All posts tagged 1970s

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas (1975)

His eyes were red. His penis hung like a limp lighthouse. He was a poor sight.
(Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, page 4)

Third in the ‘Virgin Soldiers’ trilogy and the least satisfactory. It opens with an extremely brief, 3-page prologue telling us that it is 1974 and the hero of the first two novels, John Brigg, is back in Singapore, remembering being the original virgin soldier doing his National Service in 1949/50, i.e. 25 years earlier. Now he’s back as a middle-aged staff sergeant, ‘a ghost of other days’, sent to help supervise the shutting down of the British garrison in Singapore.

But barely have we taken this in and accustomed ourselves to Singapore 1975 than… surprise, surprise, the entire text flashes back to 1950 and the original Virgin Soldiers moment, in fact right back to the exact moment when the first novel ended. If you remember, the original Virgin Soldiers novel ended with Brigg and the other surviving conscripts, their service complete, leaving the barracks at Panglin in a big lorry en route to Singapore to catch a boat home.

In this rewriting of the story, they get to the port only to discover that, due to the unexpected start of the Korean War (25 June 1950), their period of service has been extended by six months (pages 5, 12, 22). Thus, with a stroke of his pen, Thomas is able to rustle up six more months of virgin soldier narrative to bolt onto the end of his original narrative. Well, he was a business-like writer and the brand was selling well. So why not?

Cast

Page numbers are when we first hear a character speak or get a decent description of them, as opposed to just a namecheck.

John Brigg – our hero, all the way from Kilburn, north London
Harold Tasker – his best mate and wingman (p.7), from Shoreditch (p.284)
Lantry
Sandy Jacobs – Glasgow Jew
Gravy Browning – table tennis addict
Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers – gay couple, their camp dialogue reminiscent of Kenneth Williams, Villiers has a lisp (p.75)
Corporal Eggington – fan of fancy ointments and porn mags, nicknamed ‘the Calamine Kid’, aged 30 (p.224), very fat (p.257)
Private Quentin Fundrum – looks like an unkempt tree, surprisingly learned and articulate (p.96), nicknamed ‘Brainy’ (p.279)
Private Conway – from Belfast, jigsaw addict (p.83)
Lance-Corporal Williams – reading through a complete set of encyclopedias (p.82)
Corporal Field – big Siegfried Sassoon fan with a flat Midlands accent, five feet two tall
one-eyed Lieutenant Colonel Bromley Pickering (p.21) – his wife is the Southern Counties’ Women’s League Champion jam-maker (p.88)
his stammering Adjutant, Reginald ‘Reggie’
Regimental Sergeant Major Woods – who suffers from bad feet
Sergeant Wellbeloved – roundly hated by all
Lieutenant Grainger – freshly posted (p.19), 20 years old (p.75)
Lieutenant Wilson – a short stodgy officer from the pay department (p.19)
Longley – a slow-thinking private with vicious acne and a tendency to lean to one side due to a bad hip
Lieutenant Perkins – officer in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work
Sergeant Bass – NCO in charge of the Pay office where Brigg and the rest work (p.79)
Major Bilking – the medical officer (p.103)
Bernice ‘Bernie’ Harrison – Cockney nurse (p.114), stocky, ‘pretty but podgy’ (p.274)
Corporal Lunes – the medical orderly, rumoured to be mad (p.127)
Sergeant-Major Ringbold – commanding the mongrel force brought together to protect the depot at Johore Baru (p.152)
Sparkles – one of the contingent at Johore (p.155), astonishingly ignorant and stupid man, from Walsall
Corporal Dobbie – Catering Corps man at Johore (p.184), from Dorset, shot dead in the attack in the Rajit
Miss Phillimore – mad old lady who sells Brigg tennis gear (p.231)

The book’s cons

Tired

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers is OK, very funny in some places, but it feels tired, tired of itself, like the later Carry On films. It doesn’t help that it starts in an atmosphere of general gloom and depression as all the squaddies mooch around, stunned by the news they have to serve an extra six months.

Reviving finished relationships

Nor the way all the relationships, such as with the hated Sergeant Wellbeloved or the sentimental CO Colonel Pickering, which had reached a natural end in the first novel, have to be revived, pumped up like leaky old bicycle tyres. While other relationships – such as with Phillipa whose love affair dominates the first book – are never mentioned, disappear without trace.

Resurrecting Lucy

The worst resurrection of all is of ‘Juicy Lucy’. This was the nickname given to the Chinese prostitute (herself aged only 20, p.169) who showed Brigg how to have sex i.e. took his virginity in the first book. In a very intense, prolonged and moving passage in the first book, Brigg discovers she’s dead, has been kicked to death by squaddies. This (believe it or not) suited the edgy feel of the first novel, which ends in a welter of violence, but also felt complicatedly appropriate for her role in his sex life, somehow. It evoked complicated, intense and tragic emotions.

Anyway, in a move which feels cheap and shallow, Thomas simply resurrects her. Writes a sentence saying it wasn’t her but some other hooker who was kicked to death, Lucy had just gone off with a rich businessman for a while, then she came back. Which, at a stroke, destroys the intense psychological resonance her death created in the first book (p.29).

Forgetting what we’ve learned

Also, trying to get back into the mindset of Brigg 1950 requires the huge effort of putting out of your minds everything we read about Brigg 1970, as described in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’ – about his wife, her tragic death, his problematic son, his posting to Hong Kong, and the touching love affair with a lonely American woman. Basically, there’s a whole lot of stowing away what we know from books 1 and 2 of the trilogy which is required before we can really settle down to engage with this retread.

Sexism

Lastly, pretty much all the attitudes displayed by the swaggering protagonists of the book – Private John Brigg, his wingman, Harold Tasker, and the new character, the American named Clay – are completely and utterly unacceptable these days.

Indeed, from one perspective the book amounts to a sustained exercise in the objectification of every woman it describes. It’s a kind of embodiment of the male gaze, as our testosterone-driven heroes size up every woman they encounter, assessing their figures and features in purely sexual terms.

A tiny Chinese girl from the village, brown, calm-faced, walked by them, two tin cans hung from a bamboo pole on her shoulder. Also on the pole was a small lantern to light her path. Both men let her go by and then turned to watch her backside, tidy and tight in her peasant trousers. (p.123)

Lots and lots of moments like that.

Racism

And, because they spend a lot of time going to bars frequented entirely by local prostitutes, you can add outrageous racism to the charge sheet as well.

She had good legs for a Chinese girl, not splayed or muscular, and they now slid lazily from beneath the robe as she sat. (p.41)

Plus plenty of other stereotyping of the native Malays, the Chinese, the Indians and so on. It’s not deliberate, conscious, or hateful white supremacist racism – generally the opposite, as the Chinese, Malays and especially Indians are generally shown to be much cleverer, calmer and more sensible than the irresponsible, incompetent white soldiers (the only person who reacts sensibly in the Rajit shooting scene is the Indian shopkeeper, p.190) – but I think it comes under the kind of passive racial stereotyping which is, these days unacceptable in any context. And calling all the natives ‘Bongos’ doesn’t help (p.163). Or ‘wogs’ (p.251).

The Chinese eye may be narrow but it observes much. (p.255)

Ouch. Maybe this is why my local library service doesn’t have a single copy of any of Thomas’s 27 novels. Maybe someone quietly burned them all.

Except that this is now, from our perspective, a historical novel, as it was when he wrote it in 1974 or so, harking back to 1950. That’s 73 years ago and, presumably, how people spoke back then. Thomas is a novelist not a moral philosopher, and his novels contain all kinds of uncomfortable attitudes, make a point of ‘subverting’ bourgeois behaviour, telling uncomfortable truths. In a way, what’s surprising about it is the lack of racist attitudes; a handful of unacceptable terms, maybe, but by and large Briggs and the sympathetic characters like the natives and often acknowledge their superiority.

And also this is an old-style comedy, largely made up of familiar stereotypes of everyone, extending just as much to the white characters – the bumbling colonel, the posh adjutant, the sadistic sergeant major, and a host of regional stereotypes among the squaddies (the slow Northerner, the depressed Midlander, the peevish Welshman, the stingy Scot and so on).

Homophobia

While we’re listing Thomas’s sins against contemporary sensibilities, I suppose I should add the stereotyping of the two ‘pansies’ among the squaddies, Patsy Foster and Sidney Villiers. What surprised me in the original novel and in this one, too, is the very relaxed attitudes of all the other squaddies and NCOs to this pair i.e. a bit of banter, a few jokes, but they get off much easier than a lot of the other soldiers who are mercilessly teased, lampooned and sometimes beaten up. Whatever anyone says, Patsy and Sidney ‘were never put out’ (p.74), and always ready with a disarming riposte. Their occasional snippets of camp dialogue or witty put-downs of thick officers reminded me of Kenneth Williams.

The pros

That’s the negatives. As to the positives, Thomas is a very amiable writer. He just gets on with it and so do his characters. Somehow the original novel felt full of the vim and breakthrough excitement of the 1960s. This one feels like the tired sexist humour of the 1970s. Modern young readers shouldn’t waste their time on it. I only bought it to complete my reading of the Virgin Soldiers trilogy which I only started reading because I was looking for fiction about the Malaya Emergency.

I’ve registered all the cons listed above but I’m a completer-finished so had to relax and enjoy it for what it is, 1970s middle-brow entertainment, as packed with unacceptable attitudes as all those 1970s sitcoms. The complete haplessness of a bunch of young men in the army far from home kept reminding me of the sitcom ‘It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum’, which was first broadcast in 1974, and as packed with (sometimes very uncomfortable) stereotypes. A guilty pleasure.

But, despite everything, it is often very funny. Thomas is a gifted comedian. I smiled and I laughed. In these grim times, that’s a gift.

The main events

Mostly the narrative is made up of a series of comic scenes. The squaddies lament the extension of their contracts. Brigg and Tasker go to a bar-brothel looking for Juicy Lucy, dance with a few hookers, make casually racist, sexist jokes, then Brigg goes to find Lucy at her apartment and discovers she is still alive! She cries. They make love etc. Pretty much all the drama and emotion surrounding her from the first book is, thus, destroyed.

The arrival of Morris Morris, a mountain of a man, Welsh and extremely pissed off at being conscripted to fight ‘SOME FUCKING WAR’, as he puts it, a manic-depressive giant, a big rich comic character (p.47).

Tense but ultimately farcical raid on the local village looking for Chinese terrorists (CTs). Farce when there’s an outburst of machine gun fire and the entire troop throw themselves on the muddy ground in a panic, then Chinese toddlers come up to look at the funny white men lying in the mud and some customers come out of the nearby cinema where an American crime movie is playing, and that turns out to have been the source of the gunfire which scared them all.

During this village raid Lieutenant Grainger proves himself a psychopath by firing Brigg’s rifle just a foot over his head and then claiming he could have Brigg court-martialled for undisciplined use of a firearm. Brigg is shaken, horrified, then fearful of what this lunatic will do next.

The daily ritual of the soldiers working in the Admin office (pages 80 to 81).

A single American who’s become detached from his unit sent to Korea is posted on them, much to the Colonel’s disgust. Private William Clay (p.90).

Morris Morris organises a concert which is predictably dire, but not given the full setpiece treatment as the concert in ‘Onward Virgin Soldiers’. The main moment is when four nurses come on to do the can-can, with the all-male audience going predictably wild, but then Morris invites volunteers from the audience and Brigg, Clay, Tasker and another fight their way onstage to dance with the girls. Brigg likes his one who’s a feisty Cockney named Bernie. Afterwards, to their frustration, Lieutenant Grainger goes to the girls changing room with champagne and Wellbeloved tells them to clear off. Out the back a comedy pyramid of men climbing over each other to see in the window for a glimpse of naked flesh. Men. Testosterone. Brigg and Clay come up with a plan, to feign the symptoms of VD in order to be sent to the hospital where they can enquire after ‘their’ nurses.

Clay and Brigg lie to the MO about having STDs, so are packed off to the ambulance to be driven to the Singapore hospital. On the way two old lags give detailed descriptions of the spikes and hooks they use on your penis until Brigg is pale with fear and a young squaddie in the corner is crying. Turns out to be a wind-up, all the medical officer wants is a little blood sample. Brigg finds out from a tea orderly that the nurse called Bernie is Bernice Harrison who works in Casualty (p.137). So Brigg and Clay saunter off in that direction with a view to chatting up her and her mate, but the doors swing open, almost smacking them in the face, as Bernie, other nurses and a doctor hurry through two trolleys occupied by badly wounded young men. Christ! Humbled and ashamed our two Romeos get the ambulance back to barracks and thank their lucky stars.

Lantry and Clay are scheduled for guard duty, go for a drink beforehand, get hammered and, while on guard duty, their simmering rivalry erupts into a full-on fight. Until they hear officers shouting and approaching and stand up straight, smartish.

Brigg and Tasker are selected to be sent for three days depot guard duty at Johore Baru, up-country.

Before they leave, Brigg has a free afternoon and night with Lucy. For the first time they have an outing together, taking her 2-year-old nephew to the beach, the toddler playing in the surf while they chat. At one point the boy needs a poo and Brigg takes him along to the very nearby RAF base where a series of soldiers refuse him use of the loo and the little boy poos himself in tears. Brigg is furious at the rule-bound uselessness of the British. That night, they make love in a way Brigg feels is special, homely, though it’s doubtful whether Lucy the pro feels the same.

Brigg and Tasker are sent to the nearby village of Rajit to get provisions, along with the not-very-bright Private Spark and the dull Dorset man from the Catering Corps, Corporal Dobbie. Surprisingly, in the village they are attacked by snipers. Brigg, Tasker and Sparkle are in a store and survive but Dobbie was in the open by the lorry and is shot dead.

Next day Brigg and Tasker return to Pinglin and pull rank as old timers who’ve seen war. They are greeted with the tragic news that the Colonel’s stamp collection has gone missing! This seems trivial. Clay tells Brigg that in his absence he went to the nurses’ accommodation, tracked down Nurse Bernie and got two tickets to the Red Cross ball! At which point evil Sergeant Wellbeloved enters to dormitory tom tell the boys that, as the Colonel’s stamps have not been found, all leave for the following weekend is cancelled i.e. the day of the ball. This is a transparent set-up for more farcical goings-on.

First development is that some soldiers are allowed out, so long as they are going to support Gravy Browning as he competes in the Inter-Services Table Tennis Championships. Gravy is no fool and charges each of the dozen ‘supporters’ he selects ten dollars as he knows none of them give a monkeys about table tennis. On the first, Friday, night of the championships, Brigg, Clay, Tasker and the rest cheer their heads off, because they desperately want him to get through to the Saturday round, which he does.

Clay and Brigg dress in ludicrously ill-fitting evening dress ‘borrowed’ for the night from the village laundry, and set off with Browning’s other ten ‘supporters’ before skiving off to meet their dates, Bernie who we’ve met and her friend, Valerie Porter (p.214). Broad comedy because Clay’s trousers are so extremely tight that he can’t dance without risking them splitting. They look like Keystone Cops. At the end of the evening both men get a little kiss before the nurses turn and go, leaving our heroes frustrated.

‘Christ, I just touched her on the tit, hardly felt it, and she told me to be a good boy.’ (p.222)

But a few days later he calls Bernie from St James-the-Less Rest Home for British Soldiers and, to his surprise, she offers to come along and play tennis. Obviously he doesn’t have any kit nor know how to play so there’s a panic-stricken run around to buy the gear, from a mad old lady, spindly Miss Phillimore, who keeps reminiscing about the good old days of the Raj.

A digression about sex

Then they go to the chalet he’s rented where, after some snogging, she reveals that she’s a virgin and scared to death. What most strikes me about the (fairly graphic) descriptions of sex Thomas has in his novels is the way there’s little or no foreplay and no attempt at lubrication. Most times I’ve had sex with a woman it has required a lot of foreplay, kissing and stroking etc and very often additional lubrication from the wide variety of lubrication products available everywhere these days i.e. all high street supermarkets.

My point is that there’s none of that in Thomas’s descriptions, none. There’s a bit of kissing, he suckles one or other nipple, then kneels between the woman’s legs, lowers onto and into the woman and gets shagging. That’s it. Every time. The variety and inventiveness of sex we’ve got used to over the past generation or so, not just from manuals and guides but just from telly and the movies, simply doesn’t exist in these books.

By the same token, on the occasion when they’re in bed together and he can’t get an erection, Brigg asks Bernie ‘to sort of play about with him a bit’ (p.269). That’s it, that’s as much as he can think of.

Sorry to be so graphic, but I found this complete absence of sexual sophistication, and the lack of awareness of female anatomy or needs, a fascinating part of the book’s social history. I suppose Brigg is meant to be 19, has only himself just lost his virginity, lacks any kind of maturity, so shouldn’t be taken as any kind of evidence of sexual knowledge in 1950 or 1975, but still…

Anyway, Brigg takes Bernie’s virginity in an extended scene conveyed entirely through their dialogue, as she describes his erection entering her, how it hurts, how it’s too big, how she’s crying, does he really love her etc and then, in seconds, he climaxes and it’s all over.

God, to think that in the old days we relied on books like this for our information about sex (porn being almost completely inaccessible and sex education useless). The waste…

Back to the plot

Now they’ve had their brief crude intercourse poor Bernie thinks they’re in love and are going to get married or such, while we know that Brigg is actually still in love with Lucy, so Bernie’s heading for a bad disillusionment.

Clay comes to Brigg for advice. They agree to take the girls out on a double date. They go to a dire dance hall but the girls insist they move on so Clay takes them to a club. Excruciatingly, it’s the one where Lucy works, the Liberty Club. The white girls go to the loo together and Brigg runs over to Lucy to tell her he’s only performing a duty, he’s been tasked with entertaining some officer’s wives. She treats him as if she’s never met him and coolly tells him to fuck off. Back at the table he is even more upset to learn that Clay, who watched the exchange, has himself had sex with Lucy a few times.

The evening ends in farce when they notice Eggington, who had earlier made a big deal about trying a new Japanese mud treatment for spots, dancing by himself on the dancefloor, completely drunk and celebrating that his spots have, in fact, disappeared. Brigg is desperate when the beautiful Lucy deliberately punishes him by dancing with fat, ugly, sweating Eggington, but then he goes mad and starts a striptease, eventually completely naked and waving his big schlong at their table screaming ‘No spots, no sports!’ as Valerie and Bernie scream with delight.

Bouncers converge on the fat man, the soldiers go to his defence and it dissolves into a massive fight, until the Military Police arrive and everyone finds themselves on the pavement outside helpless with hilarity.

A comic scene where Clay and Valerie, Brigg and Bernie break into the grounds of St James-the-Less Rest Home, with the help of a comically punctilious Indian watchman who loans him a ladder for five dollars.

That night they bicker because Bernie saw the way he looked at Lucy and her feminine intuition did the rest. He can’t get an erection and they don’t have sex. However, next morning they’re woken by Miss Phillimore and two elderly friends delivering tea to each chalet with a hymn and him standing and singing (while Bernie hides) makes her laugh so much they proceed to have genuinely relaxed sex and, for the first time in her life, she has an orgasm (p.272). Only then does she reveal that she and Valerie have put in for a transfer and are going to move to a hospital in Colombo, Ceylon, on Christmas Eve. They both pretend to be upset but deep down Briggs suspects they’re both relieved.

Christmas morning and the squaddies in their dormitory have a good old moan. There’s an interesting passage where the Jew, Jacobs, rubbishes Christianity for being a fairy story and the others say well it all started with ‘his mob’, all said without any animosity, just because they’re irritable and missing home (p.277).

On Christmas morning all the privates in the barrack put on an impromptu fancy dress parade, marching up the hill to the CO’s mansion for his one-eyed blessing. During the confusion someone deposits the stolen stamp collection on his sundial.

There’s an epic Christmas lunch with the officers serving the men, who become maudlin. Mad Lieutenant Grainger comes over and kills all mirth by informing them that they’ll be going to back to the depot for stints of guard duty. Then he goes and deliberately spills boiling custard over sergeant Wellbeloved’s bare legs. ‘He’s mad, that bastard,’ mutters Brigg (p.288).

We learn that Bernie’s gone, flown away. Just like that (p.292). End of the affair which had seemed central to the narrative. Briggs is back itching after Lucy.

On Boxing Day after some bickering, Clay says he needs a breath of fresh air. Briggs is convinced he’s going to see Lucy, so gets a taxi into town. He finds him at the Liberty Club but Lucy’s not there and the Yank runs off. This turns into a comic race between the two rickshaws they’ve hired.

But when they both arrive at Lucy’s flat it’s to find her seriously ill, too weak to move, a lake of vomit by her bed. Clay runs to fetch help, while Brigg tries to make her drink water but she’s almost unconscious. Ambulance arrives and takes her to hospital. three hours later our sad boys know it was attempted suicide. Why?

Cut to Brigg in the office closely supervised by officers. The officer supervisor announces that he, along with his cronies Clay, Tasker, Morris Morris, even Sergeant Wellbeloved, have been selected for another round of guard duty at the Johore depot.

They’ve barely arrived at the depot and dumped their kit before Grainger is round to tell them about the wild pig hunt. Thomas had Grainger mention this a couple of times back at Pinglin, his enthusiasm to go and hunt wild boar in the forest, bring it back, roast and eat it. Now, as this is page 414 of a 444-page book, we know this is probably going to be the Big Climactic Scenes. Give Thomas’s form in the other three novels I’ve read (i.e. there are grisly deaths) I fully expect someone to get killed during this ‘wild pig hunt’.

All the men are too scared of Grainger, too cowardly and too sensible to do anything. But remember that tiny detail of how, at the Christmas lunch, Grainger accidentally-on-purpose tipped scalding custard over his junior, Sergeant Wellbeloved. Well, my money was on Wellbeloved shooting Grainger.

But it doesn’t turn out that way. Grainger leads the men off on a long and exhausting trek through dense jungle along narrow paths, breaking occasionally for rest and food. On the way back they come to a clearing and to everyone’s terror a huge wild boar bursts out of the wall of jungle and makes a run at them as they all leap aside. Once it’s got to the end of the clearing it turns for another run and the others watched astonished as Grainger plants his feet like a matador and taunts it. When it charges Grainger waits till it’s half way to him then fires a long burst on his Sten gun and kills it, its momentum making it plough into the ground at his feet.

Unfortunately, that’s not all. They see men standing at the end of the clearing, who they suddenly realise are CTs (communist terrorists). Grainger tells them to duck and Brigg flings himself into the wall of greenery, tripping over a log and slipping and falling a hundred feet down to a stream. From here he hears a lot of further shooting and hand grenades from back up in the clearing. Then a great bulky rumpus coming down through the undergrowth towards him.

It’s Morris Morris, he’s been badly shot, a bullet ripping through his stomach and groin leaving a big exit wound in his back. He comes to a rest in the stream, leeching blood. Brigg tries to reassure him, goes back up to the clearing and is horrified to see Grainger dead next to the dead pig. Terrified, he skeets over to the officer, retrieves his field dressing and returns to Morris and tries to apply it to the huge wound.

There follows an extended and meant-to-be moving scene where Morris slowly bleeds to death in the stream and confesses to Brigg that he’s not married with kids. He invented the wife and family, even fabricating letters from them. He is in fact gay or, in the lingo of the time, ‘a poor old Cardiff docks poof’ (p.332). Briggs is flabbergasted.

They hear voices and Briggs inches his way back up the slope to the rim of the clearing and sees armed men tie the dead pig to a bamboo shaft and then the corpse of Grainger, too, and then carry them away. He waits five minutes before moving, inching back down to the stream where Morris is dying.

As night has fallen and its gotten darker, they’ve realised there’s a light downstream and sounds. Morris won’t let Brigg leave him so Brigg has to get the man-mountain to lean on him as they blunder along the shallow stream, eventually arriving at a local village in the middle of a fiesta. By the time Brigg staggers into the clearing, Morris is dead.

The villagers let Brigg stay there overnight but insists he sleep in the same hut as the corpse. In the morning they send a messenger. Soon a truck arrives with a driver and two silent Gurkhas. The driver informs him that the others are alive: a) Clay got his posting back to an American unit and has left; b) Wellbeloved got a shoulder wound and bored everyone bragging about his bravery; c) Tasker is unwounded. With amazing speed he’s back at the depot for a tearful reunion with his mucker, Tasker.

Tasker describes Grainger’s mad heroism, the way he immediately charged the CTs, firing non-stop, must have got 3 or 4 of them before he himself was shot down, while Clay and Tasker dived into the undergrowth.

An Army lorry takes them back to good old, safe old Panglin. They buy an ice cream from the local vendor. They clump into the dormitory and look at Morris’s vacant bunk. Brigg wryly states that they still have two months, 25 days and 22 hours of the six months left to serve.

THE END. As with the first novel, the reader is left feeling dazed and bereft.

Nice turns of phrase

Almost very page is illuminated by imaginative and generally funny turns of phrase and thought. Here are the lads on parade:

Around them other squads were formed on the square; wooden figures like clothes pegs on long washing lines. The moon was hanging about the Naafi and the eternal noise of the crickets rattled the night. (p.57)

The prosaic reality of colonial prostitution:

Mucky Meg, the plump and motherly Eurasian who did midweek masturbations for impoverished soldiers at a dollar a time, missed the serious importance of the soldiers’ invasion altogether. ‘You like dollar wank, Johnny?’ she inquired politely of Brigg as he stood stiffly at a street corner. (p.59)

‘Dollar wank’ – a nice collocation of American and British culture. When the platoon are walking in single file, led by Corporal Field who jumps with fright at every flicker of light or strange sound:

The patrol behind him jumped in reactions to his jumps, giving the effect of an apprehensive caterpillar. (p.62)

The character of the man-mountain Morris Morris gives Thomas plenty of scope:

Most nights he looked like a great pie on his bed as it bowed spectacularly under his weight. (p.86)

Of the lanky, bony American, Clay, when he goes to salute:

Clay’s loose limbs came together as though someone had pulled a lever. (p.92)

In the waiting room to see the medical officer:

It was like a Trappist monastery after a wild night of illicit talking. (p.127)

Christmas morning:

The sun looked as though it had been up all night. (p.279)

This is what I mean by how easy and pleasurable and entertaining it is to read Thomas’s prose.

Movie version

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers was made into a cheap and pathetic movie (1977), strongly redolent of the skinflint production values of the period (Hammer, Carry On). Supposedly set in Malaya it very obviously looks like where it was shot, namely in and around rainy Maidenhead in Berkshire.

It was directed by Norman Cohen who also directed movie versions of the TV comedies, ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ (1969) and ‘Dad’s Army’ (1971) and some of the truly dreadful ‘Confessions of…’ sex comedy series: ‘Confessions of a Pop Performer’ (1975), ‘Confessions of a Driving Instructor’ (1976) and ‘Confessions from a Holiday Camp’ (1977). God help us. This was what was served up to us at our local cinemas in the 1970s.

It’s mildly interesting that Thomas wrote the screenplay himself.

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers on YouTube

Credit

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers by Leslie Thomas was published in 1975 by Methuen Books. Page references are to the 2005 Arrow paperback. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related (comic) reviews

Leslie Thomas reviews

Malaya reviews

History

The War of Running Dogs by Noel Barber (1971)

Fiction

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by Simon on June 7, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel, Sex

Tagged 1970s, Bernice Harrison, Bernie Harrison, Bongos, British Army, Chinese, Christmas, clay, comedy, Corporal Dobbie, Corporal Eggington, Corporal Field, Corporal Lunes, CTs, Dollar wank, farce, Gravy Browning, Harold Tasker, history, homophobia, Indians, It Ain't Half Hot Mum, John Brigg, Johore Baru, Juicy Lucy, Kenneth Williams, Kilburn, Korea, Korean War, Lance-Corporal Williams, Lantry, Lieutenant Colonel Bromley Pickering, Lieutenant Grainger, Lieutenant Perkins, Lieutenant Wilson, Longley, Maidenhead, Major Bilking, Malaya Emergency, Malays, Miss Phillimore, Morris Morris, National Service, Norman Cohen, novel, Panglin, Patsy Foster, Private Conway, Private Quentin Fundrum, prostitution, racism, Rajit, Reggie, Regimental Sergeant Major Woods, Sandy Jacobs, Sergeant Bass, Sergeant Wellbeloved, Sergeant-Major Ringbold, sex, sexism, Sidney Villiers, Singapore, Sparkles, Stand Up Virgin Soldiers, Sten gun, table tennis, the Calamine Kid, the Liberty Club, Valerie Porter, Virgin Soldiers

Posted by Simon on June 7, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/stand-up-virgin-soldiers-leslie-thomas/

Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024 @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The annual Deutsche Börse Photography Award celebrates outstanding bodies of work that have been exhibited or published in Europe in the previous twelve months. All the nominated artists are acknowledged for their major achievements and innovations in the field of photography and contemporary culture. All the entrants are whittled down to just four artists who are displayed every spring at the Photographers’ Gallery in Soho, Central London.

This year’s four finalists are Lebohang Kganye, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Hrair Sarkissian and VALIE EXPORT.

Lebohang Kganye (born 1990, South Africa)

Kganye’s display is the simplest. It looks like a junior school project. She has selected photos from her family album, blown them up and then stuck them on plywood stands. She’s then arranged them into four groups. The overall title is Mohlokomedi wa Tara and the four settings are: the inside of her grandmother’s kitchen; an outdoor scene with her grandfather sitting in a chair; a landscape with a herd of cows; a farm landscape with a mud house in the background.

Installation view of ‘Mohlokomedi wa Tara’ by Lebohang Kganye (2018) Photo by the author

You can’t possibly deduce it from the installation itself, but the piece is intended to commemorate, among other things, the fact that the family was forced to migrate and to change their surname by the Apartheid regime’s Land Acts and Apartheid laws. According to the curators:

Using her family archive, Kganye skilfully explores and reimagines notions of home and belonging. Her fusion of images and words not only navigates the complexity of the South African experience but also contributes to the process of decolonisation through the visualisation of personal and collective memories and knowledge.

When I was in the room before it, I noticed people going into the Kganye room and spending as little as a few seconds in it. In, look around for 10 or 15 seconds, out. There’s nothing more to see or interact with than these wooden stands displaying family photos. It’s a neat gimmick or brand, but do you think they’re contributing anything ‘to the process of decolonisation’ in South Africa?

Lebohang Kganye’s website

Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad

This is the most complex display, spread across two spaces and 6 or 7 walls. It is a collaboration between the photographer Gauri Gill (born 1970, India) and the painter Rajesh Vangad (born 1975, India). Over the years Gill has taken photos of rural Indian life in and around the village of Advasi and Vangad has used the techniques of the Warli culture he was born into to paint over them. The results are a fusion of photography and painting, documentation and art. Or, recognisable photos of rural India with lots of fiddly lines and details drawn onto them.

Installation view of photos from ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author

The criteria for inclusion in the prize are not only to be featured in an exhibition in Europe but also for any books of photography published in Europe during the previous twelve months and it’s for their joint book, published in 2023, that Gill and Vangad have been nominated, and copies of it are on display here.

Installation view of copies of ‘Fields of Sight’ by Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad (2023). Photo by the author

Tate have bought one of their photos, ‘The Eye in the Sky, and devote a long web page to it, which explains their aims and techniques better than I can.

Hrair Sarkissian (born 1973, Syria)

Sarkissian’s works is about war and conflict. As his name suggests, he is of Armenian heritage, scion of a family which lost members in the Armenian Genocide during the Great War and the trauma of war and state repression ring through his work. Thus one of his first major projects, Executions Squares (2008 to 2010) depicts deserted public spaces in Syrian cities which were once sites of execution. The two works on display here are on the same theme of state repression.

Last Seen (2018 to 2021) is a set of 50 photos showing the locations where 50 people who were removed, arrested, interned, disappeared or abducted were last seen by their loved ones. Sarkissian travelled far and wide to locations in Argentina, Brazil, Bosnia, Kosovo and Lebanon. Some images have the appearance of a shrine where every detail has been left exactly as it was when the loved one vanished.

‘Last Seen’ (2018 to 2021) by Hrair Sarkissian

The second work is an installation which contains no photographs at all. You pass into a smallish room which is complete darkness, the walls painted black, no light, so dark I worried I might bump into one of the other visitors. No visuals just audio. Speakers on the walls play a soundscape. You totally have to have read the wall label to understand what’s going on.

First of all it’s called Deathscape and it is the recordings of forensic archaeologists exhuming bodies from the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939). Over 2,000 mass graves survive from the period in which over 100,000 civilians are buried. The soundscape of the installation mixes the sounds of shovels breaking the soil with brushes clearing away the dirt mingled with the heavy breathing of the excavators.

Quite obviously this isn’t a photograph and doesn’t include any photographs so what it is doing in a photography prize exhibition is open to question. For the tragic seriousness of the themes this is the most important display, but weighed solely as photography, it’s probably the weakest.

Hrair Sarkissian’s website

Trigger warnings

More and more art galleries post warnings at the entrance to warn visitors about dangerous material which might ‘trigger’ them. There are visitor warnings at the Royal Academy slavery exhibition and there’s a warning at the entrance to this exhibition, too.

The exhibitions have potentially triggering content including nudity, depictions of violence, and other sensitive matter.

Nudity!? The naked human form is now regarded as dangerous because it might ‘trigger’ viewers? Wow. This growing super-sensitivity can’t help but feel like a big step backwards into the Victorian era. Maybe galleries should cover up the legs of their pianos in order to prevent any suggestive thoughts. Maybe books ought to be rewritten to remove offensive material and anything which might ‘call a blush into the cheek of a young person,’ as Dickens put it in 1864. But then it’s already happening – Roald Dahl books rewritten to remove language deemed offensive (Guardian).

There are no warnings about the warnings, though, to help people who are triggered by trigger warnings. These might read: ‘This is a warning that the exhibitions contain warnings which might trigger people who are triggered by warnings about being triggered.’

VALIE EXPORT (born 1940, Austria)

All these warnings are to prepare you for the room devoted to VALIE EXPORTt, a ‘radical’ feminist artist from the late 1960s and 1970s. EXPORT became notorious ‘for her radical performances and critical examination of women’s role in society and the arts’ i.e. taking her clothes off in order to subvert the male gaze, challenge the patriarchy, reclaim her agency etc etc or, as the curators put it:

‘Pointing out entrenched patriarchal structures in mass media image culture, her fearless artistic practice exposes the role representation plays in the construction of gender, sexuality and social norms. Through photographs, filmic works, performances and installations, EXPORT deals with key issues including the body and the gaze, performance and the image, and subject and environment. For over 50 years, VALIE EXPORT has influenced generations of female artists, contorting, cutting and deforming her body to expose the profound social oppression of women – a theme that continues to resonate today.’

The single most striking thing about the EXPORT display is how old it is. It amounts to about a dozen black-and-white photos from her golden era in the 1970s and one small video installation from 1983.

In some of the photos she is shown embracing the stone walls of libraries and public buildings, dramatising the way women are forced to bend and distort themselves to fit into Patriarchal Society (Body Configurations, 1972). In several others she’s stripped naked and is crawling through a maze of electrified wires set up in her studio, acting out the snares and mazes which women have to navigate in a Patriarchal Society (Hyperbulie, 1973).

In 1970 she had a tattoo of a garter belt done on her thigh, where the garter would actually be, and then had it photographed from different angles. This is BODY SIGN ACTION from 1970 and by:

‘juxtaposing the garter with her exposed body EXPORT confronts society’s notions of female sexuality as repressed and shameful. Her work demonstrates female sexuality as liberated and prompts discussions about gender equality and autonomy.’

A pretty clear indication that, for curators, whether a photo is well composed, well shot, well lit, well developed, well framed, whether it is beautiful, evocative, emotionally powerful or aesthetically pleasing are all irrelevant; all that matters is whether it prompts discussion.

Installation view of VALIE EXPORT at the Photographers’ Gallery, showing stills from ‘Hyperbulie’ (1973) on the left, and ‘BODY SIGN ACTION’ (1970) on the right. Photo by the author

The most striking image, probably EXPORT’s greatest hit, is from a shoot when she dressed up as a wild-haired terrorist holding a machine gun, dressed in Velvet Underground-era leather, apart from the crotch, which has been removed to display her pubic hair and pudenda.

‘Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, Motiv’ 1969/2001 by VALIE EXPORT

This is by far her most famous work, so much so that it’s on the front page of her website and all across the internet if you Google the word ‘Aktionhose’. The German title translates as ‘Action Pants: Genital Panic’. Action Pants. There’s an idea for Ann Summers or Victoria’s Secret, although it also sounds like a character from Viz.

The photo records a performance where she walked into an independent cinema dressed like this, her exposed pubes at everybody’s eye level. This intervention was intended as:

‘a critique of the sexist voyeurism in film and cinema…Her unwavering gaze into the camera amplifies her challenge against a culture that objectifies and oppresses women, transforming her rage into a bold statement of empowerment and resistance.’

She did this on 22 April 1969, a few months after The Beatles released The White Album, which raises a pretty obvious question which is, Why has an artist whose heyday was fifty years ago been entered in a competition about the best photography exhibitions of 2023? This is the kind of baby boomer cultural imperialism which drives my kids nuts and some of the younger people at work occasionally complain about, too. There’s nothing in EXPORT’s display more recent than the 1980s. I guess it’s like giving a worthy old actor a Lifetime’s Achievement Award at the Oscars.

(Incidentally, this is an award for photography not performance and yet most of the photos of EXPORT – crawling through the wires or showing off her garter tattoo or wearing her crotchless trousers – weren’t taken by her, but my male photographers, in the crotchless case by Peter Hassmann. No award for him.)

VALIE EXPORT’s website

Your call

The winner of the £30,000 prize will be announced on 16 May 2024, with the other finalists each receiving £5,000. Who do you think should win and why?

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by Simon on March 22, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Photography

Tagged 1970s, Action Pants: Genital Panic, Advasi, Aktionshose: Genitalpanik, apartheid, Armenian genocide, Austria, baby boomer, Body Configurations, BODY SIGN ACTION, Conflict, crotchless trousers, Deathscape, Deutsche Börse Photography Award, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, Dickens, Executions Squares, Feminism, Fields of Sight, forensic archaeology, Gauri Gill, Gauri Gill & Rajesh Vangad, Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad, Great War, Hrair Sarkissian, Hyperbulie, India, Last Seen, Lebohang Kganye, male gaze, mass graves, Mohlokomedi wa Tara, Motiv, nudity, patriarchal society, patriarchy, Photographers' Gallery, photography, photography prize, Politics, post-colonial, radical feminism, Rajesh Vangad, Royal Academy, South Africa, Spanish Civil War, Syria, tattoo, the beatles, The White Album, Trigger warnings, Valie Export, war

Posted by Simon on March 22, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/22/deutsche-borse-photography-foundation-prize-2024-the-photographers-gallery/

Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990 @ Tate Britain

‘You start by sinking into his arms and end up with your arms in his sink.’
(1970s feminist slogan)

‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990’ does what it says on the tin and is the largest assembly of British feminist art ever gathered together in one place. It is an encyclopedia of British feminist art and activism in the 1970s and 80s, packed with images, ideas, associations, slogans, shocking stories, stimulating art works, music and voices.

Seven Demands 1974 by See Red Women’s Workshop © See Red Women’s Workshop

Huge

‘Women in Revolt!’ is huge. It features some 600 works by over 100 women artists and (very often) women’s collectives.

The definition of ‘work of art’ is cast as wide as possible to include paintings, drawings, photographs, textiles, prints and films, but this doesn’t begin to indicate the range of the material. Each of the seven rooms (and these are often sub-divided so you end up with about 12 distinct spaces in total) contains at least one display case, sometimes two or three, each containing large amounts of documentary material on the theme of the room, and this includes posters, leaflets, pamphlets, handouts, magazines, self-help manuals and books, all with a polemical feminist theme.

As one way of surfing through the material I set out to list all the magazines featured in these cases. I ran out of puff after noting Speak Out, Foward, Outwrite, Shrew, (lots and lots of copies of) Spare Rib, Enough, Banshee (for Irish feminists), the Beaumont Bulletin, Women’s Report, Feminist Art News, Mukli, Red Rag, In Print, the GLC Women’s Committee, Socialist Woman, Power of Women, Women Now!, Edinburgh Women’s Newsletter, Glasgow Women’s Liberation Newsletter, Tayside Women’s Liberation Newsletter and so very much on – an extraordinary outpouring of voices and opinions, a nationwide, grass roots explosion of activism and organising that burst out everywhere and then snowballed…

Reading list

The exhibition is accompanied by all kinds of paraphernalia and accessories. Before you even get in there’s a room-sized space containing a big table and 7 or 8 chairs next to shelves holding 20 or 30 feminist books from or about the period. You are encouraged to take the books down, sit and read them. I liked the look of ‘The Lost Women of Rock Music‘, although maybe not at the price of £49.

On a hoarding nearby there’s a list of feminists organisations which I list at the end of this review.

The LP

There’s an old-style record player playing an LP which has been created specially for the exhibition:

There are a couple of headsets so you can sit on the bench and tap your toes to feminist hits by the likes of the Mo-Dettes, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, The Raincoats or, my favourite, The Gymslips.

Films and documentaries

The LP headphones prepare you for the fact that the exhibition includes no fewer than 27 films with a combined duration of around 7 hours! Plus 25 artworks which include audio.

These all have headphones so you can sit and listen to documentaries about black women or a BBC discussion about whether domestic work should be paid, about the Grunwick strike, a shocking documentary about how women of colour immigrating to Britain had to undergo virginity checks (in the 1970s) and so on.

Related events

The exhibition is accompanied by 6 podcasts, a long Spotify playlist of Women in Revolt music, and there’s a festival of feminist films at the National Film Theatre. The Tate café even has feminist cakes on sale.

Feminist meringues on sale in the Tate café. Photo by the author

It’s much, much more than an exhibition. It feels like a parallel universe, the universe of committed feminists which sits alongside the universe the rest of us inhabit, and yet is based on a completely different set of values and assumptions, has its own vocabulary and jargon, inhabits a discursive realm thronged with hundreds of thousands of books, pamphlets, articles, meetings, organisations, websites, social media pronunciations, an endless alternative point of view.

Start point 1970

The exhibition very specifically covers the period 1970 to 1990. Why? 1970 was the year of the first Women’s Liberation Conference and is a convenient starting point for the emergence of a distinctive feminist branch of the cultural and political rebellions of the later 1960s.

Thus the early rooms are all about squats and collectives and are liberally sprinkled with talk of overthrowing capitalism, how capitalism relies on the patriarchy i.e. the systematic oppression of women, undervaluing of women’s work (especially housework and child-rearing) and so on.

There are pamphlets explaining the communist take on women and the family (‘Feminism in the Marxist Movement’ and ‘Communism and the Family’). In the curators’ words:

In the 1970s and 1980s a new wave of feminism erupted. Women used their lived experiences to create art, from painting and photography to film and performance, to fight against injustice. This included taking a stand for reproductive rights, equal pay and race equality. This creativity helped shape a period of pivotal change for women in Britain, including the opening of the first women’s refuge and the formation of the British Black Arts Movement.

There are lots of black-and-white photos of squats and slums, some of the vintage documentaries who street scenes of road filled with lovely old motors from the 60s and 70s.

Are many women Marxists?

The wall label of room 2 states:

Many women see capitalism as the root of their oppression. They challenge its reliance on patriarchal systems in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded. They also view women’s unpaid reproductive labour as exploitation, and a necessary condition of capitalism.

Do they? Do ‘Many women see capitalism as the root of their oppression’? In the intense hothouse of academia, maybe. But out here in the wider world where many women run companies and corporations and, of course, populate the highest ranks of the Conservative Party?

The buzzwords ‘capitalism’, ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ crop up throughout the exhibition, particularly in the earlier rooms when we’re closest in time to the revolutionary turmoil of the late 1960s and many radicals thought that Western capitalism was teetering on the brink of collapse.

This made me feel sadly nostalgic for my school days in the 1970s when left-wingers believed in such a thing as socialism, believed that capitalism could be ‘overthrown’, all it would take would be one more heave and the entire oppressive system would be overthrown and usher in the communist utopia, social ownership of utilities, industries and businesses, where everyone would contribute according to their ability and take according to their need.

The economic, social and political naivety of those times seem an age ago, now.

Nostalgia

This raises an issue I had throughout the show which is that, I think I was meant to respond with outrage and sympathy to the many oppressions women laboured under in the 1970s and 80s but I found quite a lot of the material heart-warmingly nostalgic. Take the room devoted to punk women, which featured artworks and videos (of Ludus performing) and a display case full of fanzines with Johnny Rotten or the Clash on the cover. This was pure nostalgia for me and warmed the cockles of my heart.

Art or social history?

This thought in turn triggered several other questions which nagged me all the way through, namely: 1) How much of the works on display were art and how much social history? At one end were paintings and sculptures which are explicitly and unambiguously art. At the other end were the display cases holding magazines, posters, pamphlets and whatnot which are, in my opinion, documents of social history. In between were questionable objects or works which begged the question. For example, there’s a room devoted to Greenham Common. As in every room, it has a display case showing magazines, flyers, letters, maps and so on. In complete contrast was a massive installation of a wire fences covered with bric-a-brac typical of the camp and, on another wall, a bit painting (art).

But what about the ten or so (very good) black-and-white photos showing Greenham women in various stages of protest? Are they ‘art’, or documentary shots as might be taken by a magazine journalist? Or the quilt made by several Greenham women, showing Greenham slogans, hanging on the wall?

Installation view of photos of women at Greenham Common. Photo by the author

2) And this was related to a second question which was: am I responding to the works because a) they nostalgically remind me of my misspent youth (e.g. the punk room), or b) because I’m responding to the issues they raise and the (sometimes terrible) stories they tell) or c) as works of art?

Very few of the 600 works on display actually cut through to me as works of art (I mention my favourites below). Far more of them were attached to stories which were more in the shape of newspapers stories (the police shooting of Cherry Groce, the virginity inspections of black women immigrants, the disabled woman who was sterilised by male doctors without her consent etc) or issues (abortion, social pressure on women etc).

Or had a kind of documentary factual basis such as, in the pregnancy room:

the 90 second long black-and-white movie which consisted simply of a close-up of a pregnant woman’s stomach so that you could see the baby moving inside (Antepartum by Mary Kelly)
the sequence of black-and-white photos a woman artist took of her stomach from the moment she learned she was pregnant

Installation view of ‘Ten Months’ by Susan Hiller. Photo by the author

‘Ten Months’ documents Hiller’s pregnancy. The artist uses a conceptual framework to explore an intensely subjective experience, presenting one photograph of her stomach for each of the 28 days of 10 lunar months. Accompanying the photographs are texts from the artist’s journal that reflect on the psychic and physical changes that occur during pregnancy.

(Who isn’t) restoring women’s voices?

As always, the curators claim that many of these artists have been overlooked and left out of traditional male-dominated narratives of modern art – ‘women, who despite long careers, have been largely left outside the artistic narratives of the time’ – and so this exhibition is putting things to rights!

For many of the featured artists, this will be the first time many of their works have been on display since the 1970s.

This is very similar to the claim made at the ‘RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology’ exhibition which is on at the Barbican until 14 January, and which also brings together women artists and collectives from the 1980s through to the present day, also claiming they have been written out of art history, also claiming to set the record straight, also claiming to give women artists their voice, etc.

In other words, this is the standard claim made at the exhibition of almost any woman artist or artists. It may well be true. But it’s well on the way to being a cliché, one of the received ideas of our time.

Are they worth it?

I’ll come straight out and state an obvious point: maybe a lot of these women artists weren’t consciously ‘written out’ of art history by wicked white male art historians as a result of a patriarchal conspiracy, but because they…er…aren’t any good.

Take that LP featuring tracks by revolting women bands such as the Mo-Dettes, the Slits, the Poison Girls, the Gymslips, the Au Pairs, Girls At Our Best and so on…maybe these bands haven’t been forgotten by time or erased, i.e. aren’t much known or written about in histories of pop music, not as the result of some scary conspiracy by white male music critics but…because they’re just not as good or interesting as The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Jam, The Buzzcocks et al.

Some of the work here is outstanding, but a lot of it only makes sense in the context of feminist protest, was designed to provoke the enemy or raise the consciousness of allies, to educate and inform. A lot of it is only a little step above the posters, pamphlets and handouts created by women all over the country in response to injustice and discrimination, which is to say they are all in a worthwhile cause but…as art…judged as works of art…even if we extend the definition of ‘art’ to breaking point…

Rather than rewriting them badly, here are the curators’ own wall labels quoted directly. Indentation indicates curators’ text.

Room 1. Rising with Fury

In the early 1970s, women were second-class citizens. The Equal Pay Act wouldn’t be enacted until 1975. There were no statutory maternity rights or any sex-discrimination protection in law. Married women were legal dependants of their husbands, and men had the right to have sex with their wives, with or without consent. There were no domestic violence shelters or rape crisis units. For many women, their multiple intersection identities led to further inequality. The 1965 Race Relations Act had made racial discrimination an offence but did nothing to address systematic racism. While trans women were gaining visibility, a controversial 1970 legal case found that sex assigned at birth could not be changed, setting a precedent that would impact trans lives for decades. The 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act gave people with disabilities the right to equal access but failed to make discrimination unlawful. In 1967, the Sexual Offences Act had partially decriminalised sex between two men, but lesbian rights were almost entirely absent from public discourse.

In 1970, more than 500 women attended the first of a series of national women’s liberation conferences. Sally Alexander, one of the organisers notes, it was the beginning of ‘a spontaneous iconoclastic movement whose impulse and demands reached far beyond its estimated twenty thousand activists.’ Many of these activists were also members of organisations like the Gay Liberation Front (1970 to 1973) and Brixton Black Women’s Group (1973 to 1985). Together they marked a ‘second wave’ of feminist protest, emerging more than fifty years after women’s suffrage. They understood that women’s problems were political problems, caused by inequality and solved only through social change.

The artists in this room made art about their experiences and their oppression. They worked individually, and in groups, sharing resources and ideas, and using DIY techniques. Their subject matter and practices became forms of revolt, and their art became part of their activism.

Three display cases in room 1 of Women in Revolt! giving a sense of the number of small to medium-sized objects on display © Tate. Photo by Madeleine Buddo

I liked ‘Rabbits – the Pregnant Bunny Girl, Mrs Rabbits and Woman as Animal’ by Shirley Cameron.

These photographs document a performance from 1974. While heavily pregnant with her twin daughters, Cameron dressed as a Playboy bunny girl and ‘installed’ herself in a pen with rabbits at local country shows. She toured the Devon County Show, Lincoln Show, Three Counties Show, Border Show and East of England Show. Brilliant idea.

I liked the photos of a performance based on a wedding ceremony by Penny Slinger.

These photographs document a performance in which Slinger wore a handmade wedding cake costume. The artist describes the series as ‘both a parody of a wedding ritual, and recreation from a woman’s point of view’. The images were included in Slinger’s 1973 solo show at Flowers Gallery, London. Deemed too controversial for public display, the police raided and shut down the exhibition shortly after it opened.

Near the top of my favourite pieces in the show was a series of three porcelain figures of dancers by Rose English. These are small, barely a foot tall, brightly and joyfully decorated, humorously emphasising each figures’ brightly coloured vulva and melony breasts. They were fun and innocently frank.

Porcelain Dancer 1 by Rose English © Rose English courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome. Photo by the author

Room 2. The Marxist wife still does all the housework

By the mid-1970s, women has asserted their rights to equal pay and to work free from discrimination and harassment. Some held positions of power in business and politics, and following Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister in 1979, a woman held the highest office in the country. Despite this, traditional gender roles remained. For women to achieve equality, change was needed in both public and private spheres.

Small consciousness-raising groups brought women together to discuss their shared experiences and recognise the social and political causes of their inequality. This practice woke women up to their oppression and made the personal political. Women discussed the concept of reproductive labour – the work required to sustain human life and raise future generations – and joined international campaigns such as Wages for Housework. Art became a tool to highlight the unpaid activities they were expected to perform and the physical and emotional impact this had on them.

For many women artists, there was no separation between their home life and artistic practice. They produced work at kitchen tables between caring and domestic responsibilities. Their environment informed the materials used, the size and format of their work, as well as their subject matter. Artists also turned to their bodies as their subjects. They explored fertility, reproduction and the complexity of navigating highly prejudicial medical systems, particularly for women with multiple intersecting identities.

The artists in this room challenge art historical tropes and media stereotypes: from the idealised nude to the selfless mother and doting housewife. These women present their bodies and homes as sites of oppression whilst simultaneously reclaiming agency over them.

Three fabulous crocheted figures by Rita McGurn

Untitled Rug and Figures by Rita McGurn (1974 to 1985) Photography by Keith Hunter

McGurn worked as a television, film and interior designer. In the 1970s and 1980s her art practice was pursued privately, primarily in the context of her home. She employed a range of found and domestic materials in her practice, making use of whatever was to hand. Working in crochet, she created life-sized people that were placed around the house in changing configurations. Her daughter, artist France-Lise McGurn (born 1983) recalls, ‘We all lost some good jumpers to those crochet figures, as stuffing or just stitched right in.’

Screaming video by Gina Birch

Still from 3 Minute Scream by Gina Birch (1977)

Birch writes: ‘I came to London from Nottingham in 1976 to go to Hornsey College of Art. I was very soon immersed in what became punk and the world of 1970s politics of squatting, nuclear disarmament, Rock Against Racism and later Rock Against Sexism. The rundown city was our playground.’ At Hornsey, she met Ana da Silva and they formed the experimental punk band The Raincoats (as featured on the exhibition LP). Birch recalls, ‘It was a time of casual sexism, casual sex and more overt sexism.’ Three-minutes is the approximate length of a Super 8 film cartridge, here filled entirely with Birch’s energetic screaming.

Helen Chadwick

This was really good, 12 photos recording a performance given by Chadwick, titled ‘In the Kitchen’. What I liked very much about them was their geometric precision and symmetry. Plus the brilliance of the conception.

For this performance Chadwick created wearable sculptural objects from PVC ‘skins’ stretched over metal frames. They included a cooker, sink, refrigerator, washing machine and cupboards. The original setting featured a strip of vinyl floor tiles and a soundtrack of excerpts from the BBC Radio 4 programmes ‘Woman’s Hour’ and ‘You and Yours’. Chadwick wrote: ‘The kitchen must inevitably be seen as the archetypal female domain where the fetishism of the kitchen appliance reigns supreme. By highlighting and manipulating this familiar domestic milieu, I have attempted to express the conflict that exists between … the manufactured consumer ideal/physical reality, plastic glamour images/banal routine, conditioned role-playing/individuality.’

‘In the Kitchen (Stove)’ by Helen Chadwick (1977) © The Estate of the Artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome

Erin Pizzey

An honourable mention for Erin Pizzey who in 1971 founded the Chiswick refuge for abused women (formally known as Chiswick Women’s Aid), a self-funded haven for women victims of domestic abuse, and a model which was to be copied first around the country and then across the world.

It’s recorded here in six highly evocative black-and-white documentary photos. A nearby display case contains a copy of the book Pizzey wrote on the subject, ‘Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear.’ What a heroine, what a heroic achievement – although, reading further about her life, you see that Pizzey, like so many other idealistic feminists from the 1960s and 70s, has had a tortuous and often disillusioning afterlife.

Room 3. Oh bondage, up yours! (i.e. punk feminism)

Subcultures provided opportunities for new models of womanhood from the mid-1970s. Punk, post-punk and alternative music scenes combined socially conscious, anti-authoritarian ideologies with DIY methods. Technical virtuosity was out, and the amateur was in. Freed from the pressure of being the best, the first, or the most original, artists began trashing the conventions of both high and popular culture, giving rise to new forms of expression.

Young musicians, artists, designers and writers set up bands, record labels, fanzines, collectives and club nights. They created work that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, often using clashing and violent imagery and explicit material. For many women this meant subverting gender norms, embracing the provocatively ‘unfeminine’ as well as the hypersexual.

Through their DIY methods, multi-disciplinary approaches and challenge to the status quo, these subcultures had much in common with the women’s movement. Yet artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti notes: ‘I aligned myself more with Gay Liberation than Women’s Liberation… Freedom “to be” was my thing. I didn’t want another set of rules imposed on me by having to be “a feminist”.’ For zine writer and punk feminist Lucy Whitman (then Lucy Toothpaste), it didn’t matter whether these women identified as feminists or not, ‘in all their lyrics, in their clothing, in their attitudes – they were challenging conventional attitudes’. These artists were freeing women of the bondage of expectation and helping them redefine women’s role in society.

Leotard (1979) by Cosey Fanni Tutti

This is an example of one of the costumes worn by Fanni Tutti for her professional striptease performances. The artist explains: ‘The costumes I used for my striptease work were “scripted” according to the audiences I performed to. Each signed a different masked persona, a fantasy or sexual predilection applicable to the age or social groups of the men who frequented the places I performed in. The vast majority of the costumes were made myself using carefully selected sensual practical materials that enabled smooth, elegant removal.’

Installation view of ‘Leotard’ by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photo by Larina Fernandes

Gill Posener’s defaced posters

You see these around quite a lot but they never lose their sparkle:

Installation view of photos of posters defaced by Gill Posener in 1982 and 1983. Photo by the author

In these prints Posener documents a series of feminist interventions to advertising billboards around London. Living in lesbian squats in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Posener and her friends (who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution) would graffiti over sexist billboards and photograph them. Prints were sold as postcards to raise funds for radical causes. After moving to the US in the late 1980s, Posener became photo editor of the hugely influential lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs.

Room 4. Greenham Common

There’s a room about Greenham Common at the Barbican Re/Sisters exhibition. There was a room about Greenham at the Imperial War Museum’s exhibition about war protests a few years ago. I.e. it’s all true, it was all worthwhile but, in the realm of culture, it’s a well-trodden cliché.

On 5 September 1981, a group of women marched from Cardiff to the Royal Air Force base at Greenham in Berkshire. They called themselves Women for Life on Earth. They were challenging the decision to house 96 nuclear missiles at the site. When their request to debate was ignored, they set up camp. Others joined, creating a women-only space. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp became a site of protest and home to thousands of women. Some stayed for months, others for years, and many (including a great number of artists in this exhibition) visited multiple times.

Greenham women saw their anti-nuclear position as a feminist one. They understood that government spending on nuclear missiles meant less money for public services. They used their identities as mothers and carers to fight for the protection of future generations and a more equal society. The camp’s way of life – communal living, no running water, regular evictions and arrests – was challenging. But Greenham was also a refuge. Women were liberated from the restrictions of heteronormative society and embraced separatism. Race, class, sexuality and gender roles were regular topics of discussion.

Protest took on artistic forms for Greenham women. They made banners and collages, produced sculptures and newsletters, and weaved spider webs of wool around the perimeter fences. They wrote and sang protest songs and keened – wailing in grief to mourn lives lost to future nuclear wars. Large-scale public actions, like the 14-mile human chain created by 30,000 people holding hands to ‘embrace the base’ brought widespread media coverage to their cause.

Greenham politicised a generation of women, inspiring protests across the world. It also forged relationships and networks that continue to inform the women’s movement.

Dominating the Greenham room is this big installation by Margaret Harrison.

Installation view of ‘Greenham Common (Common reflections) 1989 to 2013’ by Margaret Harrison. Photo by Larina Fernandes

‘Greenham Common (Common reflections) 1989 to 2013’ is constructed from concrete, mirrors, clothes, children’s boots, pram, soft toys, photographs, plastic bags, household items, wire netting and barbed wire. In this installation Harrison recreates a portion of the perimeter fence at Greenham Common military base. Women living at the Greenham Peace Camp regularly attached clothes, banners, toys, photographs, household items and other everyday objects to the wire fence Here, Harrison adds mirrors in reference to the 1983 ‘Reflect the Base’ action when women held up mirrors to allow the base to symbolically look back at itself and its actions.

Room 5. Women of colour

The following two rooms highlight some of the artists that defined Black feminist art practice in the UK. These women were part of the British Black Arts Movement, founded in the early 1980s. Their artworks explore the intersections of race, gender and sexuality. They do not share a unified aesthetic but acknowledge shared experiences of racism and discrimination.

In the 1980s, a series of high-profile uprisings across the UK highlighted the reality of life for Black people. In the face of high unemployment, hostile media, police brutality and violence and intimidation by far-right groups, people of colour came together. The term ‘political blackness’ was used to acknowledge solidarity between those who faced discrimination based on their skin colour. Many artists drew on this collective approach. They formed networks, organised conferences and curated exhibitions in order to navigate institutional racism in the art world. As Sutapa Biswas and Marlene Smith described in 1988:

We have to work simultaneously on many different fronts.
We must make our images, organise exhibitions, be art critics, historians, administrators, and speakers. We must be the watchdogs of art establishment bureaucracies; sitting as individuals on various panels, as a means of ensuring that Black people are not overlooked.
The list is endless.

In 1981, Bhajan Hunjan and Chila Kumari Singh Burman opened Four Indian Women Artists, the first UK exhibition exclusively organised by and featuring women of colour. In the following years artists including Sutapa Biswas, Lubaina Himid, Rita Keegan and Symrath Patti curated group exhibitions that set out to challenge what Himid describes as the double negation of being Black and a woman. By working, organising and exhibiting together, women of colour developed personal and professional networks that helped them sustain their practices up to the present day.

There’s a lot in these rooms. I liked a very conventional but beautifully executed painting, ‘Woman with earring’ by Claudette Johnson, which you can see on Pinterest.

Also a video by Mona Hatoum in which she walked through Brixton barefoot with her ankles attached to Doctor Marten boots which seem to have been filled with weights to make each step a challenge. Irritatingly, I can’t find the video online, but there’s a Tate web page about it.

Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan

‘Love, Sex and Romance’ consists of 12 vivid photocopies and screenprints on paper.

Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan (1984) Photo by the author

Keegan’s work responds to her extensive family archive that dates back to the 1880s. Here, Keegan employs images and fragments from this archive to create monoprint collages. The artist describes her practice as a response to ‘a feminist perspective’ of ‘putting yourself in the picture’. In talking about her process, Keegan explains: ‘I’ve always felt that to tear somebody’s face can be quite violent, but if you’re doing that to your own face, you’ve given yourself permission, so it’s no longer a violent act. It’s a deconstructive act. It’s a way of looking.’ This work was made in 1984, the same year Keegan co-founded Copy Art, a community space for artists working with computers and photocopiers.

Room 6. ‘There’s no such thing as society’ [the AIDS, gay and lesbian room]

In 1987, weekly lifestyle magazine Women’s Own interviewed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She discussed AIDS, the importance of the ‘traditional family’, and money as ‘the driving force of life’. During the interview she delivered the infamous line, ‘there is no such thing as society’

Thatcher’s statement centred the ‘individual’ and reflected her ‘fundamental belief in personal responsibility and choice’. This position aligned with her neoliberal ideology, encouraging minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs. Thatcher’s opponents read her comments as a suggestion people could overcome the conditions of their oppression through hard work and resolve. This failure to acknowledge the social and systemic inequalities that led to this oppression was counter to everything women’s liberation stood for.

The free market agenda of Thatcher’s Conservative government had also brought about a shift in the art world. Alongside the rapid commercialisation of the art market, a series of cuts to state funding resulted in arts organisations turning to corporate sponsorship. For the artists in this exhibition, this focus on individualism and profitability made the challenge of finding funding, space or a market for their work even harder.

Yet these artists persisted. They continued to make art, question authority and challenge dominant narratives. Times were difficult but they rose to the occasion. As Ingrid Pollard notes: ‘We weren’t expecting to get exhibitions at the Tate; in the 1980s, people set up things of their own. We did shows in alternative spaces – community centres, cafes, libraries, our homes. We occupied spaces differently.’

Gays and lesbians interviewed on film, playing on TV monitors. Photos of lesbians frolicking in the woods, on marches, staging poses for arty photos.

Stop the Clause protest, 1988 by Mumtaz Karimjee, Photograph courtesy the artist

There’s a humorous slogan on one of the photos (the exhibition is awash with ‘radical’ slogans, mottos, t-shirt jingles, lapel badge phrases and so on; before you even enter the exhibition, in the book space I mentioned there’s an entire wall of lapel badges each with a smart, catchy slogan).

One of these days these dykes are going to walk all over you.

Disability arts

The gay and lesbian room morphs into an area devoted to activist art for the disabled. For some reason these tugged at my heartstrings more than a lot of the art from the previous rooms. A society, and maybe all of us as individuals, will be judged by how we treat the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. If there is a God, they will judge us not by how angry we get at each other on Twitter or TikTok but how kind we are, especially to the poorest and weakest in our societies. It’s worth setting down the curators’ summary of disability arts, much less publicised than feminist art.

The Disability Arts Movement played an important part in the political struggle for Disability Rights and the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. Artists and activists worked together to fight marginalisation and create more authentic representations of disabled people. Organisations such as Shape (founded 1976), Arts Integrated Merseyside (now DaDAFest) (founded 1984), London Disability Arts Forum (founded 1986) and publications such as Disability Arts in London (DAIL) (first published 1985) promoted Disability Arts across the UK.

Women were engaged with this work from the outset. In 1985, photographer Samena Rana spoke on disability and photography as part of Black Arts Forum Weekend at the ICA, London. In 1988 artist Nancy Willis was joint organiser of the Disabled Women Artists Conference at the Women Artists’ Slide Library in London. In 1989, DAIL editor Elspeth Morris guest edited an edition of Feminist Art News titled ‘Disability Arts: The Real Missing Culture’. The publication featured 18 contributors including standup comic Barbara Lisicki who declared, ‘I’m a disabled woman. My existence has been mocked, scorned and misrepresented and by being up here I’m not allowing that to continue.’

Rolling Sisters by Nina Nissen (1983) Courtesy of Lenthall Road Workshop

End point

The curators have chosen 1990 as the end point of the exhibition though there is no one event to mark it as clearly and definitively as the 1970s women’s liberation conference which marked the start. In November that year Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign. The Soviet Union was to cease to exist the following year. The downfall of Thatcher supposedly led to a more moderate form of Conservatism under John Major, though I was there and it seemed, at the time, more like a long, drawn-out epoch of embarrassing Tory incompetence. Around the same time (1989 to 1991) the collapse of the Soviet Union evaporated faith in a communist alternative to Western capitalism which had sustained the radical left for the previous 70 years. Much of the fiery left-wing rhetoric of the previous decades was suddenly hollowed out, became irrelevant overnight.

A bit more interestingly, in the wall label for the final room the curators claim that it was the growing influence of the commercial art market which led to the marginalisation of the kind of hand-made, self-grown, radical, agit-prop art we’ve just been soaking ourselves in. In the 1990s art began its journey of increasingly commercialisation and monetisation which has brought us to the present moment when Damien Hirst artworks regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars.

My memory is that, as the 1990s progressed, the economic and cultural legacy of the Thatcher years kicked in, became widely accepted, became the foundational values of more and more people – and that ‘art’ became more and more about money and image. I loved the 1997 ‘Sensation’ exhibition but recognised at the time that it symbolised the triumph of the values of its sponsor, Charles Saatchi, the sensational, newsworthy but superficial values of a phenomenally successful advertising executive.

A lot of the material in this huge exhibition is barely art at all, or is art which relies heavily on its polemical political message for its value – but I miss the era when feminists like these, when so many of us on the left, believed that genuine society-wide change was possible. I take the mickey out of it but I miss it, too.

The merch

After visiting an exhibition stuffed with calls to overthrow capitalism, overthrow the patriarchy, overthrow the system which exploits women etc it’s always comical to emerge into the exhibition shop and discover you can buy all sorts of classy merchandise designed to help you overthrow capitalism from the comfort of your own living room.

Alongside the posters, prints, fridge magnets and tote bags festooned with slogans about women uniting and overthrowing the patriarchy, even I was surprised to come across a stand of feminist beer.

Riot Grrl beer on sale in the Tate shop. Photo by the author

This is Riot Grrrl Pale Ale, retailing at the revolutionary price of £7.95 a can – according to its marketers, ‘a tropical pale ale that’s as bold and rebellious as the feminist music, art and activism it champions.’

A long, long time ago (1978) The Clash lamented how the system turns rebellion into money. Countless works and slogans from the exhibition will probably inspire women who visit it to keep the torch burning, to take forward the endless struggle of women fighting for equality. But I humbly suggest that not many women nowadays believe they can ‘overthrow capitalism’ and so they, like most of us, have to make the best accommodations we can to the system as it actually is.

List of artists

Brenda Agard; Sam Ainsley; Simone Alexander; Bobby Baker; Anne Bean; Zarina Bhimji; Gina Birch; Sutapa Biswas; Tessa Boffin; Sonia Boyce; Chila Kumari Singh Burman; Shirley Cameron; Thalia Campbell; Helen Chadwick; Jennifer Comrie; Judy Clark; Caroline Coon; Eileen Cooper; Stella Dadzie; Poulomi Desai; Vivienne Dick; Nina Edge; Marianne Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene); Rose English; Catherine Elwes; Cosey Fanni Tutti; Aileen Ferriday; Format Photographers Agency; Chandan Fraser; Melanie Friend; Carole Gibbons; Penny Goring; Joy Gregory; Hackney Flashers; Margaret Harrison; Mona Hatoum; Susan Hiller; Lubaina Himid; Amanda Holiday; Bhajan Hunjan; Alexis Hunter; Kay Fido Hunt; Janis K. Jefferies; Claudette Johnson; Mumtaz Karimjee; Tina Keane; Rita Keegan; Mary Kelly; Rose Finn-Kelcey; Roshini Kempadoo; Sandra Lahire; Lenthall Road Workshop; Linder; Loraine Leeson; Alison Lloyd; Rosy Martin; Rita McGurn; Ramona Metcalfe; Jacqueline Morreau; The Neo Naturists; Lai Ngan Walsh; Houria Niati; Annabel Nicolson; Ruth Novaczek; Hannah O’Shea; Pratibha Parmar; Symrath Patti; Ingrid Pollard; Jill Posener; Elizabeth Radcliffe; Franki Raffles; Samena Rana; Su Richardson; Liz Rideal; Robina Rose; Monica Ross; Erica Rutherford; Maureen Scott; Lesley Sanderson; See Red Women’s Workshop; Gurminder Sikand; Sister Seven; Monica Sjöö; Veronica Slater; Penny Slinger; Marlene Smith; Maud Sulter; Jo Spence; Suzan Swale; Anne Tallentire; Shanti Thomas; Martine Thoquenne; Gee Vaucher; Suzy Varty, Christine Voge; Del LaGrace Volcano; Kate Walker; Jill Westwood; Nancy Willis; Christine Wilkinson; Vera Productions, Shirley Verhoeven.

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by Simon on December 30, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Photography, Sculpture

Tagged 1965 Race Relations Act, 1970 Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act, 1970s, 1980s, 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, Abortion, AIDS, Aileen Ferriday, Alexis Hunter, Alison Lloyd, Amanda Holiday, Ana da Silva, Annabel Nicolson, Anne Bean, Anne Tallentire, art, Arts Integrated Merseyside, Banshee (for Irish feminists), Barbara Lisicki, Bhajan Hunjan, Black feminist art, Bobby Baker, Brenda Agard, Britain, British Black Arts Movement, Brixton Black Women's Group, capitalism, Carole Gibbons, Caroline Coon, casual sexism, Catherine Elwes, Chandan Fraser, Charles Saatchi, Cherry Groce, Chila Kumari Singh Burman, child-rearing, Chiswick Women's Aid, Christine Voge, Christine Wilkinson, Claudette Johnson, collapse of the Soviet Union, Communism, Cosey Fanni Tutti, DaDAFest, DAIL, Del LaGrace Volcano, Disability art, Disability Arts in London, Disability Arts Movement, Disability Rights, Disabled Women Artists Conference, domestic work, Edinburgh Women’s Newsletter, Eileen Cooper, Elizabeth Radcliffe, Elspeth Morris, Enough, equal pay, Equal Pay Act, Erica Rutherford, Erin Pizzey, exhibition, fanzines, Feminism, feminist activism, feminist art, Feminist Art News, feminist artists, film, Format Photographers Agency, Foward, France-Lise McGurn, Franki Raffles, Gay Liberation Front, Gee Vaucher, gender, Gill Posener, Gina Birch, Girls At Our Best, Glasgow Women’s Liberation Newsletter, Greenham Common, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, Greenham women, Grunwick strike, Gurminder Sikand, Hackney Flashers, Hannah O’Shea, Helen Chadwick, Houria Niati, housework, In Print, Ingrid Pollard, installation, Jacqueline Morreau, Janis K. Jefferies, Jennifer Comrie, Jill Posener, Jill Westwood, Jo Spence, Johnny Rotten, Joy Gregory, Judy Clark, Kate Walker, Kay Fido Hunt, Lai Ngan Walsh, Lenthall Road Workshop, lesbian art, Lesley Sanderson, Linder, Liz Rideal, London Disability Arts Forum, Loraine Leeson, Lubaina Himid, Lucy Whitman, Ludus, Margaret Harrison, Margaret Thatcher, Marianne Elliott-Said (Poly Styrene), Marlene Smith, Martine Thoquenne, Marxism, Mary Kelly, Maud Sulter, Maureen Scott, Melanie Friend, Mona Hatoum, Monica Ross, Monica Sjöö, Mukli, Mumtaz Karimjee, Nancy Willis, Nina Edge, Nina Nissen, nostalgia, Oh bondage, On Our Backs, oppression of women, Outwrite, Painting, patriarchy, Penny Goring, Penny Slinger, Politics, post-punk, Poulomi Desai, Power of Women, Pratibha Parmar, punk rock, race, Ramona Metcalfe, Re/Sisters exhibition, Red Rag, Reflect the Base, reproductive rights, Riot Grrl, Rita Keega, Rita Keegan, Rita McGurn, Robina Rose, Rock Against Racism, Rock Against Sexism, Rose English, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Roshini Kempadoo, Rosy Martin, Ruth Novaczek, Sally Alexander, Sam Ainsley, Samena Rana, Sandra Lahire, sculpture, See Red Women’s Workshop, Sensation, sexism, Sexual Offences Act, Shanti Thomas, Shape, Shirley Cameron, Shirley Verhoeven, Shrew (lots and lots of copies of) Spare Rib, Simone Alexander, Sister Seven, Socialist Woman, Sonia Boyce, Speak Out, Stella Dadzie, Su Richardson, Susan Hiller, Sutapa Biswas, Suzan Swale, Suzy Varty, Symrath Patti, Tayside Women’s Liberation Newsletter, Tessa Boffin, Thalia Campbell, the Au Pairs, the Beaumont Bulletin, The Clash, the GLC Women's Committee, The Gymslips, the Mo-Dettes, The Neo Naturists, the patriarchy, the Poison Girls, The Raincoats, the Slits, Tina Keane, UK, up yours!, Vera Productions, Veronica Slater, Vivienne Dick, Wages for Housework, women, women artists, Women Artists’ Slide Library, Women for Life on Earth, women in Britain, Women in Revolt!, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 to 1990, Women Now!, women of colour, Women's Liberation Conference, Women's Report, X-Ray Spex, Zarina Bhimji

Posted by Simon on December 30, 2023

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The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff (2004)

How should democracies respond to terrorist attacks? In particular, How much violence, secrecy and violations of human rights should a Western government deploy in order to safeguard a democratic state which, ironically, claims to deplore violence, secrecy and loudly promotes human rights?

How far can a democracy resort to these means without undermining and to some extent damaging the very values it claims to be defending?

How far can it go to deploy the lesser evil of abrogating some people’s human rights in order to ensure the greater good of ensuring the security and safety of the majority? These are the questions Ignatieff sets out to address in this book.

The book is based on a series of six lectures Ignatieff gave at the University of Edinburgh in 2003. Obviously the context for the lectures and their starting point was the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America.

Historical context – the War on Terror

It’s difficult now to recreate the mood of hysteria which gripped so much public discourse in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. US President George W. Bush declared a War on Terror (18 September 2001) which justified major military attacks on Afghanistan (Operation Enduring Freedom starting 7 October 2001), then Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom starting 20 March 2003), alongside combat operations in a number of other Muslim countries (the Philippines, Sudan et al). The US Congress passed a law allowing the President to declare war on anyone he thought was a threat. In his State of the Union speech, 29 January 2002, Bush singled out three likely contenders as the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’, being Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Apart from the mismanagement of the two major wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the most contentious aspect of the so-called War on Terror became what many perceived to be the egregious breaches of human rights which a newly bullish America began to practice. Critics claimed the so-called war was in reality an excuse for creating a hi-tech surveillance state, for reducing civil liberties and infringing human rights.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks the US government passed the Patriot Act which included three main provisions:

expanded surveillance abilities of law enforcement, including by tapping domestic and international phones
easier inter-agency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counter-terrorism efforts
increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify for terrorism charges

The law upset human rights groups on various grounds, for example, the powers given law enforcement agencies to search property and records without a warrant, consent, or even knowledge of the targets. But the single most contentious provision was its authorisation of indefinite detention without trial, which became associated with the notorious detention centre at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba,

Ignatieff’s approach

The lectures were given at the heart of this period (2003), 18 months into the War on Terror, as the Patriot Act was still being rolled out, just after the US government launched its invasion of Iraq (March 2003).

In his introduction Ignatieff makes the point that already, by 2003, there was a well-developed legalistic literature on all these issues. He is not going to add to that (he isn’t a lawyer). He wants to take a broader moral point of view, bringing in philosophical and even literary writers from the whole Western tradition, to try and set the present moment in a much broader cultural context.

My purpose is…to articulate what values we are trying to save from attack. (p.xvii)

It’s worth noting that at the time he wrote and delivered these lectures, Ignatieff was the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I.e. he didn’t have an amateur, journalistic interest in these issues, but was a senior academic expert in them.

The text is full of Ignatieff’s trademark complex, subtle and often agonised moral reflections, mixing reportage on contemporary politics with references to writers of the past, continually teasing out subtle and often very illuminating insights. At the same time, as I worked my way through the rather laborious networks of arguments, I began to have less and less confidence in his arguments. Fine words butter no parsnips and seminars on moral philosophy can go on forever. What were his practical conclusions and recommendations?

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Democracies have often deployed coercive measures, seeing them as the lesser evil deployed to avert the greater evil of terrorism, civil conflict and so on. But it requires that the measures can be justified publicly, subject to judicial review, and have sunset clauses i.e. fixed lengths so they don’t become permanent features of the society.

Government infringement of its citizens’ rights must be tested under adversarial review. This idea recurs again and again in the text. The defining feature of democracies is intricate sets of checks and balances. If some rights have to be abrogated during emergencies, these suspensions can still be independently tested, by judges, by independent advisers, and they will eventually have to be revealed to the citizens for ultimate approval.

There is a spectrum of opinions on suspending civil liberties. At one end, pure civil libertarians maintain that no violations of rights can ever be justified. At the other end, pragmatists eschew moral principles and judge restrictive legislation purely on practical outcomes. Ignatieff is somewhere in the middle, confident that actions which breach ‘foundational commitments to justice and dignity – torture, illegal detention, unlawful assassination’ – should be beyond the pale. But defining precisely what constitutes torture, which detentions are or are not legal, where killing is or is not justified, that’s the problem area.

If lawyers and politicians and intellectuals are going to bicker about these issues forever i.e. there will never be fixed and agreed definitions, the one thing all good democrats can rally round is ‘to strengthen the process of adversarial review‘ i.e. to put in place independent review of government measures.

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

If laws can be abridged and liberties suspended during an ’emergency’, what remains of their legitimacy in times of peace? If laws are rules, and emergencies make exceptions to theses rules, how can their authority survive once exceptions are made? (p.25)

Chapter 2 examines the impact the emergency suspensions of civil liberties has on the rule of law and civil rights. Does the emergency derogation of normal rights strengthen or weaken the rule of law which we pride ourselves on in the Western democracies?

Ignatieff takes the middle ground that suspension of rights does not destroy them or undermine the normal practice of them, indeed helps to preserve them – provided they are ‘temporary, publicly justified, and deployed only as a last resort.’

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Why do liberal democracies to habitually over-react to terrorist threats? Why do we seem so quick to barter away our liberties? One way to explain it is that majorities (i.e. most of us) are happy to deprive small and relatively powerless minorities (in the War against Terror, Muslims and immigrants) of their rights in order to achieve ‘security’.

But our opponents have rights, too. Just as in the debate over freedom of speech, any fool can approve free speech which they agree with, it’s harder to fight for the right of people to say things you dislike or actively think are wrong. But that is the essence of free speech, that is its crucial test – allowing the expression of opinions and views you violently disagree with, believe are wrong and immoral. It is precisely these kinds of views we should make every effort to allow free expression. ‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ as Voltaire famously put it.

It’s easy and uncontroversial to defend the human rights of poets and activists who protested against apartheid or communist oppression. Much harder to insist that detainees being grabbed in Iraq or Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world and flown half way round the world and who might well be members of al Qaeda or ISIL, are provided just the same level of legal representation and rights as you and me. But that is exactly the test of our commitment to human rights: whether we extend them to our bitterest enemies.

Same goes for the other elements in the system of checks and balances, namely the other wings of government, the courts and the media. The temptation and the tendency is for everybody to ‘rally round the flag’ but this is exactly the opposite of what ought to happen. The American constitution vests power in the Presidency to take extraordinary steps in times of crisis or war but that is precisely the moment when the other elements in the division of power should increase their oversight of executive actions.

In his searing indictment of America’s mismanagement of the war in Iraq, Thomas E Ricks makes just this point. The build-up to the war involved questionable evidence (about weapons of mass destruction), wrong assumptions (about the response of the Iraqi population to foreign invasion), criminal mismanagement and the complete absence of a plan for the aftermath. While describing all this in forensic detail, Ricks points out that this is precisely the point when the administration’s plans should have been subjected to intense and critical scrutiny, something which might have saved tens of thousands of lives, billions of money, untold materiel. Instead, in the atmosphere of hysterical patriotism which gripped America, Congress rolled over and approved the plans with little serious examination and the press turned into bombastic cheerleaders. Both miserably failed to live up to the roles assigned to them in a free democratic society.

In fact most of this chapter is taken up with a useful and informative history of terrorism as a political tactic, starting with the Nihilists in nineteenth century Russia, then onto the two great loci of political violence, in revolutionary Russia and Weimar Germany, before turning to post-war terrorism in Latin America (Chile, Colombia, Peru), in Sri Lanka, in Israel, before cycling back to Europe and the 1970s terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades, before a brief consideration of the separatist/nationalist terrorism faced by Britain in Northern Ireland and Spain in the Basque Country.

Ignatieff’s summary from this brief conspectus is that terrorism never works, it never achieves its political aims. The Russian and Weimar regimes weren’t undone by political violence but by the cataclysm of World War One and the Great Depression, respectively. Marxist terrorism in 1970s Germany and Italy aimed to create media spectaculars and psychological tipping points whereby the population would be woken from their slumber, rise up and overthrow the repressive bourgeois state etc. Complete failure with the terrorists either committing suicide or publicly recanting.

In Latin America political terrorism either produced the exact opposite of what was intended, for example in Argentina, where it helped a repressive military junta into power. Or, as in Sri Lanka and some extent Israel, it became a stalemate that extended over such a long period of time that it became the social reality of the country, giving rise to a society characterised by random atrocities, intimidation of local populations by the terrorists, and repressive state apparatuses. The host society wasn’t liberated and transformed but permanently degraded.

Ignatieff then considers how the British, on the whole, managed the Northern Ireland situation successfully by abrogating various civil rights but under the aegis of government and judicial review.

But part of the reason his review of traditional terrorism is so enjoyable is because it’s so familiar from decades of print and TV journalism – but this itself highlights, I think, a weakness of the whole book: which is that the campaign of al Qaeda and related groups was not to achieve political change (like the Marxist terrorist groups of the 1970s) or to achieve constitutional change / nationalist independence (as with the Basques or, at the other end of the Europe, the Kurdish terrorist groups in Turkey). Those aims could both be handled in Ignatieff’s model i.e. carefully incorporated into the existing political structures.

By contrast Al Qaeda wanted to destroy the West not only as a goal in itself but as part of an even grander aim which was to undermine the contemporary world order of nation-states and re-create the historical umma, the worldwide community of Muslims that was once held together under the caliphate of the prophet Mohammed. Osama bin Laden identified America as the chief bulwark of the existing world order, especially in the Arab world, where it subsidised and underpinned repressive states. So as a first step to remodelling the world, bin Laden ordered his followers to attack Western targets anywhere, at any time.

Ignatieff was writing in 2003. We had yet to have the 2004 Madrid train bombings (193 dead), the 7/7 2005 attacks in London (56 dead), the Boston Marathon bombing on 15 April 2013 (3 dead), the 18 March 2015 attack on a beach in Tunisia (21 dead), the 13 November 2015 attack at the Bataclan theatre in Paris (90 dead), the Manchester Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 (23 dead), plus numerous other Islamist atrocities in countries further afield.

If the central aim of al Qaeda and its affiliates is to kill and maim as many Westerners as possible, it’s difficult to see how this can be incorporated into any kind of political process. And in the next chapter Ignatieff indeed concludes that the organisation itself can only be defeated militarily.

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

An examination of terrorism itself.

In this chapter I want to distinguish among forms of terrorism, identify the political claims terrorists use to justify violence against civilians, and propose political strategies to defeat them (p.82)

Ignatieff considers terrorism the resort of groups who are suppressed and oppressed, who have no voice and no say in the power structures which rule over them. He gives a handy categorisation of six types of terrorism:

insurrectionary terrorism aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of a state
loner or issue terrorism, aimed at promoting a single cause
liberation terrorism, aimed at the overthrow of a colonial regime
separatist terrorism, aiming at independence for a subordinate ethnic or religious group within a state
occupation terrorism, aimed at driving an occupying force from territory acquired through war or conquest
global terrorism, aimed not at the liberation of a particular group, but at inflicting damage and humiliation on a global power

With the last one sounding like it’s been made up to describe al Qaeda-style hatred of America.

Terrorism presents a classic challenge for liberals, who have traditionally been on the side of the underdog and oppressed minorities, from the early trade unions to blacks under apartheid, and so often have an instinctive sympathy for the social or political or economic causes of terrorism but who, obviously, want to stop short of supporting actual acts of violence. Where do you draw the line?

Ignatieff says the only practical solution is to ensure that the oppressed always have peaceful political means to address their grievances. Purely military means cannot solve terrorism. It requires political solutions, above all bringing the voiceless into peaceful political processes. He doesn’t mention it but I think of how the warring factions in Northern Ireland were cajoled into joining a political ‘peace process’ which promised to take seriously the concerns of all sides and parties, to listen to all grievances and try to resolve them in a peaceful, political way.

Mrs Thatcher said ‘we do not talk to terrorists’ but, rather as with free speech, it is precisely the terrorists that you should be talking to, to figure out how their grievances can be addressed and the violence be brought to an end.

Thus even if al Qaeda’s values come from completely outside the modern framework of human rights, even if they base themselves on Islamic traditions of jihad and unrelenting war against the infidel, even if they cannot be reasoned with but only crushed militarily, this doesn’t prevent Ignatieff making the obvious point that we in the West can still bring pressure to bear on many authoritarian Arab regimes to try and remove the causes of grievance which drive young men into these causes. These would include overt American imperialism; repressive police policies which enact brutal violence and deny human rights; lack of pluralistic political systems i.e. which allow subaltern voices a say and some influence. And so on (pages 99 to 101).

The weak and oppressed must be given a peaceful political alternative that enables them to rise up against the violence exercised in their name. (p.106)

The Arab future

Trouble is, a lot of this kind of hopeful rhetoric was claimed for the movements of the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, when authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Libya, Egypt and nearly in Syria. Just a few years later it was clear that the ‘spring’ comprehensively failed: an even more authoritarian regime was in place in Egypt, Libya had split into warlord-run areas and a ruinous civil war had bedded down in Syria which would pave the way for the rise of ISIS.

Personally, I think the countries in that part of the world which aren’t lucky enough to be sitting on vast reserves of oil will be condemned to perpetual poverty and conflict, because of:

the lack of traditions of individual civic responsibility and the complex matrix of civil society organisations which make the Western countries stable as politically stable as they are;
as the main offshoot of the above – universal corruption
the entrenched political tradition of strong rulers invoking ethnic nationalism or Islamic models of rule or both (Nasser, Gaddafi, Saddam)
what Ignatieff calls ‘the corruption and decay of the Arab and Islamic political order’ (p.152)
the economic backwardness of most Arab countries i.e. preponderance of subsistence agriculture
widespread lack of education
marginalisation / lack of education or political rights for women
the extraordinary population explosion (when I first visited Egypt in 1981 it had a population of 45 million; now it’s 110 million) which ensures widespread poverty
and now, the speedy degradation of the environment by climate change (loss of water and agricultural land)

One or two of these would be tricky challenges enough. All of them together will ensure that most countries in the Arab world will remain breeding grounds for angry, aggrieved and unemployed young men who can be persuaded to carry out atrocities and terrorist acts against domestic or Western targets, for the foreseeable future.

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

This chapter addresses the way that, in the absence of peaceful talks, terrorist campaigns tend to degenerate into destruction and killing for their own sake, as does the behaviour of the authorities and security services set to combat them. Tit-for-tat killing becomes an end in itself. Violence begets violence in a downward spiral.

This is the most serious ethical trap lying in wait in the long war on terror that stretches before us. (p.115)

Ignatieff realises that this well-observed tendency can be used by opponents of his notion of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. the moderate and constantly scrutinised, temporary abrogation of human rights. Their argument goes that what begins as a high-minded, carefully defined and temporary ‘abrogation’ of human rights law has so often in the past degenerated into abuse, which then becomes standard practice, becomes institutionalised, and then causes permanent damage to the democracies which implemented it.

As you’d expect, Ignatieff meets this claim by breaking the threat down into categories, and then analysing them and the moral problems and issues they throw up.

First, though, he starts the chapter with some low-pressure, enjoyably colourful discussion of Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Possessed – which describes a terrorist group which takes over a remote Russian town – and then of Joseph Conrad’s novel, The Secret Agent, which features a nihilistic character named the Professor, who walks round London with an early version of a suicide vest.

Part of the chapter addresses the practical, administrative problem of preventing anti-terrorist campaigns from descending into violence. But, as mention of the novels suggest, he also explores (as far as anyone can) the psychology of the nihilistic terrorist i.e. people who just want to destroy, for no purpose, with no political aim, for destruction’s sake.

It can be an individual who wants to make a name for themselves through a spectacular, for example Timothy McVeigh who carried out the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured 680. Lone actors like this are always going to be very difficult to detect or deter.

Then he discusses the Japanese doomsday cult known as Aum Shinrikyo which carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Terrorists who (claim to) represent an ethnic or nationalist cause can, in principle, be negotiated with for at least two reasons: one is that negotiations may hold out the hope that some at least of their goals may be achieved; the other, is that, insofar as they represent an ethnic group, a population, this population can be worked on to reject the group or moderate its behaviour.

With single actors or death cults, levers of negotiation and bargaining are obviously absent. Having established the key characteristics of these kinds of actors, Ignatieff moves on to a detailed consideration of al Qaeda. In his view it has twisted Islamic teachings so completely as to become a death cult. The 9/11 bombers didn’t leave demands or any way to negotiate – they just wanted to strike a blow at the West, specifically America, and that meant killing as many Americans as possible.

His analysis is on the brief side (there are, obviously, hundreds of books about bin Laden and al Qaeda) but, as usual, throws up fascinating insights and ideas. a) It is impossible to negotiate with a suicide bomber because being negotiated out of detonating is, by definition, a failure of the mission they’ve taken on.

b) More subtly, an organisation that sets out to use suicide bombing as a strategy cannot fail because it has no defined, workable political goals or aims. Bin Laden’s aim of clearing Westerners out of Arab lands, overthrowing the existing Arab states, recreating the 7th century caliphate and implementing Sharia law in full, is not a practical programme, it is a utopian millennarian vision. It is so impractical, it is such a long-term and enormous goal, that true believers can’t, in a sense, be demoralised.

c) And this is where the promise of immortality comes in. Once true believers are promised direct entry into heaven, they have ceased to be political actors and, in this narrow sense, Ignatieff defines them as fanatics.

He adds a distinct and fascinating idea which is that all death cults, and most terrorist groups, have to have a theory which discredits the idea of civilian innocence. Obviously blowing up a load of people going to work in their offices is murder. So, just as obviously, terrorists who do it have been re-educated or indoctrinated not to see it that way. The most basic route is for their ideological leaders to persuade them that nobody is innocent; that so-called ‘civilians’ are as guilty as the acts of repression or infidelity or murder as the armies or forces of their countries.

The Algerian National Liberation Front used this defence to justify blowing up cafes full of civilians as part of their ‘war’. Scores of other terrorist groups use the same justification, erasing the difference between the soldier (a figure defined and attributed specific rights and responsibilities under international convention going back at least as far as the Geneva Conventions) and the civilian (who, under human rights law, is not responsible in warfare and should not be a target).

But this works both ways. For when terrorists are embedded in local populations, emerging to ambush soldiers then disappearing back into the crowd, a tendency develops for those soldiers to come to hate the civilian population and take out their anger and frustration on them. Happened in Vietnam (My Lai etc), happened in Iraq (Haditha etc). And of course all such breakdowns of military discipline it play into the terrorists’ hands by getting the population to move over to support them. That’s why terrorists work hard to trigger them.

So, blurring the difference between soldier and civilian can be practiced by both terrorist and security forces and always heads in the same direction, towards ever-growing atrocity and massacre. Eventually both sides are murdering unarmed civilians, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Something which distinguishes us from the terrorists is that liberal democracies put huge value on human life, and this particularly applies to civilian human life. Therefore the kinds of massacres which US troops carried out in Vietnam and Iraq sully the reputation and undermine the meaning of liberal democracy itself. I.e. they drag us closer to the indiscriminate violence of our enemies.

These pictures of fanatical death cults are by way of preparing the way for the second half of the chapter which moves on to try and define precisely when two anti-human rights tactics may be used, namely selective assassination and torture. Ignatieff is not an absolutist or civil libertarian i.e. he reluctantly admits that, in addressing the kind of nihilistic fanatics he has described, assassination may be the only way to eliminate people you can’t bargain with, and that extremely ‘coercive’ interrogation may be necessary to extract information from fanatics which may save lives.

This is a detailed discussion of contentious issues, but the bottom line is Ignatieff things they may be permitted, but so long as his basic criteria are fulfilled, namely that they are a) approaches of last resort, after all else has been tried b) and that some kind of independent judicial review or oversight is in place. It is when these kind of policies turn into secret death squads that a rules-based liberal democracy starts to be in trouble.

Ignatieff repeats some familiar objections to torture, namely that it simply doesn’t work, that it produces intense hatred which can motivate those who survive and are released into going on to carry out atrocities, and it degrades those tasked with carrying it out. There’s evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American operatives tasked with torturing during the War on Terror.

Typically, Ignatieff adds another point I’d never considered which is that there is a slippery slope from torture to plain murder. This may be for two reasons: the tortured may be converted by the process into such inveterate enemies of the state that their interrogators realise they will never be rehabilitated; and, more sinisterly, the torturers realise they can never release their victims because they themselves, will eventually be implicated i.e. the truth will out. Therefore it’s easier all round just to bump them off. Hence the ‘disappeared’ in South American dictatorships, all those detainees who, after extensive torture, were taken out in helicopters and thrown into the sea. Torture doesn’t just not work, create new enemies and degrade the torturers – it creates a problem of what to do with the tortured? A downward spiral all the way.

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

The book ends with a bleak discussion of what may happen as and when terrorists acquire weapons of mass destruction i.e. terror attacks on a devastating scale. Are our democracies strong enough to withstand such attacks? How can we strengthen our institutions to ensure that they are?

Ignatieff has a number of suggestions about how to prevent the proliferation of terrifying WMDs. But he comes back to his fundamental position which is that the way to defend and strengthen liberal democracies in the face of increased terrorist threats is to make them more liberal and democratic, not less.

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

The text is continually spinning off insights and ideas which I found distracted me from the main flow. For example, the notion that every terror campaign, sooner or later, with complete inevitability, ends up terrorising and killing people on their own side – moderates and ‘sell-outs’ and anybody in their ethnic group or repressed minority who threatens to engage in political discussion with the oppressors. In a sense, moderates are more threatening to a terrorist group than their overt enemy, the repressive state, which is why so many terrorist groups end up killing so many people on their own side (p.104).

2. The threshold of repugnance

The savagery of the Algerian fighters for independence in the 1950s left a permanent scar on the national psyche of all concerned so that when, 30 years after independence (1962) in 1992, the ruling elite disallowed an election which would have given power to the new radical Islamist party, the country very quickly descended into a savage civil war, with Islamic terrorists and government security forces both murdering unarmed civilians they considered guilty of aiding their opponents.

Both sides, with generational memories of the super-violence of the struggle for independence, invoked it and copied it in the new struggle. There was little or no threshold of repugnance to deter them (p.105). Violent civil wars set new lows of behaviour with after-comers can then invoke. The whole process ratchets ever downwards.

3. The world is watching

There’s plenty of evidence that if a movement judges that it needs the help of the outside world (of the ‘international community’ which Ignatieff is so sceptical about in his previous books) then it will tailor its behaviour accordingly. It will, in other words, try to restrain violence.

The African National Congress knew it had strong support across the Western world and put its faith in international pressure eventually bringing a settlement, so that its political leaders (and its defenders in the West) chose to play down the violence of the movement’s activist wings (which, as per rule 1, above, were mostly directed against their own i.e. the black community, witness the invention and widespread use of ‘necklacing).

In other words, the international community counts. It can exert pressure. It can use its leverage to turn liberation movements away from terrorist methods. Up to a point. As long as the movement is well organised, as the ANC was and is. At the other extreme is the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), little more than a rag-tag band of psychopaths, who led an 11-year ‘civil war’, little more than a campaign of terror against their own populations (as described in stomach-churning detail in Anthony Loyd’s book, ‘Another Bloody Love Letter’). They had nothing whatsoever to gain from outside influence except being shut down. So with nothing to lose, they continued their killing sprees for 11 long years (1991 to 2002).

At the other end of the organisational scale, Russia was able to carry out atrocities and conduct a war of total destruction in Chechnya because they know no-one was looking (it was almost impossible for foreign journalists to get in) and nobody cared (it wasn’t a location of strategic significance, no oil, none of the racial discrimination the West gets so worked up about) so mass murder proceeded with barely a ripple in the Western press.

These examples prove a general rule which is that the ‘international community’ can have some moderating influence on some insurgences, terrorist campaigns and wars (p.98).

Notes and thoughts

This is a complex and sophisticated book. The language of human rights often segues into discussion of particular conventions and international declarations in such a way that to really follow the discussion you have to be pretty familiar with these documents and laws and rules.

I also found some of the political concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around quite obscure and unfamiliar – communitarianism, the conservative principle, adversarial justification, the decision cycle and so on.

I got along with his first political book, ‘Blood and Belonging’, very well. Ignatieff began his discussions with detailed descriptions of the political situations in half a dozen countries, giving plenty of colour and a good feel for the place, its history and issues and people, before getting on to the philosophical discussion, and only applied a handful of relatively simple ideas in order to shed light on the nationalist conflict he was covering.

This book is the opposite. It is sustained at a high academic level, continually introducing new concepts and making fine distinctions and drawing subtle conclusions, with only passing reference to real world examples. It sustains a level of abstraction which I eventually found exhausting. I wasn’t clever enough, or educated enough in the concepts which Ignatieff routinely throws around, to really make the most of it. Probably the best way to read it is one chapter at a time, going back and working through the logic of his argument, chewing over the tumble of clever conclusions. It’s certainly the most demanding of Ignatieff’s half dozen politics books.

Seven days later

Having pondered and revisited the book for a week, maybe I can offer a better description of how the text works. The best bits of ‘Blood and Belonging’ were where Ignatieff shed light on the psychology of different types of nationalism (especially the crude sort of ethnic nationalism which so quickly degenerates into violence).

The same is true here, as well. The best bit about, say, the chapter on nihilism, is Ignatieff’s categorisation of different types of terrorist psychology, and then his exploration of what each psychology is, how it comes about and works in practice. This is fascinating and hugely increases the reader’s understanding, especially when he applies the categories to real historical examples.

What I found harder going, where I think the book comes adrift, is when he moves on to discuss how ‘we’ in liberal democracies ought to deal with the new post-9/11 terrorism threat. It’s at this point, throughout the book, that he keeps using his concept of ‘the lesser evil’ i.e. we should, temporarily, and with supervision by some kind of objective person like a judge, abrogate some of our treasured human rights in some circumstances, where it’s absolutely necessary – it’s these passages, and the entire concept of ‘the lesser evil’, which I sometimes struggled to understand and never found completely clear or convincing.

Ignatieff’s categorisations and definitions of types of society or politics or terrorism, and his descriptions of the psychologies behind them, I found thrilling because they’re so incisive and instantly clarified my own thinking; whereas his discussions of the ‘morality’ of the political response to terrorism, I found confusing and unsatisfactory.

Credit

The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2004. All references are to the 2005 Edinburgh University Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 17, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Politics, War

Tagged #democracy, 1970s, 7/7 attacks, 9/11, Afghanistan, African National Congress, Al Qaeda, Algerian National Liberation Front, Another Bloody Love Letter, Anthony Loyd, Arab Spring, Arab world, assassination, Aum Shinrikyo, axis of evil, Baader-Meinhof Gang, Bataclan theatre, book, Bosnia, Boston Marathon bombing, Britain, Carr Center for Human Rights, checks and balances, Chile, civil liberties, Colombia, death squads, democracies, Dostoyevsky, Egypt, Ethics, Geneva Conventions, global terrorism, Guantanamo Bay, Haditha, Harvard, human rights, insurrectionary terrorism, international community, interrogation, Iran, Iraq, ISIL, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Joseph Conrad, Kosovo, Kurdish terrorism, Latin America, lectures, liberation terrorism, Liberty and Armageddon, loner terrorism, Madrid train bombings, Manchester Arena bombing, Marxist terrorism, Michael Ignatieff, moral philosophy, Mrs Thatcher, Muslim countries, My Lai, Nihilists, North Korea, Northern Ireland, occupation terrorism, Oklahoma City bombing, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Osama bin Laden, Paris, Patriot Act, Peru, political philosophy, political theory, Politics, President George W. Bush, prophet Mohammed, Psychology, revolutionary Russia, Revolutionary United Front, RUF, separatist terrorism, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sudan, surveillance, terrorism, terrorist attacks, the Basque Country, the caliphate, The Ethics of Emergency, the Great Depression, the lesser evil, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, The Philippines, The Possessed, the Red Brigades, The Secret Agent, The Strength of the Weak, The Temptations of Nihilism, The Weakness of the Strong, Thomas E. Ricks, Timothy McVeigh, Tokyo subway attack, torture, UK, University of Edinburgh, US Congress, Vietnam, violence, Voltaire, war on terror, Weimar Germany, Western democracy, WMDs, World War One

Posted by Simon on May 17, 2023

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BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON @ the Saatchi Gallery

This is a huge, vast, awe-inspiring, ginormous exhibition, full of riches and surprises and fun. The Saatchi Gallery is housed in a grand and spacious building just off the King’s Road. It has three floors of exhibition space (ground, 1st and second floors), some of its rooms are huge, plus little side-rooms, nooks and crannies, corridors and the stairwells you go up to move between floors.

Every inch of this space, all the rooms and all the walls are covered with wild and vivid examples of the exhibitions subject, for this is a huge, comprehensive exhibition of Street Art and Graffiti. Wow, is it big! Wow, is there a lot, a huge amount, to take in! It aims to be the most comprehensive exhibition of graffiti and street art ever held in the UK and surely it is.

The Cosmic Cavern by Kenny Scharf – a dayglo party installation, inspired by the night-clubs and discos of the 1980s in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

To give a quick sense of the scale, here’s a list of some of the participating artists:

10Foot, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Craig Costello, CRASH, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, DONDI, Duncan Weston, Dr. REVOLT, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martin Jones, Martha Cooper, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, POSE, PRIDE, PRIEST, Richard Colman, RISK, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, SWOON, TAKI 183, Toby Mott, TOX, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Todd James, VHILS , ZEPHYR.

Site-specific mural by selected group of participating artists in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Room after room is packed with paintings, artefacts, sculptures, installations. There are standard gallery rooms with paintings hanging discreetly on the wall but there’s also some vivid installations, namely a mock-up of a 1980s record shop whose walls are plastered with old posters, complete with racks holding real LPs you can browse through.

Interior of Trash records, including interactive record player, t-shirts, skateboards, and a multitude of youth culture ephemera in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There’s a life-sized shop full of colourful clutter and bric-a-brac. There’s a corridor lined with black and red graffiti, which is illuminated in pinky-red light, giving you a full visual experience as you walk through it. One of the best bits is a room covered with dense black-and-white patterns giving you pleasantly zig-zaggy optical illusions, in the middle of which are some stands with squiggly over-coloured zoomorphic swirl sculptures. All pleasantly weird and wonderful and disorientating. Some toddlers in it at the same time as me loved it.

Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone: installation in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There are 13 rooms in all and each one is given a theme, within which what seem like floods of artists are explained and displayed.

The exhibition sets out to give a historical account of the genesis and development of modern graffiti sometime in the 1960s and from then on twines the development of graffiti in basically two places, London and America, specifically Los Angeles.

Accompanying the explanation of the development of street art was a lot about contemporary music, which also came in two essential flavours. First of all there’s what I thought was a surprising amount about English punk, with several walls made up of fabulously retro old posters for scores of punk bands.

There’s a lot about the Clash who in 1980 left sleepy London town for America where they entered into all kinds of collaborations with US hip-hop and rap bands. The show includes FUTURA2000’s legendary 30-foot-long painting, made on stage with The Clash during a performance.

There’s a passage devoted to Don Letts, film director, disc jockey and musician, collaborator with the Clash among many other groups. To my surprise a whole section is devoted to bad boy impresario, Malcolm McLaren. There’s a series of photos depicting the mutations of his shop on the Kings Road, Sex, which morphed into Seditionaries and several other incarnations, and then to his post-punk attempts to stay ahead of the trend by moving to America and exploiting the new sound of hip-hop.

Wall-sized photo of Malcolm McLaren and the arted-up boogie box he’s carrying in a display case in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

And then of course, there is hip-hop itself, with several galleries devoted to massive photos of key bands such as Public Enemy, NWA and many more rappers and DJs with colourful confrontational soubriquets, juxtaposed with the graffiti and street artists who inspired or were inspired by them.

Classic photo of Public Enemy by Glen E. Friedman in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

I found the jumping between black American culture in the 1980s and essentially white punk culture from the late 1970s quite confusing, but in a fun, disorientating kind of way. London, punk, tower blocks and concrete subways, the Clash, Mrs Thatcher and so on, I immediately get, relate to and remember. Life in some American ghetto, bling and baseball caps, and the complex social legacy of the civil rights movement or Black Power, a lot less so. In fact, not really at all.

I guess there are two ways to approach such a funfair, such a festival of art, such an overwhelm-ment of paintings, installations, set-ups and so on: one is to read the sensible wall labels, which attempt to give a coherent account of the birth and growth of street art, and go slowly mad with the level of detail. The other is just to stroll around and react to the scores and scores of vivid, vibrant setups and displays. Here’s the cluttered shop of bric-a-brac I mentioned. What has it got to do with graffiti, what is it trying to do? To be honest, I don’t know, but I loved it.

Puppet Workshop ‘Rubbish Stuff’ by Paul Insect in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

So far I’ve given the impression it’s mad and cluttered and busy, and some of the rooms or spaces definitely are. But others are the complete opposite, big traditional gallery spaces with sensible wood floors, white walls and all kinds of works hung on them.

Some are sets of paintings on wood (or concrete) because one of the things that comes over is that, among the 100+ artists on display, some began as street artists but have been going for 30 years or more and have evolved a more studied conventional practice. Hence a very conventional display which looks like this:

Installation view of BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

In other places, works have been sprayed directly onto the gallery walls by contemporary artists.

Wall art by Kenny Scharf, created specially for BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Running the entire height of one of the big stairwells is what amounts to a dense wallpaper made up of hundreds and hundreds of photos of New York subways trains entirely covered with classic urban graffiti. There’s a room devoted to the work of Lawrence Watson (born 1963) who worked his way up through the New Musical Express and The Face, during which he was commissioned to do a photojournalism on the New York hip-hop school and took classic snaps of artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Public Enemy.

Lawrence Watson installation featuring contact sheets and a performance video of one of the many hip-hop acts he photographed, at BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

There’s what you could call a busy but essentially orderly displays, such as this one of brightly coloured rectangles with catchy images or logos.

Site-specific poster installation LONDINIUM 2023 by C.R. Stecyk III in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Then there’s politics because young people are constantly rebelling, bless them, before they grow up, get married, get a mortgage and kids and vote for people like Boris Johnson or Dominic Raab.

I warmed to the rebel imagery of the English punk strand of things, and especially liked a huge long wall covered in posters for punk bands and gigs in the late 70s, mixed up with posters execrating Maggie Thatcher and weathered old copies of the magazine Class War, which I used to get when I was a student, mainly for the hilarious covers, like the satirical covers of Private Eye, only with added venom. Ah, the Miners Strike, the Battle of Orgreave, bombs in Northern Ireland, Exocets over the Falklands, those were the days, eh?

Part of the punk poster collage in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Some definitions

1. Graffiti

Graffiti is a name-based, usually illegal art work which can range from simple tag signatures to elaborate, multi-coloured designs.

Graffiti is probably as old as civilisation i.e. cities. We have graffiti from ancient Rome (displayed at the British Museum’s Nero exhibition). Modern-day graffiti arose in 1967 in New York and Philadelphia as a form based on repetition of the artist’s name or tag, embellished and stylised. Graffiti movements or communities arose round the increasingly popular. Generally, you gained respect the more daring and illegal your work.

Untitled by ZEPHYR, a venerable graffiti artist who’s been ‘working’ for over 50 years, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

2. Street art

Street art is usually illegal work that falls outside the scope of ‘graffiti’, for example, image-based posters, stickers, stencils and installations. In a modern art context, street art dates from as recently as 2000 when a critical mass of artists, many of them originally graffiti-ists, crystallised the practice and attracted attention from curators and art scholars.

3. Murals

Murals are large-scale wall art, whether legal or illegal.

Exhibition contents

Let me try to give a more structured overview of this huge, unwieldy phantasmagoria by, basically, copying the press release.

The curators’ stated aim is to zero in on exceptional moments in the history of street art. These include the emergence of punk, the birth of hip-hop (celebrating its 50th anniversary, happy birthday, chaps) and street culture’s growing influence in fashion and film.

What comes over just from that preliminary introduction is that the exhibition is nowhere near complete. These are just a tiny fraction of works from an art form or movement which was spontaneous, undisciplined and often ephemeral by its nature. It’s a tiny selection of what could arguably be seen as the only really global universal art form, found as much in urban centres in Latin America, Africa, Russia, China, the Far East, as on the mean streets of Brixton or Philadelphia.

‘Toy Alley.. after the Murder’ installation by PRIEST in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Anyway, the exhibition is divided into what the curators call ‘chapters’.

1. Vandal

First thing you see on entering the gallery is a graffiti-filled installation of what looks like a teenager’s bedroom, ‘The Vandal’s Bedroom’ by American artist Todd James, presumably to establish several themes: predominantly that this whole worldview is by and for youth, angry sullen teenagers and students or – in America more than England, I suspect – black kids from ghettos who felt outside all existing norms and social structures. The other theme being mess, it’s a mock-up of the bedroom of the messiest teenager in history, covered in posters and magazines and rubbish and sci-fi paperbacks but mostly festooned with scrawls and tags and ‘toons. Looked like my son’s bedroom on a good day.

Vandals Bedroom by Todd James in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

2. Music and art converge

The socio-political turmoil of the late 1970s and 80s, where the decline of cities met artistic resistance, a shift which was felt in both the US and UK. Youth culture responded by painting graffiti on walls and public transport, creating art that reflected and reimagined the times in an explosion of expression on the streets. It was about identity in the face of oppression, self-awareness, and self-discovery in a moment of a depleted economic outlook.

3. Dream galleries

A selection of American and European originators, photo documentarians and cultural icons who helped contextualize and spread graffiti culture around the world. In André Saraiva’s Dream series, there is a visual articulation of how graffiti, street art, hip-hop, punk, fashion and break-dancing all sprung from the late 1970s and early 1980s into the 90s and today, and became a hybrid celebration of underground culture.

Featured artists also include Mister CARTOON, known for his tattooing and Los Angeles murals; a Beastie Boys installation featuring fashion and ephemera from the band’s prolific history; and LADY PINK’s feminist murals, illustrations and paintings.

Feminist mural by LADY PINK, an Ecuador-born artists who started painting New York subway trains aged 15, in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

4. Legends

Hosts icons such as legendary NYC artist, Eric HAZE, a torch bearer for generations to come; a new large-scale painting by abstract expressionist artist José Parlá; advertisement posters by KAWS; and ephemera by Keith Haring, one of the most popular street artists of the 1980s.

5. Blockbusters

Works commissioned specifically for this exhibition by graffiti trailblazers Shepard Fairey, LA-based activist, and FAILE, a Brooklyn-based artistic duo taking over the streets of NYC since the late 90s.

6. Larger Than Life

A site-specific installation by LA-based icon Kenny Scharf, the largest version to date of his immersive and interactive installation Cosmic Cavern, consisting of Day-Glo paintings, ephemera, and reused materials found in the streets of LA (see first photo in this review). Also the signature puppet characters made from recycled materials by Paul Insect, one of London’s original street art pioneers.

7. Timeline

A deep dive into street culture history through archival photography, ephemera and fashion to examine the cross-pollination of influences across music, fashion and film. Includes a large wall vinyl by feminist collective Guerrilla Girls.

8. Art with conscience

Works by hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.

9. Consideration into innovation

Lisbon-based artist, VHILS, who repurposes waste and found materials to reimagine city walls.

Doors by Portuguese artist VHILS , in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

10. The Next Phase

The final ‘chapter’ is titled ‘The Next Phase’ and contains new op-art works by Valencia-based artist Felipe Pantone, whose high-contrast, geometric patterns challenge perspective, creating a distinctive digital age aesthetic.

Summary

It’s huge, and there’s loads of wall labels which are on two levels: high-level ones introducing each room and giving overviews of particular moments, themes and places (New York and London, but plenty of others); and then more specific labels zeroing in to give the biographies of the scores and scores of artists featured and descriptions of specific works. If you studied all of them you’d be here all day. It’s a feast of colour, creativity and information.

Rules and respect

The visitor handout includes 6 rules we visitors should comply with, for example ‘Respect the artworks’ and ‘Do not touch them’ etc. Rule 4 is ‘Do not sticker or tag the gallery’. Now I entirely understand why they say that – it is a very nice clean gallery, staffed by nice clean visitor assistants who are extremely helpful. Still, I couldn’t help finding it funny that an exhibition all about the wild, anarchic, street culture of the 70s and 80s is held in such an atmosphere of politeness and respect and silence, in beautifully maintained and utterly sterile white spaces.

Selection of works from the Afterlife Series by CRASH (2022) in BEYOND THE STREETS LONDON at the Saatchi Gallery

Where’s Basquiat?

I was surprised there was no mention of New York’s most famous graffiti artist, the devastatingly brilliant, cool and beautiful Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 to 1988), subject of a brilliant exhibition at the Barbican.

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by Simon on April 24, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition

Tagged 10Foot, 1970s, 1980s, AIKO, Alicia McCarthy, André Saraiva, art, artefacts, Basquiat, BÄST, Beastie Boys, Beezer, Bert Krak, BLADE, BLONDIE, Bob Gruen, Brassaï, Broken Fingaz, Brooklyn, C. R. Stecyk III, CES, Charlie Ahearn, Chaz Bojórquez, Chris FREEDOM Pape, Christopher Stead, Class War, Conor Harrington, CORNBREAD, Cosmic Cavern, Craig Costello, Crash, DABSMYLA, Dash Snow, DAZE, DELTA, Don Letts, DONDI, Dr. REVOLT, Duncan Weston, Ecuador, Eric HAZE, Escif, Estevan Oriol, exhibition, Fab 5 Freddy, FAILE, Felipe Pantone, FUME, FUTURA2000, Glen E. Friedman, GOLDIE, Gordon Matta-Clark, graffiti, Gregory Rick, Guerrilla Girls, Gus Coral, Henry Chalfant, hip hop, HuskMitNavn, IMON BOY, installation, Into the New Realm with Felipe Pantone, Jaimie D’Cruz, Jamie Reid, Janette Beckman, Jason REVOK, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Joe Conzo, John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres, José Parlá, KATSU, KAWS, KC ORTIZ, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KING MOB, Kings Road, LADY PINK, Lawrence Watson, Lisa Kahane, London, Los Angeles, Malcolm McLaren, Maripol, Martha Cooper, Martin Jones, Maya Hayuk, Michael Holman, Michael Lawrence, Mister CARTOON, MODE 2, Mrs Thatcher, murals, New Musical Express, Northern Ireland, NWA, Ozzie Juarez, Pablo Allison, Painting, Pat Phillips, Paul Insect, Philadelphia, POSE, PRIDE, priest, Private Eye, Public Enemy, punk rock, rap, Richard Colman, Risk, Robert 3D Del Naja, Roger Perry, Saatchi Gallery, sculpture, Seditionaries, sex, Shepard Fairey, SHOE, Sophie Bramly, spray paint, STASH, Stephen ESPO Powers, Stickymonger, Street Art, SWOON, TAKI 183, The Battle of Orgreave, The Clash, The Cosmic Cavern, The Face, the Falklands, the Miners Strike, Tim Conlon, Timothy Curtis, Tish Murtha, Toby Mott, Todd James, TOX, VHILS, youth culture, Zephyr

Posted by Simon on April 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/24/beyond-the-streets-london-the-saatchi-gallery/

Chris Killip @ the Photographers Gallery

This is one of the most powerful and moving exhibitions I’ve ever been to.

Chris Killip was one of the UK’s most important and influential post-war documentary photographers. He was born in 1946 and died in October 2020. He is best known for his gritty photos of working class life in the north of England in the 1970s and 80s and we really mean ‘gritty’ – portraits of people living in the depths of poverty, immiseration, neglect, illness, marginalisation, scraping a living in grim, depressed, forgotten communities.

Spread over the top two floors at the Photographers’ Gallery, including some 150 black and white photographs as well as a couple of display cases of ephemera (magazines, posters, publicity flyers) works, this exhibition amounts to the most comprehensive survey of Killip’s work ever staged. And dear God, it’s devastating.

Helen and her hula-hoop, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumbria, 1984 © Chris Killip, Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

I’m going to replicate the structure of the exhibition and summarise the wall labels because it’s important to get a good understanding of time and place to really appreciate the work.

Off to London 1964

In 1963, aged 17 and living on the Isle of Man, Killip opened a copy of Paris Match looking for news about the Tour de France and instead came across the famous photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson of the little boy carrying two bottles of wine along the Rue Mouffetard in Paris. On the spot he realised he wanted to be a photographer. He bought a cheap camera and worked that summer as a beach photographer saving up the money to move to London in 1964, just at the start of Swinging London.

Here he found work as an assistant to the commercial photographer Adrian Flowers. They were heady times and he was at the heart of London, arranging commercial photoshoots for magazines, fashion, commercials.

New York 1969

In autumn 1969 he went on a visit to New York which changed his life. He went to see the exhibition of Bill Brandt photos at the Museum of Modern Art but it was the museum’s permanent collection which made his head spin. Here he saw photos by Paul Strand, August Sander, Walker Evans and others like them, documentary photographers who tried to depict the life of the common people in communities often remote from flashy urban living.

He returned to England, quit his job in flash London and returned to his homeland, the Isle of Man, a man with a mission, to photograph his truth, to record the traditional peasant lifestyle of the island before it was eroded and swept away by the very commercialism he had formerly served.

Isle of Man 1970 to 1972

Between 1970 and 1972 Killip photographed the island and its inhabitants during the day and worked at his dad’s pub by night. In 1973 he completed his book, Isle of Man.

This was the first of the long-form or long-term projects which form the basis of his achievement. the next few decades would see him applying the same in-depth approach to capturing marginalised communities on film, living in them, getting to know them, sharing their privations, getting under the skin of their physically and spiritually impoverished lives.

As you would expect, many of the photos of the Isle of man are landscapes but they are not that great, they are not as powerful as, say, Don McCullin’s louring, threatening studies of his adopted region of Somerset. But it’s not the landscapes that matter, it’s the people.

Mr ‘Snooky’ Corkhill and his son © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

My God, what a wonderful, wonderful collection of portraits, warm, humane, detailed, candid but compassionate portraits of the kind of plain-living, rural workers who were dying out as a breed even as he photographed them. You know those lines from Yeats’s poem, Easter 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in verse:

Invoking that mood of respect, it feels like an act almost of worship to write out the names of the people Killip photographed, the children, teenagers, farmers, wives and widows:

My cousin, Stanley Quirk, Cooil-Sleau Farm, Greeba
Laurence and Judith Quilliam, two children
Mr Radcliffe
Mrs Pitts, Slieu Whuallian
Miss Redpath, Regaby
Sonja Corrin, a small girl in her best white dress with a white bow in her hair
Mr John Willie Garrett holding a wrench and spanner
a host of old men in caps at The Mart
Mr and Mrs Corlett, Ballakilleyclieu

There is no God, no plan and no redemption. But images like this, full of understated dignity and wholeness on the part of the sitters, and respect and humanity on the part of the photographer, make you think maybe human love and compassion does redeem something, save something from the human wreck, raise us above our everyday lives into a higher realm blessed by more than human love.

(Note the way in the list above all the people are given titles, Mr, Mrs, Ms. It’s an old-fashioned mark of respect.)

Mrs Hyslop, Ballachrink Farm, the Braid © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Immersion

He became an immersive photographer, living for months or more among the communities he sought to depict. His mission and his sympathies were not with the well-educated and well-heeled who run the country and write about it, but with ‘those who have had history done to them‘, the proles and chavs and pikeys and white trash who are dismissed by all commentators, make no impact on official culture, live and die in caravans or shitty council houses on sink estates at the arse end of nowhere.

Huddersfield 1972

In 1972 the Arts Council commissioned Killip to do a photo essay comparing and contrasting Huddersfield in Yorkshire with Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk for the exhibition ‘Two Views: Two Cities’. As far as I could see there was just one photo from Bury in the show, a neat-looking shot of some nice castle ruins. By contrast, as you can imagine, the rundown streets of Huddersfield with its mills, tenement housing, crappy high streets, boarded up shops and sad bus shelters grabbed Killip’s sympathies.

Playground in Huddersfield, 1974 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Newcastle 1975 to 1979

In 1975 Killip was commissioned to undertake a British Gas/Northern Arts fellowship. In his spare time from this commission he roved the streets and suburbs and slums of the city and as far afield as Castleford and Workington. My God, the squalor, the neglect, the decline, the decay, the old Victorian slums being demolished and the new cut-price, cheap council estates falling to pieces before your eyes. A landscape of vandalism and graffiti.

Demolished housing, Wallsend, August 1977. © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Killip stayed in Newcastle for years, getting to know the area. For two years, 1977 to 1979, he served as director of a photo gallery, Amber’s Side Gallery. The May 1977 issue of Creative Camera was entirely devoted to Killip’s North East photos (a copy of it is one of the ephemera gathered in the display cases I mentioned earlier).

Children and terraced housing
Terraced house and coal mine
Two men on a bench
Looking East on Camp Road, Wallsend, 1975

There is a huge difference between the Manx series and this one. The Manx photos are dominated by large portraits of people who fill the screen, who are at home in their surroundings, their crofts or workshops. They’re big. They fill the photos as they fill their lives, at ease with who they are. They are fully human.

In the North East photos what dominates is the built environment. People are reduced to puppets, physically small against the backdrop of the enormous or decaying buildings. The buildings come in two types, terrible and appalling. The terrible ones are the old brick terraces thrown up in a hurry by the Victorian capitalists who owned the mines and steel works and shipbuilding yards and needed the bare minimum accommodation to keep their workers just about alive – badly built, no insulation, draughty windows, outside toilets and all.

Though Killip didn’t plan it, his time in Newcastle coincided with the wholesale destruction of the old brick terraces and their replacement with something even worse: the concrete high rises with broken lifts reeking of piss, the windswept plazas, dangerous underpasses, and oppressive network of toxic, child-killing urban highways, all the products of 1960s and 70s urban planners and brutalist architects.

May 5, 1981, North Shields, Tyneside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is why I call the architects room at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the room of shame. Go on a tour of British cities to see for yourself the destruction of historic centres and their replacement with brutal concrete urban highways full of thundering traffic, concrete underpasses tailor made for muggers and rapists, bleak open spaces where the wind blows dust and grit into your eyes, the concrete facias of a thousand tragic shopping precincts and, looming above them, the badly built tower blocks and decaying office blocks. Concrete cancer.

This isn’t an architecture for people, it’s an architecture for articulated lorries. Thus the human beings in Killip’s harrowing photos of these killing precincts are reduced to shambling wrecks, shadows of humanity, scarecrows in raincoats, harassed mums, bored teenagers hanging round on street corners sniffing glue. This is what Killip captures, the death of hope presided over by a thousand architects and town planners who could quote Le Corbusier and Bauhaus till the cows came home and used them to build the most dehumanised environment known to man.

Killingworth new town, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

As Philip Larkin wrote of young northern mums in their headscarves supervising their unruly children in some suburban playground:

Their beauty has thickened.
Something is pushing them
To the side of their own lives.

(from Afternoons by Philip Larkin, 1959)

It’s epitomised by the photo of the silhouette of an old lady sitting in a half vandalised bush shelter in Middlesbrough. She’s wearing a headscarf and slumped forwards because her life, in this gritty, alienated environment, is bereft.

Woman in a bus shelter, Middlesborough, Teeside © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Compare and contrast with the proud, erect, unashamed men and women of the Isle of Man. Pretty much all the humanity has been stolen from the mainlanders.

At some point I realised a lot of these grim Tyneside photos show a disproportionate number of children, children imprisoned in squalid houses, hanging round on derelict streets, trying to play in a crappy playground overshadowed by mines and factories, left outside the crappy, rundown bingo parlour, the cheapest nastiest, knockoff 60s architecture, complete with collapsing concrete canopy. A landscape of blighted lives and stunted childhoods.

Boy outside Prize Bingo Parlour, Newcastle 1976 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Two girls in Grangetown
Terraced house and coal mine, Castleford, 1976
Terraced housing, County Durham, 1976
Children and terraced housing, Byker, Newcastle, 1975
Butchers shop, Byker, Tyneside, 1975

Skinningrove 1982 to 1984

Skinningrove is a fishing community on the North Yorkshire coast. Killip had noticed its striking landscape on a drive up the east coast back in 1974 but found it difficult to penetrate the community. In fact locals chased him off the couple of times he tried to photograph them. His way in was through friendship with a young local named Leso, who made Killip feel welcome and reassured locals of his good intentions. Between 1982 and 84 Killip documented the crappy, poor, hard scrabbling lives of Leso and his mates – Blackie, Bever, Toothy, Richard, Whippet – as they fixed nets, repaired boats and hung around bored.

Leso and mates waiting for the tide to turn, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

This is an extraordinary, remarkable, amazing portrait of a dead-end community, poverty, low expectations and young people bored off their faces. No wonder they took to sniffing glue and as the 80s moved on and adopted the punk look pioneered down in London to express some kind of sense of identity and worth, rebellion against grey-clad council houses, the grey sky and the unremitting rhythms of the grey, cold, freezing sea.

This section is given tragic force when we learn that Leso, who got Killip his ‘in’ into the community and of whom there are many photos, fixing nets, waiting round for the tide to turn, hanging with his punk mates, walking across a dirty road carrying a rifle, he died tragically during Killips’s stay.

The fishing boat he and some mates were in was overturned at sea and Leso and David were drowned, tubby Bever made it back to shore. In tribute Killip made Leso’s grieving mother an album of three dozen photos of her lost son.

Leso, Blackie, Bever, ?, David, on a bench, Whippet standing, Skinningrove, 1986 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Seacoal Camp 1981 to1984

Killip discovered Lynemouth, Northumberland, in 1976. It had a strange and eerie vibe because there was a massive coalmine not far from the sea and waste coal was expelled into the sea, only to be brought back to shore on the incoming tides.

And a community of travellers or extremely poor people living in caravans and using horse-drawn wagons in and near the sea had sprung up which made a living scavenging this coal, using it to heat their homes, cook food, and to sell to other locals. An entire lifestyle based on coal scavenging.

Once again Killip had trouble penetrating this closed and fiercely protective community. From 1976 when he first came across it he made repeated attempts to photograph the people but was chased away. Only in 1982 was he finally accepted when, on a final visit to the local pub he was recognised by a man who’d given him shelter from a rainstorm at Appleby Horse fair and vouched for his good intentions.

So Killip set about taking photos, delicately tactfully at first. But in winter 1983 he bought a caravan of his own and got permission to park it alongside the community’s ones. Once really embedded he was able to record all the different types of moments experienced by individuals or between people engaged on this tough work, at the mercy of the elements, permanently dirty with coal muck.

Rocker and Rosie Going Home, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, Northumberland, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

In the unpublished preface to the volume of poems he was working on when he was killed in the last days of the Great War, Wilfred Owen wrote:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Same, with modifications, goes for Killip. The poetry, the deep, deep poetry of these photographs, derives from the immense love and compassion they evince, love of suffering humanity, the candour and accuracy of the shots, finding moments of piercing acuity amid the grinding poverty and mental horizons which are hemmed in on every side by slag heaps, metal works and the four walls of a cramped caravan.

Gordon in the water, Seacoal Beach, Lynemouth, 1983 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Boo with his rabbit (1984)
Rocker and his toad, Lynemouth, Northumberland
Nini and Helen sorting coal (1983)
Rocker hand-picking coal (1984)
Helen and her hula hoop (at the top of this review)
Alison and two carts, 1983
Selection of images
Killip’s caravan and car, 1983, with huge aluminium smelter in the background
Three lads in Killip’s caravan

Photography and music

Photography is like music. Regarding music you can describe the notes and cadences, the technical manoeuvres and key changes, the invocation of traditions and forms and write at length about the ostensible subject (the Pastoral symphony, the Moonlight sonata etc). But in the end you have to let go of all of that and experience it as music, let the music do its work, what only it can do, triggering emotions, memories, fragments of feelings or thoughts, stirring forgotten moments, making all kinds of neural connections, filling your soul.

Same with these photographs. I’ve described what he was trying to do, bring respect and compassion to people right on the margins of society, the lost, the abandoned, the forgotten. He’s quoted as saying he had no idea he would end up recording the process of de-industralisation, it just happened to be going on as he developed his method and approach as a social photographer. Long essays could be written about class in England, about deindustrialisation and then, of course, about the Thatcher government which supervised the destruction of large swathes of industry and British working class life alongside it.

But at some point you pack all that way and let the photos do their work, which is to lacerate your heart and move you to tears. This is the best our society could offer to God’s children. What shame. What guilt.

Father and son watching a parade, West End of Newcastle, Tyneside, 1980 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

The Miners Strike 1984 to 1985

A friend of mine at school in the Home Counties, his older sister was married to a copper. He told us the Miners Strike was great. They were bussed to Yorkshire, put up in army barracks, paid triple time wages and almost every day there was a fight, which he and his mates always won because they had the plastic shields, big truncheons and if things got really out of control, the cavalry. Killip apparently treated the long strike as another project with a view to producing another long-form series.

Durham Miners Gala, 1984 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

But images from the Miners Strike project aren’t treated separately as the other projects are. Instead they’re rolled into the In Flagrante section.

In flagrante 1988

In 1985 the publisher Secker and Warburg told Killip they’d be interested in publishing his next book. This would mean access to a larger audience than previously and Killip was inspired. He worked with editor Mark Holborn and designer Peter Dyer to produce the 1988 book In Flagrante. Unlike all his previous projects which were heavily themed around specific communities and locations, In Flagrante deliberately cut his images adrift from their source projects to create a randomised cross-section of his career (although anyone who’d studied the previous projects has a good idea where each of them come from).

For the bitter bleakness and the unerring accuracy of the images, In Flagrante has been described as ‘the most important book of English photography from the 1980s.’ I was particularly taken by the set of photos of miserable English people from the 70s and 80s on various English beaches, at Whitley Bay, and so on. Narrow lives, no expectations, the quiet misery of the English working classes. They’ve come to the seaside for a break, for a ‘holiday’ and none of them know what to do there. Images of a nation at a loss what to do with the land it finds itself in.

Revolt

Respect goes to the tribes of young people who forged ways of rebelling against the poverty and low to zero expectations of their environment. In Flagrante contains a surprising number of photos of young punks who took the form to baroque extremes long after it was abandoned in London. There are lots of shots of the Angelic Upstarts of all bands, playing sweaty punk gigs in Gateshead. In fact the gallery shop has a music paper-size fanzine-style publication entirely full of shots he did of sweaty punk gigs in the mid-80s. ‘We’re the future, your future.’

The Station, Gateshead, 1985 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

America 1991

What happened to Killip after that? America. I was disappointed to read that in 1991 he was invited to be a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies in Harvard University. In 1994 he was made a tenured professor and was department chair from 1994 to 1998. He only retired from Harvard in 2017. Well, no doubt taking the Yankee dollar was the right move for him, but it meant the abrupt end of the sequence of breath-taking portfolio projects which had begun in 1970.

Summary

Killip’s oeuvre represents not only an invaluable document of social history 1970 to 1985 and, as such, a blistering indictment of an incompetent, uncaring, bewilderingly lost society – but it is also a testament to love and the redeeming possibilities of art.

The compassion and humanity of his work is embodied in its closeness and intimacy with its subjects, not the fake intimacy of eroticism, but being right there with poor suffering humanity; right up close as the dirty kids play in their abandoned playgrounds, the dispirited losers chain-smoke in a wretched bingo hall, an old lady loses the will to live in a vandalised bus shelter, bored young men sniff glue in a remote fishing town, and lost children spend all day every day clambering over filthy mounds of coal to help their mums and dads scrape a flimsy living The poetry is in the pity.

Youth on wall, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1975 © Chris Killip Photography Trust. All images courtesy Martin Parr Foundation

Levelling up

In the 50 years since Killip took these photos generations of politicians have come and gone, promising to narrow the North-South Divide and level up the whole country. All bollocks. Life expectancy for babies born in the North-East, like per household income, remain stubbornly below the national average. Pathetic, isn’t it. What a sorry excuse for a country.

Go and see this marvellous, searing, heart-rending exhibition.

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by Simon on February 8, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Exhibition, Photography

Tagged 1970s, 1980s, Adrian Flowers, Appleby Horse Fair, August Sander, Bauhaus, Bever, Bill Brandt, Blackie, Byker, Castleford, Chris Killi, County Durham, Creative Camera, documentary photography, Don McCullin, Durham Miners Gala, England, English social history, exhibition, Grangetown, Harvard University, Henri Cartier-Bresson, housing estates, Huddersfield, In Flagrante, Isle of Man, Killingworth, Laurence and Judith Quilliam, Le Corbusier, Leso, Lynemouth, Mark Holborn, Martin Parr, Middlesbrough, Miners' strike, modernist architecture, Mr 'Snooky' Corkhill, Mr Collister, Mr John S Kennaugh, Mr John Willie Garrett, Mr Radcliffe, Mr Stanley Quirk, Mrs Barbara Hyslop, Mrs Dolly Gellin, Mrs Thatcher, Ms Redpath, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Newcastle, Newtown, North of England, North Shields, North Yorkshire, North-South Divide, Northumbria, Paul Strand, Peter Dyer, Philip Larkin, photographs, photography, poverty, punk, punk rock, Richard, Seacoal Camp, Secker and Warburg, Skinningrove, Sonja Corrin, the Angelic Upstarts, the Miners Strike, the North-East, The Photographers' Gallery, The Station, Toothy, town planning, Tyneside, Walker Evans, Wallsend, Whippet, Whitley Bay, Wilfred Owen

Posted by Simon on February 8, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/chris-killip-the-photographers-gallery/

Heard in the Dark, One evening and others by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett short prose pieces from the 1970s.

Heard in the Dark 1
Heard in the Dark 2
One Evening
As the story was told (1973)
The Cliff (1975)
neither (1976)

Heard in the Dark 1

The two Heard in the Darks were extracts from the work in progress which was eventually published in 1980 as Company. These two extracts were published as stand-alone pieces in literary magazines.

Heard In the Dark 1 begins with unusual syntactical clarity i.e. readable sentences:

The last time you went out the snow lay on the ground.

It depicts a consciousness ‘lying in the dark’ remembering taking a spring walk in the snow. Because Beckett is determinedly anti-romantic he depicts the snow with lambs frolicking in it but also ‘strewn with red placentae’. the blood-soaked reality of farming reminded me of Ted Hughes’s many poems of farm life and lambing, from Moortown in particular.

He knows the walk inside out, could virtually do it with his eyes shut. With characteristically Beckettian obsessiveness about numbers he says, ‘you need normally from eighteen hundred to two thousand paces depending on your humour and the state of the ground.’

He used to do the walk with his father but not any more: ‘Your father’s shade is not with you any more. It fell out long ago.’ But now the walk is getting harder.

The same hundred yards you used to cover in a matter of three to four minutes may now take you anything from fifteen to twenty.

This is because the character has, as if in a nightmare, encountered what you could call The Beckett Problem which is simply: he can’t go on. Of his feet, he asks:

Can they go on? Or better, Shall they go on?

Now he lies in the dark remembering the scene and the sense of slow decline. At the very end he looks back expecting to see the usual straight line of footprints in the snow. He thinks he’s walking in a straight line, ‘a beeline’, ‘taking the course you always take’. But looking back at his footprints, he realises he’s been walking in a great swerve, anti-clockwise or ‘withershins’. And that’s the end of the fragment.

This prompts two thoughts:

1. ‘withershins’ is a Scottish dialect word and he was fond of these abstruse terms for direction, also using ‘deasil’ in several works from this time, which is a Gaelic word meaning ‘right-hand-wise, turned toward the right; clockwise.’

2. The Faber Companion To Samuel Beckett suggests the counter-clockwise circular movement is a nod to the same direction taken by Dante in the Inferno. Dante isn’t mentioned anywhere, but the piece is obviously yet another journey, though that makes it sound too glamorous, it’s yet another laborious trudge and in this fairly basic way lots of Beckett’s prose pieces can be related to Dante’s Divine Comedy, insofar as they are often about people trudging through bleak, inhospitable landscapes and/or bodies contorted into uncomfortable or painful positions, which is what the Inferno is packed with.

The obvious difference is that in the Divine Comedy, Virgil carefully explains why the people they see are in the plight they’re in, there’s always a good reason and the punishment generally matches the sinner’s sins. Not only that, but the individual is generally emblematic if wider categories of sin, which themselves sit within a carefully worked-out framework of Christian reward and punishment. In other words, The Divine Comedy overflows with meaning and purpose.

Beckett is like Dante with absolutely all the meaning, purpose and understandability stripped away, leaving inexplicable trudging, crawling, contortions and punishments, for no reason.

Heard in the Dark 2

Another fragment from Company. Again, the person being addressed as ‘you’ is lying on their back in the dark and remembering a ‘cloudless May day’ when a woman joins him in ‘the summer house’. Being Beckett, we are immediately given, not the romantic, emotional or psychological aspects of this encounter, but the precise physical dimensions of the house:

Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across. Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-à-vis. Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge.

Here his father liked to retire after Sunday lunch with a glass of punch and read. When he chuckled, the person addressing themselves as ‘you’ liked to chuckle along. It appears to be a disarmingly simple memory from his boyhood.

Unexpectedly, the narrative gives a major insight into Beckett’s obsession with numbers and permutations and calculations: it’s therapeutic!

Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble… Even still in the timeless dark you find figures a comfort.

And details his boyhood calculations of the size and surface and cubic volume of the summer house. Escape from feeling into maths. Hah! As if Beckett has made what appears to be a psychological coping strategy into an entire literary aesthetic.

So no surprise that he then devotes a slightly demented amount of time thinking through the issues of measurement and scale and maths triggered by the fact that when ‘she’ arrives at the summerhouse where he’s waiting, her eyes are at his own eye-level even though he’s sitting down within. Pondering this problem requires far more text than anything at all to do with ‘her’ or with his feelings.

She must have entered the summerhouse because he looks at her breasts and then at her abdomen. They are both bigger than he remembered. Could she be pregnant, ‘without your having asked for as much as her hand?’ They both sit on in the dead still of his memory, remembering it, there, as he lies in the dark.

Well, it seems, on the face of it, to be a surprisingly straightforward and surprisingly poignant boyhood memory (father chuckling) mixed and blended by a young adult memory (a presumed girlfriend) on the family property back in Ireland (which was substantial and comfortable).

It is made into Beckett material via the obsessive calculation of shape and volume and then the characteristically oblique paragraph about her possible position in order for them to have the same eye level etc. But the basic content is amazingly old school and sentimental. Beckett was 74 by the time Company was published.

One Evening

One Evening is a prose poem related to the long piece Ill Seen Ill Said. It describes a body lying on the ground in a green greatcoat where it is found by an old lady dressed in black. Once again, the style represents a massive backwards step away from the radical prose style of How It Is, back to something vastly more conventional and conservative.

He was found lying on the ground. No one had missed him. No one was looking for him. An old woman found him.

She was looking for flowers. It is lambing time (lambs, hmm – like the lambs in Heard In the Dark and therefore in Company also). The text gets a bit more adventurous with the narrator commenting that this or that detail ought to be like this or that – as if we’re overhearing the author thinking aloud about his piece.

He wore a greatcoat in spite of the time of year. Hidden by the body a long row of buttons fastened it all the way down. Buttons of all shapes and sizes. Worn upright the skirts swept the ground. That seems to hang together.

When the phrase is repeated we realise it is one of those words or key phrases, whose repetition Beckett uses to build up the strange mechanical atmosphere of his prose.

Were a third party to chance that way theirs were the only bodies he would see. First that of the old woman standing. Then on drawing near it lying on the ground. That seems to hang together.

Attention switches to the old lady who has been cooped up all day by the rain. Now it has ceased she hurries out to take advantage of the light before sunset. She is wearing the black she adopted as a young widow. It is to lay flowers on her husband’s grave that she has come out to pick them.

This is another example of the paradox that, although much of Beckett’s technique was pioneeringly avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, so much of the actual content of those was immensely conservative and old fashioned. His plays and prose are highly experimental but often, when there is a discernable content, actually describe old ladies and old joxers from his youth in deeply rural Ireland. Beckett has been called ‘the last Modernist’, or one of the first post-Modernists – but a lot of the content has a late Victorian feel. An old lady dressed in black picking flowers to put on the grave of the husband who died when she was young sounds like something from Thomas Hardy.

Thus the figure of an old lady in black out picking flowers at sunset literally stumbling over the corpse of a young man dressed in a green longcoat face down in the grass of a field forms what the narrator calls a ‘tableau vivant if you will’. The whole thing has a late-Victorian feel, it might be a Symbolist painting from the 1890s, The Old Lady and The Suicide, or, as the Faber Companion suggests, a nocturne in green (the coat and the grass) and black (the old widow’s mourning) and yellow (the scattered flowers).

As the story was told (1973)

A short prose piece composed in August 1973. Like many Beckett prose pieces it simply begins and he sets down words and images and then you have the strong sense that the initial formulations then have to be explained and create an ongoing momentum of their own, one detail leading to another, which needs explanation, and so the text ramifies outwards like a glass of wine spilt on a tablecloth.

As the story was told me I never went near the place during sessions. I asked what place and a tent was described at length, a small tent the colour of its surroundings. Wearying of this description I asked what sessions and these in their turn were described, their object, duration, frequency and harrowing nature.

The narrator puts up his hand and asks where he is and is told in ‘a small hut in a grove some two hundred yards away’.

The narrator is, as so often, lying down. (Beckett protagonists rarely do much more than trudge around barren landscapes, or sit cramped in claustrophobic skullscapes, or lie in bed; you can’t help thinking that these are the common physical postures of The Writer – they never, for example, run, shower, bath, drive a car, catch a plane, sit on a train. No. Trudge, Sit or Lying down, preferably in the dark, these are the Beckett positions).

The dimensions of the hut remind him of the summer house he spent so much time in as a boy. Aha. As described in Heard In The Dark 2 and Company. The penny drops and I realise that it is not just the obsession with measuring and counting and calculating displayed by so many Beckett characters which reflects his own coping strategy –

Simple sums you find a help in times of trouble

… but that maybe the umpteen cramped spaces in which so many of his figures find themselves – especially in the experimental prose works like Imagination Dead Imagine or All Strange Away or The Lost Ones – are imaginative recreations of the warm and cosy, womb-like feel of the actual summerhouse in the grounds of the big Beckett family home in Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock where he spent so many happy boyhood hours.

Thus the cabin the narrator finds himself in now:

had the same five log walls, the same coloured glass, the same diminutiveness, being not more than ten feet across and so low of ceiling that the average man could not have held himself erect in it, though of course there was no such difficulty for the child.

The narrator describes himself as sitting in a cane chair with armrests, like the man in Fizzle 7 who sits at an open window facing south in a small upright wicker chair with armrests. There is a ripe slice of surrealism or Absurdity when a hand comes through the door and passes him a sheet of paper which he carefully tears into four pieces and gives back to the hand which withdraws.

And the arbitrary or contrived nature of the piece is made overt in the next passage:

A little later the whole scene disappeared. As the story was told me the man succumbed in the end to his ill-treatment, though quite old enough at the time to die naturally of old age.

What old man? Only in the last sentences can we maybe piece together that an old man was being subjected to ‘harrowing’ sessions – presumably, tortured – and would have been released if only he could find the right answers to the questions. The narrator asked what the old man was required to say, but no, they cannot tell him.

So there are two familiar Beckett tropes: the confined space or room within which the narrator is, initially lying down, but then finds himself sitting; and someone being tortured, as in Rough For Radio 2.

The Cliff (1975)

La Falaise was a short prose poem Beckett wrote in French in 1975. An English translation was commissioned from Edith Fournier so it could be included as The Cliff in the 1995 Complete Prose. It’s so short I can quote it in full:

Window between sky and earth nowhere known. Opening on a colourless cliff. The crest escapes the eye wherever set. The base as well. Framed by two sections of sky forever white. Any hint in the sky at a land’s end? The yonder ether? Of sea birds no trace. Or too pale to show. And then what proof of a face? None that the eye can find wherever set. It gives up and the bedlam head takes over. At long last first looms the shadow of a ledge. Patience it will be enlivened with mortal remains. A whole skull emerges in the end. One alone from amongst those such residua evince. Still attempting to sink back its coronal into the rock. The old stare half showing within the orbits. At times the cliff vanishes. Then off the eye flies to the whiteness verge upon verge. Or thence away from it all.

It demonstrates several things. First, that although the Faber Companion calls it a prose poem, there is nothing sensual or passionate about the prose. It is a very cold prose poem.

The word ‘skull’ crystallises the mood, and the whiteness of the cliff itself echoes the white skulls and white cells and white rotunda inside which the protagonists of All Strange Away and Imagination Dead Imagine found themselves, and which prompted critics to use the word ‘skullscapes’ to describe them. Although out of doors, this short piece feels like another skullscape.

The use of ‘residua’ (the plural of ‘residuum’ which is simply a more formal way of saying ‘residue’) is like a hangover from his earlier writings which he liked to stuff with arcane and obscure terminology, and has a double effect: insofar as it is a scientific term, it adds to the sense of clinical detachment and unemotion; but as an unnecessarily pedantic word it introduces a whiff of satire, self-deprecating satire against the author.

neither (1976)

Short enough to quote in its entirety:

to and fro in shadow from inner to outershadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither

as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again

beckoned back and forth and turned away

heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other

unheard footfalls only sound

till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other

then no sound

then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither

unspeakable home

Another meditation, brief as a prayer, about the gap or space between self and unself, I and not I, the immediate consciousness which experiences and the posterior consciousness which reflects, remembers, re-assembles experience into a permanent flow of memories, thoughts, decisions, neither of which, in Beckett’s bleak phenomenology, can provide a resting place or home.

The word ‘footfalls’ anticipates or echoes the name and the subject of the stage play he wrote in the same year.

In fact, Beckett wrote neither to be set to music by the American modernist composer Morton Feldman and described its subject, living in the shadow between self and non-self as ‘the one theme in his life’.

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) Short stories
Murphy (1938) Novel

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

Watt (written 1945, pub.1953) Novel
Mercier and Camier (1946) Novel
First Love (1946) Short story
The Expelled (1946) Short story
The Calmative (1946) Short story
The End (1946) Short story
Molloy 1 (1951) Novel
Molloy 2 (1951) Novel
Malone Dies (1951) Novel
The Unnamable (1953) Novel

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

All That Fall (1957) Radio play
*Acts Without Words I & II (1957) Mimes
*Endgame (1958) Stage play
*Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) Stage play
*Rough for Theatre I & II – Stage plays
Embers (1959) – Radio play
The Old Tune (1960) adaptation of a radio play by French writer Robert Pinget
*Happy Days (1961) – Stage play
Rough for Radio I & II (1961) Radio plays
Words and Music (1961) Radio play
Cascando (1961) Radio play
*Play (1963) Stage play
Film (1963) Scenario for a film
All Strange Away (1964) Short prose
Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) Short prose
How it Is (1964) Novel
Enough (1965) Short prose
Ping (1966) Short prose
*Come and Go (1965) Stage play
Eh Joe (1967) Television play
*Breath (1969) Stage play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

Lessness (1970) Short prose
The Lost Ones (1966-70) Short prose
*Not I (1972) Stage play
Fizzles (1973 to 1975) Short prose pieces
Heard in the Dark, One evening and others – Short prose pieces
*That Time (1975) Stage play
*Footfalls (1976) Stage play
Ghost Trio (1976) Television play
…but the clouds… (1977) Television play
Company (1980) Novella
*A Piece of Monologue (1980) Stage play (Beckett on Film production)
*Rockaby (1981) Stage play
Quad I + II (1981) Television play
Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) Short novel
*Ohio Impromptu (1981) Stage play
*Catastrophe (1982) Stage play
Worstward Ho (1983) Prose
Nacht und Träume (1983) Television play
*What Where (1983) Stage play
Stirrings Still (1988) Short prose
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 1
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson (1996) part 2
Samuel Beckett timeline

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by Simon on January 18, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Short stories

Posted by Simon on January 18, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/heard-in-the-dark-one-evening-samuel-beckett/

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind (1998)

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to fuck her. And if I don’t want to fuck her, she shouldn’t be in the movie’ (Don Simpson, President of Worldwide Production, Paramount Pictures, after seeing a showreel of Shelley Duvall, quoted on page 370)

Turns out lots of the senior people in the ‘New Hollywood’ of the early 1970s were know-nothing scumbags.

Also turns out the movie business is first and foremost a business i.e. even the most ‘radical’ far-out types in the late ’60s-early ’70s were concerned to make a profit – lots and lots of profit – win prizes, gain respect, engaged in extremely serious, dog-eat-dog competition with their peers and rivals. Basically, same old same old.

And it turns out that these young New Hollywood types were into awesome amounts of sex, adultery, free love, were ‘pussy addicts’, ‘pussy struck’ (p.212) and ‘pussy hounds’ (p.208), propositioning any girl who walked by, had multiple mistresses, girlfriends, even ordering up partners from modelling catalogues (a technique pioneered by Brian de Palma who recommended it to Steven Spielberg).

And that they ingested a whole heap of drugs – at first everyone smoked pot, riskier types took acid, and then in about 1971, the whole town discovered cocaine. By 1980 Hollywood was a winter wonderland of white powder. Martin Scorsese alone seems to have been a one-man pharmaceuticals factory (p.377).

None of these things are, by themselves, that much of a revelation. What makes this book such an epic read is the awesome amount of detail that Biskind goes into on all these and many other topics, and the amazing eye-witness testimony he appears to have coaxed out of everyone who was there.

Easy riders

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a big, intensely researched and hugely absorbing book, turning in at just over 500 pages of smallish print, including the index and ‘Cast of characters’.

The idea is simple. The later 1960s saw the final collapse of the Old Hollywood which had dominated from the 1920s, with its rigid studio systems, production quotas, stars under strict contracts, subject to carefully managed images and appearing in movies with, by and large, squeaky clean subject matter (Doris Day & Rock Hudson) or, if a bit more gritty (gangster movies, Westerns), nonetheless featuring clear heroes, baddies and well-upholstered love interests.

In this Old World, directors were simply hired hands who took pride in subsuming their own style to the requirements of the studio and the project (mostly – though you could still tell a Howard Hawks movie from a John Ford movie etc).

The late 1960s saw the arrival of a Completely Different Approach, with writers and directors and actors determined to tear down all the old restrictions, to portray more explicit violence and sex and controversial political and social themes in their movies, and to have a lot more say about the kinds of movies they wrote and directed. They wanted to be auteurs, not just directors but film-makers, free to convey their special visions in their own personal ways.

The new young generation of writers, directors and actors who came through at the end of the 1960s created a Golden Age of Independent Cinema in a new kind of Hollywood, which slowly adapted to more grown-up, controversial and ‘difficult’ themes.

The audiences were younger, too, and better educated, college kids who wanted to see the unsettling reality of the world they lived in – the endless carnage in Vietnam and student protests and Black Power and drugs and free love – portrayed up on the screen.

All of this is fairly well known, as is the list of New Hollywood directors:

Robert Altman (b.1925) M*A*S*H*, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Nashville
Mike Nichols (b.1931) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Teach Me!, Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge
Roman Polanski (b.1933) Rosemary’s Baby, Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess
William Friedkin (b.1935) The French Connection, The Exorcist
Woody Allen (b.1935) Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Stardust Memories
Peter Bogdanovitch (b.1939) The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon, Daisy Miller, Nickelodeon
Francis Ford Coppola (b.1939) The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Apocalypse Now
Brian de Palma (b.1940) Carrie, Scarface
Martin Scorcese (b.1942) Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York New York, Raging Bull
Terence Malick (b.1943) Badlands, Days of Heaven
George Lucas (b.1944) THX 1138, American Graffiti, Star Wars,The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark
John Milius (b.1944)
Steven Spielberg (b.1946) Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind

The key New Hollywood actors:

Warren Beatty, James Caan, Robert de Niro, Richard Dreyfuss, Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Jon Voigt, Ryan O’Neal, George Segal

New Hollywood movies

And the movies themselves. In this list I’ve 1. highlighted in bold the movies Biskind treats in real detail 2. and indicated their directors. The others are included as context. And I’ve included the movies which won Best Picture Oscar for each of the years. The idea is that there a few forerunners in 67 and 68:

1967 – Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn), The Graduate (Mike Nichols), Cool Hand Luke – Best Picture Oscar: In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison)

1968 – Bullitt (Peter Yates), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski): Best Picture – Oliver! (Vernon Harris)

But 1969 was the year of the Big Breakthrough:

1969 – Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper), The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Best Picture – Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger)

1970 – M*A*S*H (Robert Altman), Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson), Catch-22, Little Big Man (Arthur Penn), Woodstock: Best Picture – Patton (Franklin Schaffner)

1971 – The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovitch), Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby), Dirty Harry, Klute, THX 1138 (George Lucas): Best Picture – The French Connection (William Friedkin)

1972 – The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson), Cabaret, Deliverance, Jeremiah Johnson: Best picture – The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola),

1973 – American Graffiti (George Lucas), The Exorcist (William Friedkin), The Last Detail (Hal Ashby), The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman), Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese), Paper Moon (Peter Bogdanovitch), Badlands, Sleeper: Best Picture – The Sting (George Roy Hill)

1974 – Chinatown (Polanski), The Conversation (Coppola), Daisy Miller (Bogdanovitch), The Parallax View, The Taking of Pelham 123: Best picture – The Godfather part II

1975 – Nashville, Shampoo, Love and Death, Jaws, Three Days of the Condor: Best picture – One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Foreman)

1976 – All The President’s Men, Bound For Glory (Hal Ashby), Marathon Man, The Omen, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Taxi Driver: Best picture – Rocky (John G. Avildson)

1977 – Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Best picture – Annie Hall (Woody Allen)

1978 – Coming Home (Ashby), Days of Heaven (Malick), Blue Collar (Schrader): Best picture – The Deer Hunter (Cimino)

1979 – Apocalypse Now (Coppola), 1941 (Spielberg): Best picture – Kramer v Kramer

1980 – Popeye, Heaven’s Gate (Cimono), American Gigolo (Schrader), Raging Bull (Scorsese), Tess, The Elephant Man: Best picture – Ordinary People

1981 – Reds (Beatty), Raiders of the Lost Ark: Best picture – Chariots of Fire

Qualities of New Hollywood movies

To summarise: the ‘New Hollywood’ was a brief historical window when a new generation of writers and directors, unfettered by Hollywood traditions, felt empowered to tackle challenging new subject matter, shot more cheaply on location (away from the technical and stylistic limitations of studios), starring attractive young actors (Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway), with more graphic treatments of violence and sex.

And a troubled, haunting tone. The best New Hollywood films capture a wistful sense of the loss of shared values and social certainties besetting late-60s America, exacerbated by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and the general disillusionment with politicians and the ‘old’.

Matching this disillusionment, many New Hollywood films specialise in an atmosphere of uncertainty – uncertainty about plots and characters and values.

The demographics are interesting. In the 1950s and into the 1960s movie-going audiences tended to be middle-aged, high school-educated i.e. not too intellectual. The Sound of Music suited them just fine. But the arrival of the New Hollywood period coincided with a marked shift in the movie-going public, which changed to a younger, more affluent, college-educated demographic. By the mid-1970s, 76% of all movie-goers were under 30, 64% of whom had gone to college. Radical students. Peace, man. Don’t bogart that joint, my friend.

It was a more studenty audience ready to lap up more extreme violence and full-frontal nudity undreamed of by the Hollywood of the 1950s. The old studio heads couldn’t understand these pot-smoking hippies at all and the New Hollywood period can be seen as a hiatus while the Old Guard gave unprecedented autonomy (and money) to a bunch of new, young, wannabe directors.

In reality it only took 4 or 5 years (Martin Scorsese says the period lasted from 1971 to 1976 ‘because we were just starting out’, p.233) before a new generation of studio executives figured out new ways to cater to / exploit the new audience, new genres, subjects, and approaches to marketing and releasing movies, which would restore big money profits and revenue streams to the studios, and the era of happy-go-lucky experimentation ended (see below).

The stories

Gossip Biskind loves gossip. His book is basically a gossip fest. Donna Greenberg has a rich husband and lives in a big beach house in Malibu. She knows Julie Payne, daughter of John Payne and child actress Ann Shirley. Julie has a perfect American body. She is fierce and wild, chainsmokes and drinks, is liable to turn up at Donna’s house at one in the morning, screaming: ‘I want to use your swimming pool to have a fuck.’

There’s lots of stuff like that. If you find that kind of thing interesting or entertaining, then this is the book for you.

Wanna know about the time Dennis Hopper threatened to pull a knife on Rip Torn in a bar? Or ordered 50 nubile young women up to his apartment for an orgy he could film (p.134)? Or beat his wife, who eventually ran away with the kids, terrified he was going to kill her? Or was married for six days to a gorgeous dollybird he met on the location of his second movie – but that once he got her home he took to roaming round the house, off his face on drugs, firing live ammunition, slapping her about, and handcuffing her to the bed so she couldn’t get away… until after six days of this, at a moment when the cuffs were off, she fled?

It’s all here, plus hundreds and hundreds of other stories of the same ilk. The way Warren Beatty’s Winebago on location was besieged by nymphets and spent hours rocking up and down, day and night, as he screwed them? Studio execs lounging by the pool giving all the bikini-ed nubiles who passed by numbers out of ten, Bert Schneider trying to persuade his wife to screw all his friends so he’d feel less bad about his flings, powerful men thinking it run-of-the-mill to say things like ‘Nice tits, honey’ to every woman they met.

The hundreds of outrageous stories behind the bloated, disaster-struck production of Apocalypse Now (the drugs, the no script, Brando’s refusal to act, Martin Sheen’s heart attack, the typhoon which destroyed the set, Coppola’s nervous breakdown), the extraordinary drug intake of Martin Scorsese which almost killed him (pp.386-7), the overdose which saw Hal Ashby being stretchered off to hospital after a hard night partying with the Rolling Stones (p.353).

Sex Biskind loves this stuff and loves describing the sex lives of the directors and executives and stars. Once Peter Bogdanovitch arrives in Hollywood, he and his wife do a good job inveigling their way into the highest Old Hollywood circles.

When their friends went away, they house-sat. Like X-rated Goldilockses they went through the closets of Beverly Hills mansions trying on clothes and fucking in every bedroom. (p.115)

Yes, ‘fucking’. The book starts with everyone being foul-mouthed as you can imagine, and then goes downhill. Everyone was fucking everyone else. Well, to be more precise, pretty much every male in the book is unfaithful to whatever partner they have (wife, mistress, girlfriend). Some, like Beatty, are natural babe magnets. Others set out to systematically screw the wives and girlfriends of all their friends.

A whole lot of women are interviewed who give a lamentable collective portrait of a generation of ‘pussy addicts’. Ted Ashley, chairman of the Warner Brothers film studio from 1969 to 1980 was, according to producer Don Simpson, ‘the pussy freak of all time’ (p.82). Peter Bogdanovich casts his girlfriend Cybill Shepherd in flop after flop because he is ‘pussy struck’.

Once Francis Ford Coppola made it big (very big) with The Godfather he bought a huge house with a pool in San Francisco, gave big parties, as soon as his wife went to bed, he was touching up all the nubiles in the pool. ‘It was no secret that Francis was a major pussy hound,’ says Marcia Lucas (p.208).

Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson emerge as particularly colourful characters. As Biskind puts it, ‘Bert [was] a man for whom the term ‘mindfucker’ was invented…’ (p.130) and he screwed his way through an armada of women, a highlight of whom was the beautiful actress Candice Bergen. He tried to get his wife, Judy, to sleep around too, so he wouldn’t feel so guilty about his affairs, and encouraged his friends to hit on her (p.129). He drove Candice (Candy) mad by his incessant lecturing her about life, how to behave etc, acting Svengali to her Trilby.

Bob Rafelson directed one of my all-time favourite movies, Five Easy Pieces, but is bluntly described as a ‘bully’, raving, shouting, blustering and browbeating everyone around him (p.119).

Drugs And the drugs. Obviously drugs of one sort or another had been around for a long time but mostly on a tiny marginal fringe. The success of Easy Rider made every young producer, director, actor or executive worth his salt feel like he had to be au fait with hash and pot, and the radical ones tried acid. Biskind describes some of the small independent production houses where the secretaries had the task of rolling the joints in preparation for big meetings.

Drugs were even involved in the actual production of the films. Bob Rafelson controlled the pacing of Jack Nicholson’s performance in Five Easy Pieces by managing his drug intake. He and the producer would discuss whether it was best to give Jack some hash or some grass before each scene, depending on the acting requirements (p.119).

Everyone knew Dennis Hopper would scarf down any pharmaceuticals from anywhere within reach. During his acting career, some directors never used him after lunch, when he would be trolleyed; another director sent Hopper calls sheets which included annotations suggesting which drugs he should use before which scenes (p.136).

Then cocaine came in. It went from being a secret vice to a social norm. Bowls of cocaine were laid out at the best parties. Wearing a little gold coke spoon on a necklace became a fashion statement. ‘Cokey’ becomes an adjective. The movie Personal Best is powdered with the stuff.

It was a cokey set. A production designer referred to [the movie’s writer-director] as ‘old write-a-line, snort-a-line Towne’. (p.395)

Scorsese at the Cannes Film Festival had good coke flown in from Paris for himself and his entourage. When studio executive Robert Evans flew out to visit the set of Robert Altman’s movie, Popeye, shooting in Malta in 1980, his luggage contained large consignments of coke for the director and crew, which made it embarrassing when his luggage got lost and opened by customs. Biskind tells a wild story of a panic-stricken Evans ringing studio head Don Simpson in the middle of the night, making him realise the stakes were that a senior exec and a major film could go down in a drugs scandal, and telling him to get no less a personage than Henry Kissinger on the case! (p.370).

Business All this sex and drugs stuff is initially entertaining, but after a hundred pages has got a bit oppressive. More interesting is the insight into the movie business as a business. We are told about umpteen ‘business meetings’ where decisions are made about greenlighting numerous projects, or where Old Hollywood executives are persuaded to fund risky experimental new ventures, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studios. That said, they’re not like the meetings I used to go to at government departments, which go on for one, two or three hours with an agenda, minutes and action logs. In Biskind’s hands most of these ‘meetings’ quickly turn into shouting matches, where executives and directors shout and swear at each other.

It wasn’t exactly a meeting, but it gives you a flavour of the business relationships to learn that whenever super-producer Robert Evans phoned Francis Ford Coppola with yet more criticism about the Godfather project, Coppola invariably ended up yelling obscenities, slamming the phone down, and kept a hammer nearby so he could smash the phone to pieces (p.153). After which a secretary replaced it with a new one.

When producer Stanley Jaffe, at a pre-production meeting for The Godfather, was so insistent that Marlon Brando wouldn’t be in the movie that he slammed his fist on the table, Coppola feigned having an epileptic fit, and fell to the floor in spasms, to convey just how imbecilic the suggestion was (p.153).

Money And there’s a lot of talk about money, about how much a project will cost, how much the studio will put in, the shape of the deal i.e. will director and stars get cash up front or a percentage of the profits, and how those profits could be calculated differently, taking into account all kinds of overheads, what John Landis calls ‘numbers and deals and phone calls’ (p.245).

Warner Bros exec John Calley pays $125,000 up-front to direct the screwball comedy, What’s Up, Doc? Brando gets $50,000 for appearing in The Godfather while Coppola only got $110,000 (plus 6% of the take, which ended up making him a multi-millionaire). Robert Towne was paid $250,000 to write Chinatown plus 5% of the gross. Lots and lots and lots of financial detail like that.

The process So, putting to one side the sex and drugs gossip, it’s interesting to get really embedded into the way the whole system worked: the way producers, directors, actors and execs were constantly having business meetings and/or social gatherings, hanging out in bars, discussing books or plays which have the potential to become movies, discussing who would be right to develop it, to turn it into a treatment or a script, who to offer the parts to, and the complexity of schedules and commitments, which meant your first choice of director or star actor or whoever, were continually being changed, adjusted, projects dropped, projects revived and so on. Like spinning plates. Like moving between multiple stages where multiple producers, directors, writers and actors are all spinning multiple systems of plates, an awful lot of which crashed and shattered, often very expensively.

And Biskind seems to have staggering access to it all. He seems to have carried out interviews and garnered eye-witness accounts from everyone present at all the key moments, parties, meetings, phone calls and sets. Some critics have complained that Biskind distorted evidence and stories and accounts in order to fit his wildly cynical and jaded narrative, but he indicates where accounts conflict and anyway, who cares? The point is rarely in the detail, it’s in the overall atmosphere of grotesquely appalling behaviour at every level, in every way.

As a small example of how it works – legendary cinéaste and would-be director Peter Bogdanovitch – before he’d directed anything – and his wife production designer Polly Platt, were sent by a magazine to write a feature about the making of what turned out to be John Ford’s last movie, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn. They got friendly with young actor Sal Mineo, the only person on the set their age. Sal gave Polly a dog-eared copy of a trashy paperback titled The Last Picture Show and said it would make a good movie and he’d love to be in it.

Thus began the long process which led to the eventual production of the movie, The Last Picture Show, released in 1971, one of the defining movies of the New Hollywood, Bogdanovitch’s first and arguably greatest film. During filming he fell in love with the female lead, Cybill Shepherd, aged 20 at the time, and left his wife who – the book emphasises – had played a key role in not only adapting the book, but even on set, helping to direct it. Biskind describes in excruciating detail the torment Polly went through as she helped her husband with every aspect of the day’s filming, only to go back to their apartment alone as he spent every night with pneumatic young Cybill.

None of which stops The Last Picture Show being a masterpiece and one of my favourite movies.

So from the hundreds of examples in the book, you get a good sense of the very extended series of accidents, insights, conversations, commissions, scripts, hirings and firings which are all involved in the convoluted processes which lead up to the production of any movie.

Networks And you get a good sense of the extended network or matrix which all this takes place in. Parties mattered. As a small example, Peter Fonda’s agent, Sue Mengers, had parties where people hooked up and did deals: Ann-Margret met director Mike Nichols and got a part in Carnal Knowledge; Burt Reynolds met director Alan Pakula and got a part in Starting Over; Lauren Hutton got chatting to director Paul Schrader and got a part in American Gigolo (p.132).

The socialising was important. Anything could happen at tonight’s party, someone could tip you off to the script going round, or that so-and-so’s looking for a director or actor for some project they’re considering… and it could be the Big Break. You never knew.

‘I went to every party, talked to everybody I could to get a picture made. I looked at people in terms of whether they could help me.’ (Scorsese, quoted page 238)

So this is why personal relationships really mattered. This is where the gossip comes in. Information about who was up and who was down, who was friends with who or had fallen out with who, who was looking to take revenge or sabotage someone else – all this was potentially vital business information as it made the landscape of opportunities much clearer.

That said, almost all the friendships, marriages and relationships in the book sooner or later turn sour, and often toxic. Because of the nature of the business.

Beatty and Towne had been friends since the ’60s. They were as close as two men could be, but it is hard to maintain friendships in Hollywood where the stakes are so high, where there are vast disparities of money and power, where the lines between affection and business are blurred, and people never know whether their success is earned or accidental. Enough is never enough, and the poison of envy eats away at the fibre of friendships. (p.305)

Types of director

The dark, yellowy feel of The Godfather derives almost entirely from the Director of Photography, Gordon Willis. I was surprised to read Biskin stating that Francis Ford Coppola’s strengths were not really visual – he was good at story-telling, writing dialogue and getting on with actors. Willis gave The Godfather that unparalleled look.

Obviously there are different kinds of directors, but I hadn’t quite realised just how different. Whereas Coppola loved actors and working with them, Polanski hated them and behaved like a dictator, like Napoleon. ‘Who gives a fuck about your motivation, your paycheck is your motivation, just say the fucking words’, he shouted at Faye Dunaway on the set of Chinatown (p.189). On on occasion she was sitting in a car holding a coffee cup while Polanski yelled at her, until she finally flung it in his face, at which point he realised it was full of pee. Hers, or co-star Jack Nicholson’s, sitting grinning next to her?

Hal Ashby, by contrast again, was immensely easy-going with his actors, one of the greatest ‘non-directors’ of all time according to Nicholson, but the downside was scenes often lacked bite and intensity so that the script got washed out (p.179).

Robert Altman created a ‘wonderful atmosphere’ on his sets, where he worked alongside the actors to get at the ‘truth’ of a scene (p.215). But he also ‘fucked everybody over’, limited other people’s pay but made sure he got the full rate, sacked crew members arbitrarily and was, of course, a womanising s.o.b.

William Friedkin was a very technical kind of director, very involved with the lenses and the technical effects, but he didn’t like actors, he went on record as saying he’d rather direct tree stumps (p.218). And we hear about the time he permanently injured Ellen Birstyn’s spine, during a special effect for The Exorcist.

And Terrence Malick (Badlands) was so notoriously indecisive that he took two years (!) to edit Days of Heaven (finally released in 1978), after which he retired from the business for decades.

One of the best bits of the book, I thought, was the one-page biographies of all the key directors.

Hal Ashby was raised on a farm and one day found his dad in the barn who’d put a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger; he never recovered, bottled it up, but it came out in titanic rages.
Coppola was stricken with polio when he was eight-years-old, and spent a year in bed, all friends and most family forbidden from visiting him, lonely and isolated, a sense of loneliness and victimhood he carried into adult life.
Scorsese was a short, skinny, sickly momma’s boy with allergies to everything and bad asthma, ‘filled with phobias and anxieties’ (p.238). He was timid, bordering on cowardly, hated confrontation, always smiling. But he bottled up the rage from being a short skinny kid in a rough neighbourhood – he was a wall puncher, a phone thrower (p.239) – and projected his anger into his films – which is why I’ve never liked them (p.227).

He was not very confrontational. Which is one of the reasons I think he gets so confrontational in the films, he’s just letting all that out. All the stuff he can’t do in his day-to-day life. (Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver)

William Friedkin grew up in a tough neighbourhood of Chicago and was arrested for armed robbery (!). After the success of French Connection and The Exorcist, he thought he was a genius and behaved intolerably to everyone, many enemies being thrilled when his next movie, Sorcerer, shot on location in the Dominican Republic, was a catastrophe.
Paul Schrader’s upbringing was one of religious terror and beatings by his pious mother and father. The God-fearing upbringing of screenwriter Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard, with its parental beatings and hellfire terrors, is itself the stuff of fiction (or nightmares). His obsession with suicide, with always having a loaded gun by his bedside, the fantasies of mass violence, all this was to spill onto the screen in the script of Taxi Driver.
Steven Spielberg was the nemesis of the counter-culture, immune to politics, never took drugs, shared his parents’ values, wanted to do good business and entertain.
George Lucas very similar, brought up in provincial nowheresville by philistine parents, small, frail and ill (he had diabetes cf. Scorsese’s asthma and Coppola’s polio). On his arrival in LA he initially thought he wanted to be a rebel like the swaggering cool dudes, de Palma and John Milius and Paul Schrader – till he had a eureka moment when he realised he wanted to make people happy, he wanted to entertain them – which led to the good-time American Graffiti (1974) and then the epoch-making, childish simplicities of Star Wars.

Lucas and Spielberg were in the vanguard of the counterattack by small-town and suburban values that were to reclaim Hollywood as their own. (p.343)

This is partly because it sheds light on the individuals. But also because they’re one of the few places where you get a bit of depth and variety, and an insight into other lives, other American settings and contexts, outside the pussy-grabbing, dope-smoking, egomaniac film world.

The end of an era

The very same ‘film school brats’ who helped to pioneer the new age, unwittingly brought about its demise.

The air of artistic freedom which had come in with Easy Rider (1969) began to reverse itself when the commercial success of Jaws (1975) and then the epic Star Wars (1977) led the studios to realise the potential of a new kind of blockbuster, whose profits could be amplified by careful control of production, marketing and merchandising. Slowly that heady air of half-amateur experimentalism and freedom of subject and tone drained away.

Films like Alien (1979) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) incorporated all the technical innovations pioneered in the previous decade, but had somehow morphed them into a slick new professional look. The moral and stylistic ambivalences of the best New Hollywood movies of the very early 70s had been turned into slick product which went on, as we all know, to become highly profitable franchises, complete with TV spinoffs and a world of merchandising.

Alongside the invention of a new type of blockbuster, went a further change in the demographic of people consuming movies. If 60s radicals had applauded the change in demographic from middle-aged to student-aged audiences, they were not so happy when this downward trend continued towards actual children.

By the mid-1970s 50% of the American movie-going public was aged 12–20. The thing about actual children is they tend to be as socially conservative as their parents, and so the downward trend in the age of the movie-going public was accompanied by a move away from the brief political radicalism of the early 70s towards a reborn conservatism of subjects and approach.

George Lucas understood this extremely well. He is quoted as saying American Graffiti was targeted at 16-year-olds, Star Wars at ten to 12-year-olds (p.318) and that is the basically childish demographic where most movies have stuck ever since.

The Indiana Jones series, like the never-ending Star Wars series, are, basically, films for children, and they were the future, the grandparents of today’s endless X-Men and Marvel Superhero franchises.

Film critic Pauline Kael realised this at the time and wrote essays warning about the trend towards juvenile feelgood movies, not least in an essay titled ‘Fear of Movies’ (p.342). Biskind quotes Spielberg himself as saying he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind entirely to conjure up that child’s sense of wonder, and goes on to point out how the movie’s protagonist abandons his adult responsibilities to his wife and son, regresses to childhood enshtusiasms and then, by entering the alien mothership, effectively goes right back to the womb, relinquishing all adult worries.

It’s hard to think of a more infantilising vision. (p.363)

Biskind’s analyses

Biskind provides fascinating accounts of the random conceptions and lengthy travails of all the key movies of the 1970s, accounts which are drenched, as I’ve said in gossip about personalities, sex and drugs, along with the intricate wheeler-dealing between directors, stars agents and studio executives, that more often than not continued right the way through the shooting, editing and preview stage of the films, sometimes even after they’d been officially released.

But at the point where the narrative reaches the actual release of each of the signature movies of the movement, he also subjects the key movies to interesting ‘criticism’ and ‘analysis’.

Thus he as a very insightful (to me, at any rate) page about The Exorcist which he sees entirely as ‘a male nightmare of female puberty’, drenched in fear of emergent female sexuality, which is why the movie can be seen as a conspiracy of all the male characters to torture and torment the pubescent girl, Regan, back to her pre-sexual innocence (p.223).

Biskind is good on how the unique visual look of The Godfather owes everything to director of photographer Gordon Willis (pp.156-157) but he goes on to give an insightful interpretation of how the movie as a whole, despite its status as the masterpiece of the New Hollywood’s leading figure, Coppola, is in fact a profoundly conservative if not reactionary movie, in its psychological and cultural tendency – promoting the huge importance of family and loyalty at a time when the counter-culture was busy trying to undermine The Family as a bourgeois, sexist construct (p.164).

To bring this out Biskind usefully contrasts the scene where Michael and the Don acknowledge their love for each other with the comparable scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicolson’s character completely fails to communicate with his stroke-bound father.

The Godfather embodies a type of blockbuster sentimentality which points towards the neo-conservative values of the Reagan era, whereas Five Easy Pieces embodies the low-key, on-location, moral and psychological ambiguity and frustration which was the signature note of the New Hollywood. Which is why, although I can acknowledge that The Godfather is a masterpiece, I prefer the low-key, realistic ‘truths’ and perplexities of Five Easy Pieces more.

On another level, Biskind discusses the role of genres. He details the struggles Coppola had to get the movie made, not least the scepticism of every studio exec that gangster movies were passé, and so brings out how its unexpected success marked the beginning of the rehabilitation of old genres in a new blockbuster style.

This reinvention of worn-out genres would turn out to be the modus operandi of Spielberg and Lucas, reinventing scarey (Jaws), science fiction (Star Wars) and adventure (Indiana Jones) in the new blockbuster idiom.

Biskind neatly calls their achievement ‘genre gentrification’, and that captures the way a rough, edgy, arty neighbourhood (New Hollywood) ended up being taken over by smooth-talking young urban professionals (Spielberg, Lucas) and how the tired old Hollywood genres were made over, given a technological lick of paint, and resold at vast profits (p.342).

When you read Biskind’s very useful potted biographies of Spielberg and Lucas, what comes over is what utterly conventional personalities they are, coming from bland provincial backgrounds, completely lacking in political edge, timid and unworldly, who knew about life mainly from TV, who arrived in the Sodom and Gomorrah of 70s Hollywood but didn’t sleep around and didn’t take drugs, just wanted to make movies.

Their lack of rock’n’roll behaviour should have warned all the other bullshitting blowhards of the movement (de Palma and Schrader and Friedkin and Rafelson spring to mind) that here was something new, and quiet and understated, which was going to steal the carpet from under their feet.

Biskind sees this triumph of the homely, the popular, the regular guy and the mass popcorn-eating audience embodied in the story of Jaws itself. In it the rough, tough, right-wing macho man Quint gets eaten. ‘The intellectual Jew of the left’ (Biskind’s words, p.279), despite all his college talk, is ineffectual and runs (or swims) away. It is the unreflective, unflashy, everyman cop, Brody, who saves the day. The movie’s representative of precisely the kind of ‘familymanregularguy’ who Spielberg would aim his following movies at (with such dazzling success).

Politics and society

I warmed to lots of Biskind’s analyses because he relates the movies to their social, cultural and political context, which is much the same way as I think and write about art and literature in this blog.

1969 was the high point of the Vietnam War, protests against the war, and the hippy counter-culture, Woodstock etc. Easy Rider provided images, characters and a popular soundtrack which crystallised that cultural moment. But by spring 1975 it was over. In fact the Paris Peace Accords ended the war in January 1973 and by March 1973 all US forces had been withdrawn. There followed two more years of conflict before Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army in April 1975, but the entire raison d’etre of the anti-war movement evaporated in 1973. Alongside it, the enmity of all right-thinking left-wingers and liberals to Richard Nixon’s presidency were vindicated when Nixon resigned in August 1974, rather than face impeachment over the Watergate scandal.

So by 1974 the main bogeyman and the central issue of the counterculture had both disappeared, depriving the movement of its focal points and energy. Instead, America had a whole new set of worries. The country was stricken with an energy crisis from the autumn of 1973 which brought to a juddering halt the run of economic growth which had fuelled increasing affluence ever since the end of the Second World War.

A huge middle ground of public opinion, which had been prepared to let the hippies get away with the benefit of the doubt, who had let themselves be persuaded that America was an evil imperialist power or had dabbled with pot, now found themselves unemployed and scrabbling for work.

George Lucas is quoted several times as saying ordinary people were fed up of being told by New Hollywood directors that they were wicked racist imperialist pigs exploiting the workers. They wanted to see movies which would leave them feeling happier as they walked out the cinema than when they went in, not wretched and depressed (pp.363)

Hence American Graffiti, a feelgood movie deliberately set in the early 60s before the whole shitstorm of Vietnam and the counterculture kicked in. And then Star Wars, the ultimate in apolitical escapism, set in a universe long ago and far away, where the good guys wear white and the bad guys dress in black.

You can hear it in the rock music, too. In 1969 hipsters listened to the hairy ugly dudes in Steppenwolf, singing their signature track Born To Be Wild which runs through Easy Rider, ‘head out on the highway, lookin’ for adventure’. Young film studio executives were taking pot, even acid, experimenting with open marriages and free love.

Just four years later (in 1973) The Eagles released Tequila Sunrise, laden with slick worldweariness, and the young studio execs were now wearing carefully ironed jeans and cheesecloth shirts, everyone was snorting cocaine and looking for the next Godfather.

By the late 70s Bert Schneider, the buccaneering executive behind BBS Productions which funded a lot of the early New Hollywood productions, now felt tired and old. The BBS building on La Brea, once the headquarters of everything hip and happening, now felt like a dilapidated old ‘head’ shop, covered in yellowing posters from the hippy era, relics from a different age (p.299).

When Barry Diller, who came from heading TV channel ABC arrived as new CEO of Paramount, he sacked a lot of the old staff and installed a young Michael Eisner as President.

When Eisner came in as president, the atmosphere at Paramount changed completely. They wanted to do what they had done at the [TV] network, manufacture product aimed at your knees. (Richard Sylbert, Head of Production at Paramount at the time, quoted on p.297)

Biskind explains that it was the ‘TV regime’ at Paramount that ‘helped to put the New Hollywood in its grave’ (p.397).

New ways of doing business

The era of experimentation came to an end when Hollywood discovered new ways of making big, big money from blockbusters. Frankly, I didn’t understand the minutiae of the new ways of funding projects which Biskind describes, but I did understand the three other key elements which were ‘new’:

1. Breaks Previously movies had been released in a relatively limited number of cinemas round the country, and in waves or ‘breaks’ – alpha cinemas first, then, when the first wave of popularity had passed, in beta cinemas – all in a bid to stretch out a movie’s paying life. With Godfather, the studio opened it across a much larger number of cinemas right at the start – and made a ton of money (total box office something like $280 million). Having seen this work so well, Universal Pictures copied the tactic with Jaws – its first weekend it opened in 409 cinemas and made a huge profit – the total take ended up being $470 million. So mass openings right across the country became part of a new ‘blockbuster’ strategy.

2. TV promotion Conventional wisdom throughout the 1960s was that television was the rival, the competitor, which was slaying the film industry, taking ads away from the screen, but much more importantly, allowing people to slump on their sofas after dinner and watch high-grade entertainment without having to schlepp through bad weather and wait in line to get into a movie which may, or may not, be any good.

It was a business strategy breakthrough when marketing departments realised that heavy investment in TV commercials could make a massive difference to box office. Seems obvious to us now, nearly 50 years later, but it was a revolutionary breakthrough at the time. Thus Universal spent $700,000, an unprecedented amount, on half-minute ads during prime time TV slots to promote Jaws and the results were spectacular.

Jaws change the business forever, as the studios discovered the value of wide breaks – the number of theatres would rise to one thousand, two thousand, and more by the next decade – and massive TV advertising, both of which increased the costs of marketing and distribution, diminishing the importance of print reviews, making it virtually impossible for a film to build slowly, finding its audience by dint of mere quality. As costs mounted, the willingness to take risks diminished proportionately. Moreover, Jaws whet corporate appetites for big profits quickly, which is to say, studios wanted every film to be Jaws. (p.278)

3. Merchandising The third aspect of the ‘blockbuster revolution’ was merchandising. There’d always been book tie-ins and cheap trinkets, but they had never been commercially important. Once again it was Jaws that began the process, with toys and t-shirts, but Star Wars which took it to a whole new level. What’s fascinating to learn is that George Lucas knew this from the start.

Until Star Wars, merchandising was a relatively trivial cash centre. Lucas understood its importance (p.320)

Lucas was fascinated by money, studied the bottom line, analysed the sources of profit and realised from the start the immense potential of Star Wars merchandising. After all, from the get-go he conceived it as a movie for kids, and you sell kids toys, right? He aimed to make ‘the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make’ (p.321), and recoup the money on the toys.

Star Wars drove home the lesson of Jaws, that kids and young adults would come back again and again to a movie without stars… It woke up the studios to the potential of merchandising, showed that the sale of books, T-shirts, and action figures could be a significant profit centre. Star Wars‘s merchandising efforts, instead of merely promoting the movie, as had been the case in the past, took on a life of their own and sucked up well over $3 billion in licensing fees as of the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy in 1997, adding an incentive to replace complex characters with simple figures that could be turned into toys. (p.341)

Taken together, massive ‘breaks’, TV advertising and mass merchandising (combined with the more obvious element of ‘popular’, mass-audience-pleasing subject matter) provide a good working definition of the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon and are, quite clearly, the exact opposite of the low-budget, improvised, ambiguous art movies that New Hollywood directors got to make in their brief window of opportunity.

Which is why critics and insiders date the New Hollywood era from 1969’s Easy Rider, which seemed to blow the film world right open, to 1975’s Jaws when the window for interesting art movies began to close, and then 1977, when Star Wars slammed it shut.

Star Wars was the film that ate the heart and soul of Hollywood. It created the big budget, comic-book mentality. (Screenwriter Paul Schrader, p.316)

Star Wars swept all the chips off the table. What happened with Star Wars is like when MacDonalds got a foothold, the taste for good food just disappeared. (Director William Friedkin, p.344)

Dennis Jakob coined the term ‘twerp cinema’ for the movies of Lucas and Spielberg.

No-one knows

One of the most fascinating things about the book, is no-one knows when a movie is going to be a hit or a flop. I found it riveting to read about the disasters which plagued the production of Jaws, I had no idea it was such a screwup all the way through the filming and editing, and right up to the last minute Spielberg and a lot of the suits thought it was a disaster. Even more amazingly, Lucas was at moments suicidal about Star Wars which he thought was a piece of junk, incoherent twaddle, and so did many of his friends and family!

It’s fascinating to see just how contingent so many of the films were. Nobody knew, not even the makers, whether they would, by the time of the final edit and the final sound mix, be Oscar winners or humiliating failures.

This helps explain the relentless anxiety, the uncertainty, paranoia and angst of the leading directors. As the budgets got bigger, the pressure on them, and the producers and studio execs, became unbearable. Here’s one snapshot from hundreds:

Scorsese went into Raging Bull twisted into a knot of bitterness, defiance and self-doubt. He was overwhelmed by a sense of fatality… Scorsese was edgy and irritable as ever, prone to sudden outbursts of anger… Scorsese had such a severe anxiety attack on the bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo that he couldn’t catch his breath and was convinced he was having a coronary… (pp.391-2)

One consequence was the drugs, which were easily available and were the easiest way to escape the crushing anxiety of each day. But it also explains the prevalence of adoring groupies and yes-men which Biskin describes the uber-directors as surrounding themselves with (Friedkin, Ashby, Bogdanovich, but especially Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese). Because the closed-shop of adulatory groupies was like the drugs – a vital prop, a psychological survival strategy for men who came under immense pressure, not only to deliver big budget hits, but from their own inner demons telling them they ought to have been making the artistic masterpieces they’d come into the business dreaming about.

It was a recipe for endless malaise, anxiety, anger, frustration and depression. And masses of drugs. And the terrible treatment of women.

Jews in Hollywood

I don’t particularly care whether there are or have been lots of Jews in senior positions in Hollywood. It’s well known that some of the most prominent executives who set up the first studios in the 1920s were Jews who’d moved out from New York (Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, Louis Mayer, Irving Thalberg), but a lot weren’t. Similarly, a number of key players in the New Hollywood movement were Jewish… and a lot weren’t.

But it does appear to matter to at least some of the characters themselves, and it palpably matters to Biskind. He consistently note a person’s Jewishness, and quotes their own remarks about their Jewishness:

[Robert] Towne’s melancholic, hangdog expression and pale, feverish eyes, along with the Talmudic slope of his shoulders gave him a rabbinical cast he would never entirely shake. (p.30)
[Robert Towne] was a born kibitzer. (p.50)
[For The Graduate, director Mike] Nichols turned the [originally Gentile] families into Beverly Hills Jews and gave the part to Dustin Hoffman. (p.34)
[Bob Rafelson] was handsome in the Jewish way, a shock of dark brown hair over a high forehead, rosebud lips frozen in a permanent pout under a fighter’s battered nose. (p.53)
Director Henry Jaglom remembers [Bert Schneider] from Camp Kohut, for Jewish kids, in Oxford Maine…(p.55)
Bert and his princess Judy [Feinberg] were truly Jewish royalty. (p.56)
‘These were people who didn’t feel authentic,’ says Toby [Carr]. ‘Artists suffer and upper-middle-class Jewish boys from New York didn’t feel they had…’ (p.58)
Evans, according to his number two, Peter Bart, ‘idolised gangsters, but he was fascinated by Jewish gangsters – Bugsy Siegel – not Italian ones’. (p.142)
Evans and Bart screened mob movies, realised they had all been written and directed by Jews (p.142)
Everyone who worked for [Charlie Bludhorn] was certain he was Jewish, but if so he took great pains to conceal it. (p.144)
Bart recalls, ‘We were in London together, going out for dinner. I picked Frank [Yablans] up in his room. He was finished dressing, looking at himself in the mirror, and he said, “You know, I’m a really ugly man, I’m a homely fat Jewish man.”‘ (p.145)
[Robert Towne and Roman Polanski bickering over Chinatown] ‘What’s her name?’ ‘No, it can’t be that, it’s too Jewish.’ ‘Who says it’s Jewish?’ (p.166)
[Transamerica bought the struggling studio United Artists.] ‘There was a lot of resentment because UA had had twelve, fifteen years of success, then the Jews had taken the goys for a fortune…’ (p.214)
According to Jennifer Nairn-Smith, ‘William [Friedkin] denied his whole background…He hated being Jewish. Think Yiddish, dress British.’ (p.220)
Says Friedkin, ‘If The Exorcist had previewed it would never have come out ’cause people would have written on their cards, “This is terrible, you have a little girl masturbating with a crucifix, you dirty Jewish bastard.”‘. (p.222)
[Verna Fields] was a large, warm lady with short brown hair and half glasses, hung on a string, perched on the tip of her nose. She was like a Jewish aunt, except that instead of talking gefilte fish recipes, she talked editing. (p.237)
Spielberg’s mother opened a kosher dairy restaurant in Beverly Hills, but her son avoided it. He disliked his stepfather, who was an Orthodox Jew.Some of his more Jewish-identified friends regarded him as a self-hating Jew. (p.331)
‘Can you imagine Walt Disney turning over in his grave, just thinking about opening his doors to do business with a Jew!’ (p.371)

And Biskind also sprinkles the text with Jewish or Yiddish vocabulary. I had to look up terms like:

meshuggah (craziness, or a crazy person)
a macher = big shot, important person (p.39)
a gonif = a thief or dishonest person or scoundrel (p.101)
tsuris = aggravating troubles (p.111)
zoftig = [of a woman] a full, rounded figure, plump (p.132)
a pisher = a neophyte, somebody new to a job (p.152)
a mensch = a person of integrity and honour
a nebbish = pitiful, ineffectual man (p.239)
a shiksa = a Gentile woman, often blonde and bosomy
kibitzing = chatting informally (p.284)
shtick = a person’s routine, talent or area of interest (p.287)
mishegoss = craziness; senseless behaviour or activity (p.319)
alter cockers = older generation, granddads (p.413)

Why does Biskind dwell on the Jewish origins of his characters, and litter the text with Yiddish idioms? I don’t know and I don’t much care, but I found it a persistent and intriguing aspect of the book.

And it added piquancy to one of the promotional quotes on the back cover, from the critic of the Spectator magazine who described Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as having ‘the most dislikeable cast of characters since William S. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’.

That’s a brilliantly insulting quote, but it’s given added – and, I assume, unwitting – undertones by the Jewish flavour of a lot of the text.

Women in Hollywood

1. Husbands dumping their wives

Director William Friedkin lived as man and wife with partner Jennifer Nairns-Smith for three years until she announced she was pregnant. When she had the baby, in November 1976, he dumped her (p.311)
Martin Scorsese had a relationship with writer Julia Cameron and got her pregnant. During the filming of his musical New York, New York Scorsese started an affair with star Lisa Minnelli. When Cameron had his baby, he dumped her (p.326)

Just a few flagrant examples of the way these powerful, egotistical men treated their women. And the hundreds of examples of the everyday sexist attitudes of all the men on display are far too many to quote.

#metoo

This book was published in 1998, almost twenty years before the outing of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in the #metoo social media campaign.

What puzzled me about #metoo was that it seemed to come as a shock and a surprise to so many people. Hadn’t they read this book – which catalogues the appalling way most women were treated by powerful men in Hollywood throughout the 1970s (and into the 1980s)? Or its sequel, Down and Dirty Pictures, published in 2004, which chronicles the appalling behaviour of, yes, the exact same Harvey Weinstein? Or any of the hundreds of other exposés of Hollywood’s ‘dark underbelly’? Wasn’t the exploitation of a lot of the women who worked there a core part of most people’s vague impression of Hollywood?

When I was a kid I read books about the silent movie starts which chronicled the ‘scandalous’ sexual behaviour of the likes of Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks and the outrageous incident of Fatty Arbuckle and the wine bottle. When I was only 12 or 13 I read David Niven’s memoirs of Hollywood, which revolved around sex, especially when he shared a house with Errol Flynn.

From hundreds of references, articles, jokes, on TV, in novels and biographies, I acquired a solid impression of Hollywood as a Sodom and Gomorrah of know-nothing executives ranting, of preening stars making impossible demands, and dictatorial directors reducing their leading ladies to tears; of wild parties, booze and drugs and shameful, disgraceful behaviour.

And a key part of this lurid mythology was the widespread cliché about ‘the casting couch’ and how generations of leading ladies had had to screw or give blow jobs to all manner of directors and execs in order to get jobs. Hadn’t people read about the sexual humiliations Marilyn Monroe had to put herself through before she ended up killing herself, stories which have been repeated in umpteen documentaries and sensationalising biographies.

My point being, I thought that the sexual harassment and abuse of women in Hollywood was common knowledge and one of the most basic aspects of anyone’s mental image of Tinseltown.

‘In Hollywood men put enormous pressure on women to fuck them, even if it’s only once. It’s like the dog that pisses on the lamppost, even if it’s only once. They want that kind of connection and then maybe they can relax.’ (Actress Beverley Walker, quoted on p.234)

It seems that the #metoo revelations about Harvey Weinstein took place when a handful of brave women decided to finally stand up to the climate of fear which Weinstein and others like him were able to exert over Hollywood’s female population. And it struck such a nerve because it turned out that millions of women in not just film but all kinds of other industries, and not just in America, but around the world, had had to, and were continuing to have to, put up with outrageously exploitative, bullying behaviour from men in power.

All well and good. I wholeheartedly support the #metoo movement and all its goals. I’m just bemused by the way so much of this information was already out there. It suggests something about books like Biskind’s – that they can be bestsellers, widely read and reviewed and yet… somehow, not change anything.

It points towards the difference between static channels like books, and even magazine or newspaper reports – and the much more dynamic medium of twitter, where what are, in essence, the same kind of accusations, could go viral very quickly and create momentum, create a movement.

There’s a lot more to be said on these issues, #metoo and the (in)effectiveness of books to change anything, but I thought it was worth recording a few thoughts here.

3. Strong women

Meanwhile, Biskind does make the point that not all the women are downtrodden wives and bimbo girlfriends; that there were some very strong, achieveful women in the Hollywood of the time. One of the most striking gossip-type facts to emerge was the important role played by their partners in both Peter Bogdanovich and Bob Rafelson’s early successes.

Bogdanovich’s wife, Polly Platt, was a production designer but all accounts have her intimately involved with the actual directing of his masterpiece, The Last Picture Show, sitting beside his director’s chair, discussing shots. He dumped her to begin his infatuated affair with Cybill Shepherd, and never made such a good film again.

Similarly, Bob Rafelson’s wife, Toby Rafelson was also a production designer, and had a big impact on his early masterpiece, Five Easy Pieces. After his womanising and drug-taking drove her away, Rafelson never made a good movie again (a point made by actress Ellen Burstyn, quoted on page 273).

There were also a number of notable women film editors.

Verna Fields edited Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon and What’s Up, Doc? but really made her reputation co-editing American Graffiti and then almost single-handedly saving Jaws, whose rushes were an epic mess (and for which she won an Oscar).

Marcia Lucas, George’s wife, also had an editing role on American Graffiti,then cut Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, New York New York and – seismically – Star Wars.

(It’s worth noting that Woody Allen – who doesn’t feature much in the book, being neither a New Hollywood rebel or a New Blockbuster mogul – has always used woman editors, Susan E. Morse 1977-98, Alisa Lepselter from then to the present.)

I don’t want to just repeat the outrageous attitude of most of the men in the Hollywood of that era, but also want to put on record the achievement of strong, talented women who managed to survive and thrive in it.

A craft, not an art

I use the term ‘movies’ throughout this blog to describe the way American films are, ultimately, products of American hyper-consumer capitalism and not works of art.

I myself have worked as a television producer/director, directing about a dozen commercial videos, and have also hired and employed very talented TV directors for a period of six years (1994 to 2000). I’ve worked very closely with producers, directors and editors (in television).

Granted, TV is not the same as film. But these experience are the basis of my opinion that film is a craft and not an art. Some people in these areas really are amazing, genius craftsmen and women. But, in my opinion, to call it an ‘art form’ is ludicrous – specially when you read scene after scene of blustering, know-nothing executives shouting and yelling about who or what they insist is in the movie, when you read how many ‘great’ movies were in fact bodged and botched and stitched together out of ramshackle compromises, deals, bankruptcies, disagreements, technical and logistical disasters.

As a small example, I was struck by the fact that producer Philip D’Antoni told William Friedkin, director of 1971’s The French Connection, that part of what had made Steve McQueen’s 1968 classic, Bullitt, so great was the epic car chase, so he should put a car chase into Connection. So Friedkin did (p.204). It’s a great car chase, a really brilliant car chase. But it’s not ‘art’.

Similarly, I hadn’t realised that the actual filming of Jaws had been such an epic catastrophe, taking three times as long, and costing three times as much, as budgeted. The script wasn’t finished when they began filming, so many of the scenes were improvised in the evening in Spielberg’s hotel room, with the scriptwriter, Carl Gottlieb, jotting down the best bits – and then filming these ad-libbed scenes the next day.

They made three giant plastic model sharks, but one sank and the others looked terrible, and so it was only because of the accidental fact of their ridiculous look and impact in the early filming that led Spielberg (or others, depends whose story you believe) to completely rethink the script and re-edit the movie so that the shark rarely appears until the end – thus you don’t see it in the first half of the film, which, combined with the brilliant music by John Williams, makes its unseen menace infinitely more threatening and scarey.

Most of the movies described here involved similar amounts of chaos, bad planning, script crises, changes of mind or emphasis, random elements chucked in at the last minute, the studio insisting on reshoots or re-editing the whole thing, and so on and so on.

That’s not art. It’s a shambles. It comes as a shock to learn that Spielberg, at one point, suggested that, at the climax of Jaws, after Chief Brody has blown up the shark and been reunited with Dreyfuss and as they paddle towards the shore, that, in a black joke, they see a fleet of shark’s fins appear on the horizon heading towards them!

‘Art’ is an excuse

Here’s another way of thinking about the ‘Is film an art?’ question.

It’s an excuse. A lot of these people behaved appallingly, not so much the obvious sexism and getting drunk and hitting people, but the shouting at everyone, the bullying coercive behaviour, the exploitation of young women, ripping everyone off, sacking people arbitrarily, using people’s life stories without crediting them, using their ideas, scripts and stories without credit, stabbing their business partners in the back – the book is an awesome catalogue of despicable behaviour.

And their justification? “It’s art. I’m making great art. I am a great artist.”

So all this ‘art’ talk can easily be reinterpreted as an excuse to justify monstrous egotism and abusive behaviour. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls contains more than enough examples of the jaw-dropping egotism, selfishness and the brutal mistreatment of women by some of cinema’s greatest ‘artists’ to wither and kill your opinions of them forever.

(It also kills your respect for ‘film critics’, people employed to suck up to monsters and overlook their abusive behaviour in the name of promoting their ‘art’ — and for ‘film studies’ academics, trying to persuade their students that these hugely compromised products of consumer capitalism are some kind of ‘art form’. Films can be very well crafted – having produced and directed broadcast TV I understand that very well, and how you can take to pieces all aspects of a script, of the techniques of direction, framing, lighting, editing and sound mixing a movie, yes. But that doesn’t make Jaws or Star Wars, let alone Rocky or Finding Nemo or Home Alone 2, works of art. They’re just very well-crafted products designed to be consumed by a mass audience and as nakedly intended to generate profits for their investors as MacDonalds chicken nuggets or a Samsung Galaxy.)

Pictures, not movies

I use the term ‘movies’ to indicate the blunt fact that movies’ are products of American hyper-capitalism, and deliberately don’t talk about ‘film’ or ‘films’ as this is what pretentious ‘film studies’ people say when they start talking about auteurs and ‘artistic vision’.

So it was interesting to realise that everyone in this book, including Biskind, refers to movies as ‘pictures’ – as in the title of the memoirs of über-producer, Robert Evans, The Kid Stays In The Picture, or the obvious fact that the Academy Award each year goes to ‘Best Picture’. Everyone in the business, including Biskind, seems to call them ‘pictures’, not films or movies. Pictures.

And that reminds me of a story which Oscar-winning producer Sam Spiegel tells in his autobiography about an earlier era, about the time when director Elia Kazan had made his first Hollywood movie, and the studio liked it but, after the screening, a studio executive took Kazan aside and told him he had to change his name to something less ethnic. ‘How about Cézanne?’

Kazan was appalled. ‘But Cézanne was a great artist, I couldn’t possibly compete.’

‘Nah,’ says the executive. ‘You make one good picture, everyone’ll forget the other guy.’

Credit

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind was published in 1998 in America by Simon & Schuster. All references are to the 1999 Bloomsbury paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 17, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in America, Film

Tagged #metoo, 1960s, 1970s, Al Pacino, Alan Pakula, Alisa Lepselter, American Gigolo, Apocalypse Now, Arthur Penn, auteur, Barry Diller, Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Brian de Palma, Bullitt, Burt Reynolds, Carl Gottlieb, Chinatown, cinema, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, cocaine, Coming Home, counter-culture, Cybill Shepherd, Dennis Hopper, Don Simpson, drugs, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, Elia Kazan, Ellen Burstyn, Faye Dunaway, film, film industry, Five Easy Pieces, Francis Ford Coppola, Gene Hackman, George Lucas, Gordon Willis, Harold and Maude, Harvey Weinstein, Heaven's Gate, hippies, Hollywood, independent cinema, Jaws, Jennifer Nairns-Smith, John Ford, John Landis, M*A*S*H, Marcia Lucas, marketing, Marlon Brando, Martin Scorcese, Martin Scorsese, Martin Sheen, Mean Streets, merchandising, Michael Cimino, Michael Eisner, Midnight Cowboy, Mike Nichols, movie business, movies, Nashville, New Hollywood, New York, Paper Moon, Paramount Pictures, Paul Schrader, Pauline Kael, Peace movement, Peter Bogdanovitch, Peter Fonda, Polly Platt, Popeye, Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Richard Nixon, Richard Sylbert, Rip Torn, Robert Altman, Robert de Niro, Robert Evans, Roman Polanski, Sal Mineo, Sam Spiegel, sex, sexism, Shampoo, Shelley Duvall, Star Wars, Steppenwolf, Steven Spielberg, Sue Mengers, Susan E. Morse, Taxi Driver, Ted Ashley, Terence Malick, Terrence Malick, The Conversation, The Conversation The Godfather part II, The Deer Hunter, The Eagles, The Exorcist, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Graduate, The Last Detail, The Last Picture Show, Toby Rafelson, Verna Fields, Vietnam War, Warren Beatty, Watergate, William Friedkin, Woody Allen

Posted by Simon on May 17, 2020

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The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)

Lenin, following Marx, assumed the incompatibility of class interests: because the rich would always exploit the poor, the poor had no choice but to supplant the rich. [President Woodrow] Wilson, following Adam Smith, assumed the opposite: that the pursuit of individual interests would advance everyone’s interests, thereby eroding class differences while benefiting both the rich and the poor. These were, therefore, radically different solutions to the problem of achieving social justice within modern industrial societies. At the time the Cold War began it would not have been at all clear which was going to prevail.
(The Cold War, page 89)

John Lewis Gaddis (b.1941) is a renowned academic expert on the Cold War and has been teaching and writing about it since the 1970s. The preface to this book explains that his students and publishers suggested he write a popular, brief overview of the subject about which he knows so much, and that this book is the result.

The cover of the Penguin paperback edition promises to give you the lowdown on ‘THE DEALS. THE SPIES. THE LIES. THE TRUTH’ but this is quite misleading. Along with Len Deighton’s description of it as ‘gripping’, this blurb gives the impression that the book is a rip-roaring narrative of an action-packed era, full of intrigue and human interest.

Cover of the Penguin edition of The Cold War

Academic and theoretical approach

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the book feels much more like the textbook to accompany a university course in international studies. It doesn’t at all give a chronological narrative of the Cold War and certainly has no eyewitness accounts or personal stories of the kind that bring to life, for example, Jim Baggott’s history of the atom bomb, Atomic, or Max Hasting’s history of the Korean War.

Instead, the book is divided into seven themed chapters and an epilogue which deal at a very academic level with the semi-abstract theories of international affairs and geopolitics.

Nuclear weapons and the theory of war

So, for example, the second chapter, about the atom bomb, certainly covers all the key dates and developments in the history of the bomb but is, at its core, an extended meditation on the German theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz’s, famous dictum that war ‘is a continuation of political activity by other means’ (quoted p.51). The chapter shows how U.S. presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, and their Russian opposite numbers, Stalin and Khrushchev, worked through the implications of this profound insight.

If war only exists to further the interests of the state (as it had done through all recorded history up till 1945) then a war which threatens, in fact which guarantees, the destruction of the very state whose interests it is meant to be furthering, is literally inconceivable.

Truman showed he had already grasped some of this when he removed the decision to deploy atom bombs from the military – who were inclined to think of it as just another weapon, only bigger and better – and made use of the atom bomb the sole decision of the civilian power i.e. the president.

But as the atom bombs of the 1940s were superseded by the hydrogen bombs of the 1950s, it dawned on both sides that a nuclear war would destroy the very states it was meant to protect, with profound consequences for military strategy.

This insight came very close to being ignored during the darkest days of the Korean War, when the massed Chinese army threatened to push the Allies right out of the Korean peninsula and plans were drawn up to drop atom bombs on numerous Chinese cities. Again, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, American generals were advising President Kennedy to authorise a devastating first strike on the Soviet Union with likely results not wildly exaggerated in Kubrick’s bleak nuclear satire, Dr Stangelove.

And yet both times the civilian authority, in the shape of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, rejected the advice of their military and refused the use of nuclear weapons. Truman signalled to both China and Russia that the Korean War would remain a conventional war limited to Korea only. And Kennedy made significant concessions to the Soviets in order to defuse the Cuba situation. We aftercomers owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the wisdom and restraint of both these men.

It is by following the ramifications of the new theory of war created by the advent of nuclear weapons, that Gaddis makes sense of a number of Cold War developments. For example, the development of regular meetings to discuss arms limitations which took place between the Cold War antagonists from the Cuban crisis onwards, talks which certainly continued to be fractious opportunities for propaganda on both sides, but which also proved Churchill’s dictum that ‘jaw jaw is better than war war’.

Capitalism versus communism

If chapter two considered the evolution of new military theory during the war, chapter three covers much the same chronological period but looked at in terms of socio-economic theory, starting with a very basic introduction to theories of Marxism and capitalism, and then seeing how these played out after World War One.

Gaddis deploys a sequence of significant dates each separated by a decade, which tell the story of the decline and fall of communism:

in 1951 all nations were recovering from the devastation of war, the USSR had established communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and a newly communist China was challenging the West’s staying power in Korea
in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev visited America and gleefully told his audience that the communist countries would surge ahead in economic production and ‘bury’ the West
by 1971, as consumerism triumphed in the West, all the communist economies were stagnating and communism in China was accompanied by inconceivable brutality and mass murder
by 1981 life expectancy in the Soviet Union was in decline and Russia was mired in a pointless war in Afghanistan
by 1991 the Soviet Union and all the communist East European regimes had disappeared, while China was abandoning almost all its communist policies, leaving ‘communism’ to linger on only in the dictatorships of Cuba and North Korea

Capitalism won the Cold War. Marx claimed to have revealed the secrets of history, that the capitalist system was inevitably doomed to collapse because the exploited proletariat would inevitably grow larger as an ever-shrinking capitalist class concentrated all wealth unto itself, making a proletarian revolution inevitable and unstoppable. That was Marx and Engel’s clear prediction.

1. In direct contradiction to Marxist theory, living standards in all capitalist countries for everyone are unrecognisably higher than they were 100 years ago.

2. Marx predicted that his communist revolution could only happen in advanced industrial countries where the capitalists had accumulated all power and the proletariat was forced to rebel. In the event, communist revolutions turned out to be a characteristic of backward, feudal or peasant countries, namely Russia and China, later Cuba, and then a sorry string of Third World basket cases – Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. Communism only took hold in Eastern Europe because it was imposed by Russia’s military dictatorship, and was thrown off the second that Russia’s tyrannical grip was loosened.

It was the tragedy of both Russia and China that, in order to make their countries conform to Marx’s theories, their leaders undertook policies of forced collectivisation and industrialisation which led to the deaths by starvation or murder of as many as 50 million people, generally the very poorest of their populations. Communism promised to liberate the poor. In fact it ended up murdering the poorest of the poor in unprecedented numbers.

It wasn’t just their theory of revolution that was wrong. Lenin’s 1916 tract, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is an interesting analysis of the history of the European empires up to that date and a contribution to the vast debate over the origins of the First World War. But its key practical suggestion was that capitalist states will always be driven by boundless greed and, therefore, inevitably, unstoppably, must always go to war.

Gaddis shows how Stalin and Mao shared this doctrinaire belief but how it led them to bad miscalculations. Because, in direct contradiction to the notion of inevitable inter-capitalist conflict, American presidents Truman and Eisenhower, both with direct personal experience of war, grasped some important and massive ideas, the central one being that America could no longer be isolationist but needed to create (and lead) a union of capitalist countries, to build up economic and military security, to ensure they never again went to war among themselves. The opposite of what Lenin predicted.

This was a big shift in American strategy. Throughout the 19th century America concentrated on settling its own lands and building up its own economy, happily ignoring developments beyond its borders. Despite President Wilson’s achievement in persuading Americans to intervene in the Great War, immediately afterwards they relapsed back into isolationism, refusing to join the League of Nations and indifferent to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Germany and Japan.

After the cataclysm of the Second World War, American policy shifted massively, finding expression in the Truman Doctrine, President Truman’s pledge that America would help and support democracies and free peoples around the world to resist communism. To be precise:

‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ (Truman’s speech to Congress on 12 March 1947)

The Truman Doctrine was prompted by practical intervention ($400 million) to support the anti-communist forces during Greece’s Civil war (1945 to 1949), which the Americans felt also had to be balanced by support ($100 million) for Turkey. In both respects the Americans were taking over from aid formerly provided by Britain, which was now no longer able to afford it. The doctrine’s implicit strategy of ‘containment’ of the USSR, led on to the creation of NATO in 1949 and the Marshall Plan for massive American aid to help the nations of Western Europe rebuild their economies.

Of course it was in America’s self-interest to stem the tide of communism, but this doesn’t really detract from the scale of the achievement – it was American economic intervention which helped rebuild the economies of, and ensured freedom from tyranny for, France, West Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and Holland (in Europe) and Japan and South Korea in the Far East. Hundreds of millions of people have led lives of freedom and fulfilment because of the decisions of the Truman administration.

The power of weakness

Of course the down side of this vast new expansion of America’s overseas commitment was the way it also included a long and dishonourable tradition of American support for repellent dictators and right-wing rulers solely because they were the only available anti-communist figures available in many countries.

This lamentable tradition kicked off with America’s ambivalent support for Chiang Kai-shek, the semi-fascist Nationalist leader who America supported in pre-communist China, then the repellent Syngman Rhee in post-war South Korea, through Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, General Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and so on and so on.

This dark side to American post-war foreign policy is well-known, but what’s thought-provoking about Gaddis’s account is the thesis he hangs his fourth chapter on, a teasing paradox which only slowly emerges – that many of these small, ‘dependent’ nations ended up able to bend the Superpowers to their will, by threatening to collapse.

Thus many of the repellent dictators America found itself supporting were able to say: ‘If you don’t support me, my regime will collapse and then the communists will take over.’ The paradox is that it was often the weakest powers which ended up having the the strongest say over Superpower policy. Thus Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China was able to summon up American support, as was the equally unpleasant Sygman Rhee in South Korea, because America regarded these states as vital buffers to communist expansion, which meant that, in practice, both dictators could get away with murder and still be supported, often reluctantly, by the U.S.

But the same could also go for medium-size allies. In 1950 both France and China very much needed their respective sponsors, America and the Soviet Union. But by 1960 both were more confident of their economic and military power and by the late 1960s both were confident enough to throw off their shackles: General de Gaulle in France notoriously withdrew from NATO and proclaimed France’s independence while in fact continuing to benefit from NATO and American protection. France was weak enough to proclaim its independence while, paradoxically, America the superpower had to put up with de Gaulle’s behaviour because they needed France to carry on being an ally in Western Europe.

Mao Zedong was in awe of Stalin and relied on his good opinion and logistical support throughout his rise to power in China in 1949 until Stalin’s death in 1953. This respect for the USSR lingered on through the 1950s, but China came to despise the weakness of Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, and the feebleness of the USSR’s hold over its East European satellites, especially after they rose up in revolt (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968).

I didn’t know that border incidents between China and Russia flared up in 1969 and spread: for a while it looked as if the world’s two largest communist powers would go to war – making nonsense of Lenin’s thesis.

This of course presented the West with a great opportunity to divide the two communist behemoths, and Gaddis is favourable to President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the brave decision they took to visit China, to meet Mao in person and try to develop better trade and cultural links.

The Chinese, surrounded by a menacing Russia to the north, neutral India to the West and the traditional enemy, Japan, to the East, realised there was merit in reaching an understanding with distant America. Nixon realised what an enormous coup it would be to prise apart the two largest communist nations, as well as helping sort out some kind of end to the disastrous war in Vietnam.

By this stage, 25 or so years into the Cold War, the relative simplicity of a bipolar world divided between two superpowers had become considerably more complicated, an increasing complexity created by the newly independent nations of the developing or Third World, and the growth of a would-be ‘non-aligned’ group of nations seeking to avoid entanglement with either side, but cannily playing both superpowers off against each other in order to extract maximum advantage.

Other themes

These first chapters deal with:

the realisation of the nuclear stalemate and its implications i.e. superpower war is self-defeating
the failure of both capitalism and communism to deliver what they promised
the realisation by ‘weak’ states that they could use the superpower rivalry to their advantage

Further chapters discuss:

Human rights

The rise of the notion of human rights and universal justice, which was increasingly used to hold both superpowers to ever-tighter account. Gaddis looks in detail at the slow growth of official lying and ‘deniability’ within American foreign policy (epitomised by the growth in espionage carried out by the CIA) which reached its nadir when the systematic lying of President Nixon unravelled after Watergate.

Gaddis compares the discrediting of American policy with the long-term effects of the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. In a kind of mirror of the Watergate experience, the Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia planted seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of communist rule in the minds of much of the Soviet population and especially among its intellectuals. From the 1970s onwards the Soviets had to cope with home-grown ‘dissidents’, most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev worked hard to secure the ‘Helsinki Accords’, a contract with the West giving a permanent written guarantee of the security of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He allowed the declarations of human rights which made up its latter sections to be inserted by the West as a necessary concession, but was appalled when these began to be used by dissidents within Russia to measure the government by.

When a Czech rock band was arrested by the authorities in 1977, leading intellectuals protested and signed Charter 77, which politely called on the Czech communist government to respect the human rights which were paid lip service in both the Czech communist constitution and the Helsinki Accords. And when the first Polish pope, Pope John Paul II, visited his homeland in 1979, he also called on the Polish government to respect human rights as defined in the Helsinki Accords.

Gaddis identifies this emergence of human rights, a realm of authenticity over and above the laws or actions of any actual government, of either West or East, as a major development in the 1970s.

The power of individuals

A chapter is devoted to the importance of individuals in history, contrary to Marxist theory which believes in historical inevitabilities driven by the power of the masses, themselves driven by the ineluctable laws of economics. Thus Gaddis gives pen portraits of key players in the final years of communism, namely Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, but most space is given to the key role played by Ronald Reagan.

Gaddis explains that détente, the strategic policy developed by President Nixon and continued by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and on the Soviet side agreed by Brezhnev, amounted to an acceptance of the status quo, especially the borders in Europe, and thus solidified Russia’s grasp in the East. With these borders defined and agreed, both sides could:

Settle down to a routine of talks about reducing nuclear weapons (which, by this stage, came in a bewildering range of shapes and sizes – hence the complexity of the Strategic Arms Limitations [SALT] talks).
Sublimate their confrontation into the developing world: hence the stream of local conflicts in far away countries like Ethiopia or Nicaragua. Fascinatingly, Gaddis quotes Kremlin advisers confessing that the Soviet leadership often had second thoughts about getting involved in some of these remote conflicts, e.g. in Angola or Somalia, but felt trapped by the logic of needing to be seen to support ‘national liberation struggles’ wherever they involved self-proclaimed Marxist parties.

At the time it felt as if Soviet communism was successfully funding revolutions and spreading its tentacles around the world; only in retrospect do we see all this as the last gasps of a flailing giant. According to Gaddis, the great political visionary who brought it to its knees was Ronald Reagan!

As someone alive and politically active during the 1980s I know that the great majority of the British people saw Reagan as a bumbling fool, satirised in the Spitting Image TV show in a recurring sketch called ‘The President’s brain is missing’. To my amazement, in Gaddis’s account, Reagan is portrayed as a strategic genius (one of America’s ‘sharpest grand strategists ever’, p.217) who swept aside détente in at least two ways:

Reagan thought communism was an aberration, ‘a bizarre chapter’ (p.223) in human history which was destined to fail. So instead of accepting its potentially endless existence (like Nixon, Ford and Carter before him) Reagan’s strategy and speeches were based on the idea that Soviet communism must inevitably collapse (for example, in his famous speech in Berlin when he called on Mr Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’).
Similarly, Reagan rejected the entire twisted logic of mutually assured destruction which had grown up around nuclear weapons: he was the first genuine nuclear abolitionist to inhabit the White House, hence his outrageous offer to Gorbachev at the Iceland summit for both sides to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. And when Gorbachev refused, Reagan announced the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative (nicknamed Star Wars) i.e. the creation of a satellite shield which would shoot down any incoming nuclear missiles attacking the United States, thus rendering Russia’s nuclear arsenal obsolete, but also dangerously disturbing the delicate balance of power.

At the time these destabilising words and actions seemed reckless and dangerous, and what Gaddis portrays as the entrenched détente establishment on both sides strongly criticised Reagan. It is only with the enormous benefit of hindsight – the knowledge that the Soviet Union and communism were to collapse like a pack of cards in 1989 – that Reagan’s approach and all his speeches take on the light not of a mad old man (he was 74 when Gorbachev came to power in 1985) but of a bold visionary.

The steady growth in Reagan’s stature is a salutary lesson in how history works, how what we think about a period we’ve actually lived through can be completely transformed and reinterpreted in the light of later events. How our beginnings have no inkling of our ends. An object lesson in the severe limitations of human understanding.

Conclusion

To summarise: The Cold War is not a straightforward historical account of the era 1945 to 1991; it is, rather, a series of thought-provoking and stimulating essays on key aspects and themes from the era.

Each chapter could easily form the basis of a fascinating discussion or seminar (of the kind that Gaddis has no doubt supervised by the hundred in his long and distinguished academic career).

In other words, coverage of specific incidents and events is always secondary to the ideas and theories of geopolitics and international strategic ideas which the period threw up in such abundance, and which are the real focus of the text.

It’s a fascinating book full of unexpected insights and new ways of thinking about the recent past.

I was politically active during the 1970s and 1980s, so I remember the later stages of the Cold War vividly. Maybe the biggest single takeaway from this book is that this entire era is now a ‘period’ with a beginning, a middle and an end, which can be studied as a whole. As it recedes in time it is becoming a simplified artefact, a subject for study by GCSE, A-level and undergraduate students who have no idea what it felt like to live under the ever-present threat of nuclear war and when communism still seemed like a viable alternative to consumer capitalism.

Although many of its effects and implications linger on, with every year that passes the Cold War becomes a distant historical epoch, as dry and theoretical as the Fall of the Roman Empire or the Thirty Years War. I try to explain how it felt to be alive in the 1980s to my children and they look at me with blank incomprehension. So this is what it feels like to become history.

Credit

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis was published by Allen Lane in 2005. All references are to the 2007 Penguin paperback edition.

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Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future @ Tate Modern (January 2018) Russian conceptual artists depict the miserable squalor of life under communism.
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Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale (2016) Account of how Lenin’s journey back to Russia to lead the 1917 Bolshevik coup was funded by German Military High Command.
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Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (2011) The Russians try to export communism to Afghanistan leading to ten years of miserable war.
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010) includes chapters on the great famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation.
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Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957) Love story set amid the brutal violence of the Russian revolution.
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940) Koestler’s fictional account of a Moscow show trial based on friends of his who were tried in Stalin’s Russia.
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Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012) A brilliant account of the rise of the Vietnamese communist party and its long struggle against the French imperialists.
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The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016) includes chapters on the abortive communist uprisings in German cities after the Great War.
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015) Essays about Weimar art which make extensive use of contemporary Marxist cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer.
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984) Includes an account of the communist members of the Bauhaus.
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984) A visual history of the German avant-garde, often communist, of the 1920s.
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-33 by John Willett (1978) Willett a big fan of Brecht, Piscator and other socially committed i.e. communist artists.
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974) includes a detailed chapter on the German communist intelligentsia of the 1920s.
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of bullying and poverty.

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Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 so preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

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The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1870-71) of Paris by Alistair Horne (1965) details the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.
Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) A play depicting vicious in-fighting among communists in a fictional East European country.
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism in which he seeks to prove that communist rule will be necessarily tyrannical.

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The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed Spanish communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution.

Communism in England

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) Orwell’s fable about the failure of the Russian Revolution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) Orwell’s vision of bombed-out England of the future under a totalitarian socialist regime, Ingsoc.

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by Simon on February 2, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in China, Communism, European History, History, Politics, Second World War, War

Tagged 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2005, Adam Smith, Afghanistan, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Angola, atom bomb, Berlin Wall, Brezhnev, capitalism, Charter 77, Chiang Kai-shek, China, CIA, Communism, containment, Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia, deniability, dissident, Eastern Europe, Eisenhower, Ethiopia, General de Gaulle, General Pinochet, geopolitics, Gerald Ford, Germany, Greek civil war, Helsinki Accords, Henry Kissinger, history, human rights, Hungary, hydrogen bomb, international affairs, Iraq, Japan, Jim Baggott, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis Gaddis, Kennedy, Khrushchev, Korea, Lech Wałęsa, Lenin, Mao Zedong, Margaret Thatcher, Marx, Mikhael Gorbachev, Ngo Dinh Diem, Nicaragua, Nixon, nuclear weapons, Paul Simpson, Poland, Pope John Paul II, Russia, Saddam Hussein, SALT, Second World War, Somalia, Soviet Union, Stalin, Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Strategic Defence Initiative, Syngman Rhee, the Cold War, the Shah of Iran, the Truman Doctrine, theory of war, Truman, Turkey, USSR, Vaclav Havel, Vietnam, von Clausewitz, Woodrow Wilson

Posted by Simon on February 2, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/the-cold-war-john-lewis-gaddis/

Peter Kennard @ Imperial War Museum London

A five-room retrospective of the 50-year career of Peter Kennard, the English master of political photomontage. It’s free and on for another year, it is inventive and interesting – so no excuses for not checking it out.

Biography

Kennard’s career started in 1968 when he was a student and witnessed at first hand the violent confrontations between students and police of that year: here in the UK, in France and America, and behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. He quickly established a fiercely left-wing, polemically accessible visual style based on cutting up and juxtaposing photographic, magazine-style images to create startling montages, which became familiar to readers of the Guardian newspaper or New Statesman magazine in the 1970s, and especially the 1980s.

©Peter Kennard Crushed Missile (1980) Original photomontage

The exhibition reveals Kennard’s artistic practice to be wide-ranging, including straight oil paintings, photomontage and sculptures. The show proceeds in roughly chronological order, establishing that, not only has he been a prolific creator of images for newsprint, magazines and posters, but conforms to the more traditional artistic practice of creating works grouped by theme or technique.

STOP (1968 to 1972)

Still a student reeling from the disorientating political violence of the 1960s, Kennard created a series named STOP. He wanted to produce a more immediate and approachable art and so, in this series, used a photographic enlarger to transfer photographic images to canvas, along with the accompanying ‘dirtying’ marks and blotches, as if the image is the result of a rough, crude, industrial process.

©Peter Kennard STOP 30, (1970) oil and canvas

His whole approach is here in embryo: a left-wing, politicised image featuring the police/military, handling sleek shiny weapons – set against an image of the ‘victim’: women, the Irish, beaten-up protesters, the starving millions in the Third World.

It was the late 60s/early 70s, so the writings of Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht were very fashionable, particularly his theory of the ‘alienation effect’ – that people must be moved by a work of art, but not in a lulling way that reinforces their ‘bourgeois’ sensibilities (such as the Impressionist works currently on display at the National Gallery); they must be able to see how the work is made, and made to realise that the entire ‘reality’ around them – in the papers and media, TV, adverts and movies – is as constructed, as smoothed and airbrushed as a pop star’s publicity pictures.

Reacting against this smoothness, the radical committed art work must foreground its own constructedness and thus show people that everything is constructed. That is part of the process of helping people to realise that society doesn’t need to be this way. This society is a construction and it could be constructed differently, more fairly and justly, without exploiters and exploited, without the grotesque inequalities in wealth and life experiences which capitalist society says, via every channel available, are sad and regrettable but, alas, unchangeable. It is not unchangeable. There are alternatives. We don’t have to live this way.

So the raggedyness of the montages and other works is part of the message.

The 1970s and 1980s

One room is devoted to maybe a hundred of his images – posters on stands and display cases showing scores of covers of New Statesmen magazine or special features in The Guardian, illustrated by Kennard. I recognised loads of them and realised his cut-out style was a dominant visual motif of the strife-torn 70s and then the violent and fearful 1980s.

©Peter Kennard Protect and Survive (1981) Photomontage on paper

I wished the display had separated out the 1970s and the 1980s. They were very different decades.

The 1970s were dominated by the power of the trades unions and the feebleness of successive governments, whether Labour led by Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan or Conservative led by Ted Heath, in dealing with them or with the numerous economic shocks which played havoc with the British economy and society at large: namely, the 1973 Oil Crisis which led to the Three-Day-Week and the slow strangled death of the old heavy industries – coal and steel and car- and ship-building –which needed more and more state intervention to compete against younger international rivals.

But if the Left thought it had a strong case and was fighting a tough battle in the 1970s, it turned out to be as nothing compared to the 1980s, when America was led by two-term President Ronald Reagan and Britain rejoiced in the premiership of Mrs Thatcher (1979 to 1990).

Not only did Mrs T tackle the trades unions head on with punitive and restrictive legislation, but provoked and then won the bitter year-long Miners’ Strike (recently featured in Tate Britain’s Fighting History exhibition), hugely reduced state support for heavy industry, before stumbling across the money-making device of privatising government-owned industries.

Thatcher’s premiership was saved by the patriotic Falklands War and, along with her soul mate across the Atlantic, she engaged in strident and confrontational rhetoric directed at the Soviet Union, notoriously described by Reagan’s speech-writers as ‘the Evil Empire’. The deployment of cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads to Greenham Common in Berkshire in 1982 led to an escalation in fear among ordinary people, and political activism on the Left against what seemed to many the real and present possibility that there might be some kind of a conflict, whether by accident or design, a Third World War, a nuclear holocaust which would wipe out humanity.

Kennard responded with numerous images which tackled all these issues head-on in vivid cutups and montages – missiles bursting forth from planet earth, from soldiers’ heads, from the bodies of starving Third World children, Mrs Thatcher cutting off life support to a baby, the earth devastated by an oil explosion, people being forced to eat money.

Among the many vibrant, compelling (and bitterly funny) images of the era is his montage of cruise missiles superimposed on Constable’s famous painting of rural idyll, The Haywain.

© Peter Kennard Haywain with Cruise Missiles (1981) Original Photomontage

Looking back, we can see that Mrs Thatcher represented the end of the old Left, as defined in the 1960s, which had dragged itself on across the violent, strife-torn 1970s. A rump fought on throughout the 1980s but against steeper and steeper odds, surviving the defection of the Social Democrats; and then the old ‘hard’ Left was marginalised into insignificance by the election of New Labour in 1997. New Labour was ‘new’ in that it had successfully jettisoned all the policies which made it unelectable throughout the 1980s, but which had also made Labour distinctive (unilateral nuclear disarmament, mass nationalisation of key industries, reinstatement of trade union rights etc).

Protest movements continue to this day, outraged by the West’s wars or the crimes of the bankers, but seem small-scale and ineffective compared to the permanent ongoing sense of crisis and fear, the mass strikes, the marches and street fighting with the police, which I remember from the 1980s.

That era was probably Kennard’s heyday and most prolific period, and this room – festooned with posters, newspaper and magazine covers, all sporting his harsh, brilliant images – brings it all back.

©Peter Kennard Warhead 1 (1981) Original photomontage

Newspaper (1994)

A series of cases containing real copies of financial newspapers, often the Financial Times, onto which Kennard has photocopied his own hand or arm, or those of an obviously emaciated Third World victim, clutching and clawing and tearing the paper. Reminding us of the realities of exploitation – generally far away in developing countries – which underpin our comfortable lifestyles in the West.

©Peter Kennard Newspaper 1 (1994) Carbon toner, oil, charcoal, pastel on newspaper, wood

Reading Room (1997)

In the same room, a series of cases showing double spread broadsheet newspapers over which Kennard has drawn in charcoal, smudged and blurred, large and haunting faces of the poor and dispossessed.

The wall panel explains it stems in part from memories of going to Paddington library as a boy, where the papers were set up on tall wooden lecterns which helped lend them an aura of authority and permanence. Whereas, of course, the newspapers are man-made like anything else, and tell anything but the truth, generally retailing distracting garbage about celebrities or validating the behaviour of big business and politicians as if they know best, as if they are acting in our best interests…

Decoration (2002 to 2003)

Five of these very big portrait-shaped works open the show dramatically. They are digital prints worked over in oil. Inspired by the Gulf War they depict campaign medals and ribbons, the ribbons made from the tattered flags of the UK and US and the medals themselves icons of death and destruction, such as shattered bloody helmets, or the hooded body of an Iraqi ‘prisoner’.

© Peter Kennard Decoration 8 (2003-4) Oil and pigment on canvas

Face (2002 to 2003)

It will be seen from Newspaper, Reading Room and Decoration that Kennard’s art incorporates a lot more than the photomontages which made him famous. Face is another departure, a series of medium size canvases, very dark, in which you can just about make out the lineaments of human faces, portraits almost buried in the gloom and – as with victims everywhere – eerily depicted without mouths.

Boardroom (2015)

The fifth and final room is small and comprises one work, the installation Boardroom, festooned with images and posters pinned to the wall and hanging from protruding supports, as well as the business cards or logos of the world’s great multinational corporations, while the handrail around the room is covered with ‘shocking’ statistics, designed to outrage us, galvanise us, inspire us to rise up and overthrow this wicked, militaristic and greedy society. (See photo at the end of this post)

Heartfield > Kennard > Banksy

Having studied 1930s politics and art at school then at university I was fairly familiar with the photomontages of John Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, a radical artist active between the wars, an early member of the German communist party and the German branch of Dada, an extremely prolific creator of satirical photomontages.

The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little man asks for big gifts by John Heartfield

Heartfield fled the Nazis in 1938 and returned to East Germany after the war. Interestingly, his Wikipedia article states:

In 1967, he visited Britain and began preparing a retrospective exhibition of his work, photomontages, which was subsequently completed by his widow Gertrud and the Academy of Arts, Berlin, and shown at the ICA in London in 1969. (Source: Wikipedia)

1969. Just the time Kennard was defining his own artistic practice and approach. Kennard has explained the way the ‘alienation effect’ of photomontage has a vividly political aim:

That sense of ripping into an image, unveiling a surface, going through that surface into an unrevealed truth, is at the core of photomontage. I sit in a room with the tools of my trade and try to pummel these pictures into revealing invisible connections.

There is a direct lineage. No Heartfield, no Kennard.

But various people have made a further connection between Kennard’s deliberately populist, accessible practice and the street, anti-art of Banksy – not only in ‘attitude’ but in actual visual style. The screaming face in STOP 30 looks exactly a piece of Banksy graffiti, as does the whole idea of making unexpected juxtapositions, like the rioter throwing flowers, designed to make you ‘think’.

Rioter throwing flowers by Banksy

And on the cover of the book of the Kennard exhibition, there is a quote from Banksy: ‘I take my hat off to you Sir.’

No Heartfield, no Kennard. No Kennard, no Banksy.

Conclusion

I was amused to exit an exhibition excoriating neo-liberal capitalist values… into the shop to be confronted by the ‘Peter Kennard range: poster £8, book £12.99, T shirt £18.’

It is as if we have to go into a special space to feel our outrage, an Outrage Chamber, to get very irate about the amount the US spends on weapons, the number of people living below the poverty line, the fact that the 85 richest people own as much as the poorest 3.5 billion people on the planet etc etc and all the other scarifying statistics which fill the Boardroom installation and the exhibition book – and then step out of the Outrage Chamber back into our real lives, where we dilly-dally, wondering whether to buy the book and the poster, whether our rather lefty nephew might like the t-shirt, or whether there’s time for a coffee at the nice new IWM café.

I am still digesting the argument of Gerard DeGroot’s popular history, The Seventies Unplugged which I read a few weeks ago. He argues that the political activities of all types of radical in that decade woefully overestimated the number of people who saw the world like them – i.e. as a swamp of corporate greed and political oppression requiring comprehensive overthrow – and lamentably underestimated the number of people who actively want an ordered, conventional society with a strong police force, the unions kept in their place, established social and cultural conventions, the possibility of getting a job, buying a house and a car, and the annual holiday in the sun. Most people want normal.

And looking at the nicely laid-out display of Kennard t-shirts and books and posters, all supposedly meant to prompt us towards revolt and rebellion, made me think that even radicals like things more or less the way they are: to camp out in front of banks or march through Whitehall, enjoy a bit of fisticuffs with the cops, and then home for a nice shower and an evening playing on their X-boxes or watching I’m a Celebrity, texting each other on their Samsung phones, posting photos of their radicalism on Facebook.

Kennard’s art is innovative, visually exciting and energising, consistently inventive and his lifelong commitment to a cause is impressive and moving, and his art may well have prompted revelation and politicisation in many of its viewers over the past 40 years, leading them to take up causes, to protest against nuclear weapons, to march against the Iraq War.

But the cruise missiles came to Greenham Common, regardless. Mrs Thatcher was elected three times, destroyed the unions, privatised industry, introduced market forces to the NHS, regardless. Ronald Reagan’s hair-raising rhetoric in the end forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, despite all his clever critics. Blair and Bush took us into the Iraq War, regardless of all the photos and t-shirts and posters and marches, despite millions protesting. Because many millions more acquiesced in it or actively supported it.

And who just won the election? The opponents of everything Kennard believes in.

Peter Kennard in his new installation The Boardroom, part of Peter Kennard: Unofficial War Artist, at Imperial War Museum London.

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by Simon on May 24, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, History, War

Tagged 1970s, 1980s, Banksy, Greenham Common, Imperial War Museum, IWM, John Heartfield, Mrs Thatcher, Peter Kennard, Ronald Reagan

Posted by Simon on May 24, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/05/24/peter-kennard-imperial-war-museum-london/

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All posts tagged 1970s

Cast

The book’s cons

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Resurrecting Lucy

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Lebohang Kganye (born 1990, South Africa)

Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad

Hrair Sarkissian (born 1973, Syria)

Trigger warnings

VALIE EXPORT (born 1940, Austria)

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Start point 1970

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Are they worth it?

Room 1. Rising with Fury

Room 2. The Marxist wife still does all the housework

Three fabulous crocheted figures by Rita McGurn

Screaming video by Gina Birch

Helen Chadwick

Erin Pizzey

Room 3. Oh bondage, up yours! (i.e. punk feminism)

Leotard (1979) by Cosey Fanni Tutti

Gill Posener’s defaced posters

Room 4. Greenham Common

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Love, Sex and Romance by Rita Keegan

Room 6. ‘There’s no such thing as society’ [the AIDS, gay and lesbian room]

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Historical context – the War on Terror

Ignatieff’s approach

Contents

Chapter 1. Democracy and the Lesser Evil

Chapter 2. The Ethics of Emergency

Chapter 3. The Weakness of the Strong

Chapter 4. The Strength of the Weak

The Arab future

Chapter 5. The Temptations of Nihilism

Chapter 6. Liberty and Armageddon

Other thoughts

1. Internecine killing

2. The threshold of repugnance

3. The world is watching

Notes and thoughts