzger, which I attended in London recently.

Among the many other friends and colleagues who had gathered to celebrate this important day were Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson of London Fieldworks, Alastair Brotchie of Atlas Press, Alan Sutcliffe of the pioneering Computer Arts Society, composer Kaffe Matthews, The Arts Catalyst curator (and Performance Magazine founder) Rob La Frenais, Andrew Wilson, Curator of Modern & Contemporary British Art at Tate, Ingrid Swenson of Peer, and my former Arts Council colleague Bronac Ferran.

Following a short and eloquent speech (reminding us of absent friends) and toast by Andrew Wilson, it seemed apt that I should read an excerpt from my new short story, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, which is dedicated to Gustav Metzger. The title refers of course to Metzger’s 1st and 2nd Manifestos: Auto Destructive Art, 1959, and Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art, 1960.

As discussed in the previous post, this story was written partly to test the satirical potential of applying the ‘cut-up technique’ to two source texts: Metzger’s own 1974 call for an ‘art strike’ and the ‘Creative Ecologies’ speech made at the State of the Arts conference in February 2011 by the Right Honourable Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries. I had wondered what kind of new text might be created by remixing these two originals, and whether that new text might reflect back critically on both sources as well as forming the basis of some sort of critical response to the work of artists Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull.

As well as being, you know, a good story… You can judge that for yourself, as the full text of ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ is reproduced in the previous post, but the cut-up sequence at the centre of the story ends with a couple of sentences that I found much more difficult to read aloud, in public, than I had expected. The words really caught in my throat:

The government is passionately committed to smothering art and the denial of labour is our chief weapon. To bring down the art system it is necessary that people who once practised art never regain their creative spirit; to eradicate it in every corner of the country.

‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ was commissioned by the Russian Club Gallery and published on 30 March 2011 to accompany the current exhibition by Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull, which runs until 7 May. The story is published as an A3 folded pamphlet which is available free to gallery visitors while stocks last.

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Rupert Ackroyd / Alison Turnbull, Russian Club Gallery, 340-344 Kingsland Road, London E8 until 7 May. Opening times: Tuesday to Saturday, midday to 5pm.

A barricade in all but name

The Russian Club Gallery just published my new short story, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, as a folded A3 pamphlet to accompany the exhibition/project by Rupert Ackroyd and Alison Turnbull, which opened on 30 March. The pamphlet is free and is available from the gallery until the show closes on 7 May, or while stocks last. I am reproducing the full text of my story below, but of course the pamphlet is the real thing. I’ve given away the few spare copies that I had, so I would recommend getting to the Russian Club asap to see the great show by Rupert and Alison and to obtain your free copy.

I’ve worked with Alison Turnbull before, contributing a short work of fiction to her artist’s book Spring Snow: A Translation, and publishing her Black Borders: 1994 – 2006 on Piece of Paper Press. I wrote a little about Spring Snow here. The opportunity to write another piece of fiction in relation to Alison’s work seemed too good to miss, so I visited both Rupert Ackroyd’s and her studios on 10 February 2011 to discuss the collaborative project that they were making for the Russian Club show. This was the day of the State of the Arts conference, which was taking place at the RSA on the Strand and which I’d been following on Twitter. Visiting the Russian Club gallery at the end of the day, I noticed what looked like a page of yellowing newsprint among some rubbish — faded prints, cardboard backings and mountings — that had been extracted from junk shop picture frames by the artist and Russian Club gallery director Matt Golden. Looking more closely I discovered that it was an original news broadside published by the Daily Express during the General Strike on 12 May 1926. At the bottom right of the page is a story bearing the headline ‘False News’:

Three men have each been sentenced to 21 days’ hard labour for selling a leaflet called “The Fulham Worker” which stated that the Welsh Guards had been confined to barracks for intimidation.

‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’ is dedicated to the artist Gustav Metzger and at the heart of the story – as noted also in the story – is a short text produced for satirical purposes by cutting-up his statement, ‘Art Strike 1977-1980′, in Art in Society / Society into Art: Seven German Artists (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974) and Ed Vaizey’s speech at the RSA, ‘The Creative Ecology – Speech at State of the Arts’ (London: DCMS, 2011). The story’s title is of course after Gustav Metzger’s 1st Manifesto: Auto Destructive Art, (single printed sheet) London: the artist, 1959, etc

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Auto-destructive Arts Policy

For Gustav Metzger

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Three men and a woman have appeared at Westminster Magistrates Court, Horseferry Road, London, charged under the new legislation with Conspiracy to Exhibit and for distributing a satirical broadside entitled Auto-destructive Arts Policy . This publication includes a text that one of the accused, the author Tony White, allegedly produced by ‘cutting-up’ and ‘re-mixing’ (‘for satirical purposes’, he claims) artist Gustav Metzger’s 1974 call for an ‘Art Strike’ with a speech made at the State of the Arts Conference at the RSA London on 10th February 2011 by the Right Honourable Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries.

By such ‘literary’ contrivance was the Minister made to appear to have said that he wanted, ‘to make a case for the use of art for direct social change.’ (Our italics.)

An editorial standfirst asks whether Vaizey and Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt might not themselves yet succeed where Metzger failed, by actually creating the ‘years without art’.

Tony White’s disputed text continues:

The art world uses art to confuse and divert us. The only way through this horrifying reality is to face the fact that the arts are currently deployed against the interests of the state. That art, the voluntary arts and the amateur arts should be in the service of revolution against the state and capitalism is unsatisfactory. Nevertheless much of the debate about the arts focuses on fighting the system.

Artists can use the same methods of production and distribution as me to talk about lack of money, but I call for a lack of art, for years without art, a period of three years – 2011 to 2014 – when artists will not work, sell work, or permit work to be supported by grant funding. It’s worth reminding people – and some still seem oblivious to this fact – that last year’s settlement took place against the background of the publicity machinery of the art world. Art pretends that it would have been possible for the dealer/museum/publicity complex to continue juggling artists, finance, works and patronage systems.

My view is that our cup is still plentiful but we should refuse collaboration with any part of the art world. National and local government is at best disingenuous: the years without art will see the collapse of many local libraries, local theatres and theatre companies or local arts centres, dance companies as well as diverse arts events and organisations. Institutions handling contemporary art will be severely hit and will have to reduce their staff. Magazines will fold.

Yet the ramifications of inaction would be tough. The last thing a Whitehall Minister needs is the arts demanding changes to every decision they disagree with. I believe that three years is the minimum period required to cripple the Arts Council and create difficulties for artists. Artists should be sufficiently wealthy to live on their own capital. It will be necessary to prevent not just the local library or the local theatre or the local arts centre from exhibiting and publicising art in the future but the entire community. The government is passionately committed to smothering art and the denial of labour is our chief weapon. To bring down the art system it is necessary that people who once practised art never regain their creative spirit; to eradicate it in every corner of the country.

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The accused are (in alphabetical order): Rupert Ackroyd, a sculptor working from Myddleton Square, Islington; Matt Golden, Gallery Director of the Russian Club Gallery, named after a snooker club that previously occupied the premises on Kingsland Road in London’s East End; Alison Turnbull, a highly-regarded painter latterly of Kentish Town but born Bogotá, Colombia, and; the above-named Tony White, best known for penning a novel set in the contemporary East End but now living in south west London.

Ghoulish Ackroyd – a church crypt is his studio – has exhibited widely in recent years. A typical ‘work’ might be his ‘Large Assemblage’ (2010) which comprised a replica Victorian Gothic church door stood horizontally against a transparent glass or perspex column filled with coffee beans. A hollowed-out, fake oak beam contained a number of cardboard boxes themselves containing multiple ‘stash tins’ – standard tobacco tins painted black and adorned with glittery stickers bearing black and white likenesses of late folk-rock legend Nick Drake, the whole then distressed as by some mechanical sander. This apparent drug-culture reference prompted one elderly gallery visitor to remark, ‘My 59 year old son with a chain of “head shops” and a couple of stalls at Camden Market could have done that.’

Turnbull too, has exhibited extensively in the UK and around the world, most recently at Matt’s Gallery, Copperfield Road, where her installation, Observatory (2010) took as its starting point the ground plans of one such astronomical edifice built by Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States.

Chief Crown Prosecutor Astbury asked that twenty pages of notes produced by White during apparent ‘studio visits’ to premises rented by Ackroyd and Turnbull respectively be considered for disclosure. These notes, she claimed, recorded heavily coded conversations – also held on Thursday 10 February 2011 – in which Ackroyd talks for example of ‘English vernacular’, of craft, architecture and the ‘heavy, conservative nature of the built world’. He describes journeyman carpenters, air-dried European oak and mortice and tenon joints. Turnbull also speaks of domestic vernaculars; particularly those found in 1960s wallpapers. She talks of lozenge motifs and counterintuitive perceptions of size such as might be created by distance or proximity. White questions whether this might produce a kind of domestic ‘dazzle’. Turnbull repeatedly mentions the Japanese architectural concept of kirei sabi or ‘gorgeous humbleness’.

The Crown Prosecution Service suggested such statements were far from the innocent discussions of art that the accused claim, and attempted to show that the so-called ‘collaborative artwork’ produced by Ackroyd and Turnbull to Golden’s commission is in fact a barricade in all but name. Documents were shown to the court in which art historian Dr Ed Krčma specifically uses the language of class struggle when describing Turnbull’s work as, ‘the result of disciplined labour.’ (Our italics.) He talks of her using ‘…the tools of technical draftsmanship,’ of her ceding to, ‘the painting’s demands,’ through, ‘the jostle and poise of colours [and] incident,’ before concluding that, ‘This disciplined aesthetic constitutes an effective barrier to […] vague poetics.’

The CPS pointed out the current proliferation in the art world of ‘agit-prop’ ‘installations’ comprising sit-ins, workshops and teach-ins, as well as materials including barrels, chains, carts, paving slabs, stones, cobbles, bricks, planks, scaffolding, earth, sandbags, tables, doors, Molotov cocktails, gas masks, motorcycle helmets, fireworks, signs, posters, placards and sundry items that might be instantly repurposed to create a protest or to produce an impromptu barrier to blockade for example a street or public square, or to defend such a barricade.

Expert witness Professor Mark Traugott of the University of California Santa Cruz and author of a new book The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press) spoke of a ‘barricade consciousness’ when called to explain his ‘preoccupation’. Citing historian and political scientist Charles Tilly, Traugott described a ‘repertoire of collective action’: the spectrum of contemporary approaches, methods and tactics available to protesters.

Structures that were not constructed and defended by civilian insurgents, although perhaps identical in all other respects, are considered here only as a point of contrast with the revolutionary barricade proper. Even one and the same structure, built by insurgents but captured and turned to account by a military force attempting to quell their rebellion, will, from the moment it changes hands, cease to be treated as a barricade under the definition adopted in this study.

In her concluding remarks, Chief Crown Prosecutor Astbury questioned whether given the volatile social and economic situation, all artworks might not be seen as insurrectionary: ‘Might we not,’ she asked the Court, ‘add to Tilly’s “repertoire of collective action” the massive civil disobedience of making things?’

All four were released on bail and will appear at Southwark Crown Court for a plea and case management hearing on 7th May. Father of one Golden was ordered that the Russian Club Gallery premises should remain open to the public until then, from Tuesday to Saturday each week, midday to 5pm.

Daily Express, Wednesday 30 March 2011

© Tony White, 2011
Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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Pioneers in Art and Science: Metzger, (DVD) dir. Ken McMullen, published London: Arts Council England, 2005. Available from Concorde Media.

Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

Alison Turnbull, Spring Snow: A Translation, London: Book Works, 2002.

Tony White, ‘Auto-destructive Arts Policy’, in Rupert Ackroyd/Alison Turnbull, London: Russian Club, 2011. Available free from the Russian Club Gallery, 340-344 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DA.

Free MP3 of A Porky Prime Cut live at the NPG

Thanks to Gabriel Thorp at the National Portrait Gallery, London, who grabbed a digital recording off the desk during my Dirty Literature gig with Tim Etchells on 18 March 2011.

Creative Commons Licence
A Porky Prime Cut © Tony White, 2011; Music © Simon Edwards, 2011. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Feel free to extract the MP3 from this player (e.g. using the Firefox add-on ‘Download Helper’) if you prefer to listen using your own MP3 software or device.

Electra who put the event together will be putting the recording of the whole gig on their site very soon. Regular readers will know that I’ve been very excited to work with bassist Simon Edwards on this, so I wanted to make the live recording of ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ with Simon’s funk bass accompaniment available as a standalone piece of audio in its own right too. This is also a chance to test out the WordPress audio player for the first time, so as ever feedback is welcome.

You can download ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ as a free ebook courtesy of James Bridle’s excellent Artists’ eBooks site. We’re also hoping to put this recording on to the EPUB file as an extra.

I hope you enjoy it.

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Acknowledgements: ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ by Tony White is part of Digital Transformations, an arts project using photography, film, sound, mapping, creative writing, web design and exhibition to raise the profile of the communities of Kinson, Townsend and West Howe in Bournemouth. Digital Transformations is coordinated and curated by SCAN with Bournemouth Libraries and Arts, and Bournemouth Adult Learning. It is funded and supported by The Learning Revolution Transformation Fund, Bournemouth Borough Council, SCAN, Bournemouth University, and The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE). The collaboration with Simon Edwards was supported by Electra as part of their Dirty Literature programme for the National Portrait Gallery, London.

A Porky Prime Cut


Last week I gave a reading from a new short story entitled ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ at the National Portrait Gallery London, with live musical accompaniment from bass player Simon Edwards. Twitter friend @Alexandra_Wall posted this excellent photo of the gig on Twitpic. Thanks Alex.

It was a very enjoyable evening and I shared the bill with old friend Tim Etchells. All of this was for the launch of Electra’s exciting new Dirty Literature series of talks and readings that runs through until June. Tim read a lovely new piece which is quite hard to describe, but felt like a kind of sit-com in fragmented monologue form that was culled (or collaged) particularly from a series of increasingly unhinged internal memos from an ever smaller group of constables who guarded the Gallery in the early years of the 20th century. There is a plan to get audio and video of the event online, so when it’s up I’ll post a link to Tim’s piece. At present it doesn’t exist as a published text, and I’m not sure if Tim has plans to perform it again, so do have a look at the video when it’s up.

Tim and I have known each other for quite a while now. We met in the late 1980s when I was at art school in Sheffield where Tim’s company Forced Entertainment are based. Here is the Streetview photo of the former Sheffield art school premises on Psalter Lane. The Googlemaps car snapped it just before the college was closed down – hence the banner above the door. I have very happy memories of being at Psalter Lane, so the thought that these buildings have all now been knocked down makes me feel slightly bereft. However, it is still possible to get an arts education in Sheffield. The courses have survived it’s just that they’ve moved out of these mainly purpose-built studio buildings down to other Sheffield Hallam University buildings in the city centre. I was there quite recently. It was good to be back.

Tim was one of the first few people that I invited to do something for Piece of Paper Press when I started the imprint in 1994. He wrote the short story ‘About Lisa: a small bad story in twelve good parts’ in response to the constraints of the format and we published it in the usual edition of 150 in 1995. Here is a slightly murky scan of the front cover!

Tim has blogged about that period in the introduction to a new German language, Swiss edition of his collection Endland Stories, which sadly is out of print in English.

My story for the NPG gig, ‘A Porky Prime Cut’, was commissioned by digital arts agency SCAN in Bournemouth as part of their Digital Transformations project. I first blogged about the project here around a year ago, when I met the two other artists involved, Simon Yuill and Kevin Carter. Then I blogged some more here, here, here, here and here! You may gather that it was a very generative project :-)

The story is kind of a culmination and a condensation of all of that research.

And it was particularly generative not least because it made me confront my own biography even while writing a short story set in and around a town I hardly knew. Or two towns: Bournemouth and Poole. Writing ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ made me look again at some of my own formative experiences, in particular those moments where as a teenager perhaps you might discover that you have some kind of creative agency. All of which made me remember just how contingent my own art education really was.

So it felt quite special having the chance – thanks to Electra and the NPG – to read the story as a 20-minute standalone piece with live music from Simon Edwards in the form of his fantastic 85 bpm funk bass accompaniment. This really is something that both Simon and I are hoping to do again.

I’m also hoping that we can add the MP3 of the performance on to the ebook which you can download for free from James Bridle’s wonderful Artists’ eBooks.

The ebook includes beautiful colour photographs of Turbary Common taken by Bournemouth photographer Diane Humphries. Diane also took this photo of me on my first visit to Turbary Common, one cold, wet and misty March morning a year or so ago. At some point soon ‘A Porky Prime Cut’ will also I think be available via Bournemouth Libraries, both in ebook form and as a special print edition on Piece of Paper Press. I’m hoping there will be an event or two down there, too. I’m looking forward to that very much.

Dirty work, ‘Slang Truth’, Errata

1) Dirty Work

Lots of work behind the scenes in the past week for the inaugural Dirty Literature event that I’m doing with writer Tim Etchells at the National Portrait Gallery on 17 March. I’ve been rehearsing with musician Simon Edwards, who will be providing live musical accompaniment to one of the pieces I’m reading. I’m very excited about this, and I’m hoping we’ll get a good recording of the piece on the night, too, which we can make available after the event.

The producers, Electra, sent through a j-peg of one of the slides I’m planning to use during my reading (see left). It is a reversed-out version of my freehand drawing after the Throbbing Gristle flash design that I’ve mentioned in a previous post. I’m planning to use analogue technology in the shape of some Kodak Carousel projectors that are permanently installed in the National Portrait Gallery’s theatre. We’re testing it all out on Wednesday.

Tim and I last shared a bill at The Story 2010, Matt Locke’s annual conference about contemporary story telling across media and platforms (which just had its 2011 outing). Planning my reading for Dirty Literature I had wanted to respond to the location of the National Portrait Gallery at the southern end of Charing Cross Road, so was looking for creative commons licensed images of the Poll Tax Riots that took place in and around Trafalgar Square 21 years ago in March 1991. I found a couple of great images online — scans of distressed old photographic prints (see right), scratched and covered in finger prints — and funnily enough it turned out they had been taken, all those years ago, by Russell Davies who was the MC at The Story 2010. Russell has generously granted us permission to use them.

The blurb for our event just went to press in a publication that Electra and the National Portrait Gallery are producing to publicise and document the series. Here’s the latest version of what I’ll be doing:

Responding to the ‘Poll Tax riots’ and recent protests in Trafalgar Square, White will read from Charlieunclenorfolktango, his satirical 1999 novel about an alienated police force, before being joined by musician Simon Edwards to preview a new short story commissioned by digital arts agency SCAN for their Digital Transformations project.

The Dirty Literature series at the National Portrait Gallery kicks off with Tim Etchells and I on 17 March at 7.30PM. As noted previously, the event is free, but booking is essential.

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2) Foxy-T in the Indy

Last Friday the Independent published a feature article by their Deputy Literary Editor Arifa Akbar in their weekly Arts & Books supplement entitled (in the print version) ‘Stories from the Sounds of the Streets’, which includes brief interviews with myself and others about our own work and/or about ‘the vernacular tradition in literary fiction.’

I very much enjoyed chatting with Arifa about all this. A couple of factual errors* about Foxy-T crept in to her final copy, but I guess that is par for the course, and I am amazed and delighted that Foxy-T continues to be written about nearly eight years after publication: most novels having (I’m paraphrasing a long-lost note from Iain Sinclair) ‘the shelf-life of a fruit fly.’

The article is framed by questions of authenticity:

slang narratives continue to raise debate over what is seen, and sometimes claimed, as a more authentic mode of storytelling

The double-page spread of the print version is punctuated with pullquotes from writers Stephen Kelman (‘I felt from the beginning his voice was authentic…’) and Gautam Malkani (‘…I thought wow. It is authentic, but invented authenticity’).

I’m not sure that ‘authenticity’ is the issue, but it reminded me of the line scrawled on the cover of The Fall‘s 1982 LP Room to Live: ‘Undilutable Slang Truth!’

Sarfraz Manzoor writing about Foxy-T and Londonstani in a piece following the publication of Malkani’s novel a few years ago asked whether an unrealistic expectation of authenticity is placed upon writers from Black and Minority Ethnic groups. Maybe so. I think ‘authenticity’ is also used as a kind of critical shorthand that masks more complex questions of power, identity, class, narrative, the reading experience, etc etc. For me writing Foxy-T at the turn of the century, it was precisely the inauthenticity of Bangladeshi rude boys calling each other ‘rasta’ — an observable/audible rupture with the necessary identity politics of Black British language in the second half of the 20th century — that made the novel possible; that the novel set out — amongst other things — to explore.

After the usual ‘street talk scare stories‘ (which I’ve discussed here), Akbar’s wide-ranging and broadly positive article is very welcome. I was and am thrilled to see that Foxy-T is also included in a round-up of ‘The best in “slang” fiction’  alongside how late it was how late, A Clockwork Orange and Trainspotting. Great!

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3) Errata

*One of the small (but to me, glaring) errors in The Independent article states that Foxy-T was ‘published a year before [Monica] Ali’s Brick Lane and […] was buried beneath the critical acclaim of her book.’ Ouch! Actually, Faber and Faber published my novel one month after Ali’s, but Foxy-T continues to receive plenty of its own ‘critical acclaim’, including recently here in the Indy itself or in this Browser interview with the esteemed Great Hedge of India author Roy Moxham. More press elsewhere on this site, of course.

FYI, the Radio 4 Today Programme interview about Foxy-T that is mentioned in the article is weirdly absent from Today‘s otherwise more or less exhaustive ‘listen again’ archive, so I put it on Youtube: