Improvised spoken and music/noise performance. Presented 17th July 2018 at the Spread Eagle pub in Croydon as part of
Tempting Failure international festival of performance and noise.
It was an apocalyptically hot day. The streets smelled of drying piss. The
one-stringed instrument deployed via a harmoniser pedal is one that I made. The Blanket/robe I wore is covered in texts from the Bike Cemetery wall, surrounding a sigil derived therefrom. Below are some clearer images of it, from
Bad Blood, an improvised performance at "Frivolous Convulsions" show at Turf Gallery, Croydon 11 January 2018.
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| Bad Blood 2018. Photo: Pouya Mota, 2018 |
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| Bad Blood 2018. Photo: Pouya Mota, 2018 |
I am also wearing, of course, the titular
Mural Crown, which is essentially a representation of the walls of the polis that is placed on the head of an allegorical representation of that polis, or an aspect of it, often a tutelary deity. This was commonplace in the ancient world and persisted for many centuries when allegorical public sculptures were made.
I cannot now remember where I got the idea that this deity/personification was placed on the city walls whilst simultaneously wearing the city walls but I suspect it must have been somewhere in Marina Warner's excellent
Monuments and Maidens: the Allegory of the Female Form. In my view, this figure both supporting and being supported by the boundaries of the polis is a concrete illustration of the dual nature of example and exception: the exemplar and the outcast, as described by
Giorgio Agamben -
[...T]he exception is situated in a symmetrical position with respect to the example, with which it forms a system. Exception and example constitute the two modes by which a set tries to found and maintain its own coherence. But while the exception is, as we saw, an inclusive exclusion (which thus serves to include what is excluded), the example instead functions as an exclusive inclusion [...].
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| By Lonpicman - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12778930 |
Pictured above are some more recent(ish) examples of the mural crown. These are to be found on the Holborn Viaduct adorning allegorical representations of activities important to the city. In this case "Agriculture" and "Commerce".
Unsurprisingly, Brexit was much on everybody's mind at the time, including mine. Beyond the bare result, nothing much had happened at that point, but there was a lot of crap being talked about sovereignty - in the dual sense of that of the nation-state and of the individuals who chose to vote Leave. It was rather as if these two concepts had been fused; so the piece begins with a recording of Nigel Farage early in the morning of the day after the referendum when first reports came of a probable victory for Leave:
This […] will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people.
This remark gives an insight into the sort of fantasies at play in at least some quarters. "Reality" ("real people") is achieved insofar as subjects align with the “ordinary”, the supposedly familiar, yet unspoken, substrate of the social. This emblematic “real” was assigned by many national
haruspices to the “white working class”, a demographic supposedly hitherto ignored and despised, who were presented as being the core Leave-voting demographic. However, contrary to this fantasy,
Leave voters were not overwhelmingly Northerners and neither were they exclusively, or even mostly, working class. Why working class Northerners should be more "real" than anyone else was, of course, never explained any more than a clarification of what would actually constitute "realness" in a person was given or why this fantasy of the "Northern Working Class" should be exclusively white, for that matter. The purpose of this caricature was to enable numerous actors in the media/political class to ventriloquise this phantasm of an
ur-Brexit voter, to treat them (although a fantasy) as simultaneously, some sort of "left behind", or what Alberto Toscano calls
"non-synchronous people" whilst also being the avatars of some "real Britain": both abjected
residuum and elevated exemplars. That vast numbers of people have been thoroughly screwed over by the post-welfare statist, post-Fordist iteration of capitalism in the UK is undeniable. That they all voted fervently for Brexit is bullshit.
The piece was intended to allegorically combine the exemplary sovereignty of the (head of) state or the city walls - the boundaries that mark out the exception or provide a plinth for the exemplar - with the abjected subjectivity, space and time of the Bike Cemetery (hence the blanket/robe and the incongruous West Ham chant at the beginning). I wanted to present the paradoxical strands of (welfare statist) liberal democracy in confrontation with the supposed autonomy of the empty space of performance. The ambivalence Rimbaud expresses in the poem
Bad Blood towards both the bourgeois democratic society against and within which he lived with his role as artist whilst acknowledging the mutual complicity involved. This appeared apt to me at the time (and still does) so found their way into this and other pieces:
Not a single family in Europe I don’t know –– By that I mean families like mine, who owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man
As
Lauren Berlant remarked,
"[…t]here are no unmixed political feelings, there is no unambivalent potentiality for the social"; this is accurate and useful. The whole Brexit debate was at that time and as far as I know still is (I have given up all news and current events in disgust) marked by performative fervency on both sides; allowing no room for ambivalence about the EU or either staying in or leaving it. It was all pretty unedifying; a cartoon of politics. The whole thing looked and looks like the
denoument of a power struggle between two factions of the financialised ruling class, who called themselves "Leave" and "Remain" for convenience. A crucial aspect of liberal democracy, as we knew it and didn't exactly love it, was that ambivalence was a structural element to it.
