Orgreave and Other Battles - interview with Jeremy Deller

[this is an interview I did with artist Jeremy Deller in July 2010, still fresh to the Islands, for my planned book with interviews with British thinkers, philosophers, artists, activists about the meaning and possibility of a revolution today. amongst other interviewed are: Mark Fisher, David Crowley, Owen Hatherley, Dominic Fox, Jon Wozencroft, Isaac Julien, Ulrike Ottinger, John Roberts, Douglas Crimp, to name a few.

Still unfinished, there may be a new spur to finally do it. The yesterday's event of Margaret Thatcher's death gave me the impulse to publish this interview on the blog. Miner's strike and Orgreave remain a wound on the UK's working class. So often it occurred to me that many who were interested in Jeremy's work (crowned last year with a big retrospective in Hayward Gallery, Joy in People), may not necessarily share his politics or politics of the miners.

Mind you, this was made just after the Tories have been elected, and doesn't contain any of the atrocities of the last 3 years, only their predictions.

Let it prompt my work on this book (when I finish the previosu one). Hopefully, we'll see it published this or next year. If you like it, please share it and cheer me on to finish the book).

ORGREAVE AND OTHER BATTLES

INTERVIEW WITH JEREMY DELLER

25/07/10
with thanks to Owen Hatherley, who helped with transcription

AGATA PYZIK: I wrote to you for the first time when there was still a Labour government four or five months ago, and I thought that would be a good start. My partner lives here, and I've been visiting for seven months...

JEREMY DELLER: So you know a bit about the politics.

Yes, or everything I can. People are terrified, and it's funny, though it sounds like a simplification, but your best known work, on the Battle of Orgreave, considered the disaster of the previous Tory government, and we're having another one, in fairly different circumstances not only politically but as far as the development of capitalism goes, but I thought – there will be some kind of...the amounts of cuts that are going to be introduced...

...are going to be bad. But I think everyone knows it's going to be bad. Because earlier nobody knew what was coming. All the arts organisations should be worried, everyone should be worried – there'll be cuts from 25-40%, more or less. So we'll see. But they seem to be enjoying it.

Who seems to be enjoying it?

The government. So it could lead to a social breakdown, some sort of breakdown of our social fabric, of society. There could be more riots, a repeat of 1981.

Do you think a kind of historical repetition is possible?

Yeah, I think it always is. It's really about human behaviour rather than history. So I think it's...we'll see. If they do what they say they're going to do and things happen, then there could be a lot of trouble ahead. A lot, I imagine. Though they don't seem to be worried about this.

So I started with the Battle of Orgreave, which is nine years old now -

Yes, 2001.

Which has become some kind of...one of the favoured examples in terms of participatory art, for instance in Clare Bishop's text in Artforum a couple of years ago, where she wrote about you, Artur Zmijewski and a few others, as a kind of 'delegation', delegating other people to make your work or to interact, which then becomes your work. On the other hand, re-enactment is fairly present in domains that have nothing to do with art. We have a lot of historical re-enactments in Poland, especially under the right-wing government. This year we had the re-enactment of a 600 year old battle with the Germans, and the Warsaw Uprising is one of the favourite themes – battles in the streets of Warsaw that get re-enacted.

The Jewish uprising?

No, the Warsaw uprising of 1944.

That's interesting, I didn't know about that.

So Artur Zmijewski, who is frequently juxtaposed with you and others working in this area has been shooting this cycle called 'Democracies' for the last two years. You're familiar with it?

Mmm.

...which is filming direct participation in 'democracy'.

It sounds really good.

I could send it to you. It's his testing the very basic possibility of participating in democracy.

But it's documentation.

Documentation plus editing of some kind. But I'm mentioning it in the context of the Battle of Orgreave, which is something completely different, though you have real people, real policemen and real miners, as well as people who specialise in re-enactments. So my question is – what is the strategy behind it, given that the poignancy of the Miners' Strike has been a trauma ever since, something that people put almost on the same level as the Second World War, a myth of the working class – what was the strategy behind staging it like this?

Why did I do it, you mean? I did it because I remember seeing it on TV when I was a child, or a young man, a teenager, so I wanted to do it as an investigation. Also there's a sense of absurdity to it, and ridiculousness, and a humour which doesn't get picked up on much. To re-stage a riot - it's almost impossible, by definition. And too use the re-enactment societies, who are huge in Britain, where it's not really a nationalistic thing, because they re-enact battles from all over the world, but also ones where the British lost, often. So it's...I don't see it as too nationalistic, but I wanted to engage those people on something, and work with them on a political re-enactment. A political battle, not something that happened a hundred or more years ago, but something very very recent, or too recent to re-enact. Too soon for them. For them it was very unusual to do this. So there was a number of reasons to do this, really. Personal, and then about history, British history, because re-enactors look at history in a very specific way. I wanted them to look at British history in a different way, in a rough way. In a way they don't really understand, maybe, in the sense that they don't see the Miners' Strike as a war, as a Civil War. I was presenting it as a form of warfare. So they had to think of it as part of a war. And also, they were meeting people who had been part of the strike, which you can't do with any other war, really, apart maybe from the Second World War, because they're all dead. So they've got to meet and mingle with veterans of a war, of a campaign. I was interested in that. You can see that in the film – they mix or don't mix, or maybe they get a little bit scared. Mainly it was about investigating a moment of history, on a grand scale. Investigating it physically rather than with a text, or film. Rather than just looking at an archive, actually doing it as a reconstruction as a form of investigation.

So it was an attempt to raise or create a political consciousness in people living in 2001?

Yeah, although people who live there don't need to re-live it. It was really for other people, because they know about it already, they live with it. It was for the actors really, and then the general public.

What about the miners who participate? Whenever there are anniversaries of Auschwitz, the survivors sometimes wear again the stripes. There's this very interesting aspect of trauma or reversing the trauma...

...but also of pride, a sense of pride, for the miners, and if you're an Auschwitz survivor there's a shame in that you survived, or a shame or whatever. For the miners...yes, they didn't really wear old clothes, they just wore their normal clothes. Everyone does, really. We didn't go for re-enactment in those terms, but we did try and make it a piece of performance art, like a massive performance art piece. But going back to your question. Yes, the miners are always brought up, and as the years go on, it's looked at differently. The anniversary was more sympathetic to them. Initially, there were no anniversaries until 2004, so we did it in 2001, and before that there hadn't been anniversaries, or any interest in it, because it was too difficult to talk about.

What was the impact on the participants?

Some had a really good time, some were upset by it – the miners, I'm talking about. It was a range, a variety, but what I think they enjoyed most was meeting all their friends, everyone came back together – about 200 guys came back together, and they could talk, they could socialise, which was really important.

What about the potential that...this is in a way the sense of re-enactment, but since it was staged, it raised again those emotions, but it couldn't have a political impact in a way.

No.

So there is a certain futility to it.

Yeah, of course, and an absurdity to it as well. The absurdity of remaking a riot.

But what was the miners' reaction, weren't they disappointed?

No, they understood it. They weren't expecting a new revolution because of a re-enactment, they weren't expecting the world to change because they were doing that. They're realistic people. If anything, it was the re-enactors who were expecting something to happen during the re-enactment, who thought it would start a massive real riot and then a battle and then a revolution or something. So the miners were just totally pragmatic about it. They weren't expecting public policy to change or the mines to re-open at the end of it.

The boundary, if there is any, between art or what have you arises – did you experience criticism on that level, that this thing promises much more than it's able to give?

No, or if it did I didn't hear it. No. I wasn't setting out to change the world. It wasn't promising anything, there was no promise. It was an artwork.

You use the word 'performance', and obviously there's discussions about what performance is, whether it can be reproduced. For you what's the essence of performance as such?

That's a big question. In that piece in particular? It's a public event, people acting out roles, or former roles. It's rehearsed, it has a script – and it has an audience, and that's what a performance is really, because a film hasn't got an audience. There is no audience when it's being made. So the role of the audience is important. But I'm improvising really. To be honest - I don't really think about these things. I don't think very much about my work, and I try not to, and let other people do it.

But on the other hand something like this re-enactment is a very consciously political work.

Of course it is. It's very pointed. But what I'm saying is that doesn't mean I think about it too much in retrospect, or even at the time – I have an idea, and think let's do this idea. I don't think of the theory, or dissect it too much, because if you dissect ideas you end up thinking 'that's a terrible idea'. This won't work, that won't work. So I try not to. But it was a consciously political work, and made at a time in which the art world was not particularly interested in politics, where the mainstream artworld was more interested in hanging out than making political artworks.

When for the first time did you think you wanted to make art that engaged other people, not just the artworld?

I think that in terms of making art that works with people, which is I think what you mean,

Yes, working with people, that is collaborating, that is delegation...

1996. Because I did a project with a brass band. It happened in 1997, but it began in '96. I realised I enjoyed doing it and that I didn't have to make objects anymore, but I could just work with people. I wouldn't have to make an object, but it was a thing.

I'm thinking about social sculpture, and Beuys...

Yes, but I wasn't thinking about that.

Whenever we do something that engages people it engages communities, and this is something that your work is about.

It can be, yeah. The brass bands are people who make music within communities, so there is that. But I do lots of other things as well, because if that's all you did then you become a certain kind of artist, especially in Britain, where everyone has to work with communities, you are asked 'can you work with these kinds of people', these people of this area...so with the Olympics there's all this art made about the people who live in the area, all of that.

In the Lea Valley. So is that what you're doing now?

Of course not – I just want to do my own thing. I don't want to be asked and dropped into a town or a school and think 'these are the people I have to make art with'. I'm not interested in that. So no.

How did you get interested in fandom communities? For instance with the Manic Street Preachers?

Well, I liked them, I wasn't a 'fan' in those terms. I liked Depeche. You probably like them, being Polish!

Well yes...I can't remember whether you included Polish fandom.

No, sadly. If we made the film again we'd make it about the Eastern Bloc, really. Russia. Rather than the US and the world. There's a really interesting US-Russia connection with the band, they were big in both countries during the Cold War.

I must get back to fandom communities, because they're transcending communities. Brass bands are a group of people who all live in the same town, Manics fans are living in the different cities of Great Britain. But I would prefer to discuss that project now, 'The Uses of Literacy'.

That was the same year as the brass band performance, that happened within four days of the brass band performance.

I just happen to live with an ex-massive fan, so I know...

Do you have the book?

No...

It's really nice, you should give it to the person you live with. It's cheap!

I probably will. Well, two things. It's funny for me, because it shaped him in those seminal years...

15, 16...

Yeah, maybe even younger. This plus the Folk Archives.

Yes, because they're the same thing, they're both forms of contemporary folk art. Well not this, but what we did with the exhibition, and folk art was about traditional and contemporary folk art, because folk art in Britain hasn't been looked at in a good way, as being stupid.

There is this distinction, that Hanns Eisler made between folk art and mass art. This is mass art, but folk art is in a way nostalgic, yearning for the past, but this is not. Depeche Mode called one of their albums Music for the Masses.

Yes, but I think the fan response is a kind of folk art. This is mass art, it's mass-produced culture; but when someone produces something about the band, that's makes a drawing, this is folk culture. That's what I believe. Because folk art isn't about yearning for the past. It can be, it can be about ancient ritual and tradition, but then so many things aren't. And who's to say that those drawings of pop stars aren't yearning for something? They're also about the past or about nostalgia.

I'm not saying that nostalgia's bad.

That's why we make folk art, and why we make folk art contemporary as well. Contemporary folk art which isn't about the past, but which is modern. Traditionally folk art has often been very political, about the moment – about the strike, about the event that happened, the riot, or whatever. So we included a lot of material like that, trade union banners and so on. So I don't agree with that definition. But then I agree mass culture is not folk art, obviously.

But forget about the definition – I thought that was brilliant, that you gathered all this work. A friend of mine said once that the writings on the walls of loos...

I did a book on that once. A book of poetry from toilet walls, in 1994.

If we take this definition of art as something that is made of...that is modern and fresh, to be honest, something disinterested, made out of free will, this modernist idea – so this is it, art created by fans, and poetry on the loo...

Yes, it's equivalent. And also it's not...you don't see it very much on the whole. Maybe now with the internet you can see it more, but mostly it was invisible. So I wanted to make the invisible visible, really. Art made by fans – you don't get to see that. Unless you get sent it, if you're a member of the band – but otherwise it's private. I wanted to make it public.

How did you start to gather this?

It was pre-internet, so I gave out pieces of paper to fans, at a queue for a concert, in London. And I put an ad out in Melody Maker, or NME, I can't remember, and then people sent me things. It's very simple. We kept in touch, and I did this show, and now it's owned by the Arts Council. It gets shown round the world or whatever or in Britain, and it's part of a national collection, which I'm really happy about.

So did it come from the idea that pop music is the modern form of folk art.

Popular art. I like music, and I enjoy seeing people's devotion to bands. I enjoy that. So it seemed natural. I was interested in the band, and the band's fanbase. It was only meant to be an exhibition for one day, but it worked as an exhibition, so it was repeated – it had its own history after that, which is great. After that I did a few more things about the band. It was very enjoyable doing the exhibition.

The band had a very exceptional appeal, because it wasn't really about the music itself, it was about Richey Edwards.

Those lyrics.

The lyrics, and slogans.

This is the best example, this album is the best example. What's the quotation there? They always had loads of quotations, from history....and on the singles.

There's now a novel about Richey Edwards, Richard by Ben Myers.

Fiction? Is it any good?

It's a first-person narrative by a former music journalist. I was wondering what appealed to you in Richey Edwards' work, because now it seems obvious...

It's not obvious when you're 13. Obviously he wasn't 13. But it's very appealing to young people at a certain age.

I must say that I find it strangely appealing, this in-your-face attitude, and the tragedy behind it...his going to the end in certain things. I'm asking you – why this following, why this band?

Because it was unique. It was at a time in Britain when most bands wanted to be as stupid as possible, as dumb as possible. And they were they exact opposite. About every generation, every decade, there's a band who is intelligent, clever and witty and so on. There wasn't another one. It was the Smiths in the '80s and in the '90s it was this band. In the '70s I don't know. A band which is going against what is popular. Which is what they always did, they were very good at that, especially with this album.

At the peak of Britpop, with the rise of New Labour.

It's such a downer of an album. 'What is this album?'

It's monstrous.

It is, something really unpleasant about it. So I was very happy to do this.

So who was the typical fan?

It's quite easy to guess. Not surprisingly, it was a sixteen year old girl who lived in the countryside or at least not in London, and who didn't have many friends.

It appealed to...

The classic pop fan, who was very intelligent, and read a lot.

Who was working class?

Not necessarily – but definitely not wealthy. It was exactly as I expected, which is a community in itself. But now with the internet it's much easier to really feel part of something. Before it was fanzines, letters, maybe phone calls, but now of course it's something else. So maybe it's about something that has disappeared. Maybe this fan world has disappeared because of the internet or changed into online rather than at home in the bedroom making stuff. I'm not sure.

On the other hand you could still make a film like Posters came from the Walls.

Have you seen it? You're not allowed to see it. The lead singer doesn't like it, and we're never allowed to show it again – even though it was made by Mute. Mute paid for it in its entirety. It's owned by Mute records. It can never be shown because the lead signer has a problem with it – though I suspect it's his wife, who is this crazy woman. He's a bit crazy too. But it'll end up on the internet, so people will see it. At the moment it's on show in Russia, and it's been shown in the UK. Basically we're showing it until they come down on us and tell us not to show it. Because it's stupid not to show it, it's crazy.

What you were able to still depict is a strong community, persisting for years.

In the Depeche film? Yeah, and that was especially in Russia. I thought that was the most amazing story. Making the film was fun, and I'm very happy with it. We had to cut a lot out, but we kept the best stories. But that's like fan adulation to an extreme degree, like no-one has really had since the Beatles. In Russia, the way they talk about the band.

What was the appeal of the band, why do you think they had this emancipatory effect in the Eastern Bloc?

It's to do with timing, how they looked, about the music, about how it looked, how it sounded, about how it's easy to reproduce, you can make copies and copies of that music and because it's very clean it can be copied very easily, so it's also for technical reasons...they looked really butch but kind of gay...they had everything you wanted really. The songs were really short and easy to understand – it was kind of perfect. And they were making their best records at that time, when it was disappearing, when all that change was happening, they were making their best songs. Even though they weren't really aware of it. They don't really know why they're so popular there, they have no idea. They don't really think about it because it doesn't really matter, it's just great to be popular. But it was really something that was adopted. They were adopted by the Eastern Bloc, the people there. And it's very modern sounding as well. It's not decadent rock music, it's a new kind of music.

Maybe it was embodying their idea of liberation at that present moment.

Exactly, those kind of tortured lyrics. It's not dissimilar to the Manics really. It works well with young people, they identify with the lyrics, the content, and the sound had all these minor keys.

What was interesting for you, the transcending again or the sense of community or the lyrical sense? I remember this tremendous guy, the homeless guy from London featured at the very end. Someone told me there's more homeless people in London than in Moscow. I live in Greenwich and I hardly see them. You made him visible, in a way.

There will be more homeless people now, because of this government. Without a doubt, that's one thing I can guarantee, more people will become homeless. When he was homeless, ten years ago or so it was a very serious problem – there was like a city of homeless people in London, at the underpass where the iMax cinema is now, there was hundreds of people living, like a shanty town. It was called Cardboard City. Hundreds of people lived there, it was like something out of Sao Paulo, and that was the result of ten years of those policies in the '80s. It's got better since, it's not as bad as it was, but it'll get worse now. They were moved to hostels, they were given more help, and also it disspiated, because that site was closed, they dispersed around London. But socially things got better in Britain, so they were helped.

I'll come back to the quotation of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, because there's this chapter on how popular culture and popular music are fooling the working class, 'sex in shiny packets'. He's very critical of it.

He was very anti-pop music. He took it too seriously, he was worried in a serious way about popular music, he didn't understand what it was really, because he was too old – he was pre-rock and roll. But the Manics were always interested in America and its effect on Britain, but they were a popular music band who transcended that. This is why I used the term The Uses of Literacy. But also it's an interesting phrase, an interesting four words – because they used literacy, they used books, they used it, they used the act of being literate.

The very name of their band, and calling themselves Ministers of Propaganda...

They were playing a lot, they were playing with their image. It was a game, in a good way. They were very clever, though some of them more clever than others. They understood it, they understood the game, and what they were trying to do. But Richard Hoggart was just terrified by what he saw. He was right in some ways, in other ways he was not right, I think. But that he looked at things closely and took it seriously was very unusual in Britain at the time. So that's why I used the title for my book.

Probably it was unavoidable in the development of the system, what we could see is the levelling, and now the widening the gaps between rich and poor in liberal societies. But you mention the game, and I wanted to ask about that in relation to the Battle of Orgreave. What is the game for you?

It's definitely a sense of play. It was a political statement, but it wasn't out to change the world. That's where activism differs from art. Activists actually want to change something very directly and very specifically, while artists don't really want to do that, or be so clear in their intentions.

And you insist that you are an artist.

Absolutely. If I was an activist and I did that piece at the end of that piece I'd like the mines to re-open, or everyone to get a job or something. Then there's an endpoint, an aim. But with that piece of work there wasn't an aim. So I'm not an activist.

To put it very bluntly, how do you see your role, making these very politically loaded and informed works of art?

Should I have a role? I'm just an artist, I like making things, and seeing what I can get away with. I'm just seeing how far I can go with things, and that's how it is. I don't have any aims, I don't have a list of things I want to do. That's why I'm not an activist. They use art forms maybe, but not as an endpoint, as a beginning. So they'll do performances as a way of trying to change things, and that's what I'm not. I'm not interested in that.

It's something that's always raised...

A lot of activists have art backgrounds, I imagine – they went to college and learned about performance art maybe, and they use those forms for political ends, in terms of issues or policies or whatever. But I'm not in that camp, no pun intended. I'm interested in it, but I don't want to be part of it.

What is this film you're working on at the moment?

There's two, they're both biopics. They're both about elderly men who have had interesting lives. One is about a 70 year old man, he's a wrestler, he's from Wales, very close to where the Manics are from, and he was a coal miner, and left the mine, and went to America to become a wrestler. He still wrestles, but it's really about his life, how he managed to leave industry and become part of the entertainment business. Then another one is about a British artist who's 83 and lives in the countryside, and still makes art, and it's about his life. His name's Bruce Lacey. He's semi-known, but he does incredible things. The other one, which is relevant to you, is the car from Iraq, which went round the US, that's coming to the UK, and is now owned by the Imperial War Museum in London. It'll be on display in September. It'll be part of their collection, on display in London and Manchester. It's relevant for your questions about art and activism and stuff.

It's funny that you mention the Imperial War Museum, which is a very interesting institution, based in a former mental institution, as there you also have re-enactments, of being in a bunker, or being bombed or something like that – museums that provide this 'war experience' – it seems relevant to the Battle of Orgreave. Calling it a battle.

That's a provocation.

As a kind of reference to the Middle Ages, even.

It was known afterwards as 'the battle', it was very quickly known as a battle. Because of the nature of it and the scale of it, with thousands and thousands of people – and also how it looked, it looked like a medieval battle, with police horses and the scale of it. And also its importance. It became one of the most important events in the strike, because the police very publicly won a battle. And they on the propaganda war as well, about the battle. So it was a battle. I did a book about the Battle of Orgreave, called The English Civil War, again as a provocation.

How did you talk to all these kinds of people, did you have to convince them?

No, I think most people understood it very quickly. Re-enactors had to be convinced. I think, maybe. The miners didn't – they understood it, on the whole. On the whole they were very excited about it.

It re-enacted a seminal moment of their life. Did they have a sense of failure about it?

Well they're glad it's remembered. And also that through history the opinions on the miners have changed, because it's a much more sympathetic view. Through history you can see what was going on much more clearly, the results and consequences. So they were happy for the attention, and for the opportunity to tell the story in their own terms, and that was important. You've seen the film?

Yes, it was part of an exhibition at CCA in Warsaw. I was interested by the form in which you have parts of the battle and then single people commenting on it.

We tried to interview different people, like a policeman, an organiser, a woman, that's important, some of the miners. We wanted to have a narrative structure to the film. And also those people who don't usually get interviewed about their time in the strike. Normal people, really – it wasn't the politicians, but the footsoldiers, really. Which was interesting, because they were all very compelling, they way they spoke. It was really good to do that. We did it after the performance, we spent a day with each person. We were really happy with those interviews. In the book there's interviews on a CD.

Do you know Artur Zmijewski's work?

A little. I've not seen it, but a friend's worked with him on a project. I really like the sound of it.

He's getting into controversial things like the Holocaust, for which he's frequently accused of exploitation. Were you ever?

Of course. As soon as you're working with people that's what you're accused of, as if they're not intelligent enough to understand what's happening. Even with the Folk Archive, when we put on a big nice exhibition with a book, we were told we were exploiting them. It's just the most stupid thing to say. A lot of people really hated that exhibition, really hated it. Art critics hated the fact they had to review it. They wrote 'I didn't want to review this show, but I had to', which is funny, but it really shows the kind of attitude to folk art in Britain, it's very class-based. That was interesting to see. They couldn't bear to see it, some of them.

They didn't like it because of class?

No, they didn't think it was art, they thought it was terrible. And it was exploitative. What they were voicing was their own fears, because they didn't have the capacity to review what we'd presented them with, they didn't know how to understand it as art.

The Depeche Mode film is a classic form of documentary...

You don't have to be an artist to make a film like that.

Why is that appealing for you?

I like documentaries. I like them, I like making them, I like watching them, I like making my own. With the Depeche film, more than anything I love films about music and musicians, so I wanted to make a film in that tradition, about a band. It was very exciting. I like the process of making films, seeing what happens. I'm doing a variety of things really, there's no way I'd want to limit myself to doing one thing, I never have. I'm curating as well, I'm curating a show in the next year, doing more films, maybe another performance piece. I'm lucky really, because of winning the Turner Prize not a lot of artists can do what I do in the UK, so I'm in a very good position. I'm always being asked to do things so it's good not to do one thing.

The things you've been creating to date are very unusual, in that they're works not made by artists, so is this going to be in this vein?

It's actually a version of an exhibition I did in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, about British music, and British identity through music. It's music-based, but it'll have art in it and music. It's not clear at the moment. It's about how our identity has been shaped through industry and music. It's not clear as you can tell.

Music as industry?

The industrial revolution and its relationship to British rock music.

Probably what happened a hundred years in Manchester was probably the biggest revolution since the Palaeolithic or something.

Yes – Manchester, Birmingham – all these big musical towns had an industrial base.

I'm going to Sheffield later today.

Well that's a very important one, for electronic music.

I'm fascinated by this, that the most exciting music from the late '70s was made by working class people in industrial towns.

Well that's what my exhibition is about, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle. Centres of heavy industry and their relationship with what became the music industry.

Now we have this austerity nostalgia, a sort of cover for the austerity policy of the government, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' and so on, which unconsciously tried to use the war policy.

Those posters when they came out were massively unsuccessful, because they were seen as massively patronising to the general public. Now they're taken as ironic, and they're everywhere, aren't they. People felt patronised by the English ruling classes – you are fantastic and you are the British public, keep going. Really crude propaganda. Now it's seen as very nice.

Can people see the very cynical politics behind it?

Well some can, though some voted for it. People must understand what's happening, they'd be crazy not to.

If it was possible for an artist to influence how people vote, would you like it?

No. That's for activists, I'm not interested in that. It's nice not to be told. That's the problem with activism, it's very preachy, it's very 'you are wrong, I am right, and I have a moral high ground and you do not'. It often doesn't see the complexity of situations. Some people in Iraq think the invasion was a fantastic thing. You could tell some people that and they wouldn't believe it. But for a lot of other people it was the worst thing that ever happened to them, so I'm much more interested in complexity rather than having all the answers. That's what politicians do, they say they can solve all the problems, and they're usually wrong. Usually it's better to see things in a more complicated way.

The Trevi, somewhere on Holloway Road

Spiritual poverty of modern machine

Timothy D. Taylor

Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising Music and the Conquest of Culture

University of Chicago Press 345 Hbk

It is easy to think niche, experimental music can escape commodification. More often than not, this is an illusion, but it would be equally gratuitous to say all the music is merely a commodity within the late capitalism, or at least it isn’t always in the same way. In his book Timothy Taylor deals with the sounds that throughout the existence of the consumerist society (that is at least since the 1920s in America) accompanied and helped to sell things. He provides a not only extremely well researched, but also fundamentally leftist interpretation, an analysis from the perspective, but not on the account, of the admen and companies and their strategies, which in order to start selling, had to construct the audience to sell their products to. From the concept of the “masses” in the 1920 to the discovery of youth as a market to the new petit bourgeois, for whom “everything concerned with the art of living, in particular, domestic life and consumption” becomes a matter of special concern, we see the construction of society via an analysis of a single subgenre – here, the ad jingle.

Of course, such criticisms are old and their most famous exponent was Adorno, now frequently misunderstood as a one-dimensional mere critic of consumptionism. Adorno, who saw the rise of nazism and fascism, during his American years was rather concerned with the cynisism accompanying the regression process, regression of our perception of art and of the world instigated by the standardisation of the mass media. Radio and then TV simplified the way the world can be grasped and helped commodifying the consumer's consciousness. His analysis was supported by his longstanding research as a part of Princeton radio project and the Hacker Foundation he lead in 1952-53.

Not subscribing to any of the symplifying binarisms (mass culture as 'good' or a necessarily evil thing) Taylor did a meticulous research going through enormous archive of the initial development of the ad business. We’re not going to discover suddenly that in fact jingles were very sophisticated things, but we’ll see, how the development of the radio and, at the same time, performing and composing of music, which was broadcasted, has lead the Don Draper’s forbears to get the idea how music can 'animate' and make the product more desirable. With commercial use of music, the question of taste wont stop haunting us. Here, Bourdieu’s theory of taste’s relation to social class and the cultural capital comes to the rescue, enriched with gender and ethnicity brought to the agenda. What may be crucial is how this music specifically designed to sell, that is of the possibly 'lowest' sort, also in terms of "primitiveness" of the composition, is a necessary backdrop, more even – must shape the conditions in which any non-commercial, niche or artistic music is made and how it is impossible to think, within consumerist capitalism, that one can escape the influence by these modes of production, broadcasting, popularization and the necessity to sell. Taylor shows the origin of this world in motion, as it’s constituted: from the supposedly “absolute” conditions, he shows our society as built by this “shlock”.

It’s a Foucaldian, as well as traditional historical approach, in this sense, that Taylor, while remaining very close to his subject and writing a microhistory, contributes to the macro image. He analyses very practical aspects: the wages of the musicians, the evolution of the copyrights (initially no one paid anyone for playing his music on the radio and one musician could easily ‘steal’ from another) and contracts. One of the things that is debunked is the myth of the laissez-faire and competition of early capitalist stage – power-consolidating corporate ambitions of “destroying all the competition” were present in America already between the wars.

In order to appeal, product had to become “emotional”, first regardless of class, and then doing this quite despicable thing, creating consumerist groups. Early admen were all disciples of Ayn Rand and we get to read the crippled poetry of the self-proclaimed Fountainheads. A 1930s one could write that “modern commercial designs will offset in some measure the ugliness and spiritual poverty of much of this modern machine environment” and instead, will bring beauty ‘in our visual world, in our landscapes, architecture and tools and furniture with which we perform the operation of living.” There's a startling resemblance here to certain avantgarde manifestoes, as the avant-garde artists obviously were fascinated by the modern way of life, the machine age, speed, technology and the everyday. Especially some of the early commercials can be little masterpieces of a short film and animation, influenced by directly or even made by the avant-garde artists. Many included first class composers, like Raymond Scott, artists like Man Ray or filmmakers like Len Lye (although UK or Europe and eg. the achievements of GPO film unit unfortunately cannot be our concern here).





It shows, how the original admen probably really thought they are making things better and creating some sort of a new art. Hence the descriptions "art director" and many other, art-related. But exactly by comparing the art with those, who are approprating its ideas, you see, how their 'art' was something different, so often about 'concealing' rather than 'revealing', what mostly good art does. In the 20th century capitalism, at leats since Warhol, art and business has became one. There was something larger than life, pioneer, 'American dream'-like about the beginnings of the ad industry, even if that lead to quite despicable things. This brings us to what the future, ie the present, will be like: how the notion of “art” will start to support the appetites of the brand new social class of “conscious consumers”.

Their “art”, as we see it more clearly now, was rather the opposite: it was to cover the ugliness of the real ad intentions (annihilating the real reasons for the crises of capitalism and social conditions) with another illusion: that of beautiful, unproblematic life. Role of a commercial jingle was then similar to the neon light at the Broadway, to dazzle, to give shivers. But alas, their 'art', however they wanted to see it, remained 'primitive', it had contributed a lot to a regression of listening in the adornian sense.

That's why Mad Men's Don Draper, who's an idealist, can both think that he's making people believe in nonsense and believe that there's something sublime to his work, that really makes things and the world better. He wants to believe in the dream. You can see, how the development of this business could ever only happen in America, with their chaotic religion of vaguely understood Freedom, the power of the Dream (even if at the cost of killing and enslaving millions of people) and identyfying all those values with capitalism. Capitalism carries a utopian, magical aspect and that's why there's actually no contradiction. Radio, cinema and the silver screen started as dream-factories to, with the time, show their much darker side.

With time, as the initial bling wore off, and there was a discovery or rather “invention” of youth, apart from the new market, criticism of the new media arose. Yet the fights of counterculture, necessarily combined with their fights for the political issues, made the commercial appeal problematic. Unlike Don Draper, who is puzzled by the counterculture, yet desires its freedoms, corporations also didn’t understand, but counted for the eternal residuum of conservatism and backwardness of their clients, prophets of the middlebrow. They weren’t wrong, and the operation of “appropriation of the cool” into the middle of the road started. The baby boomers made the Yuppies, taught to spent their lives at nothing else but cultivating their individuality. They're best portrayed by Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, who kills to the accompaniment of the jingle of the favorite talk show, muzak dripping from the walls of the office interiors or Huey & The News. “Hating the commercials” was a sign of cultivation among the aspirational classes, and it marked the corporations’ biggest triumph, as the quality was the last thing they had to be concerned about at this point. Business has become a sort of religion anyway – definitely in America, only to bring the well known film of the 70s, The Network, to mind, where it is shown, how quite “cosmic” ambitions the corporations had become, like some inverted USSR.

Today, as the music industry sees itself in a great crisis, as we live in a dystopia from WS Burroughs, the love of the middlebrow has never been better. Ad pervades the industry more than ever, so that it’s often impossible to distinguish one from another. It is so morbidly smooth that even the surgery from a sober Marxist like Taylor, pointing out also how the notion of “work” itself evaporates in this process, still can’t kill the parasite. Advertising, which helped to create the current concept of creativity, was also the pioneer of the new “cognitive capitalism”. The catchy jingle may have been the virus that first and best helped it to spread around capitalism’s sick body. In this, commercial music may be one of the best way to show contradictions of contemporary capitalism as such.

Agata Pyzik

Mauer Dreamstory, Pt.2

(X-posted from Faces on posters)

(from the work in progress "Poor But Sexy", see Pt.1 Drang nach Osten)

“I didnt want that to happen, but it did”

‘A woman who fucks an octopus’ – that was the way Andrzej Żuławski pitched his 1980 film Possession to the producer, fresh after the success of his French film L'important c’est d’aimer, about a fallen actress, played by a sad-eyed Romy Schneider, who is made to act in pornographic movies, surrounded by other failed artists, including an unusually melancholic, tender performance from Klaus Kinski. He was also right after the fiasco of his three hour long monumental metaphysical SF On a Silver Globe (1978), an adaptation of a fin de siecle futurological novel of his great uncle, Jerzy Żuławski, pulled before completion by the hostile communist authorities and shelved until 1987, when only Zulawski had a chance to "finish" the film. Around that time, he was abandoned by his wife Malgorzata Braunek, actress in his Third part of the night and The Devil, due to his famously domineering and possessive personality as a partner and a director. Left in shock and depression, he started plotting a mysogynist fairy tale about a monster....

The sleep of reason produces demons, and one of them materialised, when Anna, living in West Berlin with her functionary nice husband and child in a neat, 3 storeys blocks estate, realised she despised her husband. She confesses that to him. The rest is what happens after that confession.

Possession was made in the golden era of the genre of exploitation, and it must be due to the communal genius that things conceived as forgettable shlock to this day shine with a magnificent mixture of the visceral and the metaphysical, with cinematography, colours, costumes and set design taken from a masterpiece. Argento and the lesser gialli creators, Jean Rollin with his erotic horror, the expansion of intellectual SF, started and inspired by Tarkovsky, all paved the way for Possession, a still unrivalled study of a marital break-up, thrown in the middle of political turmoil in divided cold war Berlin. Still, Possession had a special “career” in the UK, if by career we understand horrible reception, extremely negative reviews and eventually putting it to the ‘video nasties’ list of banned films. “Film nobody likes”, it was deemed too arty for the flea pits and too trashy for the art house*.

Today perhaps we can’t imagine what it was like to live in a city surrounded by barbed wire and under a constant look of armed guards. When we first see Anna, played by a disturbingly pale, un-Holy Mary-like Isabelle Adjani and Mark (Sam Neill), we instantly see something is terribly wrong: their windows are under constant scrutiny, and surrounded by wire – the symbol of political oppression just as of the marital prison, of conventional life.

Mark’s job is not what it seems – he has completed a secret government mission, which he wants nothing to do with anymore. Meeting with mysterious grey-suited men, it’s clear he's involved in high rank espionage. Anna can’t explain what is driving her towards the mysterious lover. She wears her deep blue, up-to-neck gown of a 19^th century governess, which walks her through all kinds of atrocities as if untouched, as if it’s a secret armor.

The Berlin U-bahn is a character in its own right, scene of her neurotic commutes to the fatal flat on another end of Kreuzberg, again, by the wall, with screaming dramatic graffiti: FREIE WEST and MAUER MUST GO (despite location in the east, it was still included in the West), and in its underpasses is the most terrifying scene of her possession, where she issues green-yellow gunk among terminal gargles. In all this there's a place for comic relief: the whole character of lusty Margie, played by one of iconic RW Fassbinder’s actresses Margrit Carstensen and her comical enormous leg in plaster, just as her failed courtship of Mark; in one of Zulawski's turns of surreal genius, when  a stupor-ridden Adjani is on the tube, she's robbed of a bunch of bananas by a homeless man, who takes one and gently puts the rest back to her bag. Luxury goods were an issue in the East, mind you.

The demon can be many things: her anxieties, her neuroses that took the shape of an evil monster. The monster can be also simply a misogynistic punishment for the unfaithful Zulawski’s wife. A chronically decaying demon, built out of corpses, can be also a sum of the traumas his generation had to go through. It is common to say of JG Ballard that everything he ever written, wore the shadow of the scenes he saw in a concentration camp in war-ridden Shanghai. Similarly, it is generally believed of Roman Polanski, that all his films, revolving around pain, trauma, sickly sexuality and claustrophobia, reveal the daily atrocities he saw as a child in the Cracow’s ghetto. There’s no doubt Zulawski also went through a traumatic childhood experience, motifs of which he obsessively came back to throughout all his career: war, isolation, madness realising in taboo eroticism, violence, evisceration, Polish romanticisme fou and our tragic history. Born in Lvov, Ukraine (then Poland) in 1940, he barely survived the war, once nearly hit by a bomb, witnessing the destruction of the city and his family at a very early age. In Possession we observe a growing hostility of the spouses, a decay of the family, of the city, and of the world.

Most of Zulawski’s and some Polanski’s films, like Repulsion, Cul de Sac, Locataire (The Tenant), all associate eroticism with perversion and anomaly, and fetishism, in a genuinely surrealist way. Sex is creepy, sex involves an exchange of ugly secretions, preceding of our inevitable decay; in fact, sex is a delight in revulsion, in turning to rot, to a corpse, an acceptance not only of dying, but also of dying disgustingly.

Also, due to the amusing, pretty-ugly soundtrack of Andrzej Korzynski (rereleased recently, what's characteristic, by English afficionados from Finders Keepers), the tale gains the feel of deceit and malice and of a childish game at once: music is here at the same time parodic and deadly serious. Korzynski had a longstanding relation to two Polish directors: the great Andrzej Wajda and to Zulawski, which can be compared to the greatest director-composer couples in cinema: Leone-Morricone, Argento-Goblin/Morricone, Fellini and Rota**. In Third Part of the Night it was more art and free rock and prog - a bricoleur, it's clear he was taking from wherever he could. Some of his musique concrete experiments may owe a lot to the seminal activity of the pioneering Polish Radio Experimental Studio (featured a lot before on my blog), and Wlodzimierz Kotoński. In Possession, he takes those typically romantic styles, like tango or waltz, and turns them upside down; similarly, he takes a children’s ditty motif, played on a broken harpsichord, and twists it with sardonic, scary undertones, like a parody of a cheap Hollywood film noir. Every romantic illusion, fantasy of a nice, unproblematic life, must in the end collapse and rear its disgusting head to us. The motifs come back on a loop, signifying the hopeless routine, in which the life of Mark and Anna has hung, and how terrible the way out of it must be.

Anna’s ‘nymphomania’ can be also explained by her lack of orgasm. The whole film revolves around her lack of pleasure, or in general, woman's incapability to get an orgasm from the men that surround her. her craving for the beast is a typical freudian case of women's narcissism grew out of imprisonment and solitude (much like the aristocrat in Borowczyk's Beast, who also craved a monster as a source of unbelievable ecstasy). 'Almost' we hear from Anna each time she has sex with her husband, with a tragic facial expression, typically, almost feeling sorry for him, not for herself. Woman blames herself for the lack of orgasm, never her lover. Neill is in his role often disarmingly, charmingly naive: he's chasing his wife, this woman, whom he doesn't understand a bit, always several steps behind her, disoriented. I'm sure this way Zulawski wanted to suggest who is in fact the vulnerable sex, cheated by the deceitful womanhood. As a proof of that, we have also Anna's double, their son's teacher, like in many other films (Third part of the night), replacing the (dead) Anna, who's less demanding in bed.

Anna is disintegrating, gradually possessed by demons: with her body becoming like a lifeless marionette, sleepwalking through the besieged city, with uncontrollable self-harm, shaken by one shock after another, obsessed with bodily mutilation (never before has an electric knife and kitchen automat meant so much in the marital drama). She’s breeding her monster on her neurosis, guilt and repulsion (like Catherine Deneuve keeping a dead rabbit in the fridge in Polanski's eponymous film). I always actually thought monster is primarily an idea, Anna's punishment, her thoughts that turn into flesh. A fallen from grace housewife and mother, living on sex like a vampire lives on blood, driven to madness by the increasingly mad Berlin, Anna falls out of her previous gender roles, challenges all the cliches of a woman of her class or position and mocks this spectacle. The only healthy products she keeps in her fridge now are the macabre heads and body-parts of her victims. It’s a story of a woman who stops controlling herself: stops controlling her libido (then of course she must fail as a mother), stops controlling her mind (madness ensues), then stops controlling her body – and then her fluids start to flow freely regardless of decorum: a dress is torn, a woman fucks an octopus, a woman expels vomit, yellow prenatal waters and finally the foetus, shaken, in a shocking scene, through all her orifices.

And then there’s the characteristic claustrophobia of all the interiors, as if the closeness of the eastern border and the restriction by the wall, especially felt in Kreuzberg district, caused a specific Island Fever mentality (Insellkoller). Polanski’s Locataire (together with Last Tango in Paris and Possession forming a great film trilogy about the madness induced by the claustrophobic bourgeois tenements), tells a story of a man growingly assuming the identity of the previous female tenant, who killed herself (it’s also starring Adjani against her emploi as an unattractive, bespectacled woman who grows friendly with Polanski’s character). Similarly, Anna’s monster belongs to the insalubrious, skanky place of their love, feeding on the negative aura surrounding the place, just like on the blood and the headless bodies she brings him. Zulawski had a proper budget behind him, so it is funny and telling, that the beast was made by the special FX specialist Carlo Rambaldi, known mostly for his outstanding work for Ridley Scott's Alien (as well as Argento's Profondo Rosso; then he went on to model the little body of E.T., amazingly) and it would be tempting to compare Alien and Possession's main females and in many other ways.

The glass-blue eyes of Isabelle Adjani seem to tell the truth beyond recognition, beyond understanding…She knows that the only way through the cold war of Europe and of her own marriage is to live it, become like them: crazy.

All this to the accompaniment of the melody of sardonic music box, deriding the characters. The queasy, sickly and morbid ditty, it owes a lot to Polish Jazz and Komeda’s deliberately frantic note and soundtracks to Lenica and Borowczyk’s animated films, House or Labyrinth, or Polanski’s Cul de Sac with its fucked up organ melody in a false key, just as the cheap soundtrack to horror movies.. They all belong to something that could be called a Polish surrealist tradition, similar to the experimental Czech cinema. But it's synth drivennes is another issue entirely, taking from the italo disco frenzy of the era, Giorgio Moroder's Munich Machine.

The genius of Possession is that it's at least three films at once. On the surface it is a horror movie, if slightly metaphysical, a giallo with images terrifying beyond comprehension, with a monster, cannibalism, blood, forbidden sexuality, macabre murders, corpses etc. On another level it is a marital break-up drama, much in the style of many Bergmans, like Scenes from a Marriage or From the Life of Marionettes, with spouses self-harming, humiliating, and tearing each other apart. But that still wouldn’t explain why they act the way they act, at least if we won’t accept the rule of exploitation: there's no rules, and a plot of no plot. Here, a plot there definitely is, and it develops with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Because another level of this drama is a political movie, set in the key city of international secret services and a scene of ideological war. Anna and Mark may live the relatively privileged life of expats, in their nice low rise modernist flat, but are still subject to increasing alienation and isolation, harrassed by men of mystery in ridiculous pink socks.

Trouble with sexuality pervades the whole film – woman's sexuality, the murder of a homosexual couple, Anna's previous lover ridiculed as an amateur of tantric sex and martial arts, and all this finalizing in a third world war-verging plot. Early 80s were the era of a 'second cold war' entering a new phase, a nuclear crisis which could lead to 3^rd WW, which is implied by the final carnage between the secret services and the aftermath. Extremely theatrical, like a lot of the rest of the film, it's very much in the 'postmodern' style of the French Neobaroque. To me, Possession is one of the most prophetic movies for the 1980s, predicting the Polish Martial Law of the 1981 and the great depression that followed.

Zulawski's genius was to see the personal drama as political, and the visceral and the sexual as coming from the social and political oppression. Incredibly stylish, haunted with beauty and austerity, it's a world torn between Marx and Coca-cola (with Anna in one scene smashing the portraits of the classics of Marxism) and Zulawski is not necessarily a Marxist. The choices of many in that generation, and later - which they made as soon as capitalism entered Poland - wore serious traces of reacting over a trauma. Still, Zulawski remains a Romantic: revealing that love is the darkness, against the common, desexualized, sanitized convictions within capitalism.

* and ** - observations I owe to one of Zulawski's greatest experts, Daniel Bird.

Not For Human Consumption

[a longer version of a review published in the #348 2013 issue of the Wire)

Notfor Human Consumption

Online exhibition

CRISAP, ie Creative Research Into Sound Art Practice is a new platform for developing of contemporary critical art and thinking around sound, focusing on developing new ways of engaging with the environment, creating new software and organizing seminars and symposiums, mingling artists and scholars, with the flagship projects such as HerNoise, problematising women’s participation in the sonic and public sphere. The newest way of engaging with the public is the idea of publishing? installing? - a whole exhibition online. We can say many websites, serving as databases, with all kinds of links, mp3, podcasts, are already in a way were creating the experience of entering an "exhibition", conceived as a little world in itself. But Not for Human Consumption, sixth online show by CRISAP is consciously using the format, liquidating this way any other institutional threshold shying the potential audience away, and taking from our everyday experience of online wandering as a ready blueprint of how the future exhibition should work.

And isn’t it a realisation of the avant-garde ideas of overcoming the “space” as a finite concept anyway? Ten or so sound artists and researchers took the task of coming up with a sonic phenomena, tests, by-products and compositions, that didn’t previously exist in the world, challenging the primate of human consciousness in the phenomenal world. Text and mp3 files, distributed randomly on the page like a discontinued milky way, unveil the sounds, sometimes barely audible or unaudible, but possibly audible to the non-humans; sounds of things that do not exist yet or are yet to come. We are, for instance, listening to the listening brain, or the termites activity under earth (R. W. Mankin & J. Benshemesh’s project using geophone), or acoustic vibration tester from NASA, or modern trains DD IRM, helioseismology, solar oscillations, voice-bots, choreography for computers etc. Its sounds that can be only listened to on our behalf by the machines. Of course, in this sense, as such a post-human and even speculative music, it is very much an illustration of the contemporary theories of posthumanity, expanding of our ontological world, like Michel Serres' concept of quasi-objects or Bruno Latour’s theory of non-human actors and the so called Speculative Realism, developing mostly online. One project by Steven Hammer, is even called Towards an Object Oriented Sonic Phenomenology, and what it does is an extremely sophisticated system of listening to objects’ vibrations near a highway.

The brave new world of new sonic objects is still only looming, it seems: the intellectual just as the practical part of such project seem not have matured enough to already speak of a revolution. The non-anthropocentric theory can have of course very interesting ethical consequences, of which we have to still think aboutas explored by SF or recently, by the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq. What I’ve found nevertheless appealing, were the charm of certain projects: even computers have a right to choreography, and the voice-bots getting excited and reverberating to each other is a dream of every bored commuter on the tube, though again, I think these are concepts straight from the SF books, confirming our imagination of the future largely comes from the 30 and more years old SF visions, where there's dreaming of music created by the cosmic vibrations or the inner life of the machines. Still, CRISAP goes against this tedious argument, that we stopped projecting the future. It's speculative music, music of things to come, even if in practice it can come across as a not tremendously appealing "noise". In a way, it is also the final consequences of conceptualism, with internet as a “site specific” place, place that can be one day of a historical value.