NOTES

Part Two

1. Theo also advised us to see bad films regularly. According to him, you could get a surfeit of good art and thus lose your perspective. He lamented that the National Gallery had too many masterpieces cluttering its walls, suggesting that a few very bad pictures should be displayed to keep a sense of proportion.

2. If you worked indoors, especially in an office, you therefore had to cultivate ‘the corridor shuffle’. This enabled you to move at a rate nicely adjusted to an impression of reasonable motility while actually traversing from points A to B at the slowest permissible pace. People doing this would trot with their feet splayed outwards, making little ‘kicking’ motions towards either side of the wall, as if metaphorically kicking the walls which imprisoned them. Each step they took began with an explosive spurt immediately succeeded by a sharp brake as their foot hit an invisible barrier. In this way their gait gave the contradictory impression of being simultaneously energetic and impotent. They were in fact locomotively killing time. (I have since noticed this peculiar duck-like mincing gait in academics who have been in one institution for too long.) Such workers also seemed to continually and restlessly expand within their places of work as if their bodies were langorously and compulsively yawning. All such gestures were tools of the trade of ‘work’.

3. I did have my limits, however. When Helen Mininberg stole a copy of Robert Motherwell’s book on Dada from Westminster Reference Library to prove her love for me, and presented it wrapped up for my twenty-second birthday, I took it back and slipped it on to the librarian’s desk.

4. In London at the end of the sixties, I had participated in a ‘march against work’. We began in the City and ended in an East End park with an audience of several hundred yobs and skinheads who turned up anticipating the promised ‘rock show’. When I suggested from the stage that we might now march on the local town hall and burn it to the ground, I was met with derisive incomprehension. They had never heard anything like it. Five years after punk, cities were aflame from London to Liverpool in the worst British riots of the twentieth century.

5. An interesting example of the culture clash inherent in this is Jeremy Paxman’s separate TV encounters with Vivienne and Malcolm. Paxman is quintessentially public school, a drawling know-all with an impatient and disdainful approach to interviewing. When asked a perfectly simple question by Paxman on the late night news, Vivienne froze, clutched her temples and was agonizingly struck dumb. Many people have commented to me how embarrassed they felt on her behalf. When Malcolm and Paxman met on an art review show Paxman was hosting, the mutual dislike was evident. Paxman obviously thought Malcolm a pretentious prat, while Malcolm was almost choking with hatred over Paxman’s superior attitude and made a snide comment about Oxbridge people. Neither Vivienne or Malcolm can fend for themselves in the cultural terrain of educated debate and tend to take defiant refuge in their eccentricity.

6. This take on the Romantic roots of consumption is particularly from Colin Campbell’s remarkable book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987). This is one of the most important of the recent upsurge of works which have densened and complicated our idea of what ‘consumption’ is and what it entails, and where historically it has come from. Jean Christophe Agnew has made a neat summary of this work: ‘First, historians have shifted the birth of western consumer culture to the early modern period and deferred the arrival of mass consumer culture to the mid-twentieth century. Second, they have rejected the Weberian dichotomies between Puritanism and romanticism and, correspondingly, between saving and spending and in some instances, they have also abandoned the classic Marxist distinction between use-value and symbolic value. Finally, they have revalued the political and moral dimensions of fantasy, fetishism, dream and wish – the keywords of consumer mystification as it has heretofore been understood. As a result, the productionist, supply-side and hegemonic interpretation of consumer culture has been shaken, if not overthrown, leaving one-dimensional man marooned on a small and ever shrinking island of history.’ (JC Agnew, in John Brewer & Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods, 1992)

7. Malcolm’s seven-year studentship failed to save him from an equally autodidactic take on things. Autodidactic habits are central to the vague and free-floating pedagogy of British art colleges.

8. Once, at Harrow, a tutor snapped at Malcolm: ‘You think you know everything!’ He brayed back: ‘There’s nothing to know!’ The accent was on the word ‘nothing’, which was dragged out from the grimace of the ‘nu’ to the slap of the ‘thing’ – ‘Nuuuuuu – thing!’ The tutor was quite upset by this, but he had in fact been hoisted by his own Dadaist petard.

As every art student in the sixties knew, there was indeed ‘nothing to know’.

9. I should point out that these mannerisms became gradually toned down from his mid-twenties – and today, in his fifties, they are only infrequently apparent; a sort of doddery archness seems to have taken over.

10. We must have looked even more peculiar when accompanied by Vivienne, who, being a country girl, tripped along at a rare pace, often with her hands behind her back, and was also prone to skipping and turning occasional cartwheels.

11. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985.

12. Arthur Shapiro, Elaine Shapiro, Ruth Bruun and Richard Sweet, Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome, 1978.

13. For example, Simon Frith and Stuart Horne’s Art into Pop, 1987.

14. Rather different is Bernice Martin’s adaptation of Victor Turner’s anthropological work in A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (1981). Extending Turner’s thesis about the socially stabilizing function of the liminal or shamanic figure, Martin suggests that rock music and its associated culture functions partly as a liminal exercise, a way of enacting the collapse of social structure through ‘inspired’ or shamanic visions and behaviours. This escaping of structure works in concert with structure itself, in a symbiosis which ultimately underpins and maintains social stability. Martin’s thesis overlaps with the position taken here. But one problem with Martin’s work is its limited empirical basis. Most of her information on the music scene and about hippies, for example, seems to have come from secondary literary sources, hardly a match for Turner’s fieldwork. And it might have enriched her comments on punk to have interviewed a few punks rather than reading about them from the safety of the music press – in fact all of her information about punk seems to come from one New Society article by Simon Frith. But the meeting of Johnny and Bernice was always unlikely.

15. Tobin Siebers, The Romantic Fantastic, 1984

16. This process, of course, also occurs in other media, notably cinema, but less blatantly. It seems that popular music often tests the water for other media, probing for acceptable limits which are then confirmed by, say, mainstream Hollywood.