Hockney

I like David Hockney. He's no nonsense, down-to-earth. The BBC had a great doc about him last night and for 48 hours they've made available some "phone art" to download.

Out of all the British Pop Artists (of which he was one, more by default than anything else) he was the most "Pop". Not in the Peter Blake sense (Beatles album cover etc) but in his attitude. He loved the newness and freedom of 1960s America. His Splash paintings could've been done today. He's wry and dry like Alan Bennett - a Northern thing - but not parochial.

In Peter Whitehead's 1960s film, "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London", Hockney sits with a pair of glasses on that spell the word "Zoom" while discussing art and life. His portrait of Ossie Clark is the nation's favourite (official). He regularly appears on radio slagging the anti-smoking laws by "mealy-mouthed do-gooders". He's not afraid of technology and just having a go at things. He's a bundle of fun. And honesty. Qualities sorely lacking in our public figures. Wacko Jacko? Pah. Hockney's a true artist.

Sixties Photo Exhibition

John “Hoppy” Hopkins, Idea Generation Gallery, London, June 2009.

Hoppy’s the biggest hippy you’ve never heard of. His is not the Daily Mail version of the Sixties with minis, Twiggy and World Cup ’66. He pretty much started the counter-culture in Sixties London. Now, he’d be called a social entrepreneur. Then, he was a face about town. Making things happen. He knew everybody. He set up Europe’s first underground newspaper (International Times) and psychedelic club (UFO). He gave out copies of a groovy address book: sheets of Gestetnered paper, stapled together with names of cool folk for like-minded souls, like a lo-fi Internet. He set up the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream at Ally Pally, the UK’s own version of the Acid Tests. He was busted and sent to jail on the day Sgt Pepper was released. The judge called him, “a menace to Society”.

He also took photos that paid his way in the early days. Some are well known (Beatles, Stones, usual suspects) but others are street scenes, a drug deal, prostitutes, tattooist, bikers, CND demos, Jazzmen. The subculture, before it was called that.

His eye was great. Hoppy says it was all intuition and instinct. He’s a Cambridge physics and maths graduate so the tech-y bit was easy. The basics, like composition, are there too. It’s his ease with the snapshot moment that impresses. Shapes and faces look as fresh as when he hit the shutter. But also, timeless. Grey, dirty, bombed out, early Sixties London looks almost Victorian and strangely “now”. Perhaps it’s because we don’t normally see pictures like that from the Sixties. It wasn’t all a swirly-coloured Love-in.

Familiar places and faces you think you know appear different. They startle. Compared to the routinely rolled out stock images of the period, their unfamiliarity makes us see things anew. The Jazz pictures are glorious. Close-ups of Monk’s hands. Ornette Coleman blowing blissfully. (Coleman stayed with Hoppy on his first UK tour in 1965 and by coincidence is in town for Meltdown). The Stones at Ally Pally in 1964 look gorgeous: Brian Jones with his back to the crowd and light breaking through the huge circular window. Ringo staring blankly; John smoking a fag. Marriane smiling. Martin Luther King, close-up, thinking.

It’s all here. The Idea Generation have done a great job hanging and getting the word out. This collection and Hoppy’s archive are an untapped source of wonder. His version of events goes much deeper than received wisdom.

The Sixties will exert a much bigger pull as decades go by. Everything “normal’ today kicked off then. And, sadly, it’ll be a while before the sheer joy and innocence and innovation of that era roams the planet again, if ever. Until then, work like Hoppy’s gives us, and future generations, a beautiful glimpse into that Time and Place. Far out.  

Mick Jones Rock n Roll Library

Mick Jones’ Rock n Roll Library,

Chelsea Art Space. April 2009.

Mick Jones was in The Clash. For boys of a certain age, ahem, this bestows on him Godlike status. I loved The Clash and they are still the best band I’ve ever seen live. But that’s not important right now.

Mick as a form of protest against the British Music Experience at the O2– the Starbucking of British Rock – has put on display a tenth of his Acton lock-up. Thus we get old Clash flight cases, books, real-time Punk fanzines, videos, scribbled notes, shirts, toys, guitars, movie posters, mix tapes and ephemera from a Lifetime.

Mr Jones says all the artefacts go some way to explain where he came from and who he is. A lot of it will be familiar to anybody born before 1980 and had even a smidge of interest beyond the mainstream. A time before all our groovy, modern ways of accessing culture, when John Peel and the NME were pretty much the only ways of learning about the world, beyond whatever small part of the UK you lived in.

Is it Art though? Does the fact it’s on display in a “proper” Art space confer Art-ness. And if it wasn’t Mick’s stuff would it mean anything? OK, I’m Fan Boy but I think it transcends its Clash-ness. As an exercise in cultural rippling, blending nostalgia with the here-and-now, it’s like a giant scrapbook or Pop Art installation. Images that were transient, temporary, fleeting now resonate against eachother. Calling up ghosts at once familiar but intangible. Memories bubbling up from the cortex.

So, yeah, it was kinda Art-y. It had that Thing-ness about it. You know, form and content, the thing itself and then what the thing represents, or could represent to whomever, depending. All that Art critic malarkey.

Mick wants to create a proper library where people could look at stuff or just hold it for a while, use it for reference or just shits and giggles. Coz in 100 years most stuff like this will be lost or in land fill. The “everyday” in this collection will one day tell us more about yesterday and today. Bit like Art.

 

Jack Kerouac article (pub. Garageland)

The following piece I wrote after seeing Jack Kerouac's scroll for On The Road and published in art magazine Garageland

The Scroll.

Institute Of Fine Art, Birmingham. 6 January 2009.

Searching for Satori, I find myself standing in the small room housing about 20 feet of Kerouac’s Scroll, unrolled. The original manuscript for On The Road. He wrote it, non-stop, over three weeks in 1951, in New York, the Benzedrine rush of writing apparently fuelled solely by caffeine and cigarettes. Over the years I’ve collected Beat literature, studied the period and count Carolyn Cassady as a friend. I’d heard about the manuscript even before I read the finished book, and now after all these years, like some latter day pilgrim looking for saintly bones I’m in the same room with it.

The actual writing aside, this is The Source. The birth of the Counter Culture. A stepping stone to our world today. Context is all and, though some of the book reads as dated, it’s a time-bomb from an age where The Man was installing onto a bland post-war cultural landscape his vision of how things should be. Kerouac saw the world as it could be. Freedom of the Self and, yes, the Soul.

He came to abhor the hippy revolution which came next. But in this one book he unlocked minds. Not just with wild, yea-saying tales of madness and kicks but with his knowledge that the world is a beautiful place and God (for want of a better word) lives within us all.

Just as Kerouac felt sad that nobody takes the time to describe early morning dew on top of a fence post anymore, I wonder which modern day tale is able to speak to us like On The Road? I imagine in centuries to come people will read Kerouac anew and marvel at how and why he did it. For now, this fragile document, splattered with his pencil notes, sitting in a university building in the middle of England, is a time machine back to the man himself, sitting in New York all those years ago changing his life and ours. Respect.