By Maksymilian Fus-Mickiewicz

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Artist, photographer, writer, dj, promoter, shaman? London-based Mathew Stone has survived much of the media hyperbole surrounding his activity as spearhead of the !WOWOW! collective to rise as a respected 21st century thinker. I caught up with Mathew ahead of his latest salon, an event curated by the artist as part of the Great British Art Debate.

What brought about this collaboration?

The curator Cedar Lewison is working on a series of events and publications called “The Great British Art Debate”. He had heard that I ran salons and asked if I could do something similar for the project.

Interconnected echoes as a series seems to comprise of interviews, exhibitions and now a debate, could you explain a bit more about why you’ve chosen to use this title so often and what we can expect in the future?

I often re-use titles when I see a work as having the potential for translation and further exploration in another format. To me “Interconnected Echoes” is a poetic statement on how I see collaborative thinking occur.

You work on many projects. Would you still define yourself as a painter?

No. It seems silly to call myself a painter. I studied painting and feel informed by the history of it, but I don’t paint.

I thought about this specifically because you are now a curator for this project – which aims to provoke debate much like an installation artist would bring objects and images together to create an artwork.

I try and employ the same type of approach to all the different things that I do. I enjoy collaborating. My discussion-based events can in one sense be viewed as distinct artworks that I have instigated, but I feel it’s much more interesting to see them as evolving, multi-authored beings that are constantly redefined.

Herbert Read made a clear distinction between Art & Culture. What do you see as pure art today? Or would you argue against Read. Say, argue that the culture surrounding art is just as important.

I believe that a definition of art should encompass all of human endeavor, but I also believe that art should act as an aspirational model for human behavior. I understand the contradiction in that statement, but I think that it’s a necessary one.

As a DJ do you ever consider the exhibition should have a soundtrack or do you think its necessary to keep art and music separate?

Mostly when I DJ, it’s to earn money to keep making work. It’s interesting what you learn. Somebody once pointed out to me that in America in the early nineties there was this particular type of dance music, Baltimore club and they use this one break. But in the UK the same drum beat was being used except in rave records and I kind of like the idea that there is something that stays the same across the world but that there is also a part which is influenced by the context. The country that it emerges from. It’s obviously creative. But I don’t expect it to function in the same way as other parts of my output. It’s different if I am working on a soundtrack for a film of course.

Is there anything identifiable as British in London now?

The problem is multiculturalism as something that is specific to London and not actually a British thing. If I see an artistic scene in London, it’s going across lot’s of different levels, I see people working outside of art in a way that is informed by art or is shaped by art whether its music or different types of events. I think there’s a new type of messiness to the scene which is why it’s not so identifiable.

I’m particularly interested in gender and sexuality. Do you think Performance art is a certain late 20th century obsession with the body?

I would imagine that an obsession with the body is something that has always existed. I think that it’s interesting to try to understand performance-based art by relating it to ritual. Often this relationship is explicit, for example, I see Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic making overt references to spiritual practices from history, as well as to the present. I think that ritual within a contemporary (art) context facilitates a credible and relevant re-empowerment of ancient mythological thinking in the present.

Does Performance art serve to solve issues of gender and sexual confusion in a ways that institutions outside of the art world cannot?

I think that the triumph over suffering can occur in any context. The problem with institutions is their rigidity. When we serve a concrete social structure, we limit our opportunities to serve our communities. It inhibits the potential for self-sacrifice, which altruism relies on.

Do you think the web can break down such boundaries?

In a mass sense it’s weirdly democratic. I wondered if there is a case for arguing that actually by seeing mediated images on Google, it’s a more realistic understanding of the impact of art work than it might be if you see it in a gallery space which is a reverential environment.

Do you ever think we will reach a stage when gender will no longer be an issue. Personality as the sole factor people are judged on?

I think that the potential for this type of open-mindedness already exists. There will always be conflict, but there will also always be space to find creative solutions to it.

People have called you a pioneering force in the art world. What is the future for art, what form do you think it will take?

Robert Fillou once said “The great lesson of modern art is freedom. Now we have to incorporate ‘art as freedom’ into the fabric of everyone’s life.” I feel that this is a continual process.

http://matthewstone.co.uk/

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Maks is freelance journalist. He has contributed articles to Don’t Panic, FACT, USELESS and AnOther Man as well as managing his own arts and culture website Haus Digital. Maks is interested in photography, graphic design and instillation as well as the relationship between cultural, gender and sexual identity in relation to art and architecture. He will be regularly contributing articles to the Off Modern blog.

Lux Laze is a new short film by the incredibly talented Daniel Swan. Time-travel, cartography, pangaea ultima and the neo-brutalist architecture of a merged transatlantic super-city I would describe it, but I’ll leave it for you to decode it from that. You can watch the trailer here. And purchase it here.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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…And so, in sync with “Austerity Britain”, as promoted by our dear new leader, I have taken the plunge; I’m mucking in just like everyone else. We’ve all got to do our bit, don’t we? The point of this Big Society is that we’re united, empowered, ennobled by the fact that we… can’t afford a bus ticket.

That’s right. I’m skint. I, who have boldly been going to shit films just so you don’t have to, can no longer afford to support my three movie a week habit. I’m down to £4 per day, not counting booze and fag allowances, and believe me, it’s fucking horrible.

I mean, I don’t actually do much but watch films, be they budget DVDs or opening nights at the Barbican. It’s not pretty. If I have to watch Breathless again, I will steal a car, drive to Paris, and start hitting on underage American girls, all the while attempting to collect nonexistant debts…

Seriously, though, there is a huge, screen-shaped hole in my current existence. I’ve been trying to fill it by simply reading about the new releases. This makes it slightly difficult to write a film column for South East London’s premier culture blog; Greenberg seems to mirror my own predicament rather too closely for comfort. The new Resnais movie looks like the same ol’ quirky wank that any self-respecting nouvelle vague director phones in at every two year interval, and all this Israeli/Palestinian cinema that seems to be gaining more column inches than the Middle East conflict does lives is all a bit too political for a simpleton such as I.

However, one imminent release HAS caught my eye; l’amacoeur, or Heartbreaker, a “charming and smoothly executed” (thanks, imdb) French romantic comedy, which seems to be scene-for-scene apeing the plot of the almost-unfortunately-named David Mirkin’s 2001 comedy Heartbreakers.

It may surprise you, since in the past, I have written about, like, y’know, serious films, but I LOVED Heartbreakers. As a romcom, it was up there with the very best. Now, I know the average OffModern reader will groan at the very thought that a romcom can be good, let alone tolerable, but I think this much maligned genre is one of the most refined and delicate art forms in existence.

Please, I beg you! Let me explain myself; I was raised on the chick flick. Between 1996 and 2004, I sat through every major romcom release. Whenever a Meg Ryan title arrived at the local video rental store, it was big news for my family. We’d gather around our TV set, and see the same old story played out on what seemed like a fortnightly basis. What I began to realise after a while was that, as a sonnet is to poetry, a romcom is to mainstream cinema.

Much like Racinian tragedy, pretty much every romcom follows a very narrow plot. I shan’t even bother explaining this plot, as every human being over the age of three months in the western world has seen a romcom. Oh, alright, then; handsome boy meets cheesecake girl to mutual indifference. But wait! Fundamentally, they are both similarly misunderstood and, like, deep; it must be love. Or is it? Inevitably, some dreadful misunderstanding occurs, which leaves both parties heartbroken… No! Wait! Cue mad rush to whatever unlikely scenario is enabled by the preceding drama.

Anyway, the modern romcom follows these rules. It has to. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a modern romcom.

There are the good (Heartbreakers, Four Weddings and a Funeral, the much underrated Down with Love), the bad (How to lose a guy in ten days, Martha, meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence) and the unwatchable (almost everything else, particularly if it stars Jennifer Aniston), but the first category refines this narrow spectrum of narrative opportunities into something truly wonderful.

I know it’s easy to slag off Four Weddings (I have. In this very blog…), but it truly is one of the finest films of the last twenty years. It is a comedy of bourgeois manners unrivalled by anything else I have seen, bar, perhaps, the more artsy-fartsy oeuvre of Whit Stillman. The tired format is vehemently adhered to, yet it is of little consequence. The little embellishments, the sub-plots and auxiliary characters are so engrossing and well-observed that the central drama, and indeed, Andie MacDowell, are rendered as totally secondary to what occurs elsewhere. I have always though of Hugh Grant as the last great English filmstar, and this is the film which seals the deal. The fact that the gay characters in the film are fully formed personae rather than a bunch of screaming queens or tragic Earls Court inhabitants (as sadly, almost any celluloid homosexual has been before or since) is yet another reason to reclaim this truly wonderful film from cuddly religious festival-repeat ubiquity.

There. I have just sacrificed my dignity in public. Kill me now.

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

The death of J. G. Ballard presents the modern writer - the writer of modernity - with no small stylistic and thematic barrier. The dominant imagery bequeathed by Ballard being dystopian and apocalyptic, how does one write, in his wake, the post-apocalypse (after his predictions have come true, as has often happened)? One way, perhaps, is that related by Iain Sinclair in London: City of Disappearances: ‘Ballard, in an essay on the director Michael Powell, suggested that drama in the “serious” novel of the future would “migrate from the characters’ heads to the world around them.”’

Sinclair is one great living writer whose focus is on place, the world around, yet his corresponding focus on the effects of place upon its inhabitant(s) means that his work stops short of Ballard’s predicted aesthetic. Sinclair is as interested in the subjective experience of place, by him or by others, as he is in the objectivity of place. Subjective romanticisation of place, or for that matter subjective unromanticisation, has awkward implications for fiction. Handled badly (that is, Sinclair very much excluded), subjectivity is vanity - why should a reader necessarily care how a person or persons experience a place? This last stand for the vanity of postmodern self-conscious narration could become a literature bearing little resemblance to the actual experience of living in a modern city.

It has resulted in what is being called faction, the grounding of personal perception in more reliable fact. Since any text will comprise elements of both fiction and fact (language itself belonging to both states), faction is a non-genre, and is a lazy route for fiction to take. It is insufficient to merely refer to a place; without verbal mimicry of the experience of place, which is the experience of living in the world, a street name will suggest nothing.

More positively, and paradoxically, contemporaneous to the rise in popularity of the heritage industry and of environmental awareness, the memorialization of place, through this very subjectivity, is leading to a more democratic and objective romanticisation of place. In short, were everyone to tell the story of a place, every place would find its narrative, which is objectivity- place takes over from people, as in the suggestion of Ballard’s fiction that nature will regain control over man. Unexpected architectures are enjoying reconsideration, Brutalism in particular a source of new nostalgia. Part of this trend must surely be recession, which has created through the act of uncreation a stasis in building, and correspondingly in demolition. The pre-built goes out to meet the un-built, the new and the old are each structurally empty, are frameworks. Aesthetically, future and past look no different. How we experience cityscapes must take account of the city as it stands at present, in the immediate. At a static time, it is inappropriate to try to give narratives to places.

In any case, the city will outlast its inhabitants. The current sense that we are living in a London that is “after London,” a term derived from Richard Jefferies’ book of that name, must be reconfigured- we are living both after and before London, in a static city. Writing about London should now take account of an aesthetic of stasis- no more grand narratives- and by taking account of shapes and colours of a confused cityscape, should not narrate, but give- show, not tell. If fiction, as Sinclair says, is that which has not happened yet, then the city is always fictional, not factional. Styles and techniques beyond the prosaic are required to meet the city experientially. One architectural theory suggests that to change a place, one should not build upon it, should make it better by making it the same. A new fiction will take a similar stance.

This article is taken from the first issue of the Off Modern Journal, which you can buy here. William Shutes is contributing to a forthcoming book about Syd Barrett to be published by Essential Works.

The revolution would have carried me along, but I saw the first head paraded on a pike, and I recoiled.

I.
What is an avant-garde? One trend in defining it seeks to place it as a kind of historical subjective. This states that it existed at one particular moment in time but can then also have its vital information extrapolated and applied to the different moments in the arts when the old ideas of preceding generations have been overthrown by those of new. The dominant stylistic forms of the arts have been ousted innumerable times in the last 200 years and to such an extent that the idea of the ‘radical’ has become an historical artefact with that of the avant-garde and trans-cultural figures of intellectual magnitude. When seen like this the actual element of the radical becomes a stylistic genus to be studied with a microscope in the sterile conditions of the institution. Once this had happened the radical transforms itself and becomes a facet of economics to art dealers and critics. All attempts at radicalism in the arts and literature must then fall prey to either being forgotten or are alternatively forced to sell out. The changing of radicalism and the avant-garde into an economically viable investment has been the most recent overthrow of the dominant artistic forces in the modern era. It has destroyed the avant-garde, it is time to move beyond it, and so it is also time to move beyond the modern age, which provides the framework for the avant-garde.

The idea of an avant-garde is intertwined with that of revolution; the historical area of the avant-garde exists only in the modern era, the era of revolutions. Both the avant-garde in the arts and in politics share two common events as their theoretical progenitors; the American and French revolutions. These events move us into the modern era whilst also take it into an area of paradox; revolution is a return to something that existed before the now, it is an attempt at the replication of a golden age of either Romantic or Classical connotations. The newness of revolution is actually a return to the prehistoric, to the beginning, to a time of origin. Revolution is an act that returns time to a state of limitless progressions; it further place’s revolution within a subtext of the displacement of religion. Time used to be imbued with significance given by the gods. Heavenly apparitions defined progress and in the angels, cherubim and seraphs there was the ultimate reality, an infinity of either pleasure or suffering that existed beyond the world of the flesh. But the rise of Modernity and the avant-garde caused theological belief to dwindle to the point where it was replaced by ideology; in the modern age progression is no longer given definition by God, it is now only relatable to Man’s achievements. The modern man is free to create himself and his society as he wishes.

II.
Revolution is a time when criticism is transformed into the premonitions of utopia and the omens of dystopia. It is a mixture of the theological and the ideological. Revolution is a modern idea, born out of ideological belief, but its very basis is found in theological leftovers. Revolution is the area where cause-and-effect intersects with miracle, where history mixes with myth; this creates a new historical archetype that defines the ‘modern’ age. The old cultural gods crumble away, rotted by superstition and debased by fanaticism; a tribe of phantoms emerge from among the ruins to replace them. This is faith born from a void of exhausted faiths. This is a final paradox in the age of paradoxes.

Revolution starts out by promising the pleasures of an earthly heaven and often ends in the reality of an earthly dystopia, which brings about another revolution – the word revolution itself has connotations of the cyclical, the revolving. The new in revolution is not truly new; it is only different from the old, new and old are different halves of the same revolving wheel.

It is time to move out of the modern age. The age of revolution is over in the western world, the great experiments in ideology and mythology – socialism and fascism have collapsed and since then the modern age has been concerned only with its death throws. Modernism is done for.

III.
Revolution gives us a glimpse of the origin of everything – it allows us to see the present in a new light. It is a cleansed earth policy of development; what has come before must be stripped away to create a fertile platform for new developments. So, to move out of the modern age, in which its radical tendencies have been converted into the economics of the excel spreadsheet, we must glimpse what came before the modern age in order to move past it. The post-modernists tried to achieve it by looking back to the theories and that were rooted in pre-modernistic traditions; the prose Romances of knights, of Don Quixote and the epic poems of Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Milton and Virgil, all of this is still defined as being against Modernism, it is a conscious rebellion against Modernity and thus it interlinks itself with it. The tragedy of the post-modern is that in outwardly denying the idea of development as interlocking with the idea of revolution it comes to represent a glitch in our temporal reality. This prevents the creation of a personal history amongst the disparate fragments and multitude of voices that the postmodern condition is made of. Because it doesn’t allow anything to exist beyond it – it is presumptuously saying that is already all things that could exist. The Off Modern permits all kinds of progressions via the reconstituted detournement of all old technologies, identities, histories and ideas in order to create a new parallel modernity.

The avant-garde now exists as only a part of an historical study, its ideas and theories are relative to only one temporal reality and this is not the one we exist in. Futurism, Dada, Cubism and Surrealism, those bold advances that took the arts past the nineteenth century can no longer be replicated in order to create the necessary advances in the arts that the start of the twenty first century requires. Advances must be NEW else they are not advances, merely replications. What created the avant-garde was a great desire for progress – they came about because of the search for answers to great questions – the task at hand is to ask ourselves those same questions and come up with new answers. The main question that remains then is how do we move past them? And what advances can be made to truly delineate our new epoch from the old one?

This change must come because of the realisation that elements that were once radical have become profitable and thus are no longer sacred. They can no longer operate in the area of prophecy and rapture. To reclaim this area for ourselves we must ensure that the necessary movement is to be a final movement; a revolution of the pre-revolutionary. The end of revolution is a revolution in itself but one devoid of ideology and set apart further apart from old ideas of theology. The cycle must start again for us to progress further, as it always does and always has. There must be new dominant forces and they must not be grand unifying ISMS or cliques of experimental activity. The future must be pan-historical and pan-modern.

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This article appears in the first edition of the Off Modern Journal, which can be purchased here.

Such is our ideal – not another museum, another bleak exhibition gallery, another classical building in which insulated and classified specimens of a culture are displayed for instruction, but an adult play centre, a workshop where work is a joy, a source of vitality and daring experiment. We may be mocked for our naïve idealism, but at least it will not be possible to say that an expiring civilisation perished without a creative protest. Herbert Read

Art and music have become interrelated to such an extent that an institution like the ICA can easily feature the likes of The Smiths and the Cocteau Twins and an exhibition by Bruce Maclean, or Sonic Youth, The Pet Shop Boys and a talk by Lyotard about post-modernity, more recently the hugely influential grime club night Dirty Canvas might be going on in one room, Mogwai might be completing a five night residency in another or you could find the filmmaker Derek Jarman hosting a retrospective of his work. It is a testament to the strength of the institution and its singular claim to the British avant-garde crown, that over fifty years since it was founded it is still going strong.

Just to recap; Anarchist poet, Surrealist and art critic Herbert Read founded the ICA in 1947, with a like-minded group of committed avant-gardists, including Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Geoffrey Grigson and E.L.T. Mesens. From the beginning it was conceived of as a radical space, one that encouraged cross-pollination across all forms and styles. Its early programme traversed the worlds of art, exhibiting visual, sculptural and sound based art without distinguishing between them, only foregrounding and illuminating upon their shared avant-garde tendencies.

The ICA is a space where the purely radical elements that form the notional centres of visual art and music can overlap and lead to an exciting dialogue between the two mediums. I’d like to propose that the ICA has provided as much of a sustained attack upon the preconceived notions of popular music in Britain than any other institution or group, by providing a space where these radical assailants on popular culture could be based, from the Surrealists to Passolini, from The Jesus and Mary Chain to Don Letts to Steve Reich, the ICA has welcomed and made them comfortable, a little continuing corner of creative fertility in a sea of mediocrity and ersatz genius. Here are a few moments from the institution’s history.

1936 TO 1947 – FROM DADA TO THE FUTURE

In 1936 Herbert Read organised The London International Surrealist Exhibition, which placed British artists like Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Barbara Hepworth, who were slowly absorbing the continental influences of Surrealism and Cubism, alongside Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and Man Ray, the artists who were propagating them. The exhibition culminated on the 1st of July with Dali delivering a lecture, ‘Fantomes Paranoiaques Authentiques’, inside a deep-sea diving suit. The incident nearly resulted in his suffocation; only a quick thinking David Gascoyne, armed with a spanner, managed to rescue him. Also, part of the exhibition’s organising committee was the British pacifist and artist Roland Penrose, and the Belgian surrealist E.L.T. Mesens.

In 1947, they would conceive of a radical space for the arts in London, a place of communication between avant-garde tendencies, a place celebrating the most futuristic, the newest and the most radical movements that were developing in Europe and America in first half of the 20th Century. The 1936 exhibition, despite being shocking to the conservative British art world, didn’t turn into a sustained movement, and over the next ten years Moore and Hepworth were absorbed into grand humanist figures of tradition, becoming very public and accessible artists. The inspiration behind the ICA was to build a permanent home for what the International Surrealist Exhibition proposed – to further the radical tendencies of British art, and prevent them from dissipating. The first exhibition they launched was called 40 Years of Modern Art, and aimed to get the British public up to speed with the avant-garde developments occurring in the art world during the 20th Century.

The major upheavals that the ICA proposed in the field of music can be traced back to Erik Satie, a French composer active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Satie referred to himself as a measurer of sounds, or a phonometrician. In 1919, just a few years before his death, he started to associate with the Romanian poet, Tristan Tzara, and the DADA group based in Zurich. What ties this together with the ICA is in the development of the avant-garde in music. Satie’s influence, like that of Stravinsky and in DADA-ist sound collage and noise poetry, helped to move music out of the realm of the ‘popular song’ and into something more challenging. Among the many people enamoured by these movements was E.L.T. Mesens, one of the founders of the ICA. It is Satie’s original avant-garde approach to music that has influenced the challenging programming that the ICA has committed itself to over the last sixty years.

DANGEROUS MUSIC – THE SIXTIES IN FLUX

In New York City, in 1961, a group of artists started espousing a new form of audience / performer interaction inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”, (the famous piece of ‘silence’, with noise coming not from the performer but the incidental noise emanating from the environment or the audience), the group became known as Fluxus, and was ‘led’ by George Maciunas. In 1962 Fluxus made the trip across the Atlantic and staged a show at the ICA titled ‘Oh, What A Lovely Whore’. Fluxus used instructions to bridge the gap between audience and artist, often using the actions performed by the audience as the art itself. The instructions detailed the plan for the event that evening –

1. Prepare a wide range of activities with maximum participation incentive.
2. Light them with two or three (i.e. 1 is not enough) spotlights on stands with wheels, so that the audience can control them.
3. When the audience start to arrive hold them in a screened off area until they have all gathered.
4. Announce that you’re not going to do any event that night and if they want an event, they’ll have to do it for themselves.
5. Open screens or curtains.

The audience instantly took too their new roles as the makers of an interactive, boundary-less art happening; they jumped on trampolines, acted in and directed a play and projected films on the walls. The climax of the event was the destruction of a piano by the crowd, who then decided to rebuild a new piano from the salvageable parts of the old one, the audience then engaged themselves in continuously re-building and re-destroying the piano until the gallery of the ICA was filled with debris.

The destruction of the piano forms a neat symbol for the role the ICA has played in the musical landscape of Britain; both deconstructing it then rebuilding it from the leftover pieces. In 1968 the ICA moved into new premises on the Mall. The year featured exhibitions with work by Picasso, Bacon, Hockney and Max Ernst, T. Rex and Pink Floyd played live, the ICA cinema opened and the first major exhibition of computer art in the UK was also staged. In one year, a year with huge significance globally, invested with the Situationist riots in Paris in May, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy and the Hornsey Art School student protests in London, the ICA managed to bridge the gap between the past and the future with effortless ease.

GETTING THE LID OFF THE MAGGOT FACTORY – THROBBING GRISTLE

On the track ‘Convincing People’ from their 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats, Throbbing Gristle’s singer Genesis P. Orridge repeats the refrain ‘we don’t want to convince people’ over the song’s outro. It is evocative of much of what the band stood for during their short career, which lasted from 1976 to 1981. If the sixties in Britain where about hope and rebirth from the coldness and austerity of her post-war period, then by the time Throbbing Gristle formed from the remnants of COUM Transmissions in 1976 then they were out to prove that the future wasn’t as bright as the swinging sixties promised. Throbbing Gristle’s first performance was at the ICA, as part of the hugely controversial show, Prostitution, which drew a remarkably prescient quote from Tory MP Nicholas Fairburn when he referred to the group as the ‘wreckers of Western civilisation’. Cartoonist Garland presented a scene of a muse being mugged by Genesis P Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti outside the ICA’s premises on the Mall for The Daily Telegraph. The chairman of the ICA at the time, Ted Little, defended the exhibition and the controversy it caused, saying that the ICA had the a duty to help the contemporary avant-garde and provide a platform for it. It was a show that was designed, not to ask people to consider the merits of their shocking and inhuman approach to music and visual art, but just to create a parody of shock; COUM were an ideological and visual attack on popular culture, to Einsturzende Neubauten’s physical attack on the institution.

AN ATTACK ON POPULAR MUSIC – EINSTURZENDE NEUBAUTEN

January 1984, the start of the year which George Orwell made the emblem of all dystopian, authoritarian, nightmarish futures; of Big Brother, Room 101 and newspeak. It was ushered in at the ICA by the German industrial band Einsturzende Neubauten, and what a fitting way to do so.

Einsturzende Neubauten is often translated into English as the apocalyptic sounding ‘Collapsing New Buildings’ – with Neubauten a reference to the architectural style that spread across Germany in the wake of the Second World War. Neubauten are not analogous to the utopian Brutalist movement that spawned such iconic buildings as the Heygate Estate in Elephant & Castle and the Barbican Centre. The German Neubauten represented the functional and the flimsy; they are an unadventurous rebirth from the siege of Berlin by the Red Army and British air strikes on Dresden and Hamburg.

Einsturzende Neubauten’s music was an attack on music, and in January 1984, in the theatre of the ICA, they physically attacked the stage, venue and audience in their Concerto for Voice and Machinery. The event involved a loose group of musicians, Einsturzende Neubauten regulars Mufti, Alexander Hacke and Mark Chung as well as Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle – and a few other disparate people who’ve been resigned to history. For 25 minutes they launched an assault on the stage of the ICA with all manner of power drills, cement mixers, welding machinery and chainsaws. Glass bottles where thrown into the cement mixer, resulting in large shards of glass being ejected from it and into the crowd, who’d already been covered in sawdust by Mufti. After Neubauten and associates left the stage, the audience took up their own role in the night and tried to continue battering the ICA into submission. Hacke claimed the performance to be a utopian attempt, through violence and sound, to leave the venue through the floor.

YOUNG BRITISH ART AND BEYOND

It can seem strange to think of an institution as dedicatedly radical as the ICA not picking up on and capitalising on the Young British Artists and the massive booms in the art markets that rippled out of them. Apart from Damien Hirst’s debut solo show in 1991, the YBAs have had little presence at the ICA, and the impetus of contemporaniety has shifted away from it and towards Tate director Nicolas Serota and Charles Saatchi, who together have been setting the stylistic agenda in British art for the past twenty years. It would be fair to level at the ICA for not being at the most cutting edge of art over this past decade.

The most recent exhibition to take place there was also by the avowedly anti-YBA Billy Childish. But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing, and possibly even, despite its precarious financial future, positions it to better deal with the next ten years of art and music even if over the last twenty years or so it hasn’t necessarily been at its best. The ICA has never really associated itself with something as reductive and as media created as a ‘movement’ like the YBAs, it has always been more about gently probing and pushing at the boundaries; boundaries of taste, acceptability, art, culture and music. The 1990s saw its develop its musical programme with the likes of The Jesus and Mary Chain and Pulp both playing live there in 1994, and the Hacienda taking over the institution in 1993, and kicking off Britpop in 1989 with the Stone Roses or continuing its experimental tendencies with a festival of German electronica in 1999. Continuing onwards into the new decade the ICA has played host to the likes of Luke Haines, Daniel Johnston, Patrick Wolf, Mogwai, Patti Smith, Paul McCartney, Hot Chip and Amy Winehouse.

All the while the ICA has maintained its radical approach to music – in late 2009 they hosted Calling Out Of Context, a nine day festival celebrating the experimental approaches people have taken, and are taking, to music, and the vitality of the sonic avant-garde with the likes of Lucky Dragons, Alexander Tucker, Rhys Chatham and Micachu.

The ICA has, over the last 63 years, positioned itself quite uniquely in the British psyche, where the original waves of the avant-garde failed to take root in Britain, the Futurists, Surrealists and Modernists generally inhabiting the continent rather than our rainy island, it set itself the goal of promoting and sustaining them, and it is hard to argue against the success of the place as post-war British culture has developed. Calling Out Of Context was a return to the roots of the ICA’s musical programming, rooted in the avant-garde it is a summing up of the current state of the avant-garde, and thus the new, in music, and what has been achieved by the ICA during its existence.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

- - -

I’m starting to remind myself of Tom Townsend, protagonist of what might be my favourite ever film, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan. There’s a wonderful scene in which Townsend is arguing about Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park with Audrey, the geeky love interest. He dismisses the plot as absurd, before admitting he hasn’t actually read the novel.
‘Which Jane Austen novels have you read?’, Audrey asks.
‘None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism’, comes the smug, evidently rehearsed reply.

Blah. Anyway, it’s often the same with movies. Reviewers, bloggers and pro-censorship groups do us all a great service in going to see the bore fests that make up 85% of general releases in this country so that we don’t have to. A week or so ago, I found myself embroiled in an argument about Lee Daniels’s uber-worthy oiksploitation flick Precious with two other wannabe cinephiles. One agreed with me that it was bland Oscar-fodder dressed as poverty porn, the other praised its unique insights into the life of those living the American Nightmare. This must have dragged on for about twenty minutes before it became clear that none of us had actually seen it.

Anyway, thank god for film reviewers- without them, I wouldn’t be able to talk about half the movies I regularly pretend I’ve seen to make myself look more clever. However, there’s a problem; if 85% of films are shit, then what of the remainder? These range from middling to great, and thus don’t deserve to be ruined by the gushing hacks who evaluate them. Take Kickass, for example; there’s unlikely to be a movie with so many column inches dedicated to it this year, whether lauding its “fresh take on the tired comic book genre” (remember the Dark Knight? Truly, cliche comes in biannual cycles), lamenting its casual violence and profanity or gossiping at the fact that it was Jonathan Ross’s wife wot wrote it. I sat through it, already knowing it shot-for-shot through pure media osmosis. As it is, I’m a sucker for sub-Tarantino postmodernism, and loved it- but there was no shock, nothing of the laugh-out-loud gut reaction that I got from watching, say, Metropolitan for the first time. I was watching a low quality DVD of Chinatown later that night (yeah, really) when I asked myself how it would have been without the media blitz. Have we always been exposed to this global equivalent of the odious South African geography teacher who, inbetween racist outbursts, revealed to me the plot twist at the end of The Usual Suspects?
Maybe. But I remember a time way when blogging was in its infancy, and 24 hour news was the kind of fanciful thing that Bond villains used as their cover for world domination. I guess I was about 14, and it was important, and significantly more difficult, to be bang up to date with popular culture. Here, I will take the liberty of recounting a conversation I must have had about 75 times;

SCHOOLBOY 1*: Yeah, Trainspotting**’s great. Have you seen it? It’s Classic!
SCHOOLBOY 2: Uuuuuh…. yeah. I’ve seen Trainspotting. I was really drunk*** when I watched it, so I don’t remember much…
SCHOOLBOY 1: Yeah, I was drunk too. I don’t remember much either. But it’s classic.
SCHOOLBOY 2: Totally. Legendary…

* I have played both roles
** Can be substituted for any other canonical teen movie, although for some reason it always seemed to be Trainspotting.
*** If characters are lying even more than is evident, replace with “stoned”

I may be wrong, but I reckon this sort of conversation just wouldn’t happen now. Anyone can get access to the YouTube clips of key scenes in almost any film that merits a conversation. Tempting though it is to blame the internet and the press for ruining cinema, I would rather have a movie ruined for me than become one of those worthy neo-luddites who only buy vinyl and refuse to work on anything more sophisticated than a pre-war typewriter. In fact, as with music, the internet has allowed us to produce, distribute and criticise films in a whole new way. Okay, admittedly, I’ve never actually seen an internet film that approaches the borders of watchability, but inevitably, some day, it’s going to happen. Will this decade’s Citizen Kane get its premiere on a laptop screen in some godforsaken bedsit in Kentish Town? Probably not. All I’m saying is don’t count it out, avoid the new Drew Barrymore movie like the plague, and stop reading articles about the new Polanski flick that comes out on Friday. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a corker…
Phew. Now, how many films have I ruined for the uninitiated over the last 800 words?

*****************************************************

Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

[CLICK TO WATCH]

FOR ALL MANKIND
DIR. BY AL REINART

Hello Off Modern.

Firstly, thanks to Will and the bright young things of Off Modern for having me over here to write my waffling words all over these white pages. I can only apologise in advance…
To introduce myself, my name is Jacob Denno and I run the poetry & illustration magazine that is Popshot. Not exactly the kind of lucrative market the suits at Conde Nast might go for but in my humble and biased opinion, far more bracing than yet another fashion title. If you didn’t catch the interview a few weeks ago, perhaps go have a little peep to understand what this half baked idea is all about.

So to poetry and its wonderful array of stereotypes and perceptions. Initial associations might take you back to the 18th century and William Wordsworth or if you’re really lucky, back to the 17th Century where John Milton wrote the famously lengthy poem ‘Paradise Lost’. It’s possible that your perception of poetry may not have changed much since then - poems about daffodils and nature, more love poems than you knew possible and all championed by the aging education system who convince you this is the best thing you will ever read. Add in the fact that most people only turn to poetry when there’s a wedding, a funeral, a birthday or it’s valentines day and you would be forgiven for thinking this poetry thing is all a bit outdated and generic. But despite it being unfortunate that this is the case, it’s fortunate that this isn’t the case at all.

Which is where along with many other small publishers, magazines and nights about London Town - Popshot comes in. There is a raging scene of young and stupidly talented poets writing poems that challenge and verbalise the issues that face the modern day human. So it’s not all flowers and flamboyance. In fact, in the case of the poetry in our upcoming issue, it’s the direct opposite. So every month from now until I get handed my P45, I’ll be introducing the poets, illustrators, websites, events and collectives that are helping to shape the poetry and illustration worlds from the rather deluded eyes that I look through.

To pad out this block of text, here are two pieces from two illustrators whose work will grace the pages of our forthcoming third issue…Mr Tom Hovey and Mydeadpony.

Peace and pipettes.

www.tomhovey.co.uk

www.mydeadpony.com

I.
A historical steam-roller has gone several times through a country . . . yet the poet emerges more energetic. – Czeslaw Milosz.

The Poles, with their 200 years’ experience of occupation, have a genius for independence of mind in intolerable circumstances. Every feeling, every gesture, every word, however personal, has its political resonance. – A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books.

II.
Poetry is in part to do with voice; it is the area of literature where voice mixes with the written word. Poetry’s pre-existence is in the verbal traditions of storytelling, coming out of the oral nature of the Epic poem and moving, with Gutenberg, into being printed on a page, and later in collections and anthologies. Early examples of poetry are as memories of forgotten cultures, being concerned with voice it is also inherently about finding an identity within and for that culture and recording its histories. Think of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Beowulf or the Baghvhad Gita.

Poetry can be roughly divided into two types, those that assay the culture as a whole and those that assay the individual within that culture. The first type leads onto the second, as we move from understanding the world around us to understanding our role in that world. Poland has a history of being divided, whether in military victory or defeat her borders are, more so than most other European nations, changeable, and have changed many times throughout her history. This naturally leads onto a certain questioning of national identity, and if we say that poetry is about finding identity through voice then the Polish poets who were writing in the second half of the twentieth century are re-engaged with the assaying of a culture, and the individual’s role within it. The momentous fractures and disasters that befell Poland between 1939 and 1945 led to a disassociation, which continued under Soviet rule, providing a block between this re-engagement, the strength of Polish poetry, and its uniqueness, lies in the way its poets deal with this.

III.
After the Second World War the scholars of Western Europe moved towards post-modern and existential theories and modes of thought. The victory of the Allies over the Third Reich had secured them their academic and intellectual freedom, they were liberated then to explore and attack, to write and say and think what they wanted; free to explore the struggles of the individual mind or the continuing importance and role of art in society. Poland though was under Communist rule, with the censorship and bureaucracy that it entails. Thus the options for intellectual attack and exploration are demarked by what the government deems acceptable. This caused two things to happen to Polish poetry; firstly, much of it is was not written in Poland and secondly the poets who were still working in their homeland where not able to say certain things explicitly, forcing their collective poetic voice to find and express itself in different and subtle ways, if they are to express itself at all. Political repression of a culture manifests itself on how that culture views itself. If in a culture you are not free to express yourself, then this will realise itself upon freedom of expression in poetry, like a chain of falling dominos, with slowly contracting circles of ‘acceptable’ ideas. So if political freedom is restricted, then freedom in poetics must come from the freedoms that are afforded to the poet by the line and form.

This political repression also creates the parallel tradition of the émigré poet, who to escape these repressions leaves his home, and begins commenting on a lost homeland from the outside. Post-war Polish poetry, in finding its own, new voice, is trying to find the voice of freedom, and it finds it in sweeping metaphysical conceits or in dreams of an apolitical pastoral scenes and idylls. This is a poetry with a formal and aesthetical unity to it that belies the fragmentary nature of Poland’s history, or maybe exists in spite of it.

IV.
Cszelaw Milosz was the pre-eminent figure of literary Poland in the 20th century; over a career spanning seventy years he wrote countless books of poetry, translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish and wrote two memoirs of his early life in Lithuania. He emigrated, first to Paris and then to America, where he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkley University, in California. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, he is memorialised at Yad Vashem as one of the ‘righteous of the nations’ and a poem of his is inscribed at a memorial for the protesting shipworkers who were killed in 1970 in Gdansk. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 Milosz returned to live in Krakow where he died in 2004, at the age of 93. Milosz’s life is inseparably tied up in a situation familiar to many Poles – he was not born within the borders of Poland (borders which shifted innumerably during that period) but viewed himself as Polish, he left his home because of the political situation and returned when it was possible.

When Milosz won the Nobel Prize he was in the strange situation where he was relatively unknown in Poland, with his works being censored and banned by the government. He was then a poet writing primarily for the Polish Diaspora. Some of his most interesting works though, were written during the Second World War, between 1943 and 1945 he produced three works of historical importance for assessing Poland and what it was going through; ‘A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto’, ‘A Song On The End World’ and ‘Dedication’. These are poems that examine the impact of total war and genocide on a people and their resistance, whether spiritual or actual, of the Polish people. ‘Dedication’ talks of a ‘broken city’ in ‘the valley of shallow Polish river’, but he tells us the aims of the young poet and how he sees poetry;

What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards

Poetry, in dire historical situations, must examine them and find strength through resistance.

Tadeusz Rozewicz also speaks of the resistance and sanctuary that poetry provides against the political world. In his poem ‘The Deposition of the Burden’ he says that ‘modern poetry / is a struggle for breath’, for both himself and Milosz poetry must be about defiance and struggling to breathe, and thus, it is also to speak, as speech is a continuation and natural extension of breathing. And so through the act of speaking we try to understand civilisation and our role in it. For these Polish writers then the act of speech is given political connotations, in its restriction by censorship. Poetry finds resistance by placing ones liberty or safety at risk because of the poetic compulsion to say something; these are poets that understand that the poet must find his voice, no matter what.

In Polish poetry, as is in much of the poetry and literature that came out of the Eastern Bloc between 1945 and 1989, we witness the conflation of narrative with history and symbolism as a way of circumnavigating the restrictions placed upon writers by the censors. Adam Wazyk, who died in 1982, was one of the finest poets to explore the historical significances of Poland’s role in World War Two. Let us look at his poem ‘Sketch for a Memoir’, which was written upon his return to Poland in 1944 with the Polish Communist Army as an officer. It deals with the experiences of growing up between the two wars and the realisation that the pastoral idylls of youth will soon be transformed into the conflicts of 1939;

We were waked up, people of not quite bad will,
or buried under the rubble of a house.
And many were waked up
to have their eyes sealed with the bandages of death
and to be put up against the wall in paper shirts.

The apolitical idylls of youth that Wazyk describes as being a time where one ‘swam in rivers’ and talked ‘under chestnut tress’ are transformed from the Edenic to horrific, where we will all ‘wake up and recognise your epoch’. Or there is his poem ‘A Pre-Columbine Sculpture’, which was written just after the loosening of censorship laws in 1956 and metaphysically relates the sculpture of a ‘cruel god’ seen in a museum with the ‘the sadness of a passer-by stripped of his face’. The poem presents history’s examples of butchery and violence as unchanging and continuous, the passer-by is stripped of his face, and thus his identity; ‘there I should have understood everything’, says Wayzk. What he alludes to have understood is that history is cruel, that it repeats itself, and Polish history isn’t an unusual one in this, it is only exceptional in the scale of butchery. Let us also look at Anna Swirszczynska, who was a nurse during the Warsaw uprising of 1944. It took her many years to form her experiences into the long poem, Building the Barricade. Unlike much of Polish poetry that deals with the war, its aftermaths and Communist rule, Swirszczynska doesn’t treat the issues through the use of symbols or metaphysical conceits, she instead focuses on the everyday sufferings and the effect war has on the ordinary citizens and their resistance to it;

Along a street swept clean of people
a tank rolls firing.
It executes
houses
smashes
barricades.

Out of the gateway leaps a kid
a bottle of gasoline in his fist.
Along a street swept clean of people
he runs
at a crouch
at the tank.

One of Poland’s modern poets who is also engaged in this discourse about Polish history is Adam Zagajewski, in 2004 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for literature, a prize seen by many as a precursor for the Nobel, born in 1945 his life span comes after the great fractures of Nazi occupation, invasion and Holocaust, his history is tied up then with Communism, and like Czeslaw Milosz, was also an émigré poet who lived in France and America. His poem ‘To Go To Lvov’ deals with the subject of emigration and forced disposition by ideological forces, and the dream of a homeland, something of symbolic importance to the millions of Poles in Diaspora;

in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.

But Zagajewski, as the émigré looking back on Poland, is ‘enchanted by that legendary, defenseless country’ where one always knows ‘full well the meaning / of captivity.’ There is, for Zagajewski, something thrilling about looking back on a lost homeland; if for some poets the history of Poland is like a fracture that must be healed through poetic exploration in order for identity to be found, then Zagajewski treats this history like a symbol for his own identity, it reaches down to something deeper, more primordial, the displacement of a homeland, and yet it also deals with the outsider in a different society, trying to integrate but separated by this looming symbol, what Zagajewski calls the ‘reckless unicorn / feeding on the wool of tapestries / beautiful, week and impudent.’

V.
With Zagajewski we have moved from examining Poland’s history as fact to symbol, and thus it is truly absorbed by poetry, it finds its poetic voice, it is no longer a comment on the recent past, an exploration of something unknown, like it was for Milosz or Wayzk or Swirszczynska, but it is now firmly part of a poet like Zagajewski’s identity. The fractures in Polish history have been absorbed by time into part of the make-up of any poet wishing to call upon them for their work, with the fall of Communist rule in 1989, we move into a new chapter and consign the previous years to history.

“I am conscious of the ball, but I am also conscious that I am not the ball. I desire to possess the ball. My project is to become a for-itself-in-itself a synthesis of self and non- self, in other words, God.” – Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

After a prolonged fallow period in my teenage years, I now find myself attending two football matches in the space of a week, for the first time in ten years. Rather than attributing this spell of sporting malaise to any particular choice or disengagement, I see this as a natural progression through the various stages of my maturation.

Our formative years bring about many swings both in mood and purpose, but aimed largely towards one goal, contextualising the self apropos to our concept of the other. In early childhood this takes on a simplistic form, as we begin to explore the basic concepts of what it means to be a unique human being in our environment. It is only at the halfway point through our first decade that we start to conceive ourselves in direct opposition to other people.

To use a much-misquoted phrase, Bill Shankly in 1981 claimed, “Someone said ‘football is more important than life and death to you’ and I said ‘Listen, it’s more important than that’. That the phrase has been trotted out again and again over the past decades does not detract from an important point we can draw from it: that football is no mere pastime, and its juvenile partisanship shares much in common with a religious upbringing.

The football fan is forever shaped by these boundaries placed on them within early years, clearly defining the parameters of ‘us and them’, such that any later life revision of these principles becomes near impossible. For a child who is finding his way in the world, what could be clearer than the primary opposition of reds versus blues, hoops versus stripes, us against the world?

In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre says that, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.” It is in our formative years that this rejection of being in-itself is most apparent, when each of us has the clearest opportunity to experiment with lifestyle choices without fear of reprisal or failure. As a young child the simplistic allure of following a particular football team is akin to the safety of the homestead or the comfort of a favourite meal, but as a young adult this life pursuit becomes one of binary opposition.

~

Sartre once claimed: “In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team”. This perfectly encapsulates the idea of the football fan not existing conceptually for-itself but only within a realm of intersubjectivity, whereby tension between the same-subject and opposing viewpoint can be fully realized. To complicate an issue means to introduce more than one viewpoint for consideration, and football as the ultimate pastime of ‘us-and-them’ is therefore rooted in this complication. Conversely however, to simplify the subjective on a personal level requires one to understand that there is more than one available view and to actively decide which side one is on; ergo, to define oneself.

When I was nine-years-old, I recall clearly, after moving schools, the interrogation of other pupils as to where my footballing loyalties lay. Upon my disclosure, I could tell that my choice was not a popular one, but that I felt no sense of shame at being ‘the other’, and certainly no embarrassment at my team’s many failings in contrast to my peers’ respective clubs.

It is this, which convinces me that the decision to follow a particular club in most cases is not a decision at all, but a characteristic with which every football fan allows himself to be defined by others. I recall no stage in my upbringing where I had the chance to make the choice, and yet it is a choice which undoubtedly I have and will continue to defend as surely as if I had made it myself.

The decisions one must take to define oneself in teenage years: those concerning fashion, the opposite sex and employment for example, are not akin to this footballing non-decision, in that they must be made entirely of one’s own volition. As such any slight or critique of these decisions must be borne with the accompanying shame at its failure.

Jacques Derrida said, “beyond the Touchline is nothing”, and this perfectly describes the upsurging football fan, whose one defining characteristic is taken boldly and in deference to no one. These later teenage decisions, in contrast, are based entirely on uncertainties, and it is for this reason that the football fan so often sidelines that which is ‘certain’ in order to define the nascent parts of himself.

~

The football fan bears the weight upon his shoulders of a decision he did not make, nor will likely ever consider revising. However, we must not confuse the decision to be a fan of a particular club with the decision to be a fan of football itself. While a particular club allegiance is rarely questioned, it is simple to choose to not follow the world of football altogether.

In my life, I fell out of love with football in my early teens, only choosing to return to it as my teenage years were waning, and it is precisely this ‘choice’ which places football fanaticism under its proper scrutiny. While the young football fan is first a fan of his club and secondarily a fan of the game, the reverse is true of the adult who chooses for-itself this life pursuit.

The adult football fan takes on both parts of this decision, the a priori given-definition of himself as a member of a particular football allegiance, and the a posteriori self-definition as one who chooses to validate this decision made in his absence.

The immutability of our first love must be countered so that we can reclaim this bold decision as one of our own, and with it suffer the ups and downs that any important decision should rightly confer upon us.

We must stand up and say that we have both encountered ourselves as a football fan and later defined ourselves equally as such, rather than been content to accept solely the former.

For one cannot be proud of what he did not himself create.

“There are scientists who will tell you that spirit, because it can’t be measured, doesn’t exist. Bollocks. It does exist” - Sam Allardyce

By Germaine Arnold.

It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires. Chtcheglov, 1953.

They put Chtcheglov in an asylum for five years because he wanted to deconstruct the Eiffel Tower. Unknown, 2008.

I.

The first idea that we come across when discussing the idea of a new city, and the idea looms so large that it is not ignorable, is that of psychogeography. Traditional geography is the study of how human activity is influenced by, or has an effect upon, the earth’s surface; it generally focuses on patterns of human trade and commerce as these patterns form the basis for all human interactions. Psychogeography is a study of how a human’s environment, specifically sites of economic interaction, has an effect upon the psychological self. It is a study of the banking quarter, the market place and your trip to the corner shop to buy a paper or a packet of cigarettes. Unfortunately as psychogeography is an analysis of these phenomena of economic alienation or inclusion it is also prone to developing a thesis that will inevitably deal with proposing a new theory of how we ought to want to live; that is to say its findings are usually ideological in nature. Through its study of how we react when communing with the wider economic society it tells us that we should modify our behaviour to suit the predisposed new realities that it offers as an alternative. We then propose that all old psychogeographical interpretations and readings of the world have proven their own absurdity through their ideological bias. This is not to say that the methods laid out by DeBord, Beaudelaire and Chtcheglov are wrong though, but instead we, the Off Modern, proffer our own new interpretations and theoretical experiments to counteract the outdated models of the flâneur and its specificity to Parisian locales.

The first movement must be a return to the origin, where all creation starts, to look at how the future of the city and society has been viewed and how these visions remained only visions. These revelations are all in part retro futures, but whereas most retro futures spy visions only of consumer-techno-utopias, the retro futures of the Off Modern are not afraid of new technology. Let us take as our first divulgence, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis. In the film Lang makes conspicuous use of technology as a psychogeographical emblem, the M and Heart machines are monstrous and unexplainable, serving little purpose but to enslave the underclass who work at them. For Lang, new technology plays out on the future as a harbinger of doom, creating Babel-like visions that disconnect and alienate us from one another; whereas our modern technological way of life places the emphasis on communication, via the internet, it is also engaged with moving areas of economic commerce and trade into the realm of the unreal, non-place of the internet. Metropolis doesn’t show a technological advancement as the creation of new modes of communication or new spaces for trade, instead the proletariat are presented as chained to these advances for the good of the few. Technology works only for the overclass and they harness it and withhold its benefits from the masses. The old spaces of economic interaction as presented in a Marxist model of capitalist life have driven the proletariat into an even more economically alienating situation because of the rise of the new technologies.

Many retro futures take original portents of doom and turn them into dreams of utopia. Much of the imagery that Lang coined in the production survives, second hand, in the work of the retro futurists, who use his art deco inspired images of an overclass, but instead these images are transposed onto a society as a whole. This barrage of images of a whole society in utopian harmony are altogether unrealistic, and like other arguments developed from the work of psychogeographical experiments, are furthering an involuntarily ideological mode of living. The idea of this retro futurist utopia is that everyone will be part of this technological overclass, in Metropolis this overclass literally live in the sky above the city of the massed workers, free to ignore the reality of the world they are subjugating. But in the retro futurist utopia everyone is forcibly part of this perfect overclass, with no one subjugated to the M Machine, everyone is king or queen or prince and no-one is forced into the indignity of leaking blood into a factory for someone else’s benefit.

What we should be seeking then is a different type of retro future, one that doesn’t see new technology as a portent of human enslavement or debasement. If retro futurism takes old images of the future as its starting point, then an Off Modern retro future will instead explore a forgotten image or history of the past as its starting point, and it is through the combination of this retro futurism and a non-ideological psychogeography that we can formulate a new idea of the city. The Off Modern metropolis will be a space to finally fulfil all images and ideas of a mythical unrealisable future.

II.

Before we outline our vision of the future metropolis it would be pertinent to stop for a moment and examine the failings of the modern city, to get a better grasp on the scale of the theoretical task that we have set for ourselves and also to elucidate on the problems that need to be solved.

we were promised impossible futures ; skyscrapers of indeterminable height; new economic palaces of steel and glass; high technology clothing that will regulate your bodily temperatures and shield you from heat, cold and external damage; economic superstructures of equality; technocratic political systems based purely on knowledge; homes in the clouds and bases on Mars; ray guns, atomic endgames and mass annihilation; cyborgs built of metal and flesh, attributes like strength, vision, intelligence and speed heightened like a band of new Grecian heroes; extended life and health care systems that would ward off mortality and the effects of ageing on the human mind and body; teleportation, or at the very least, super fast travel between distant points. the twenty first century will be one long hangover from the dreams of the twentieth.

The cities that we are instead habiting are crumbling; clumsily inserted monolithic skyscrapers bordering precocious still-standing 15th Century relics.
The cities that we are instead habiting are compromises with human nature and lack of vision. We are loath to see radical development of a metropolis and cling religiously onto 15th Century relics, and yet we surround them with the impenetrable and alienating institutions of finance. The vision of life in the future as predicted by the past was irreconcilable with some certain fundamental traits of humanity as exhibited in its mythical and actual histories. We cling onto a relic as a symbol of our history and yet allow its incremental and creeping destruction. We allow the creation of endless skyscrapers because they represent a moneyed future, one of prosperity in a new high tech city. But the modern metropolis is engaged in the insertion of new technology into the gaping holes left behind by the failures of older technology; the modern metropolis is then engaged in stunting its own growth. Take the claustrophobic asphyxiation of London and the sprawling paradoxes of Americana in Los Angeles as two examples in the Western World.

The lack of correlation between what the past promised us and what it actually delivered should naturally lead onto the conclusion that we must now formulate new proposals, for an entirely new city, as well as learning from the mistakes of the past, and salvaging that which is of interest and has never been realised or has now been forgotten.

III.

The Off Modern Metropolis will have nothing to do with the vast, unending and everchanging spaces dreamt of by DeBord and Beaudelaire, but instead it will be made of the broken through dead ends of history; it is a city built upon the shifting foundations of nostalgia and built out of the unremembered, forgotten and unrealised memories of things never to have happened. Thus the Off Modern is a city, not made of real, definable and finite spaces but out of memory and imagination. Every avenue or boulevard is delineated not by what activity occurs there but what hypothetical action it could facilitate, or has facilitated in its previous lives.

To reiterate for a moment; psychogeographical experiments often end with preconceived ideological notions that further the ideas of a group about how they feel we ought to want to live. The Off Modern Metropolis would instead be an experiment in how people could be living, open to myriad interpretations of spaces.

Part of the explanation is rooted in the idea of the collage. With the rise of Stalin and his promotion of Socialist Realism over the early Russian revolutionary art movements like Futurism and Constuctivism. Stalin wrote these movements out of Soviet history, and in doing so he condemned them to never be fully realised and irresolvable. What happened to them next is that these germinal aesthetical ideas formed historical collages across Capitalist Europe in the works of De Stijl, Le Corbusier and Brutalism. The aesthetical principles of Constructivism were then subjugated to the market forces that enable building projects to take place; the idea of the proposal, cost effectiveness, material, labour, etc. With the architectural schools of Soviet Russia in exile their Leninist visions of the Utopian metropolis are warped, from here on in a Modernist Utopian vision is nothing more than an ideal unreal place.

If we are to talk of a new city as being an Off Modern metropolis then we must reconcile it with its impossibility to build, and so it is founded in the ridiculous, the physically impractically, the mentally obtuse. It is only through this that we can truly achieve the idea of a psychological new city. It is a city of perception, repetition, ghosts, historical monuments and demolished buildings; this nightclub is in fact a cinema and that bingo hall is in fact a museum, that museum is in fact an old apartment complex and the train station used to be a graveyard. This Off Modern metropolis is then in fact a type of utopian collage, made up of everything, stuck together, moments of history, forgotten artistic movements, forgotten buildings, empires and revolutions.

It’s always nice when things go to plan. For January’s Off Modern we invited a selection of our favorite zines along to show their publications. One of these publications was Popshot Magazine, a perennial pulp of excellence from the worlds of illustration and poetry which simply demands respect. It just so happens that its creator Jacob Denno is a true hero who, much to our excitement, will be contributing monthly musings on his field to the Off Modern blog. Here’s a quick interview introducing Popshot and its soon to be infamous creator…

OM: Hello dear boy, how are things at Popshot Towers? When’s the next issue due?

JD: It’s beautiful here. I just had my nasal hair clipped by the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team and I‘m about to open a bottle of 1876 Cristal. Aside from that, everything is pretty normal and the next issue should be arriving back from the printers at the end of March.

OM: Splendid. How did Popshot come about? What were your aims and/ or intentions for the magazine?

JD: It was born out of confusion, really. I didn’t quite understand how poetry had managed to maintain its musty image whilst all around it every other art form had effortlessly pulled itself into the 21st century. So I thought it was about time that changed and wanted to create a magazine that could make people view poetry in a different light, far away from the much resented school anthologies.

OM: Popshot is a hybrid of excellence from the worlds of poetry and illustration. Why did you choose to combine these two arts when creating Popshot?

JD: They were two art forms that in my mind come hand in hand. Children’s books have virtually always had stories/poems accompanied by illustrations and we grow up knowing and loving this. I felt illustration could make poetry more accessible by helping to tell the story of each poem. Words compliment pictures and pictures compliment words, it’s the best relationship I know of.

OM: What sort of people contribute to Popshot? I understand you have had a few big hitters, or scribblers, from the world of illustration helping to make Popshot what it is…

JD: Generally, most of the contributors are out and out heroes. They help to make the magazine what it is, far beyond the stuff that I do. Regarding big scribblers, we have had a few although I like to think that a spotty 16yr old pencil wielder stands as much chance of making it into the magazine as someone who’s part of the mighty Peepshow Collective.

OM: How do you collate the contributions to Popshot and bring them together into a cohesive and interesting format for people buying the magazine?

JD: We do a call for poetry submissions before each issue, always on a theme. 24 poems are chosen from that and then individually sent off to illustrators, to interpret as they see fit. As much as possible, I try to stay out of this process and allow the illustrators creative control although it doesn’t always work out. Design wise, we try and keep it stupidly simple - this hands the readers focus over to the poem, the illustration and nothing else. Hopefully, these two elements alone are enough to maintain the interest.

OM: Do you believe that combining diverse elements of culture can help to create an environment whereby creativity can develop? We’d like to think we do that at our Off Modern events… Did you enjoy January’s Off Modern and in particular, the zine fair? Manage to shift any Popshot copies?

JD: Definitely. The classic is music and art - many artists take inspiration from music and vice versa. A highly overdone case and point would be Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground.
I really enjoyed January’s Off Modern, I couldn’t feel my own face by the end of it and got a £60 parking fine for being there but it was really good to see people’s reactions to the magazine as they picked it up. One kid picked up a copy and just said ‘what the fuck?’. I never found out why…

OM: What excites you about Modern poetry and, for that matter, illustration?

JD: I feel as though modern poetry and the poetry of days gone by is representative of the differences between us and our parents. Modern poetry is louder, harsher and pays more attention to the minute detail. The bigger subjects like love and death have already been covered repeatedly in the past, but contemporary poetry is more ready to find comparisons between Lao Tzu and ejaculation (wait for Issue 3).

OM: How has Popshot changed since you started it and what does the future hold?

JD: It gets more polished every time. The core ideals remain the same but the execution refines itself. I already have problems with Issue 2 that have been corrected for Issue 3. Hopefully this will continue. As for the future, I just want to keep the magazine expanding and growing, both in number and in quality. One day I would like to throw the most epic launch party ever but I might need a billionaire on board for it to happen. It might even involve the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team…

OM: Can you give us a sneaky peek of what or who to expect in your upcoming publication? Anyone new you are excited about working with or any Popshot favourites from the past?

JD: Expect poems about taking your clothes off, porn, prostitution, swimming and beating up the Dalai Lama (it’s metaphorical). Now that I recount it, it sounds more like a sex issue but it is actually ‘The Liberate Issue’. It seems that sex and liberation come very much hand in hand. We managed to get some amazing illustrators on board as well. To namedrop a few - James Dawe, Holly Wales, Dan Hillier and Paul Holland. For Off Modern eyes only, I can show you Dan Hillier’s epic illustration of the poem ‘Icarus’. (http://www.danhillier.com/blog/wp-content/temp/2010/02/icarus23.jpg). All the illustrators are talented souls we’ve never worked with before bar one - the rather tremendous Daniel Almeroth.

The Romantic period of the arts, from roughly the second half of the 18th Century into the early 19th, was a reaction against the Classicist philosophical model put forward by the Enlightenment. Romanticism prized individualism and emotion in the artist, over the rational and logical artist of the neo-classical period. It is from the Romantics that we get the notion of the struggling artist, working in his garret on his masterpiece, ignored by the world, he is probably syphilitic and drunk on red wine. The Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Geothe in poetry, Mozart in music, Delacroix, Goya and Turner in painting), are primarily men of the industrial revolution, they are the interpreters for civilization of a world freed from the constrictions of serfdom. This manifests itself in the idea of individualism; the French and American Revolutions are Romantic in their nature, America is still unnaturally in thrall to the individualist notion summed up in its constitution, as too, unfortunately, are the arts.

Let us look at Homer, and the problems that biography pose for us when we do, there are many suppositions about who Homer was, but they must all remain suppositions barring some fantastical archeological discovery. What we deal with, in our discussion of the idea of biography in art, is fact, and fact is troublesome, especially in the area of historical fact. E.H Carr, is his work What Is History? asks us to reexamine our conception of the historical fact. Our image of the past is clouded, not just by the bias of the person recording, but also because of the reason for something being recorded. What we know of ancient Greece, comes from a select few people, mainly in Athens, we know very little of what it was like to be a Spartan, or a Theban, so even beyond examining an historical supposition with a eye trained to look for personal bias, we must also look for the huge gaps in our knowledge of history. The biography of Homer is recorded, but not truthfully, we have records from Lucian, but he is a satirist, not an historian, we know how certain groups perceived Homer, but we have no historical facts relating directly to Homer, we only have historical interpretations of Homer. Our own ideas about Homer are no more than suppositions, and for future scholars they will be little more than historical interpretations, our contemporary classical scholars can only make judgments on and conflations of previous historical interpretations, but, and here is the rub, these investigations can add nothing to the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, the true areas of importance in our study of Homer. Like Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter who Homer was, it only matters what was written, and if they were written by someone else or through conflation of different sources, it doesn’t really make much difference. Would Hamlet somehow become a different text if Shakespeare were actually a woman? No. It is interesting that we know little to nothing about who wrote some of the best literary texts, but we will argue amongst ourselves about why Van Gogh cut his ear off. It should be enough to admire the work.

The reason for further eliminating the biographical reading of art works, whether that is in poetry, novels, paintings, etc, is expounded again by E.H. Carr. His example comes from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister for the Weimar Republic; upon Stresemann’s death in 1929 he left behind a pile of papers, which have come to the English reader in the form of Gustav Streseman, His Diaries, Letters and Papers. What we must consider in our discussion of the fallacy of biography is how these mass of documents that Stresemann left behind, became the book that we must use to judge his time in office. Working backwards then, the book the English-speaking world has is different from the original in German, it is a selection of the papers and memos most pertinent to English readers. This original book is itself a selection of Stresemann’s full papers, it mainly focuses on the areas of foreign policy in which Stresemann was particularly successful; his dealings with Western Europe, his negotiation of Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations etc, it glosses over his relative failings in his policies with the USSR. So, with each step backwards that we take we move nearer to a complete picture of Stresemann. Except when we get to the actual papers themselves (which were salvaged in 1945 by the English Army), what we see is not a number of historical facts, but merely autobiography. Each of us writes himself, and all biography is first and foremost based upon autobiography, we create our own images for future consumption. In Stresemann’s personal memos, papers, files and diaries he is engaged in the creation of a mirrored self for future posterity, it is impossible to read Stresemann as a man because our interpretations of him are clouded by his own historical bias towards himself. E.H. Carr tells us as much,The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.
To make an autobiographical reading of a text we are engaged in reading into hearsay to illuminate the fact of a work. To read Stresemann’s documents to form a picture of him, as historical fact, is impossible. If we read On The Road by Jack Kerouac as a semi-autobiographical account of his own years spent on the road we are forced, by Kerouac himself, to accept not just the merits of the text, but what he went through to write it. We cloud our judgment of a novel through childish admiration of what the author’s biography can represent. Kerouac engages himself in the creation of autobiography in his text, this enables the novel to gain a veneer of reality that for large portions lacks much verve, suspense or insight.

Kerouac relies on substandard strands of our schooling that teaches us to see the artist as a grand struggling individualist creating his grand work of art, like Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; part of any discussion about a work in class focuses on the person who wrote it. The work must stand alone to be truly democratic. Contemporary art criticism places much emphasis on the work being propped up by the artist; the artist must somehow become a figure of great magnitude for his work to also be of great magnitude. The reality is that we are not in an age of figures of great magnitude. Ezra Pound implored us to ‘make it new’, this was Modernism, more or less, but isn’t it funny how the art world has taken it to mean, ‘find us someone new’. The Art Industry relies on money to survive, true novelty is unsellable because the industry doesn’t know how to sell it, a creative industry does not really rely on creativity, what it relies on is more of the same. Let’s take Four Weddings and a Funeral as an example, this film does well, Hugh Grant gets good audience reactions as a bumbling English stereotype, then we get to see more of Hugh Grant in new films, which are generally the same, because the Industry knows how to sell them. Look at film posters, they have set signs for what kind of film they are, the red lettering on white background with enlarged faces and a smattering of out of context ‘praise’. Or for another example let us take Grunge, when Nirvana went stratospheric in 1991 we have hordes of A&R men moving to Seattle like locusts to get another Nirvana on their hands, so they can make money. It is because the Industry knows how to sell this, they can sell Nirvana as music for disenfranchised teens suffering rebellion because they can create this idea of Kurt Cobain as biographically apt for them, they can sell Hugh Grant to middle-aged housewives because he plays the part of the charming stereotypical Englishman. Biography is parasitically attached to an artwork in order for it to become sellable. The art industry relies on the same premise, what we have is not ‘new’ art, but new artists who make old art, the YBAs were not ‘new’, merely successfully sold as ‘new’, and their work over the past fifteen years atones to the fact that Damien Hirst is nothing more than a coffee shop existentialist ripping off ideas that have been floating around for about a hundred years. The newness we may really speak of in contemporary art is not in the art itself but in the Industry, so to truly make something new we would have to get rid of the idea of artistic industry, as it exists now, and so it follows that the next new development in art must be to create a new kind of art industry, not a new kind of art.

Hypothetically, if there were to be a new type of art industry, one that wasn’t so much an ‘industry’, a word carrying connotation of pure economics and the processing of raw materials, via labour, into goods. A Marxist interpretation of the flaws of the art industry in very easy to concoct (although it is not the subject of this essay), but what we should be concerned with is a new way of presenting the reality of art, on a democratic level, whereby figures and money are unimportant. The word hobby isn’t palatable to the art industry, the true hobbyist is the person who does something for the love of it, it presupposes a love that is beyond profitability. A new art industry would place the hobbyist as its king. Once money becomes involved in matters of artistic creation it takes the onus off of creativity and places it on sellability, and one way that the art industry has of ensuring sellability of its product is by creating a fallacy of biography around its product. If you can convince people that the person creating a work has the biographical prerequisites necessary for them to be great you can ensure that work will sell regardless of its merits.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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There’s a phrase I hate perhaps more than any other, partly due to its patent falsehood, and partly due to the connotation with half arsed upper middle class parenting. Sure, there are some strong contenders for the title of the English language’s most irritating maxim (a solid runner up would be “a stitch in time saves nine”- what the fuck does that actually mean?), but this one takes the biscuit, throws it up, and proceeds to repeat the action with the rest of the family-sized packet. I this hear this wearisome platitude a lot on my regular mid-afternoon trips to the discount section in my local Waitrose. Genteel second-time mothers of a certain age, pushing their ludicrously over designed Cameronite prams look down at their complaining, Boden-bedecked firstborn as they reach for a re-up of organic grana padano from the precarious upper climes of the deli section.

‘I’m bored, mummy’ whines the Bedales-bound genetic photocopy.

‘Only boring people get bored, darling,’ she sighs in reply, with a look of prolonged resignation that no amount of Jamon Iberico or freshly sourced Guava puree can possibly assuage. I snigger a bit, and wonder whether wearing a ratty old tie will give me the requisite professional air to purchase alcohol without showing ID.

Anyway, before I describe any more of the rolling tedium of my existence, I’ll get back on the brief; we’ve all been bored at some point. Some of us aren’t boring. In fact, I know a number of people who, for better or for worse, are incapable of ever even approaching dull. On the contrary to this well worn parental riposte, you don’t need to be boring to be bored- you just need to watch a lot of French films.

I know, I know, I’m really rolling out the standard blokey English cliches here, and would sound like an unfunny Jeremy Clarkson were it not for the fact that I have actually watched a lot of French films. Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais may have been pretentious and incomprehensible at the best of times, but in no way whatsoever were they ever dull. The films I’m referring to are not the products of the Nouvelle Vague, themselves admittedly acquired tastes, but the work of the so-called “quality” directors of the last 15 years.

Maybe it’s due to the contrast with our own country’s appalling cinematic output of late, but as I see it, there’s a concrete routine for English film reviewers when discussing the new releases from across the Channel. They seem to swoon at the overlong dramatic pauses, ejaculate at the inevitable moment of labored dramatic climax, and bathe in the sheer tedium and predictability of yet another film about rough sex and lonely women.

Take, for example, Philippe Claudel’s critically arse-licked Kristen Scott-Thomas vehicle Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Pretty much fuck all happens. Kristen, gaunt, “mysterious” (doesn’t say much: gets angry at predictably unpredictable moments) and very pleased with herself for being one of only two major English actresses who can pass for a Frenchwoman, goes to a job interview, reveals that she’s spent time in jail, argues a bit with her bourgeois family, and eventually comes over all saintly as she reveals that she ‘fessed’ up to a crime she didn’t commit. I saw it in Notting Hill when it was released back in 2008. In an audience of about six oh-so-cultured cultured couples, I counted four heads arched back over the red seats, mouths agape, their snoring drowned out only by the interminable paroles of Claudel’s semi-realised characters. I think it’s safe to say that the other two insomniacs in the audience were having as much fun longing for some wet paint to watch drying as I was by the time the bore-fest ended.

Four out of five French art movies of the last decade follow much the same route. Take Francois Ozon, for example; his films follow the above template pretty closely, but with some wife-beating thrown in for good measure. These may seem like sweeping generalisations, but, really, trust me: I studied French film.

Anyway, this is why I’m so excited about Un Prophet, Jacques Audiard’s new one. Audiard, best known for The Beat my heart skipped, with Romain Duris, is a true great. His films seem to turn the most tired old cliches into something genuinely new and exciting. Take his 2001 film, Sur mes levres; Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos play the classic odd couple. He, a pathologically violent ex-con with a plan for one last big heist, and she a deaf, dowdy goody-goody who works in the offices of a large construction firm. That it’s almost entirely predictable is half the point- a lot of great films (a good example being the grand-pere of modern French cinema, Godard’s A bout de souffle) have one-dimensional plots, but are executed with such skill that they can bring an audience to the edge of their seats, and reduce their fingernails to nothing through sheer dramatic attrition. The throbbing sexual tension between Cassel and Devos elevates the will they-won’t they tropes to a time-bomb of repressed passion, and the violence, when it does occur, is genuinely painful to watch. In a good way, that is.

Anyway, I’m writing this on Friday 15th January, which, coincidentally, is the English release date for Un Prophet. I’m going to the cinema tonight. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Audiard’s oeuvre, then I suggest you do the same, and if it’s no longer showing, blow the rent money on a complete set of DVDs. Believe me, it will almost be worth becoming homeless for…

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.