Variations on Disturbance: Mark E Smith the Past/Future Roman Totale by Olly Beck

1. The Outsider

‘I wanted to write out of the song. I wanted to explore, to put a twist on the normal. People think of themselves too much as one person – they don’t know what to do with the other people that enter their heads’

 Mark E. Smith, 2008

‘Someone's always on my tracks

 In a dark room you’d see more than you think

 I'm out of my place, got to get back

 I sweated a lot, you could feel the violence

 I've got shears pointed straight at my chest

 And time moves slow when you count it

 I'm better than them, and I think I'm the best

 But I'll appear at midnight when the films close’

 Frightened, Live at the Witch Trials, Smith/Bramah, 1979

The Fall are one of those rarefied bands I’ve always turned to whenever I start to feel complacent or indifferent or even seduced by the mainstream establishment-led value system or the ‘English Scheme’ as Marc E Smith once wrote it. A working class autodidact, part of Smith’s legacy will be his masterly toying with identity politics and the middle class paradigm which fuels this ‘set up’. In its current guise in these times of austerity, caused by people obsessed by too much wealth, we are invited to gawp in disgust or fear at poverty ridden, drug addled ‘chavs’ in television programmes commissioned by successful TV executives who often themselves appear to have risen to the heights of middle-classness from humble beginnings. That Smith riles against (but at the same revels in) this type of stereotyping is nothing new, it was part of the Punk ethic from which The Fall erupted. But whereas most of those Punk originators were tamed and subsumed into the system, The Fall as orchestrated and organised by Smith, resisted.                    

Smith’s dogged sense of self, refused to be flattened by the media saturated world he operated in. He was on its case to the point of pedantic annoyance. Fully aware of the pits and falls of the cultural system, he chose an ethic of hard unforgiving experimental graft to bring us more than forty years of music that now that he’s gone off to other complicated universes brings yet another reminder that our culture is rescinding itself in the name of some non-alignment global pact about obsessions and addictions to the rise and fall of the dollar, yen, sterling, bitcoin and all the rest of the capitalist led orientations of this neoliberal era. That Smith wasn’t interested in more than just enough money was very clear given his deliberately chosen trajectory into musical success which he filtered in terms of his beliefs rather than sell out his vision.

I doubt he would have agreed with what I’ve just written about him. But that was always the problem with Smith; he was difficult to pin down, forever the contrarian with an acute sense of cutting through the bullshit.     

2. In Your Area

‘You've got comics in full bloom

 McCarthy reincarnates soon

 See the bones on the two-way faces

 The me generation

 See the traces of

 The madness in my area’

 In My Area, Totale’s Turns, Scanlan/Riley/Smith/Pawlett, 1980

I crossed paths with him once in the late 1990’s. He was walking down West End Lane towards Maida Vale probably on his way to another intense Peel recording session. He had this grimace that was simultaneously hilarious. He hated London, which he saw as full of mercenary eyes. Prophetic or not, he was right to be cynical about the capital. What should have been, and once was a bohemian and affordable place to live was fast becoming overpriced and gentrified. A new breed of property speculators and the rise of the rentier class were moving in on all over us like a disease, leading us to the frankly criminal state of affairs which is the London I live in today. Not that this gentrification is confined to the south, it has spread even to Smith’s hometown of Prestwich: ‘Gentrification happens so quick, it happens here. This pub used to be a bit of a rough house, and you get these middle class fellas coming in with baby’s round their neck. And that’s their idea of austerity, coming in here!’[i]

Back in 1985, I picked up my first Fall album ‘The Wonderful and Frightening World of…’ The opening track Lay of the Land, with its part-gothic, part-psychobilly sonic sensibility across which are lain seemingly potty lyrics vocalised by a sardonic northerner had me transfixed. Later, at art college, when given a visual diary project to be put to music I took my 35mm camera loaded with slide film and documented my first semi-conscious drift/dérive around the liminal bad land spaces of my suburban hometown on the outer edges of North London and used Lay of the Land as the soundtrack. These were spaces that attracted a multitude of turpitudes from the lighter side of illicit sex, teenage parties, drug taking and gang fighting to the sites of much darker misdemeanours which were all too often places which bisected the former zones of innocence deflowered. 

I didn’t think much of the results of my work, but it was cathartic given my own disturbed familial beginnings in life and the random unsituated violence which regularly haunted my neighbourhood. I certainly didn’t know anything about the likes of Guy Debord, Ivan Chtcheglov and the Situationist International at that stage.

Instead The Fall had given me access to a sense of evocation via Smith’s sense of an urban psychedelic exorcism drawn from his fascination with esoteric/visionary writers such as Arthur Machen, Malcom Lowry, H.P. Lovecraft and Philip K Dick. It was apparently from Machen that Smith drew his alter-ego Roman Totale XVII, a rebellious figure drawn  to the outside mysterium of the Welsh Mountains from an urban fiery within: ‘Machen’s style of writing horror and the supernatural into everyday occurrences, especially urban metropolitan settings, is echoed in The Fall’s urban gothic. The horror is located under the surface of things.’[ii]

Roman Totale surfaces prominently in the opus  ‘The N.W.R.A’ (The North Will Rise Again) wearing an ostrich headdress, covered in tentacles, his face a mess and dwelling underground, screwed over by a dubious local businessman called Tony. In Mark Fisher’s brilliantly perceived essay exploring the influence of pulp modernism on Smith’s writing Fisher observes: ‘Lovecraft is the exemplar here: his tales and novellas could in the end no longer be apprehended as discrete texts but as part-objects forming a mythos-space which other writers could explore and extend. The form of ‘The N.W.R.A’ is as alien to organic wholeness as Totale’s abominable tentacular body. It is a grotesque concoction, a collage of pieces that do not belong together.’[iii] Fisher’s reading (a reading he readily admits to being  just that, rather than some definitive understanding of Smith’s trademark lyrical jouissance) sees Totale’s failed redemption as standing for a North unable to re-establish its former glory whether Victorian or ancient, suppressed by its own nouveau riche aspirations: ‘More than a matter of regional railing against the capital, in Smith’s vision the North comes to stand for everything supressed by urbane good taste: the esoteric, the anomalous, the vulgar sublime, that is the Weird and Grotesque itself.’[iv]

Smith’s lyrics and his deliverance of them have a schizophrenic quality echoing another key influence in William S. Burroughs cut-up technique. Here Smith is attracted to the daily pulp of magazines and newspapers: ‘I like crap, me. The local advertiser and all that. The rubbish that’s written in there is quite fascinating. Free newspapers, the Metro and all that shit.’[v] This mixing up of the literary arcane with the throwaway mundane, the ‘high’ and the ‘low’ interjected  with Smith’s tetchy often humorous social realism is what makes repeated listening to The Fall so absorbing and challenging.                      

3. Futures/Pasts

‘I was in a sleeping dream

 When a policeman brought my mother home

 By the window I didn't scream

 I was too old for that

 I was in a drunken dream

 The pubs were closed

 It was three o'clock

 At the bottom of the street it seemed

 There was a policeman lost in the fog’

 Futures and Pasts, Live at the Witch Trials, Smith/Bramah, 1979

But with all the fascination about Smith’s cantankerous personality as the grouchy double-talking outsider as well as the Dadaist approach to meaning and performativity it’s his poetic ability that is left wanting. The song Futures and Pasts is an exquisitely paired down encapsulation of suburban dysfunction using a dream state saturated with fog and booze overseen by an inadequate authority figure where memory slips uneasily between the present, past and an implied future. Bill is Dead from Extricate is a celebratory love song like no other, while The Reckoning from Middle Class Revolt is one of the most reassuring and upliftingly defiant songs about unrequited love I’ve ever heard. The opening track Alton Towers on Imperial Wax Solvent finds Smith crooning like a deranged stalker against what could be a seedy Tom Waits style jazz meander – although it has been speculated that it was actually inspired by Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. Before the lyrics descend into chaotic clipped asides comes:

‘Grey

 Decline

 In excelcis

 And the waves

 Through the slits

 In San Rocco

 Look very different

 And are no longer any way sublime’

 Alton Towers, Imperial Wax Solvent, Smith/Spurr, 2008

4. Dictaphone Man/Lost in Music

In a long overdue but already old essay on musical experimentation as a tactical anti-establishment component employed by The Fall, Robert Walker points us towards what he calls ‘dictaphonics’.[vi] The use of lo-fi recording equipment such as dictation and home tape recorders (in the studio or out in the ‘field’) as well as Smith’s penchant for projecting his voice through guitar amps, megaphones and anything else which conveys a sense of dissemblance, is designed to disrupt ‘the acoustic, spatial, and temporal complacency of the established rock formula.’

It is also used more uniquely as a key compositional device. The haunting, oppressive sounding Spectre vs. Rector from the 1979 album Dragnet opens with the band recorded as though we are listening to them muffled and drifting up from some hellish basement: ‘The intentional muddiness of the ghost band that Smith sings over in the first part of Spectre vs. Rector is then wrenched away by the real band, an opportunity to use the claustrophobic squall of replayed sound to act like a character lurking in the space of the record. The fact that the two versions sit over each other uncomfortably adds to the songs dank atmosphere. The unflattering acoustic helps convey a sense of otherness because its tonal quality is outside of our own expectations of a piece of music.’[vii] 

Walker counts at least fifty songs from The Fall’s output which use dictaphonic insertions with varying degrees of prominence, approach and affect. The most recognisable being Smith’s use of the Dictaphone to create multiple voices emanating from the same person (himself) as a way of exploring his fascination with multiple identities and splintered personalities. And perhaps it is in this bi-polar way that John Peel’s much loved proclamation that The Fall are ‘always different, always the same’ might be understood.  

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[i] Mark E Smith, louderthanwar.com/mark-e-smith-final-interview/, July 2017

[ii] Mark Goodall, Salford Drift: A Psychogeography of The Fall, Mark E Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ed. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Routledge, 2016, p48

[iii] Mark Fisher, Memorex for the Krakens: The Fall’s Pulp Modernism, Ibid, p105

[iv] Ibid, p105

[v] Mark E Smith, thequietus.com/articles/07465-mark-e-smith-interview-the-fall, November 2011

[vi] Robert Walker, ‘Dictaphonics’: Acoustics and Primitive Recording in the Music of The Fall, Mark E Smith and The Fall: Art, Music and Politics, Ed. Michael Goddard and Benjamin Halligan, Routledge, 2016

[vii] Ibid, p80 :Walker sites the influence of musique concrete here (John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer et al) but also fellow mavericks like Brion Gysin, Burroughs and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

Text by Olly Beck 2018

On The Road Again

This 48 X 44cm painting was called The Painter on the Road to Tarascon and it's been missing since April 1945. Vincent van Gogh painted it in 1988, the same year he completed his famous Sunflowers painting. 

Vincent van Gogh was born in The Netherlands in 1883. When Vincent was 20 (a year after the photo above was taken) he came to live in the  U.K. He stayed in Brixton in South London and then Ramsgate in Kent. In 1886 he tried living in Auvers-sur-Oise, just outside Paris, he produced one finished painting every day for 73 days. Vincent then moved to Arles where he wanted to set up an artist's colony with his friend Paul Gauguin. 

In 1957 Francis Bacon based a series of paintings on reproductions of Vincent's On The Road to Tarascon. Bacon said in an interview that the painting haunted him and also claimed to love a letter Vincent sent to his brother Theo that included the line "real painters don't paint things as they are - they paint them as they themselves feel them to be."

(Above: Kes Richardson and Harry Pye at Rose Wylie's studio in Kent in January, 2015.)

 Artist/curator Harry Pye had the idea for the "On The Road Again" project in 2014. Since that time several great artists have said they'd love to make a transcription of the painting to replace the missing Vincent one. Amongst the artists on board are Chantal Joffe, Phoebe Unwin, Billy Childish, Dominic Kennedy, Kes Richardson, and Rose Wylie. 

Franz Ferdinand - The Brighton Dome 26th Feb 2018 by Mikey Georgeson

Radically Inclusive Pop

or

A triumphant display of creative originality gives reviewer cause for hope.

Franz Ferdinand as seen from the balcony of the Brighton Dome 26/02/18

Apologies in advance if this concert review is skewed by my specific interests but the benefit of sharing personal peculiarities is rather the point. In a recent interview the members of Franz Ferdinand described a desire to make a record they could imagine people listening to today. Today being the future we always imagined. It’s curiously apt that the Modernists who inspired much of FFs visual imagery conspired to drive culture into a cul-de-sac where original individual creativity was no longer relevant or thought to be genuinely possible. Normally when you hear statements like the above from a band it’s a cue for the Les Frères Chemical to remix your almost finished songs but in this case its peculiar because A) I think they meant it and B) they seem to have achieved it.  Achieved it if you subscribe to a rather old idea of the future currently gaining traction amongst critical theorists and athletics coaches*. I’m referring to A. N. Whitehead’s call to frame life as organic event rather than fixed object in his book Process and Reality. Central to this is the idea that individual creativity is a strange and dislocated thing. In ontological terms he sees life as becoming rather than the artfully quirky state of being (hip) seen through the bottom of a coke bottle. In parallel to the commercialisation of individuality the problem with Modernism’s idea of creativity as the “new” was that everything ended up being a manifesto of an idea of the “new” rather than original in the true germinal sense of the word. This is mirrored in pop music’s tension between repetition and a quest for nascent originality. During my attendance at the concert with my Wife and two sons I realised this entanglement was richly and generously played out in every Franz Ferdinand song.

A lot of people and artists (!) are wary of theoretical discourse around arts and culture. I think this is because they think, perhaps justifiably, that it ruins the experience of the music or the artefact. It’s ironic then that a lot of really helpful theory surrounds the idea that original creativity can free us from the stasis of a patriarchal culture where consumerist forces convert creativity into just another ersatz chunk of monetary power. I’m thinking largely of Deleuze and Guattari’s pragmatic calling for a “local engagement that can be the only condition of resistance the only condition by which resistance may create a new cosmos.”

I think some bands joyfully retain this idiosyncratic localness thereby force cultivating an explosive engagement in their audience. This localness is about rendering subjective singularities before they are congealed into recognisable and repeatable forms. Franz Ferdinand are one such local band. In this light their peculiarities are not adopted mannerisms but part of a heart-felt desire to create something new. By this I don’t mean a synthesis of existing elements (see mash-up) but something non-repeatable. The trouble is that somnambulistic UX culture lulled creatives (humans) into thinking that “its all been done” as if local strangeness counts for nothing. At the end of the 20^th Century we all became the “girl with the mousy hair”. Deleuze argues that genuine originality in art can return us to a Nietzschean innocence of becoming. This is the child’s wide-eyed vision of the eternal return. Or as Simon O’Sullivan says in the intro to Deleuze and Guattari, “The new is an outside that exists within this world”. The problem is, and I get the feeling this is what new FF song Huck and Jim addresses, is that pop music, like fashion, relies upon repetition of the idea of something new rather than something authentically new or local.  The lyric,

 “We're going to America

We're gonna tell them about the NHS” 

is really about the dangers of turning genuine issues into an emblematic form of status creation.  

So all this is my way of saying that the Franz Ferdinand gig at The Brighton Dome was both sonically amazing and a reason for hope. They may not want me to pin my hopes on them for changing the cosmos but it is these pockets of creative searching that will help us find a way out through the clearing.  There’s something to be said for hearing music very loud that helps you feel it in a transformative state. The meaning is delivered through affect rather than a reading of the signifiers (words) embedded in the form (music). Affect is a process and this follows the trajectory of transformation. Our progressive culture has been built upon the fixed separation of objective truth. According to Deleuze we need is a way of living in fluid entanglement. Always Ascending starts the set like a rave at the beginning of time

“It's just the way that gravity works round here

 All slowly rising, falling patiently …”

This music is highly melodic and harmonious and yet makes a whole new sense when experienced at high volume. The band themselves build a performance around this equation.  What became clear is the manner in which the songs are soothing and seductive but continually wriggle free of the standardised pop structure. They stutter and shift and make stomach-lurching skips but somehow retain a sense of flow. They do not make their “difficultness” into an equivalence of uniqueness but instead manifest a creative search for something that is novel and also as if we’ve always known it – as opposed to an ironic repetition of what everyone already knows. This kind of song-writing is about trying to shape your creativity into something engaging without endangering its germinal energy or betraying its process by turning it into a signifier for awkwardness.  So here is the Deleuzian point that only genuine and original creativity can critically engage with our times – as opposed to emblematic symbols of dissent.  If you listen to more than one FF song you will experience a specificity which is beyond an algorithmic equation. Going back to the band’s desire to make a music for now I would say this is about shifting our idea of progress. Innovation has been co-opted by market forces that insist upon repetition through familiarity. What I heard at the FF concert was a joyful and inclusive sharing of pop-music as a space for autopoesis or what Nancy calls “being singular plural”. Pop music has historically been a format for rebellion and political dissent but in time this itself becomes another poster child for freedom. By contrast, from a Deleuzian point of view creativity as propaganda betrays itself and transformation can come from

“Art’s ability to construct new sensations, unheard, unseen and altogether in human affects that marks it out as a force for genuine invention and resistance”

Adorno hated pop music’s drive to turn art into a repeatable commodity but I grew up believing pop music was a way of being or a culture in which imagination shaped reality. Perhaps I am an old fool who was overwhelmed by the experience of loud music shared with his wife and children. This doesn’t happen everyday and in itself is specific enough to warrant curious attention. You cannot separate the process of hearing the words from the music for this turns them into a letters page but Paper Cages has kept resurfacing in my mind since we drove home together after the show. Dear Sir…

“You're so vivid and free in your imagination”

Above: Me, the wife and kids meet Franz Ferdinand

* At a recent talk I attended by a swimming coach she outlined the benefits of non-goal orientated development in favour of process i.e. swimming better not faster

Text & Photos by Mikey Georgeson 2018

Invite for Extricate Print Fair which opens on 08/03/2018

INVITE:

The first EXTRICATE print fair opens on Thursday 8th March at Gallery 64a Oxford Street, Whitstable, Kent CT5 1DG.

(Image above by James Johnston)

The Extricate Print Fair features affordable prints from over 20 artists including; Guy Allott, Frank Auerbach, Gordon Beswick, Emma Coleman, Lee Edwards, Tinsel Edwards, Peter Harris & Lee “Scratch” Perry, Sadie Hennessy, Mark Jackson, Kim James-Williams, James Johnston, Jasper Joffe, Cedar Lewisohn, Jo Mamma, Jock McFadyen, Horace Panter, Raksha Patel, Harry Pye, Jonas Ranson, Twinkle Troughton, Willkay, and Vanessa Winch.

(Image above by Gordon Beswick)

The show opens at 6pm on Thursday the first of March.

(Image above by Raksha Patel)

The show runs until the 30th of March

(Image above by Kim James-Wilson)

For more info visit: www.gallery64a.co.uk

The gallery is a 10 minute walk from Whitstable train station:

Miss it and miss out.

(Image above by Guy allott)

WALL OF SOUND PRESENTS: LOVE, LOVE LIFE at Birthdays in Dalston reviewed by JOHN ROBBINS

“I have brought you many things in my time...” So says the late, great Malcolm McLaren from beneath a rubber bondage mask at the beginning of 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle'.

But these words are equally true of Wall of Sound label boss Mark Jones. Since emerging as part of the big beat explosion in the mid 90s, the label has done everything from getting Mad Frankie Fraser and Shirley Bassey into the studio with Mekon and Propellerheads respectively, brought Grace Jones and Human League out of relative retirement and scored numerous hits with The Wiseguys, Royksopp and many, many others.

There, behind the decks at Birthdays, is Jones himself, dropping party anthems from Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love' to 'Pump Up The Volume' by M/A/R/R/S and Prodigy's 'Your Love'. Towards the end of the evening, he hands out roses – well, it is Valentine's Day – before joining the crowd for a full on frugging session.

But more important than that, he's put together a packed line up of WoS-approved live acts that are every bit as eclectic and allk encompassing as the stamp would suggest.

There's a natural arc to the evening, and first up is Sabrina Kennedy. She's come all the way from Nashville to share her endearingly sincere songs, and although she's backed up by only one guitarist, she already shines with an unashamedly belting pop voice and shitloads of confidence. One to watch, definitely.

There's no such minimalism for Gabi Garbutt & The Illuminations, however. Her six piece band pack the Birthdays stage and wherever you look someone is producing a saxophone or trumpet or wrapping her infectiously lively punk/soul hybrid in layers of backing vocals. She may be a somewhat diminutive frontperson, but she remains very much the centre of attention, throwing everything into her performance as she attacks her red semi acoustic with gusto. It's a big, rowdy racket they make – check their upcoming 'Lady Matador' single for further evidence – but you can hear every word of the lyrics, which have hidden depths of reflection and melancholia. All in all, intoxicating stuff, and the swelling crowd expresses its approval with a loud chorus of excited whooping and hollering.

Artbreak are up next and this five piece from south east London are the slickest and most streamlined outfit on the bill, 'Soda Can' has plenty of jerky, quirky intrigue, and 'Will To Survive' touches on the anthemic. Add a singer with a powerful bellow, two duelling guitar playing brothers and some chunky rock grooves and the results are promising.

Purple Lights have brought the lion's share of tonight's audience, partly because it's drummer Akeeba's birthday – and what better venue is there for a birthday party – and partly because, well, they're great. Blending pure rock with heavy reggae is not your average mash up, but the likes of 'Wake Up' and 'Trigger Man' sound more natural than you might think. They go down so well that they're almost physically prevented from leaving the stage before they perform at least one encore.

A few people start heading off for last trains and tubes as we get past the 11pm mark, but like those football fans who nip out early to avoid the queues and end up missing the last minute drama, they've made a big mistake. Because Sir-Vere from Milton Keynes, tonight's headliners, put on a startlingly energetic show that's quite possibly the most punk rock thing on the bill, even though they're the furthest from the traditional guitar band set up. Stevie Vega – pornographic, homoerotic t-shirt and technology – chucks out some seriously heavy grooves, while singer Craig Hammond howls with devilish intent into the microphone, while guitarist Gary rips distorted riffs from his guitar. Their debut for WoS, 'Holy Fool', is a raucous highlight, but the sense of sheer abandon and fuck you attitude throughout is what really keeps there until the bitter end. Prodigy watch out, you finally have some serious competition!

Text by John Robbins 2018

Photos by Chris Patmore 2018

www.chrispatmore.co.uk

Inside Job exhibition at Tate Modern

Press Release

Inside Job is a group exhibition taking place on Level 6 of The Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern on Saturday April the 7th (10am until 10pm) and Sunday April the 8th (10am until 6pm).

Pablo Picasso once claimed: “Give me a museum and I will fill it” The staff at Tate may not have been given their own museum but, for one weekend only, they’ve been given level 6 of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik building to do with as they please.

Inside Job features paintings, prints, videos, installations, light boxes, photography, cartoons and textile art. There will be work from people of very different ages and backgrounds – some artists have been to the best art colleges, won awards or received rave reviews in the press – other people showing have never exhibited before and in some cases are making work for the first time since school.

Inside Job is a show that visitors can discover a little more about the wonderful diverse creative staff who work at Tate, and how as an employer Tate attracts people, who find great pleasure in arts and crafts themselves.
It will bring together Tate's varied departments, its visitors and its staff. Find out what the person who hands you your cloak room fob does in his or her own time? And discover what history of their life is reflected in the things they create?

Above Image: "Always Yes" by Ed Hadfield who works at Tate Modern's Member's Bar.

Above Image: "Untitled" by Klarita Pandolfi-Carr who works as an Information Assistant at Tate Britain.

Above: Wilkay (from the Tate Britain bookshop) in front of his drawing "More Friends"

Above: Alice Ellis Bray from Tate St Ives wearing her Ghost Dance Dress.

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For more info or images contact Inside Job's press person Harry Pye

by texting 07951189885 or: harry_pye@hotmail.com
The image of money that we use in the poster and on our flyers is by Corey Samuel of The Tate Modern bookshop.

Dale Lewis "Fat, Sugar, Salt" reviewed by Mikey Georgeson

Dale Lewis – Fat, Sugar, Salt – Edel Assanti Gallery  until March 10^th 2018

(In conversation with Sacha Craddock Jan 31st 2018)

“Over emphasis of the visual sense created a kind of human identity of the self requiring persistent violence, both to one’s self and to others…” Marshall McLuhan

At the opening of Dale Lewis’ Fat Sugar Salt at the Edel Assanti Gallery I was not altogether clear whether I liked the paintings. Liking things is a popular contemporary past time and perhaps not altogether essential for a pleasurable engagement with Art. I returned for his discussion with Sacha Craddock to try to unravel some of the questions I had. As well as the scale and impasto portions of paint I was struck by the violence in the images. It wasn’t cartoon violence nor was it a shockingly disturbing kind that pulls you up short. The other thing you notice is the frieze-like proportions, which somehow bypass the compositional pitfalls and narrative constraints of a more balanced canvas shape. It does of course call to mind the vast metaphysical landscapes of the abstract expressionist school, namely Jackson Pollock inhabited by the thrashing figures of De Kooning. During the discussion with Sacha Cradock, Lewis, deliberately of otherwise, hinted at an affinity to this heroic indecipherability with reference to his own substance intake as part of the painting process. But I was beginning to think that this need to place something within a canon or lineage is part of what Lewis’s paintings transcend. After-all transcendence is the aim of art? And so we travel along through the show guided by the canvas crossbars of unfurling urban panoramas redolent of the truncated space of Sega street-fighter games.

‘Family Fortunes’, 2017, oil, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 200 x 400 cm.

The vast frieze format also evokes the epic dramas of the Renaissance. This is the platform from which De Kooning delivered his lecture The Renaissance and Order in which he talked about a “train track in the history of art that goes back to Mesopotamia.”  Lewis’ extended proportions sit us down in the carriage. - Look there is Uccello’s Rout of san Romano and there’s Tintoretto’s Christ washing the feet of his Disciple’s (by coincidence almost exactly the same size as Lewis’ consistent canvas size of choice). Lewis has not analysed these paintings and describes his experience of them as having glimpsed them from the corner of his eye. The sense of domestic allegory is in the work and instead of Christ the artist himself is scapegoated in Family Fortunes – a title that neatly mixes the abject with the aspirational.  Tintoretto’s later version of the above takes place in a kitchen and there is also the same sense of shallow space found in Lewis’ work. It’s as if the paintings inhabit a perspectival realm but this is interrupted. It’s not the infinite cinematic scope of Uccello but something more akin to a tapestry. A more pre-renaissance idea of life as a cosmic patina unfolding in the now. Much recent art has made use of violence and transgression to award itself the kudos of otherness but this was not the feeling I got from theses paintings. I felt it was part of a struggle to reconnect with the body as part of an experiential existence.

When paintings are exhibited the idea of image is never far from the surface and Craddock was quick to introduce this snarling concept to the visiting public.  After seeing the Rose Wylie and Wade Guyton at the Serpentine recently I felt both artists were making their generations response to our new found position adrift in a sea of images constantly overlapping and shifting to reveal more  hollow icons. But with Lewis something else is happening. These are not images they are paintings with an overtly visceral quality. They are full of bodily matter and function. The shows title, fat sugar salt implies the cognitive dissonance of fast foods guilty pleasures interrupted by the need to schematise their bodily effects. Likewise, the need to place the work within a canon is part of the mind body split that has forced us into the realm of images policed by contructed perspectival space. One of the questions from the floor concerned the use of figures, “why are you using figures if you don’t want them to be seen as narrative?”

The answer is perhaps simply that the paintings are not agencies of encoded signifiers, they are transmogrified lived experience. An expression of themselves.

Rationality (the same demon that led to WWII and stoked the fires under the Abstract Expressionists) and the resultant need for a subject object split have seen to it that we live in the age of image as equivalence (head on a coin). At a recent lecture Grayson Perry half jokingly discussed how his gallery had instructed him that the work needed to work as a jpeg now. Lewis’ paintings have been compared to Perry’s witty tapestries of English society. Perry, however, constructs his work to be read. Lewis’ are much more awkwardly dyslexic and don’t work within the screen format, requiring therefore that we actually have occasion to stand in front of them. They are not there to be read they are an invitation to experience life on a level of pre-intellectual awareness. In a smart world proud of its intelligence this is a problematic concept, which cannot be fully understood only really experienced. Lewis’ paintings embody the struggle that the cognitive brain has in relinquishing its hold over our sense of identity. The violence of the image and its razor blade in the eye of all who consume is resisted by the cut and thrust of bodies lashed together on a new raft of the Medusa.

In conclusion yes there are points in these works where one can make connections to the order of history (His story) and enter into the game of untangling the process, which the use of masking tape and pencil invites but these paintings are something different. They are not about other – they are other. So as I sat there during the gallery discussion searching for the images on the tip of my wounded eye-tongue I realised I needed to let go and allow the work to function as Art. The violence is not a reflection of society and the narrative is not a Beryl Cooke-like staging of our foolish urbo-pastoral foibles, rather these are paintings entangling with our struggle to find a way through the thicket of images into a clearing of authenticity in actual lived events. Painting with its visceral immediacy and ability to push our noses into the image, has returned to remind us of our ability to feel and engage with the yearning of sentient machines possessed by a feeling that they might have a soul.

 "Art's expression is the anti-thesis of expressing something," for Adorno, implies that it remains non-identical to a tendency that is related to the exigency of commodity exchange.”  A Sinha 

Text by Mikey Georgeson 2018
Photo of audience by Jackie Clark