little hammers: October 2024

Wednesday, 30 October 2024

Reading & Other Surprises 01.11.24

T.C.HELL

COLE DENTER

ADAM BELLAGHA

CORBIN SHAW

01.11.24

7:30PM-9:30PM

Type D Royal British Legion Poppy Cross Wreath Monochrome, 2024

85.5cm x 15.5cm

Laurence Paul Fox with Stage IV Advanced Metastatic Melanoma w/ Mrs. Thatch (Burnt Fuchsia), 2024

45cm x 30cm

Oil on Expensive European Canvas

Christopher Hitchens for Vanity Fair 2008, 2023

45cm x 45cm

Oil on Expensive European Canvas

In February 2008, Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter asked writer Christopher Hitchens if he would be willing to subject himself to the form of torture know as waterboarding. Hitchens duly agreed and scheduled to be 'waterboarded' by SERE in May of that year writing a subsequent article entitled 'Believe me, its Torture' in the August edition.

In his life of J M W Turner, Walter Thornbury narrates an incident concerning a studio visit made by the painter’s friend, William Kingsley, in 1839. Kingsley made the mistake of taking his mother along to meet the great man: ‘..as my mother knows nothing about Art, I was taking her down the gallery to look at the large ‘Richmond Park’; but, as we were passing the ‘Snow Storm’, she stopped before it, and I could hardly get her to look at any other picture; and she told me a great deal more about it than I had any notion of, though I have seen many snow-storms. She had been in such a scene on the coast of Holland during the war.

When, some time afterwards, I thanked Turner for his permission for her to see the pictures, I told him that he would not guess what had (most) caught my mother’s fancy, and then named the picture; but he said —

‘I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one had any business to like the picture’.

‘But’, said I, ‘my mother once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her’.

‘Is your mother a painter?”

‘No’.

‘Then she ought to have been thinking of something else’.

Thornbury surtitles his account ‘Lashed to the Mast’ and justifies his anecdote by appeal to heroic precedent. The painter having undergone this experience in all its edifying absurdity reveals art as a technique of suffering and defiant survival, whose representative figure is Odysseus, as seen in Book 10 of The Odyssey, bound by his oarsmen to the mast of his ship so that he can hear the seductive song of the Sirens and live to tell the tale. It is an epic moment, but also lyrical in this sense: that the emblematic persistence of this episode into the modern era depends on some massive alteration to the bounds of personal knowledge and its relations to any collective awareness. As the Turner anecdote makes clear, the formal integrity of a modern artwork depends not merely on its subjective intensity but also its indifference to reciprocal endorsement, even the reciprocities of ‘experience’. The fact that something happens to me, not you, is paradoxically what makes its communicative potential representative of the historical condition of unsociable togetherness. - Kevin Nolan

Mark Collett with Stage IV advanced Metastatic Melanoma, 2024

30cm x 25cm

Oil on Expensive European Cnvas

Mark Collett is formerly chairman of the Young BNP, the youth division of the British National Party (BNP), and was director of publicity for the party. In 2019, Collett formed a group called Patriotic Alternative, of which he is currently the leader. PA have mainly focused on building their online presence through their active blog, and offline through a variety of efforts. This included a campaign in the summer of 2019, as part of PA's launch, when Collett and Tyrie coordinated a survey and, alongside fellow activists, polled people on the street in several locations across the country on questions related to immigration. To date, they have also held two conferences that have brought together very extreme figures from across the British far right. Many of the reasons for the organisation of the far right has been the unrepentant organisation of groups that have emerged out of the decentralised network of EDL, Palingenetic ultranationalism & populism. Patriotic Alternative, National Rebirth Party to name just two (the latter approved to run in Scotland by the Electoral Commission) have been able to thrive & have never been seen as the terrorist organisations they are. They will continue to 'defect' from fraction to fraction (see Alek Yerbury) ingratiating themselves into communities & galvanizing a new generation of British fascist activists.

Andrew Leak (Tug Haven, Dover), 2024

45cmx35cm

Oil on Expensive European canvas

A poem I wrote some months ago, about an arson attack by Andrew Leak on a Border Force centre for processing migrants in Dover, Kent. He supposedly was reading Tommy Robinson's Enemy of the State at the time, alongside Mark Collett, a neo-nazi political activist and former chairman of the Young BNP. A lot of the poem has a sort of convulsed roaming lyric in the form of 'a Yaxley.

Leak died hanging himself with a regimental tie at a nearby petrol station in the driver's seat of his white Seat following the attack, described as using crude incendiary devices. He was never part of any regiment, it was tie purchased from a local charity shop.

At the end of Brendan Behan's play An Giall, Leslie is a Cockney solider held hostage in Dublin lodging house in exchange for an IRA man who is to be hanged in Belfast. Civic guards (Garda) accidentally shoot him on a raid in the house. The Bells of Hell is sung as his corpse rises & he sings along. I'm singing it right now, incidentally.