No.
SMELLIN’ SALTS
DON N O L E IV T C E L L ARAF CO R 2013 NOVEMBE
FREE
ARAF Collective London is a not-for profit cultural organisation which attempts to generate awareness, publicity and solidarity for artists, musicians and writers who require a public platform. We actively opt out of any commercial interests: the interests of ARAF are social and reactionary; a creative site of resistance against ‘arts cuts’ culture. Established in 2011, we have built a network of creative individuals who have performed, written or exhibited with us and we want to add YOU to the collective. ARAF is Welsh for ‘Slow’ and to be slow in an age of fast profit is political. We are the luddites of the culture industry.
THIS MONTH: ARAF COLLECTIVE PRESENT: EVENT NO. EIGHT:
CANTER-CULTURE II @ THE HORSE & STABLES, WATERLOO featuring: AEDDAN WILLIAMS TRIO / SAMPLE ANSWER / MOLLY WAGGER TRUE COLLECTIVES DJs FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE!
FREE ENTRY!
And THIS, THE EIGHTH EDITION of our free zine, SMELLIN’ SALTS ON THE THEME of COMMUNITY? THE BANDS, ART, OPINIONS, REVIEWS and more FOR PERUSAL AT YOUR LEISURE! Not FOR WRAPPING CHIPS, you !
Cover: Queenie at the Festival of Britain, 1951, Battersea Park (found in Deptford Market, 2005)
ARAF IS THE FUTURE : FREE ENTRY! MONDAY DECEMBER 2nd: @ THE THREE KINGS, CLERKENWELL : FRUIT MACHINE: ROASTIN’ ON AN OPEN FIRE : THE XMAS LECTURES ! FRIDAY JANUARY 17th: CANTER CULTURE III @ HORSE & STABLES, WATERLOO LIVE MUSIC FROM : THE ROPE AND THE COLT, JUNGLE BROWN, & more TBC! FREE ENTRY! ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON THANKS PROFUSELY: THANKS AS EVER to JOSH MARIOTT THE SULTAN OF SUPERIOUR SOUNDS; ARAF Artists of the month: True Collectives, Aeddan Williams Trio, Sample Answer, Molly Wagger Thanks to Dean and Steve @ THE HORSE & STABLES, Waterloo. Thanks to the SOUTH LONDON GALLERY & Peckham’s REVIEW Bookshop for stocking our Free zine & helping us to spread the word! ... AND SUGARLUMPS to YOU, our Salt Sniffers, Show Jumpers & Stable Hands!
SUBMISSIONS WELCOME for JANUARY ZINE EDITION please send to: follow us:
@ARAFCollective
arafcollective@live.co.uk
check us out : WWW.ARAFCOLLECTIVELONDON.COM
ARAF PRESENTS: SAMPLE ANSWER Sample Answer was one of the most exciting artists of the previous series of ARAF events, the now lost-at-sea ‘LIGHTHOUSE AT THE WRECK’ at The Recreation Ground, Camberwell. Hailing from Dublin and bringing with him the charm of James Joyce, the wit of Oscar Wilde and the swagger of Phil Lynott, this hip-hop folk crossover has supported the likes of The View, Congo Natty, Alabama 3, Pete Doherty and Archive. Please tick the appropriate box and enjoy…
MOLLY WAGGER
Molly Wagger are a five-piece electronic post-folk outfit from Edinburgh. They have been described by The Huffington Post as ‘exceptionally cool’ and Mixmag deemed their recent album Flambeaux ‘a melancholic, lowslung, post-rock gem’. The band have two singles and one album to date and are, as their website states, ‘currently holed up in their shed, writing and recording music for a future release. They only emerge for gigs and tea’. ARAF is most excited to welcome Ms Wagger to the storm-in-a-teacup that is Canter Culture, so put the kettle on…
TRUE COLLECTIVES
TrueCollectives demonstrate the benefit of holding hands across the decks. Bringing together MCs, DJs, producers and musicians from across South London, their genre-busting brand of co-operative music making is a firm favourite with ARAF. On Saturday 16th November, their debut EP, Meanwhile Love is launched at the studious surroundings of the Westminster Reference Library, so stamp your index cards. We welcome True Collectives to CANTER CULTURE for a late-night vinyl set of their favourite tracks to warm those cold cockles.
THE AEDDAN WILLIAMS TRIO Aeddan Williams is a Cardiff based freelance musician and composer. Drawing influences from diverse areas of music, his work is concerned with craftsmanship and honesty. A firm believer in collaboration as the most effective medium for creating music, he’s involved in projects with musicians from many different genres. His latest EP Ghost, soon be available to download, contains four tracks of sparse material for acoustic guitar and voice. Performing at CANTER CULTURE with stalwarts of the London jazz scene, Harry Pope (drums) and Sam James (keyboards), the set will be influenced by the ‘Second Great Quintet’ of trumpeter Miles Davis.
Community Stratospheric Community Lunar Community Martian Community Retro-community Retro-fitted Community
Community Member Community Leader Community Spokesperson Minority Community Majority Community Indigenous Community Immigrant Community Religious Community Agnostic Community Working Class Community Middle Class Community Black Community White Community Spray-Tan Community Green Community Rural Community Urban Community Suburban Community Subterranean Community High-rise community Gated Community Community Policing Community Support Officer Community Policy Community Development Community Politics Conservative Community Labour Community Parliamentary Community Cultural Community Financial Community Legal Community Logistics Community Construction Community Creative Community Celebrity Community Scientific Community Clairvoyant Community Lunar Community Martian Community Virtual Community Second Life community Pro-life community Pro-choice community Pro-Tennis Community ProtoPunk Community Post-Punk Community Postal Community Posterity Community European Community Antarctic Community Isolationist Community Nominal Community Creative Community Gaming Community BDSM Community Virtual Community Catastrophic
THIS WEEK’S KEYWORD: COMMUNITY Thanks for coming to our gig... wait… Are we a COMMUNITY now? We, ARAF COLLECTIVE are currently celebrating our final free-entry gig of 2013, the eighth edition of our open submission ‘zine, SMELLIN’ SALTS, and looking forward to our second pub lecture jam-session event, FRUIT MACHINE, next month. We’ve built a modest online following, but converge monthly in print and in person to attempt to weave a richer tapestry from disparate threads: musicians, writers, artists, performers, participants and attentive listeners. Like a school trip to the textile recycling plant, it’s free, and we’re consistently impressed by the talented and generous tailors and seamstresses we gather and stitch. As ever, ARAF NEEDS YOU to come and warp our collective weft, (may we never be hemmed-in to complacency!). Our reflections upon this, our venerable social haberdashery, have brought the keyword ‘COMMUNITY’ under our collective thimble, a linguistic ‘dropped stitch’ that needs unpicking. Welcome to our homely patchwork: Are We A COMMUNITY Now? In Keywords (1976), Raymond Williams described the use of the word ‘COMMUNITY’ in several senses since the C14th – divisible into either descriptions of social groups such as ‘common people’ or to denote particular qualities of relationship, such as those holding common goods, interests or identity characteristics. Williams noted a change during the Industrial Revolution, in which the term COMMUNITY’s sense of immediacy and locality became significant, relative to more abstract words like ‘society’ or ‘state’. Williams identified the appearance of ‘community politics’ in usage since the mid C20th, and certainly when Keywords was published in 1976, self-described groups united by aspects of identity, for example the gay community, the black community, were becoming more prevalent notions. Williams asserted at the time that ‘COMMUNITY’ is a ‘warmly persuasive’ word that seemed ‘…never to be used unfavourably’. COMMUNITY can, on the surface, appear an innocuous inclusive term. However its designation can be seen to divide as often as it unites. Labelling a ‘minority community’ as such can be used to legitimate social exclusion. It also permits the proliferation of sweeping generalisations in the media and general discourse, enabling the subtle spread of prejudices. While a particular group may be united on one issue, they can also be divided on many others, making a truly ‘united’ COMMUNITY impossible and the role of a selfstyled ‘community spokesperson’ problematic. The advent of public-private partnerships in neo-liberal administration and politics has brought terms like COMMUNITY care, COMMUNITY centres, COMMUNITY policy, COMMUNITY policing, COMMUNITY sentencing, and COMMUNITY arts into common parlance: These are top-down manufactured COMMUNITIES conscripted within the rolling back of the State. Is there such thing as a COMMUNITY? I think we’ll call this ARAF quilt a collective.
TRAGEDY AND MADNESS ARE NEVER OUTDATED... Thomas Kidd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ or ‘Hieronimo is Mad Again’ @ The Blue Elephant Theatre, Camberwell.
Last week the post-Snowden revelations that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been phone tapped by the American Secret Service caused outrage, especially, following more recent allegations of the US spying upon at least 35 world leaders. USA/World democratic relations have never been so strained and America’s role as global peeping-tom, now even watching its friends undress, has been severely condemned. All the world’s a stage and even the German Chancellor is merely a player. Having attended an intimate performance of ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ at The Blue Elephant Theatre, Camberwell, I can safely say that the current atmosphere of an unstable democracy punctuated by lies, deceit and vitriol is nothing new. While phone-taps and hacked email accounts may have been inconceivable by Thomas Kidd, the 16th Century equivalent of bought-off couturiers and keen-eyed serving girls creates a universe not dissimilar to our own. In Kidd’s play, the unstable truce brought about by Spain’s victory over Portugal leads to a tale of love, death and democracy with all the deceptions of a Snowden exposé.Tragedy and Madness are never outdated… However, before you think of this play like a period West Wing, I must introduce the ghosts and devilish spirits that, as the play’s Deus Ex Machina, influence the progressively bloodier series of murders that increase in frequency as the performance reaches its conclusion. This is a ghost story and a political satire; The Fall of The House of Usher and The House of Cards in one evening. Yet what makes this play so fascinating is its role as the first ‘Revenge Tragedy’ and its embryonic relationship to William Shakespeare’s later writing. While lacking some of the Bard’s linguistic aerobatics, Kidd’s play offers many of the themes and tropes to be exploited by the more famous playwright. An unavoidable, yet enjoyable, game of ‘spot the theatrical theft’ occurs throughout the play which makes one aware of Shakespeare’s penchant for creative thievery. Sat on the front row of the pocket-sized Blue Elephant Theatre with the actors inches away from my shoes, I experienced a sense of engagement lost in larger, more traditional venues. Consequently, as the play reaches its psychotic climax, the theatre played host to what was surely the most intense ten minutes in South London. The Blue Elephant is an excellent institution which brings the performing arts into a concrete corner of Camberwell: a location which, in my eyes, harks back to the natural setting of such plays, not in the well-regarded surrounds of a polite-chuckle, Moet-in-the-interval High Culture but as popular entertainment of the masses. A Netflix movie for those in ruffs. Overall, this was a potent performance of a historical play which had a stinging contemporary resonance; one just wishes that present-day politicians could have the excuse of a malicious underworld spirit manipulating their actions. It is not just Hieronimo who is mad.
POPAGANDA: WHEN BRITAIN WENT POP
One element of the contemporary art world which has stood out like a tin of Campbell’s soup in an art gallery is the opening of Christie’s Mayfair, a large public exhibition space administered by London’s most famous auction house, Christie’s, and its inaugural exhibition, ‘When Britain went Pop: British Pop The Early Years’. This exhibition is important for two reasons: firstly, as the Christie’s press-release notes ‘this is the first exhibition to take place in London that solely focuses on Britain’s unique contribution to the Pop Art movement’ and secondly, it represents a fundamental shift in the institutional function of the auction house. As Lock Kresler and Francis Outred note in the preface to the exhibition catalogue, ‘The philosophy of the new gallery Christie’s Mayfair is to look back through history from today’s perspective and work with our colleagues across Christie’s and in the wider art world to create unusual, interesting exhibitions with strong curatorial values’. Here the opening of Christie’s Mayfair as a free-entry white-cube exhibition space on New Bond Street appears distanced from the commercial imperatives of the auction house. Kresler and Outred depict an institution ‘with strong curatorial values’ and revisionist art historical perspectives analogous to the art museum: Christie’s Mayfair appears a site of knowledge, and not commodity, exchange. As Mark Brown notes in the Guardian, ‘The opening of Christie’s Mayfair in Bond Street represents something of a first for an auction house. It will occupy 11,500 sq. ft. of space over three floors to stage three or four museum-quality curated exhibitions every year.’ Why, suddenly, are auction houses putting on ‘Free Public Exhibitions’ and why has British Pop Art been chosen as testcase for this transformation? I propose that this is a more complex phenomenon than the (imminent) deaths of the movement’s protagonists; a resurgence of attention tied to the economic trajectory of Art within the increasingly repressive neo-liberalism of 2013. The international art market was one of the ‘casualties’ (I use this terms devoid of sympathy) of the recent market crashes. Artworks, like all branded goods, are dialectical: they are entities made up of two ‘VALUES’. The more celebrated ‘VALUE’ is that of
SYMBOLIC VALUE, the value which we tend to speak about when talking about Art in sombre tones in Cathedral-esque galleries - Tate Modern as ‘Factory-Cathedral’ is an excellent post-fordist example. This SYMBOLIC VALUE, or use value, is usually tied to a vision of Art as a spiritual entity; the timeless, metaphysical ‘Value’ of Art as imminent religious experience as defined by Kant and Schiller in the 18th century. (This value, in my estimation, is actually FALSE and relates to an over-romanticised vision of Art as something spectacular and separate from the realm of production. Once Art becomes mystical, there emerges those ‘in the know’ who can explain it to [or conceal it from] ‘the under-educated masses’. This is where culture becomes about POWER). The counterpoint to SYMBOLIC VALUE is MARKET VALUE. This exchange value is often hushed in the Temple-Gallery where it is uncouth to talk about money and earthly matters in the realm of the heavens. However, while in previous decades the MARKET VALUE of art would be seen as vulgar, the 1990s brought an increased palatability to MARKET VALUE : the unabashed commerciality of YBAs alongside New Labour’s infatuation with the Creative Industries made MARKET VALUE an art. MARKET VALUE remains a dirty word in some quarters yet for commercial institutions such as auction houses, the increased importance of MARKET VALUE changed how they functioned.While previously SYMBOLIC VALUE lead to MARKET VALUE, this new cultural economy inverted the formula and SYMBOLIC VALUE became increasingly associated to MARKET VALUE. In this system MARKET VALUE alone could increase MARKET VALUE: a perfect equation for institutions who administer an art work’s MARKET VALUE and make profit from commission. However, Britian went pop following the market crashes in 2008-10 and the MARKET VALUE of art suddenly decreased. With the lessening of art’s MARKET VALUE commercial auction houses like Southeby’s and Christie’s were lost in their own Catch-22; the MARKET VALUE/MARKET VALUE system failed. Consequentially, in the last few years with the market now dangerously unstable, there has been a return to the traditional manifestation of institutionalised SYMBOLIC VALUE as a determinate of MARKET VALUE.Yet, institutions like Southeby’s and Christie’s have learnt from their experience of the beautiful MARKET VALUE/MARKET VALUE market: I believe that they have taken a much more active position in the attribution of SYMBOLIC VALUE. These auction houses by having public art historical shows about lesser known artists and movements can increase the SYMBOLIC VALUE of the associated artworks.This therefore influences the all-important MARKET VALUE of the accompanying Auction Sale. To reiterate, while previously Auction Houses made a profit as a conduit between a SYMBOLIC VALUE, often instituted by Public Art Historical Institutions, and a MARKET VALUE, in this new age of Repressive Neo-Liberalism auction houses attempt to increasingly determine SYMBOLIC VALUE in order to increase MARKET VALUE. This then poses the question: Why British Pop Art? The answer is simple, namely, the ever-present vogue for Vintage British Retro within contemporary capitalism: a trope that negotiates an uncertain future with a comforting, performative past. Alongside Chap Magazine, Vintage Clothes festivals and East London revival evenings, British Pop aligns with a very particular story that we tell ourselves about ourselves through (pseudo)vintage commodities. The marketability of British Pop within the Vintage/Retro discourse means that such pseudo-institutional exhibitions remain within earshot of a MARKET VALUE while still pertaining to be ‘ART HISTORICAL SHOWS WITH STRONG CURATORIAL VALUES’. Our insatiable lust for all things vintage guarantees the symbolic (and subsequently, auction market) success of an exhibition of British Pop. The middle-men have cut themselves out of an existing system and built a new art world order. Karen Eliot
DEER PRUDENCE
Sophie Armour
Living in Zone 2, it’s not often I feel in touch with my most basic animal instincts. But deep among the ferns, following a trail stamped through by a creature larger than ourselves, my heart was pounding. A rustle. Pause. We looked at each other, but carried on, chatting more nervously than before about how they’ve been known to attack humans. Then, beyond our path, blocked from view by even taller, denser ferns, RUSTLE. I ran.Turned on my heels, bolted it, heart racing in my ears. Almost to the bottom of the slope and out into the open plain, I turned around. My boyfriend was laughing at me, sauntering his way down. From this point on, my muscles were tense, my ears pricked up and my eyes played tricks on me. The day had started in an unremarkable way. We walked up a hill, sat on a bench and ate deli-bought sandwiches. A short wander later we found what we were looking for. Across the grass, by a huddle of trees, were two tall, proud deer.This was early October – rutting season – and I wanted to see some locking antlers. The two were soon out of sight, but they had ignited our desire for more.With too many people around, feeling too close to the fringes of the park, we looked for a route less travelled.The flattened-down ferns, just a few feet wide, beckoned us in. If we wanted to find deer, we would think like deer, and follow in their footsteps. I hadn’t expected to get so close so quickly. Something was on the other side of those ferns, and it was bigger than either of us. Eventually, we found where they eat. Bark-stripped trees in the shade. By this point I was in deep – a child, playing African Savannah explorer, and this time there were real live animals to be tracking. Beyond the shade a whole herd was gathered on the plain: one huge stag, a few adolescents and lots of ladies – they were marvellous. The stag started to get worked up, chasing and shoving the others. Then, suddenly, he yelled. Belted his lungs out with purpose. In the distance he was echoed by a rival, and a shouting match ensued. It was tense and we waited, but no violence ever came of it. So we followed the calls of the impressive-sounding rival in the distance. Yapping about our theories on deer relations we were caught. A huge, booming moan, straight down our ears. He had found us. Enormous, with a veritable tree’s worth of antlers, he stared at us, unnervingly close. It threw us back into deer-stalker mode. This one was seriously angry. Before long he was running full pelt across the grass, towards a whole new batch of riled-up males. But it seems deer, too, have friends. They shouted a lot, but proceeded to just hang out. Voices were coming from every direction now.We were surrounded by testosterone with antlers, in the middle of the boxing ring. A crack. That’s it! We strained our necks to look over an irritatingly tall shrub and just about saw a clash of horns. We had found it, and we were ready to take a risk to see more. Following a particularly large stag and his particularly large group of females through the ferns, we got closer. Other deer want to check out the action too. Deer change their minds in a heartbeat when their instincts warn them of a change in the vibe. They turned around, all 20 of them, and looked at us. We were in their path, and now they wanted to come back. We froze. If we run it will startle them. If we carry on they’ll feel threatened. If we back off they might chase. I had never been so terrified in a park. These animals are used to people, but they are still wild. In Richmond Park there are no fences to protect you. We were on our own. After what felt like hours of uncertainty more cracking antlers distracted them, and I legged it. In the open grass, a reasonable distance from the fighting deer and close to a reassuring number of humans, I was safe. But I had a new-found respect.You do not mess with deer. But you’ve got to go and see them rut.
A Liverpool street NEXT ISSUE THEME: “CITY” DEADLINE : 1st JANUARY 2014. OPEN CALL: Send submissions to arafcollective@live.co.uk