Censorship, a Summation, a Compilation and an Inspiration.
Success dependent on the organised brutal suppression of the work of other artists, while maintaining a veneer of respectability is utterly unsustainable therefore transient, therefore no success at all.
Yet that has become the accepted ‘modus operandi’. Here is my compendium of wisdom on CENSORSHIP , as published in the current issue of LSD Magazine, preceded by an introduction, and followed by a piece of film….
The battle against censorship in art in these times, is a long and lonely road beset with hazards. However it is a battle that has found me, not I it; and one I accept alone.
However certain giants of oldskool graffiti and now the broader underground too, have recognised my plight and shown me tacit support and thus added to my strength to continue my personal struggle for artistic freedom, and there I have found something of the true spirit of human empathy and expression.
However it must be said that even without such support I would gladly continue my path.
By accident of birth I found myself able to draw and paint, by longing for expression I found myself on the streets with crude anarcho stencils then by the mid eighties the train yards with my dreams on metal in motion and colour, then acid house parties with ultraviolet paint, then in the studio with oil and easel where I laboured for 20 years amidst a stack of books and immersed in the study of the Old Masters, then back to the streets.
Here I found many from those train yard days too had moved on, and like me still had little voice in an art world supposedly freed for “the people” by the new wave of ‘street artists’ if you believe the PR, as I did for a while, but in reality I found the art world in the stranglehold of a voracious cartel.
They saw its’ potent symbols, identity and lexicon merely as a vehicle for profit, be it of narcissism or cash, and saw myself and others like me who held their meaning dear, as a threat to be pushed aside, silenced and ignored, or charmed, duped, bribed, gifted and flattered into acquiescence.
In my search to show my own work outside the confines of this closed shop which rejected my every inroad outright, found me allied with other oldskool writers who shared my alienation; those who shared aspects of my story, continued to make art and thus identified with my plight.
At that point a journey was embarked upon, in the true DIY ethic of the punk rock I grew up on; to build something from the ground up and set up our own gallery, then a notice was pinned to my wall warning me against such an act, which was ignored, then a car was driven at me. How scared the cartel must be of the reality of art to act this way!
London writers of our generation experienced something no other artists ever have or ever will.
Not only were we the first proper ‘wave’ to saturate the trains but we were, in these heady days witness to the most concentrated awakening of consciousness in the history of the planet, even stronger in its’ pure intensity than the hippy explosion of the 1960s….acid house, the full unforgettable syncopated sensory plunge into the inner world and holographic universe in its’ purest form.
With the biomorphic shapes and ever mutating motion of graffiti lettering and clattering of wheels on tracks resounding in our heads we were then thrust into the hallucinogenic meltdown squelch of the Roland TB303 synth and relentless kick drum, in an ancient shamanic dance, now laser lit, that broke down our very DNA and reassembled it in under the strobe as brave new beings.
The B.P.M of Jack the T.A.B now forever in our bones, was a dance that accessed the ends of the universe and the building blocks of life itself and brought the shapes alive in a synaesthesiac time warp of sound which we reassembled as art.
Think Drax’s abstract wholecar hallucinogenic zigzags and loops that shook, rattled and rolled with the funk of the underground, possibly the most viscerally stunning and ‘primeval’ of these utterances which propelled the magical art of the ancient sacred cave screeching and clattering through the tunnels of the Circle Line, think of Fuels epic, heroic, mythical and prolific visions of numinous otherworlds, Nu Age lava lamp styles, and spontaneous quasi-religious poetic scrawls which set apart his hard won crown as an unbelievably prolific outsider and fearless groundbreaker, of Cherish’s aztec jelly-mould styles, Acrid’s spontaneous abstract panel pieces, Mean’s ‘dancing’ letters and experiments in spatial distortions of perceptions of the street and in the flowery spiralled tags and squashy throw-up letters that abounded all over the system from everyone from Bus One to Drop One….
Graffiti and the ‘invisible world’ go hand in hand from the earliest engravings on caves, but in London in 88-90 as the golden ages of acid house and train graffiti emerged side by side the two cross pollinated in a style never seen and have left a legacy that grows, albeit often hidden, to this day.
These writers I held in awe, some I painted with then, others I paint with now, others I’ve never even met, they and many more are those that awoke my curiosity and unwittingly guided my path, that lit my way inspiring my search for my own voice in art just as much as the surrealist and visionary painters such as Ernst, Matta or Blake. They all had the vision and pluck to rise against the conventions of graffiti or the art of their time and take it further, into the ‘otherworld’ as opposed to contemporary stylistic convention or current profusion of stage managed saccharin gimmickry, as did Blade and Futura in their own way in New York.
Some of these writers, those with the inclination are continuing their investigations, imaginations freed by the movement, electricity and industrial energy of dirty London train graffiti, freed by the spectacular inner pyrotechnics and spiritual inner joy of “The Experience” still working out their visions….others like a fine wine or lively cheese have matured, taking their influence from their life in the outer world , the enlightenment of travel and the information age and their ruminations on our culture, their continuing legacy, or of literature and their epiphanies in Eastern mysticism or the delirious ravings of the romantic poets…
The spirit of the individual is that which drives such people and which gives life to the pioneering uncategorisable works that are created in the awakening’s wake….we are many and we have many creative years of our lives ahead of us….
Is it street art? Maybe not, as the current use of the term has lost its’ value, but we were and still are street artists, the original street artists of this generation..
Is it fine art? It can be, yes, but freed from the stuffiness of the academies, the hierarchy of art’s cartels, and the rules of the classics.
Is it graffiti? That depends where it is and what its saying, but we’re all writers, whatever medium we use and its’ fluid dynamics once it met ‘jack the groove’ leave a legacy and flow that carries into whatever art we may make…
London’s scene uncovered a timeless dynamic and fused it with mass transit, lighting a fuse in many a mind. that meanders through the infinite illumination of the information age and the dusty tomes of arcane lore….
Is it a movement?
No! It’s a continuous and ancient undercurrent in human culture that took on a hearty mutation and new direction and after incubation and ponderance among many individuals is rising its’ head.
We need no labels, but we do need awareness, if we are to transcend the current serpentine hierarchy of control with its’ false flags of freedom, empathy and anarcho-meritocracy under which it aggressively infects, maligns and attempts to ‘own’ and thus censor every new growth of culture with its’ covert influence, contrived infiltration and complicit continuation of their monopolist values which celebrate denunciation of free thinking and original expression in favour of imitative, non-challenging, anti-cerebral, overtly commercial empty gesture and fake posturing.
That is what I was, (at the time unknowingly) trying to challenge by setting up a space in Brick Lane. I got out of train graffiti in 1989 and while still painting the odd piece I pursued the hallucinogenic mythical experimentation, as I re-emerged and hooked up with old comrades and certain old heroes who I now count as my friends, it confirmed my suspicions how much there was so much more to come from this dynamic still, how much was being ignored and deliberately censored, how we writers, far from the way they had been portrayed by the street art cartel were often the most intelligent, honest, open minded, poetic, enlightened and the most socially and politically aware.
All the things elements the collective wore on their sleeves as commercial false flags we carry in our heart as our life and purpose….
Any schism is not graffiti versus street art, it is of the authentic versus the synthetic, the individuals against the collective, freedom versus censorship, spirit versus mammon.
I attempted to escalate this spirit to the next logical level, into physical space, as an accidental by-product in my own search for somewhere real to show my own discoveries in paint, a place where the phenomenon that gave my work life and from which new ideas continually emerge, could be appreciated, contextualised and given due consideration for everything it was, is and will be for many years to come.
But such expression did nothing to glorify the cartel so was banned.
While I would not consider myself an Objectivist and would most definitely consider myself a proud (though discerning) altruist in opposition to many Randian thinkers, I maintain this speech given by Howard Rourke in the courtroom scene from The Fountainhead to be one of the most remarkable edicts of truth in the history of expression.
