Jane Fonda in a still from the Cherchez La Femme exhibition at Space Studios
In late November 1967, the newly-named Sony Corporation – a young, but blossoming Japanese electronics company – released the Portapak CV-2400, the world’s first consumer videotape recorder. Battery-powered, portable, and inexpensive: no longer was video the preserve of elite television companies and their hegemonic value systems.
As the Portapak’s poetic manual put it: “The portable video system represents the essence of decentralised media. One person now becomes an entire TV studio, capable of producing a powerful statement.”
Though Sony’s advertising campaigns for the Portapak depicted the video camera being used by all echelons of society, according to Alaina Claire Feldman, head of exhibitions for Independent Curators International, it became a potent weapon for French feminist collectives during the 1970s. Activist groups like Vidéa and Insoumuses documented wild demonstrations along the boulevards of Paris and radical manifestos against male power.
Feldman, the organiser of a new exhibition at Hackney’s SPACE studios, which is screening a number of these engrossing, politicised videos, explains: “The Portapak offered an opportunity for documentation of what was happening in the streets, in the factories, in private libraries and conversations, but also for creative critique of the moving image itself.”
“The portable video came exactly at the right moment: the start of the women’s liberation movement in France, hot on the heels of May ‘68,” she continued. “It was also totally unexpected that women would embrace technology at the time, and because video was so new, it had no history or canon to struggle with; it was entirely open.”
The name of the exhibition, ‘Cherchez La Femme’, is a reappropriated French colloquialism that traditionally suggests the root of all problems is women. It is this sort of institutional misogyny that these recently-translated feminist films were, and still are, railing against.
Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976), for example, is a scathing meditation on the rigid roles that women are permitted in public life. After recording footage of a French television talk show, Delphine Seyrig, along with three other women, eviscerate the shocking statements made by Françoise Giroud, supposedly the country’s Minister for Women’s well being. They edit, freeze-frame, superimpose, and add hand-written titles to Giroud’s various patronising claims: that surgery is too difficult for women, or how women’s ambitions should never go beyond pleasing their man.
The videos show both the dynamic potential in, and the collective creation of the films, mirroring how the feminist movement actually functioned. In Kate Millet Speaks about Prostitution with Feminists (1975), we see this reality: sat crosslegged on the floor, in a room with bookshelves filled to the brim, French and American feminists passionately debate the plight of the prostitutes, while ceaselessly puffing away on their Gauloises. Innovations in technology can often lead to societal change, and the Sony Portapak was no exception. The dissemination of low-budget and lo-fi work like this forged networks of exchange, catalysed strains of guerilla television, and allowed self-representation for many women. Whether these feminist collective’s goals have been achieved is still far from certain, but Feldman has “hope there’s some consequences that eventually come out of it” for the residents of Hackney that get to see them.
Cherchez La Femme is at SPACE Studios, 129—131 Mare Street, E8 3RH until 13 July.
Photograph by David Bailey courtesy of Daniel Blau Munich/London
You can take David Bailey out of the East End, but you can’t take the East End out of David Bailey: in this new exhibition, even his portraits of elder Delhi men evoke the moustachioed hipsters of Kingsland Road.
Bailey: For Real at Daniel Blau London, one of three Bailey shows held internationally by the gallery in 2014, focuses on the more gritty, yet intimate aspects of his oeuvre: more like a carpenter’s sawdust than his recent glamorous National Portrait Gallery retrospective Stardust. “The East End personifies London for me – or, it did – because it was where I was brought up,” he once told the BBC. “I like change; I like the way it morphs into something else.”
Best known for his 1960s fashion photography, Bailey was born in Leytonstone in January 1938, into a rag-tag trade: the son of a tailor. His mother was born in Bow, his father in Hackney, his grandfather in Bethnal Green, and his genealogy from there – as far as records go – traces to Whitechapel. So, although his blossoming career took him around the globe, Bailey made frequent trips back to the East End.
The prints on show are certainly not an exclusive coup: Mick Jagger and his chiselled cheekbones make an appearance, alongside several portraits of Bailey’s famous friends, but we’ve seen it all before, and quite recently. What the exhibition does offer is a morphed, oblique perspective both on individual images, and the photographer’s work as a whole. Everything on show is presented on torn, imperfect pieces of glossy fibre photographic paper: each is uniquely frayed and shredded by Bailey’s own hands. It renders not only the tactile process of image-making more personal, but also cuts much of the familiar images we know: zooming in closely, it increases the proximity to and intensity of the subjects.
Bethnal Green (1961) depicts a young boy almost buckling under the weight of a crate of Charrington beer from the local brewery. East End (1961) is a complex shot of a pub window; an attractive barmaid pulls a pint, while lines of acid-etched words in the window contrast with an advertising hoarding message in the reflection. One image portrays a tattoo of the Kray twins – the notorious East London gangsters that befriended Bailey – itself based on an iconic portrait he once took of them. The exhibition also shows a bleak side of the capital’s east here. Children explore amongst masses of sacks strewn chaotically in one photograph, while another shows a dilapidated, ramshackle building on Viaduct Street, just a stone’s throw away from where Bethnal Green tube now is. Bailey himself was blown out of his home by the Luftwaffe.
These grainy rolls of aged black-and-white celluloid are reminiscent of George Brassai’s candid street photography in Paris. They are very much like relics, shown here in mounted boxes rather than frames, and are a palimpsest of post-war London life, as well as a few ventures abroad. However, while they do provide an interesting angle on Bailey’s work, the exhibition – in a year that has comprehensively surveyed the photographer – is relatively lightweight.
Bailey: For Real is at Daniel Blau Gallery, 51 Hoxton Square, N1 6PB until 28 June.
Robert Jackson’s Industrial Readymades, on display at Oxfam, Walthamstow High Street. Photograph: Paul Coomey
Tolstoy said that art is “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for…life and progress”. E17 Art Trails takes this concept and runs with it. The tenth anniversary of the independent artist-run festival kicked off at the end of last month with a union of the very best art Walthamstow has to offer.
Part of a wider movement towards showcasing local art in the place of its creation and discovering artists among us, this is an event that is truly inclusive of the entire community, forging a dialogue between locals, artists and businesses. The theme this year is ‘Inhabit’, focusing on integration and urban development. East London is sympathetic to the growth of new against the old – a point that will be explored in audio trails, bus tours and a spotlight on heritage.
This project will explore both where and how we live, who we really are and where we came from through open houses, walking tours and installations. Highlights will include: 15 Day Forest, which will build a forest from visitors’ leaf creations; the photographic exhibition Underpass Distractions, documenting life in the slow lane; and 15 Upper Walthamstow Road, an open house that will display the works of Sharon Drew, Josh Berry and Mark Sowden. This year the festival has expanded to include food pop-ups, an exciting new venture that will feature local and organic suppliers.
The festival is a platform for E17 and Waltham Forest artists, placing East London firmly on the artistic map. Three E17 alumni were this year listed for the Aesthetica Art Prize, testament to the influence of the festival that kickstarted the careers of artists showcased there, building them local audiences.
Curator Paula Van Hagen says: “This is fundamentally an artist-led project, mapping E17 and celebrating the work of artists who live in our community. E17 Art Trail is probably the largest open access arts festival in Europe that deals in visual arts. It’s not about formal spaces, it’s about open houses: now a worldwide movement that has its roots here. This festival is all thanks to the incredible local support.”
E17 Art Trail is blazing the way for the future of local art. There is something to be marvelled at by adults and children alike in every corner of the trail – a community adventure of art on our doorstep.
E17 Art Trail runs in various locations across the E17 postcode until 15 June.
Winning painting: ‘Nico’s Cafe’ by Nathan Eastwood
We all know how a prize works. Someone has to give it. Someone has to win. And then someone says thank you, and several more say thanks anyway. And the whole thing self-perpetuates thus.
They’re fun for the judges and the winners alike – quality is defined and rewarded, and for the weaker-willed among us, a gold standard is set.
But beyond that, who cares? One look at the East London Painting Prize exhibition catalogue left you wanting more of everything – yet we’re left with just one winner.
The shortlisted works – more than half of which come from Hackney painters – were not, as the name suggests, a testament to East London as a place, but to a remarkable range of artists who happen to be based here.
Among the finalists were images of a burqa-clad mother pushing a stroller in green-gloved hands, a woman with the face of a monkey clutching a tree, masterful plush country landscapes and several geometric abstractions. Cathy Lomax, director of Transition gallery, submitted a watercolour of a woman gazing hesitantly back through a half closed door, while Ben Jamie’s shortlisted work is an evening sun-lit landscape, complete with violet foliage and deep metallic blues.
The prize is awarded in the spirit of the East End-born painter and champion of emerging artists Jack Goldhill and in this, its inaugural year, the prize went to a documentation of the oft-unnoticed minutiae of a changing neighbourhood – its humanity defined and celebrated by the unremarkable incidents of everyday life.
It began like this: 41 year-old painter Nathan Eastwood, who works from a studio on Cambridge Heath Road, stopped by his local greasy spoon for a “good solid lunch” of steak pie and mash, and snapped a covert photograph of an elderly man having a quiet meal alone, which was to become the winning painting, Nico’s Cafe – one of Eastwood’s many representations of “incidents of everyday life in East London,” he says.
The grey-and-white work is an homage to the café scenes of great American realist, Edward Hopper, but with malt vinegar and ketchup bottles instead of jaunty hats and coffee cups. And without the colour. Since finishing his MA, Eastwood has turned his back on pigment in favour of shades of black, white and grey.
As if describing a person, Eastwood describes his winning work as “very antagonistic. It was a real fight to get it the way I wanted it.”
Eastwood’s scene of moody mundanity is charming, but the draughtsmanship in some of the other paintings was astonishing.
For his efforts Eastwood will receive a £10,000 cash prize and a solo show at the Nunnery Gallery on Bow Road. With part of his bounty, Eastwood plans to expand his studio and travel to Holland to see Van Gogh’s early works in their natural habitat.
The selection implied that the judges prefer the right atmosphere to technical accomplishments, which answers my question about whether the East London Painting Prize is about celebrating East London or celebrating its best painters. This year, it seemed to be the former.
But that’s neither here nor there.
For those of us watching from the sidelines, the value in this exercise lies in the ensemble. To the Jack Goldhill Charitable Trust – thank you very much for that.
Nathan Eastwood’s solo show will take place at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Road, E3 2SJ in October.
Turfed: tackling child homelessness. Image by Andrew Esiebo
Brazilian director Renato Rocha is not obsessing about his country’s chances at the World Cup this month, even though his play Turfed, which opens this month at Hackney Downs Studios, is inspired by the ‘beautiful game’.
“If Brazil wins then people forget its problems so many of us are not supporting Brazil,” he says.
Tensions have been running high in the country with protests against the cost of staging the tournament and the comparative lack of investment in public services.
But for Rocha it’s not a case of either/or; a fairer society versus the spiralling cost of a football competition. His idea is to harness the global pull of football to raise awareness of another global problem: child homelessness.
In partnership with the Street Child World Cup, Turfed uses a young international cast, some with experience of living on the streets in London, Tanzania, the Philippines and Brazil, to tell stories of homelessness using football as a metaphor for life.
“In Brazil it’s like everything is about football,” says Rocha. “I had the idea of the analogy of the ball as an opportunity in life: so to receive the ball you have to be ready, but when you do receive the ball what do you do with it?”
Rocha has devised the play alongside the actors, who use their own experiences and stories but retell them in a non-linear way through a series of footballing analogies using dance, visual art and and music.
“Some speak with dance, some use poetry and others speak more with music. That’s the challenge that we give to them,” he says.
Rocha recalls a story about going to a hostel in central London with the crew to audition people for the play. One crew member, a life-long Londoner, confessed to not knowing the hostel existed. Rocha found this revealing. “If you don’t know, how do you solve a problem that’s an invisible problem?” he says.
“We want not just to show the audience the problem but to try to make them put themselves in that situation. If you are on the streets what do you do? Why are people living on the streets? Why do they leave their homes?”
In the UK, says Rocha, homeless children are not living on the streets like they are in Brazil. “Actually the reasons that make people to go to the streets and leave their homes are often the same,” he says and gives family, sexual abuse, domestic violence, alcohol and poverty as examples.
With Turfed, Rocha hopes to turn the tide of ‘invisibility’, though whether the play will help directly he doesn’t know. “The world is fast and people don’t have time to see,” he sighs. “But I always use the analogy of the guys who went in search of India but instead they discovered America. It might not have been what they were looking for but at least they discovered something.”
Turfed is at Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT from 9-21 June.
Callum Dixon as Dave in Between Us at the Arcola Theatre. Photograph: Jeremy Abrahams
Julia is a therapist, moonlighting as a stand-up comedian, who has recently made contact with the daughter she gave up for adoption many years ago. Dave, her client, has come to see her since the birth of his daughter triggered a depression. Teresa, another client, is a wealthy woman struggling to cope with caring for the two children with behavioural difficulties she recently adopted. For her latest work, Sarah Daniels is confronting the audience. Her play opens with Julia, played by Charlotte Cornwell, in the role of stand-up, addressing us, the ‘Guardian-reading’ theatregoers, here in Hackney E8. We are all included in this evening’s critique, which is: ‘What price does society pay to allow the middle classes to feel good about themselves?’ The suggestion is that Teresa (Georgina Rich) and Dave (Callum Dixon) are using therapy to feel good about themselves despite the ethically dubious choices they have made. But while the question may be a valid one, this play this feels like an over simplification of the issue. While it promises to ask ‘how have we come to this?’ this question is not really answered, and both Teresa and Dave have something of a plausibility problem. The motivations for Teresa’s behaviour and her relationship with her husband are not properly examined, and her story feels unreal. It also asks too much of the imagination to believe that Dave, a cockney builder, was ever a public school ‘posh boy’, and his behaviour when bumping into his therapist in a bar feels unlikely. The scenes involving Julia and her daughter Kath are the most moving. Having boldly declared to begin with that inequality is a thing of the past, the many inequalities in Julia’s relationship with her daughter are painful to witness – she craves a relationship with her, but her feelings are not returned in equal measure, and she tries to use her wealth to buy time with her. Her heartache in these scenes is palpable. Between Us includes many brilliantly observed details. On learning that her daughter is a hairdresser Julia asks “and you want to be…?” – “A hairdresser,” Kath replies. But some of the references to societal inequalities seem artificial and inserted, and the snobbery of Julia and Teresa at times too open to be convincingly English. Between Us is funny, well-acted and always compelling. Some may find its message challenging and important, others may find it unsubtle and didactic. But it is certainly engaging.
Between Us is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL, until 21 June
For the last year, Hackney author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair has been involved in a work of Odyssean proportions. In celebration of his seventieth birthday last June, he was asked to curate a personal project entitled 70×70, choosing 70 films for a series of special screenings and discussions across the capital. The task has taken him on a voyage into his own past, through a history of independent film and deep into the cinematic consciousness of London.
Speaking on a Saturday morning – stealing an hour before he must set off for a showing at the Elephant and Castle of three obscure features I’d not heard of – he gives me a brief overview of the experience.
“When I took it on I had no idea quite what it would involve. It seems like one of those ideas you get sitting down in a pub or having a late breakfast somewhere off Broadway Market and someone says ‘would you like to pick 70 films?’” It was a notion proposed to him by Paul Smith of King Mob, a spoken-word label that released CDs by Sinclair in the 90s.
“It sounds like a great sort of birthday present,” he continues. “And one way of looking back at the part films have played in my life, but in actuality it involved writing descriptions of all of these 70 films and then travelling out night after night to funny parts of the town.”
The films chosen have been a peculiar and intriguing bunch. The list includes the likes of Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard, Hitchcock and Hopper, not to mention a vast catalogue of directors you’ll never have come across. It’s a gold mine for film-lovers looking to fill their pockets with rare and forgotten gems.
“It’s kind of an act of archaeology and rescue and salvage and scavenging in lots of ways, in the same process as people comb through car boot sales or markets and pick up strange lost videos and DVDs and so on.”
The process of picking such a large number of films might sound difficult, but while the physical side of 70×70 has taken its toll, Sinclair explains that selection itself was not so much of a challenge.
“It was literally about going back, using my books that I’ve published, looking at what films were referenced in each of these books, making an initial list and then including some films that I’ve been involved with to give a fuller sense of a life in London that was largely hung around the presence of certain films.”
To borrow a phrase from his excellent book about the Beat poets, American Smoke, the project seems to have been like a raid on his own past. He describes the act of editing as similar to piecing together a kind of autobiographical documentary. However, not simply a linear map of films he’s watched along the way, the project explores the medium in a geographical sense, retracing the changing environment of film viewing and almost resurrecting a pre-internet sort of cinema experience.
Born in Maesteg in South Wales, Sinclair was living and studying in Brixton when he first “chased a film” to what’s now the Rio cinema in Dalston. This element of travel – an almost topographical approach – was an essential aspect of the work.
“It was my first visit to the East End,” he explains. “In a sense the geography of London was involved with where I saw certain films and that went on for a number of years. Obviously now the whole way of looking at films is very different with DVDs and the way that films can be found that once upon a time involved terrific geographical chases to track them down.”
The idea of simply finding a film on the web is still a foreign one to him; perhaps he sees it as a lazy, even defeatist mode of viewing that detracts from the fun of the hunt and the pilgrimage he so values.
“There’s something very magical still about seeing them actually in the community of the cinema, this building which goes back so deep into the culture of London – a bunch of people staring at this huge screen on which this rather wonderful and exotic product that’s come from somewhere is being shown just for that day, for that week. It was very special.
“Now the whole sense of it is very different. Obviously you can just type in a name and something comes up on your small screen and you think you’ve sampled it, but you haven’t had that complete sensory experience that also involves the journey and the community that you’re watching it with.”
It’s an invigorating message and one that lends itself to a wider understanding of Sinclair’s approach to his own work. Research seems to come hand in hand with experience and almost always involves a trip, an exploration – in the fullest sense of the word.
For his acclaimed book London Orbital he traversed the 120-mile length of the M25; for Swandown – a delightfully bizarre poetic documentary made with friend and collaborator Andrew Kötting – he pedalled a plastic swan from Hastings to East London via the back rivers of Kent; and more recently he walked the entire London Overground in a single day for a new book about the railway’s effect on the urban landscape and life therein.
Over the years, Sinclair’s literary output has established him a reputation as a pioneer of British psychogeography, a discipline he might not have been able to skirt entirely for 70×70 but one that is largely absent from his chosen films. When I first heard of the project, I half expected a compilation of documentary essays by Patrick Keiller, Julien Temple, Paul Kelly and the like, but, as he suggests when I put this to him, I may have been guilty of a kind of cultural branding.
“That’s very strongly why they’re not on my list. I didn’t want to go down that particular route because essentially I’d written it,” he says. “If I was just picking films I liked, Patrick Keiller would very probably have come into it, but it was a bit tautologist to do that in this particular context because it’s already such an academic industry. I felt I didn’t need to do that.”
With the series nearing its end, Sinclair looks back on the first event in July last year with particular fondness. Two films were screened at the Hackney Picturehouse – a building he made good use of years ago when it was public library – that mean a lot to him: The Sorcerers, a 1967 piece by his friend Mike Reeves, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, an early 90s collaboration between himself and Chris Petit for Channel 4. “Everything about it felt good,” he says. “I thought that was a rather magic occasion and there’s been many others since.”
The ambitious undertaking of 70×70 is set to finish at the Barbican on 7 and 8 June, with an event that will include an intimate programme of films Sinclair has been directly involved with. He will be joined in conversation by Kötting, Petit and Robert Macfarlane, among others.
“I could easily sit down and do it again with a totally different 70 but I don’t want to,” he laughs, describing the end as a kind of watershed. “I’ve actually recovered a different sense of what film is in London at this moment by doing this project. And hopefully we finish up at the Barbican at the end of it all with a couple of days worth of films that are really personal to me.”
A few days after our interview, I send him an email in search of some extra information and ask how the screening at the Elephant and Castle went. Three films were shown that apparently hadn’t found a niche elsewhere: Too Hot to Handle, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; it was attended by just four people, three of whom were a part of the project and the other a lone outsider.
“It was like a wake for a certain kind of cinema,” he writes back, in typically brilliant fashion.
Comedy duo Totally Tom star as Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot
“Nothing is funnier than unhappiness” wrote Samuel Beckett in his play, Endgame. It is apt, then, that in the Arcola Theatre’s bold new production of his famous masterpiece Waiting for Godot, the vagrants are played by stand-up comedy duo Totally Tom.
The Samuel Beckett estate is notoriously strict on the direction of his plays. Ex-Eton master and director Simon Dormandy’s casting of his former pupils, who swap bowler hats for baseball caps in the lead roles of Vladimir and Estragon, has created a few ripples of surprise.
The youth of Totally Tom might irk the purists – but they give new life to a play perhaps otherwise fated to a future as the unyielding subject of undergraduate dissertations. Playing Vladimir, Tom Palmer channels a Soho video editor with his bike satchel and scuffed Nikes while his gangly companion Estragon (Tom Stourton) has the air of a morose Irish barman – the kind you might find working in a Dalston dive.
Their clothes might be updated but Didi and Gogo’s predicament remains unchanged. They turn up to their barren spot, a background of rubble and puddles artfully designed by Patrick Kinmouth, every day to wait for their appointment with Mr Godot. The waiting is still agony, as Didi says: “Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
Their wretched impasse is punctuated by the arrival of Pozzo (Jonathan Oliver) – a whip-wielding egocentric who has an elderly man, Lucky (Michael Roberts) tied to a rope. Oliver’s Pozzo is an East End geezer with a leather pork-pie hat, rings and tattoos but he is rather out-shined by the dexterity of his slave. Commanded to ‘think!’ on demand, Roberts produces a torrent of gibberish both disturbing and entertaining, when commanded to ‘dance!’ he performs a shuffling and strangely affecting flamenco routine.
Totally Tom shift the emphasis of Beckett’s literary anti-heroes, giving them a sense of optimism that only makes the disappointment of Godot’s absence more intense. The jokes are not total tomfoolery but palliatives, desperate attempts to conceal the horror of waking up to a life without meaning.
Perhaps it is the agonisingly slow passage of time that means Didi and Gogo have been seen traditionally as middle-aged rather than young men. Dormandy’s Godot suggests that today it is the tracksuits not the suits that wait in limbo. Get a ticket, what are you waiting for?
Waiting for Godot is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 14 June.
Truman’s Brewery on Brick Lane hosted Graduate Fashion Week at the end of last month, showcasing 2014’s crop of fashion graduates, and over 40 universities and art schools. The event celebrated cultural and geographical diversity and the incredible craftsmanship and innovative design emerging from across the UK.
On a warm opening Saturday, Graduate Fashion Week was humming with students, tutors, parents and fashion industry members, and with a general air of chaotic excitement, which seems fitting for an event that showcases young people at the start of their career in a famously challenging industry.
The labyrinth-like Truman’s Brewery was divided into compact exhibition spaces for each of the universities, who significantly chose different approaches to exhibiting work. Major player on the fashion course world-stage is Kingston University, who went for tasteful wooden and industrial fittings and showcased leather book-bound sketchbooks of their students’ work – not a garment in sight. London College of Fashion had tutors sketching and illustrating on easels, the walls of the space becoming a live and evolving exhibition of fashion illustrations on loose sheets of paper. Edinburgh College of Art had created a shop-cum-showroom, bursting with garments made by students. The theme here was knitwear, representing perhaps Scotland’s age-old association with yarn production and knits.
A handful of universities were given the opportunity to exhibit their work in catwalk-form, including Manchester School of Art, Birmingham University and Kingston, among others.
The University of East London took to the catwalk on the opening day, bringing the collections of no less than twenty new BA graduates to the runway. Highlights included Kamara Appleton’s menswear collection of geometric boarders in metallic hues, on tunics and coats. Not surprisingly for a university located in the urban heart of East London, sportswear reigned strong. Leanne Beckford presented an androgynous series of navy and slate boiler suits and oversize sports coats, accessorised with giant bobble hats, while Veronica Peduzzi-Davies presented an accomplished collection of cyber sportswear featuring towelling, teddy-bear motifs and puffer jackets, paying tribute to London Fashion Week favourites Christopher Raeburn and Nasir Mazhar. Hollie Tarrier used carpet-bag floral and jacquard techniques on putty and white base colours, bringing a contemporary feel to old fabric patterns, with Tianyi Li’s collection of black lace, costume-like cape dresses and headpieces and veils bringing the show to a memorable close.
Graduate Fashion Week acknowledged fashion graduates from across the UK and the cultural diversity that informs their craft, providing them with a place to show off their talents in the heart of London’s creative East End.
Writer and former Angry Brigade member John Barker. Photograph: Eleonore de Bonneval
On 20 August 1971, John Barker was arrested during a police raid on number 359 Amhurst Road. He was detained by a specialist unit, the Bomb Squad, which had been set up at the start of the year with the express purpose of laying hands on him and the organisation he was part of, the Angry Brigade, which was linked to 25 bombings of MPs’ homes, government buildings and company offices between August 1970 and August 1971.
One person was slightly injured by an Angry Brigade bomb, but no one was killed. According to police reports, there was a fair-sized arsenal in the Amhurst Road flat, including three guns, ammunition, sticks of gelignite and detonators to set them off. Barker was put on trial with seven associates – ‘the Stoke Newington Eight’ – at which it was argued that the group had conspired to cause explosions only for publicity purposes, not to harm anyone.
Supported by the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee (“a widely-based, politically creative organisation of very different people,” several of whom had legal expertise), Barker, like fellow-accused Hilary Creek and Anna Mendelson, opted to defend himself. He says he was better at fighting his corner in the courtroom than he ever was at being an urban guerrilla, and going to Cambridge possibly helped.
Barker studied English at Clare College, Cambridge, and his old supervisor, John Newton, spoke up for him at the trial. Barker never sat his finals exams, however: along with six other students, he tore up the paper in a “quixotic protest” against elitism. “It was because – and I still think this is the case – that the education system, increasingly so, is one basically that excludes. And the function of exams, in the class system, is one of exclusion. And I don’t regret it.”
He doesn’t regret the Angry Brigade’s use of violence, either. “It’s not a moral question is it? It’s, you know, did it do anything strategic? Obviously you don’t want to hurt people. In the Angry Brigade trial it was proven over and over again that we wanted to cause damage to property but not to people.
“I’m totally against terrorism as I understand it which is indiscriminate killing.”
Nowadays, Barker works as a book-indexer and writer. His new novel, Futures, follows ‘City gents’ Phil and Jack as they plot to set up a cocaine futures market, pitting their analytical skills against understated psychopathic gang-master Gordon Murray, who has a line in Commercial Road wine-bars and softish-core Iranian porn.
Set in 1987, one year after Thatcher government deregulation unleashed the ‘Big Bang’ on the City of London, the book experiments with the kind of levelling attitude a life spent around money can engender, one which takes a wide view of the world but reduces events to a single point of significance. Its analyst characters, according to Barker, “are in a very ruthless way looking at what changes the price of things, and it makes no difference to them whether that’s people getting killed in a mine in South Africa or some shift in American monetary policy – they look at it all in the same way.”
Barker classifies Futures as a “dark comedy”, stripping the glamour off money and drugs. The story alternates between a third-person narration and a first-person view from behind Murray’s eyes. “I wanted his voice in particular because I think he’s a bore,” says Barker. ‘He’s really boring, not only unromantic but the way he kind of mimics neo-liberal language.” Murray is professional, self-controlled, but “in the end, a bit of a panicker”, a sort of gangland mirror of financiers in 1987, which included, in October, the panicked crash Black Monday.
Barker followed such events devotedly in the Financial Times, whenever he was able to persuade the group of ‘nutcases and gangsters’ he shared a prison wing with to vote to have it as their paper of the month.
As well as writing, Barker is also collaborating with the Austrian artist Ines Doujakon on art and performance work Loomshuttles/Warpaths, telling the story of textiles and colonialism over the last 1000 years, and showing this summer at the Sao Paulo Biennale.
He looks back on the Angry Brigade years with “critical respect”: “My respect about it is the commitment and the anger, that I still feel and probably even more so.
“Critical in that we didn’t change anything much. And I suppose it wasn’t very democratic politics.”
The current political situation is, he says, “horrible”. “At a subliminal level, there’s this whole thing, all across Europe, that the poor have had it too good. Elites are always going on about ‘yes, you know welfare’s too soft,’ or this and that are too soft.” He’s critical too of the accompanying idea that ‘the Chinese are coming’: “There’s always this implication that there is a threat from Asia, so we need to adopt Asian values, Asian wage-levels, and we’re too soft and we can’t compete; which I think is by and large a nonsense because they’re not looking at what’s going on in Asia, where you have huge levels of class-struggle going on.”
The fight today is about the particular, the unfungible: “The people I admire now are people who at an everyday level are fighting to keep nurseries open, or actually, you know, battling against real substantial cuts – that very unglamorous political work is the most important.”
This is the small scale, un-regarded work which world-bestriding views tend not to notice, be they global capitalist or those of classical Marxism.
John Barker will be speaking at The White Hart, Stoke Newington High Street on Sunday 8 June at 2pm, as part of the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.
Win two free tickets to the event by answering correctly the following question:
In the 1970s, the Angry Brigade firebombed a building where Stoke Newington Bookshop now stands. What was there before it was bombed?
A – a launderette B – Barclays Bank C – James Preston Butcher D – a church
