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Anger in Angrael
Mar. 10th, 2004 10:52 amOn the way to and from Sweden I have a few hours between planes in London. Since the Iraq war I've been lumping Britain, America and Israel together in my mind and calling them Angrael. Angrael is the Anglo-American-Israeli alliance. Angrael is a place I've left, and a place I consider to be 'living wrong', but I'm always fascinated to go back for a glimpse, to guage whether it's changing, and in what ways.
Angrael is 'living wrong' mainly because of Judeo-Christianity, but also because of Capitalism. Christianity is a form of world-hating asceticism which, as Max Weber showed in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was turned by capitalism into 'worldly asceticism'. Capitalism didn't teach us to love the things that Christianity taught us to hate, merely to market them. The results are what we see in the England and America of today (a celebrated and persecuted homosexual once called this 'knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing'): a mistrust of the textures and pleasures of life -- time, food, the feminine, the childish, the body, sex (that's the asceticism part) -- combined with a paradoxical expertise in marketing simulacra of, and substitutes for, these things (that's the worldliness part).
Here are some snapshots of the new and not-so-new ways Anglo-Angrael manifested itself to me on just two short days between planes:
Big signs addressed to asylum-seekers at Stansted airport. Basically saying 'Watch it!' and signed by HM Government and (less visibly) the Daily Mail.
Men on the underground reading a new lad mag called the Zoo Weekly. All I can glimpse is a photo of six women in a circle squishing their breasts together against a pane of glass.
The back page of the Sun has someone called Neville (presumably a football manager) calling a team 'a bunch of girls'. Another paper quotes him as saying the team weren't 'real men'.
A new cooking show on BBC2, Rick Stein's Food Heroes. Stein seems to be on a mission to educate the British away from their asceticism. His message, as he travels around Britain talking to 'small producers who value quality above profit', is that food is a pleasure, and that the super marketing of the supermarket system is actually decreasing our chance of enjoying tasty, interesting and varied food. The French and the Japanese would completely agree, and have protected their small producers and retailers against the ravages of capitalism. But it isn't a French or Japanese person telling the British the error of their ways. It's a British Jew (Rick himself is still an asylum-seeker of sorts: he says on the BBC website 'I've lived in Padstow for about 36 years. As I always say, I'm never going to be a local!'). I find that culturally very telling. British people listen to someone Jewish telling them to enjoy life much more than they'd listen to someone French or Japanese (and on British TV there's a long tradition of this: Lloyd Grossman, the Freuds, the Theroux). It's also possible that Jews see the limitations of Angrael more clearly than anyone else. Perhaps they even feel some degree of responsibility. 'We got you into this ascetic mess,' they seem to be saying, 'but we can get you out of it too.' Like Marx or Freud, Rick Stein can correct some of the mistakes we made when we imported Jewish ideology like the Ten Commandments, but got it all out of context, got it wrong, went too far with it.
The next thing I notice in Britain is a piece of graffiti on Piccadilly that just says 'Blair Out'. It's the first time I've seen that phrase, but I haven't been in Angrael much since the war.
After that, the next thing I notice is an exhibition called State of Play at the Serpentine Gallery. Play is a big theme with me, a corrective to the ambient asceticism and hypocritical moralism and marketing and pluricide and nannying. This great little show is about what I call Cute Formalism, and what Pat Kane calls The Play Ethic. Here at the Serpentine it's all about the tendency of people like Sarah Sze and Martin Creed to use humour and humble materials in their work. Play, like cookery, corrects the puritanism of Angrael but even here a note of caution has to be sounded: never forget the Social Services are watching! The warning comes in a piece by David Shrigley consisting of two table tennis bats (one small, one big) and two balls. The small bat is marked 'Your parents'. The big one is marked 'The Social Services'. The balls, suspended between them, are marked 'You' and 'Your wee sister'.
The next thing I notice happening in Angrael is a Jewish-American photographer getting all panicky at the Photographer's Gallery. She's Betsy Schneider and she's sitting there in the cafe (where I'm chewing a rather dismal British sandwich) talking to journalists on two cellphones and consulting with two other women on what statements to make. Schneider has been caught up in a typically Angraeli farrago. Her exhibition at the Spitz Gallery in Spitalfields Market has been closed just a day after opening because it contains photographs of a naked child: her daughter Madeleine, aged 5. One visitor saw another visitor taking photos of the photo. A complaint was made to the gallery staff, who, terrified of being sued or closed down, draped Schneider's pictures (or should we call them 'graven idols'?) with pieces of cloth and called in the police. After questioning her, the police decided Schneider's photos were lawful.
It turns out that Schneider, who lives in Norway, has had a history of problems with British photo labs, who consistently blow the whistle on people bringing them photos of naked children. The Guardian reports that 'three years ago a student of hers had some nude photos developed and processing staff reported her to the police. She in turn mentioned her teacher's work and Schneider was visited by a child protection team. She managed to prove it was an artistic project and no more action was taken. Sally Mann, for whom Schneider acted as live-in assistant from 1993-95, was subject to threats over her nude photos of children, and Schneider admits it occurred to her that her show, Inventory, could cause some upset.' The next day The Guardian added that Schneider was also arrested after having pictures of a naked Madeleine developed in a laboratory in Soho, but was released without charge. O Angrael, our home and native land!
In a country which cannot deal with beauty except to see it as sin, and which regards images of naked children as sexual by default, this sort of skirmish happens with depressing frequency. The Guardian reminds its readers that 'three years ago, police were called to the Saatchi gallery in north-west London when the question of indecency was raised in connection with photographs by the American Tierney Gearon of her young children in various states of undress. The Gearon case was resolved when Chris Smith, the then culture secretary, intervened on the gallery's behalf with a brisk lecture to the police about censorship. Much of the furore had been got up, with characteristically synthetic moral outrage, by the News of the World.' I think it's relevant to point out that Chris Smith is gay. Light comes to benighted Angrael in the form of liberal jews and gays.
Having been an artist in Angrael myself, I know the temptation to play Marylin Manson-type games of provocation with the press. What better way to use and ruse the great central Angraeli paradox, asceticism combined with worldliness, than to turn puritanism into marketing? How better to turn Angrael's problematic greens (vegetables, children, nature, diversity) into its unproblematic greens (money and the Jealous God)?
Someone who did just that, and lived to laugh last, is back. Genesis P-Orridge, chased out of Britain in a tabloid-and-police Satanic abuse scandal in the early 90s, reforms Throbbing Gristle for an event called RE-TG taking place between the 14th and 16th of May at the appropriately dismal, British-sounding Camber Sands Holiday Centre in East Sussex. There are, of course, site-specific installations by Jake and Dinos Chapman. No doubt they'll turn the centre into a vast Auschwitz-McDonald's internment camp where naked children are fed to asylum seekers. My friend Scanner is there too, and rare Derek Jarman films will be screened.
I'm not quite sure if Re-TG is a refusal of Angraeli values or a darkside celebration of them. It's all Hieronymous Bosch to me. Once upon a time I might have given a damn about the hang-ups of this little island, the left side of the Angrael triangle, where Jerusalem is always being built on whatever green space the dark, satanic mills can spare. First you get 'industry' then you get 'a celebration of industrial music in the 21st century'. First you get 'children should been seen and not heard' then you get 'every naked child a porn star'. Disgust with life leads to marketing, marketing leads to disgust with life. Once upon a time my anger at Angrael might have driven me to seek revenge, and revenge might have been publicity, and publicity might have integrated me, paradoxically, into the national story, and towards exactly such gatherings as Re-TG, this 'coalition of the willful'. Not any more. Life is too short and too good. I will be elsewhere, enjoying it, playing, and trying to learn from people who know that better than I do. Children, homosexuals and foreigners, mostly.
Angrael is 'living wrong' mainly because of Judeo-Christianity, but also because of Capitalism. Christianity is a form of world-hating asceticism which, as Max Weber showed in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was turned by capitalism into 'worldly asceticism'. Capitalism didn't teach us to love the things that Christianity taught us to hate, merely to market them. The results are what we see in the England and America of today (a celebrated and persecuted homosexual once called this 'knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing'): a mistrust of the textures and pleasures of life -- time, food, the feminine, the childish, the body, sex (that's the asceticism part) -- combined with a paradoxical expertise in marketing simulacra of, and substitutes for, these things (that's the worldliness part).
Here are some snapshots of the new and not-so-new ways Anglo-Angrael manifested itself to me on just two short days between planes:
Big signs addressed to asylum-seekers at Stansted airport. Basically saying 'Watch it!' and signed by HM Government and (less visibly) the Daily Mail.
Men on the underground reading a new lad mag called the Zoo Weekly. All I can glimpse is a photo of six women in a circle squishing their breasts together against a pane of glass.
The back page of the Sun has someone called Neville (presumably a football manager) calling a team 'a bunch of girls'. Another paper quotes him as saying the team weren't 'real men'.
A new cooking show on BBC2, Rick Stein's Food Heroes. Stein seems to be on a mission to educate the British away from their asceticism. His message, as he travels around Britain talking to 'small producers who value quality above profit', is that food is a pleasure, and that the super marketing of the supermarket system is actually decreasing our chance of enjoying tasty, interesting and varied food. The French and the Japanese would completely agree, and have protected their small producers and retailers against the ravages of capitalism. But it isn't a French or Japanese person telling the British the error of their ways. It's a British Jew (Rick himself is still an asylum-seeker of sorts: he says on the BBC website 'I've lived in Padstow for about 36 years. As I always say, I'm never going to be a local!'). I find that culturally very telling. British people listen to someone Jewish telling them to enjoy life much more than they'd listen to someone French or Japanese (and on British TV there's a long tradition of this: Lloyd Grossman, the Freuds, the Theroux). It's also possible that Jews see the limitations of Angrael more clearly than anyone else. Perhaps they even feel some degree of responsibility. 'We got you into this ascetic mess,' they seem to be saying, 'but we can get you out of it too.' Like Marx or Freud, Rick Stein can correct some of the mistakes we made when we imported Jewish ideology like the Ten Commandments, but got it all out of context, got it wrong, went too far with it.
The next thing I notice in Britain is a piece of graffiti on Piccadilly that just says 'Blair Out'. It's the first time I've seen that phrase, but I haven't been in Angrael much since the war.
After that, the next thing I notice is an exhibition called State of Play at the Serpentine Gallery. Play is a big theme with me, a corrective to the ambient asceticism and hypocritical moralism and marketing and pluricide and nannying. This great little show is about what I call Cute Formalism, and what Pat Kane calls The Play Ethic. Here at the Serpentine it's all about the tendency of people like Sarah Sze and Martin Creed to use humour and humble materials in their work. Play, like cookery, corrects the puritanism of Angrael but even here a note of caution has to be sounded: never forget the Social Services are watching! The warning comes in a piece by David Shrigley consisting of two table tennis bats (one small, one big) and two balls. The small bat is marked 'Your parents'. The big one is marked 'The Social Services'. The balls, suspended between them, are marked 'You' and 'Your wee sister'.
The next thing I notice happening in Angrael is a Jewish-American photographer getting all panicky at the Photographer's Gallery. She's Betsy Schneider and she's sitting there in the cafe (where I'm chewing a rather dismal British sandwich) talking to journalists on two cellphones and consulting with two other women on what statements to make. Schneider has been caught up in a typically Angraeli farrago. Her exhibition at the Spitz Gallery in Spitalfields Market has been closed just a day after opening because it contains photographs of a naked child: her daughter Madeleine, aged 5. One visitor saw another visitor taking photos of the photo. A complaint was made to the gallery staff, who, terrified of being sued or closed down, draped Schneider's pictures (or should we call them 'graven idols'?) with pieces of cloth and called in the police. After questioning her, the police decided Schneider's photos were lawful.
It turns out that Schneider, who lives in Norway, has had a history of problems with British photo labs, who consistently blow the whistle on people bringing them photos of naked children. The Guardian reports that 'three years ago a student of hers had some nude photos developed and processing staff reported her to the police. She in turn mentioned her teacher's work and Schneider was visited by a child protection team. She managed to prove it was an artistic project and no more action was taken. Sally Mann, for whom Schneider acted as live-in assistant from 1993-95, was subject to threats over her nude photos of children, and Schneider admits it occurred to her that her show, Inventory, could cause some upset.' The next day The Guardian added that Schneider was also arrested after having pictures of a naked Madeleine developed in a laboratory in Soho, but was released without charge. O Angrael, our home and native land!
In a country which cannot deal with beauty except to see it as sin, and which regards images of naked children as sexual by default, this sort of skirmish happens with depressing frequency. The Guardian reminds its readers that 'three years ago, police were called to the Saatchi gallery in north-west London when the question of indecency was raised in connection with photographs by the American Tierney Gearon of her young children in various states of undress. The Gearon case was resolved when Chris Smith, the then culture secretary, intervened on the gallery's behalf with a brisk lecture to the police about censorship. Much of the furore had been got up, with characteristically synthetic moral outrage, by the News of the World.' I think it's relevant to point out that Chris Smith is gay. Light comes to benighted Angrael in the form of liberal jews and gays.
Having been an artist in Angrael myself, I know the temptation to play Marylin Manson-type games of provocation with the press. What better way to use and ruse the great central Angraeli paradox, asceticism combined with worldliness, than to turn puritanism into marketing? How better to turn Angrael's problematic greens (vegetables, children, nature, diversity) into its unproblematic greens (money and the Jealous God)?
Someone who did just that, and lived to laugh last, is back. Genesis P-Orridge, chased out of Britain in a tabloid-and-police Satanic abuse scandal in the early 90s, reforms Throbbing Gristle for an event called RE-TG taking place between the 14th and 16th of May at the appropriately dismal, British-sounding Camber Sands Holiday Centre in East Sussex. There are, of course, site-specific installations by Jake and Dinos Chapman. No doubt they'll turn the centre into a vast Auschwitz-McDonald's internment camp where naked children are fed to asylum seekers. My friend Scanner is there too, and rare Derek Jarman films will be screened.
I'm not quite sure if Re-TG is a refusal of Angraeli values or a darkside celebration of them. It's all Hieronymous Bosch to me. Once upon a time I might have given a damn about the hang-ups of this little island, the left side of the Angrael triangle, where Jerusalem is always being built on whatever green space the dark, satanic mills can spare. First you get 'industry' then you get 'a celebration of industrial music in the 21st century'. First you get 'children should been seen and not heard' then you get 'every naked child a porn star'. Disgust with life leads to marketing, marketing leads to disgust with life. Once upon a time my anger at Angrael might have driven me to seek revenge, and revenge might have been publicity, and publicity might have integrated me, paradoxically, into the national story, and towards exactly such gatherings as Re-TG, this 'coalition of the willful'. Not any more. Life is too short and too good. I will be elsewhere, enjoying it, playing, and trying to learn from people who know that better than I do. Children, homosexuals and foreigners, mostly.