The Measures Taken

‘XV- The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at every moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of the calendar serves as a historical timelapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do, they are memories of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired upon simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris.’
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

Recently listening (courtesy of a mixtape) to some Ghost Box pieces, I got in an argument in which it was asked- irritatingly but rightly- why this is acceptable, and not the eternal 1978 of the Kaiser Chiefs, or the endless 1988 of the hip hop backpacker (to name a couple of perennial bugbears)? With the covers’ referencing of Pelican books’ educationalism and the sounds generally in fidelity with Paddy Kingsland cuteness or floating in Delia Derbyshire’s Tarkovskyan Zone, it’s a difficult question to answer. The easy response of ‘well, it hasn’t been revived yet’ (as was made with the postpunk revival a few years ago) is far too trite- and not even necessarily apt, as can be seen for instance with Broadcast, Boards of Canada or Look around You.



More intriguing is the suggestion by Simon Reynolds(who appears to have been reading the Measures Taken comments box) that they evoke a benign, bygone paternalist socialism in the face of an increasingly dystopian hypercapitalism. What is appealing is how unprepossessing they are- how unwilling to announce their cleverness. They fit the terms of the ‘minimal art’ described by postmaster general Tony Benn, tiny, intricate, geometric miniatures, simplistic and baffling. How quietly they make their assault on temporality- the imposed eternal present is replaced by a sweet indistinctness, time isn’t ruptured but smeared, blurred. The patrician voice on The Advisory Circle’s ‘And the Cuckoo Comes’ delineates their co-ordinates, and in so doing articulates accidentally the disorientation of late capitalism in its climate-distorting overdrive, as much as it does a childlike playfulness- ‘in the summer- well, its usually cold, and sometimes it snows. The winds blow. In the autumn, the flowers are out, and the sun shines. In the winter, the leaves grow again on the trees. And in the spring the winds blow, and the leaves fall from the trees. And the sun shines. The leaves grow again on the trees, and sometimes, it snows…’

…the mind loses its bearings. what’s the date again? (it’s so dark in here)
Simon Puxley, sleevenote for Roxy Music (1972)



These questions echo through a current exhibition of British Abstraction. Elements of Abstraction- Space, Line and Interval in Modern British Art conflates the diametrically opposed factions of Duncan Grant and his Bloomsbury ilk, with their predilection for the vitalist and picturesque, and the Vorticists’ rigid geometric bombast- the kinetic violence of the paintings by Nevinson, Lewis and Wadsworth provide a benchmark which the next 80 years of British abstraction cowers in front of. The notoriously fallow British art of the inter-war years is here revised into a semi-futurist tradition of geometry and industry. Among cute but somewhat tailist Modrianian or Moholyish designs can be seen a more alien strain- the feminine, aqueous figures and terminal beaches of the likes of Paule Vezelay, John Bigge and Marlow Moss, which suggest a quietly unnerving creation of new forms, of serpentine tendrils and depopulated shale. Rather than positing a future, time becomes irrelevant- industry as much as flesh serve as debris, in landscapes as much pre-Cambrian as they are post-apocalyptic. They suggest a kind of living architecture- the traces of the future in the past, the shadows of the ultramodern in the pre-human, as in Ballard’s Drowned World.




Interestingly though, the show marks out the British Futurism of the 20s, 30s, 50s, as utterly obsessed with the recent past. From the genuine lack of real precedent for an Edward Wadsworth we end up with Victor Pasmore’s ‘Constructionism’, admitting its passeism in its very name. Curiously, the London-based abstractionists are more timid than the dislocations and desolations practised by those artists self-exiled in St Ives, who get a separate room in the exhibition. This suggests an affinity with what Reynolds correctly sees as a pagan, ruralist strain in the Ghost Box’s New Town. The label Trunk Records, for instance, seems to exist entirely in this zone, alternating releases of unassumingly visionary British Futurists like Basil Kirchin with the soundtrack to The Wicker Man (the strains of its heathen utopia run through The Focus Group) and a prurient fixation with pre-hardcore porn. The Cornish artists in the show have a noticeable voluptuousness, a combining of their ruthless modernity with an appeal to more naturalist instincts. The force, the sense of trying to smash the continuum that infuses Lewis or Wadsworth is abandoned- the bourgeois-bohemian tries to renounce its own relentless progressivism, its propensity to growth- the ritualistic creeps back in again.



‘All the electricity belongs to the bourgeoisie, yet they eat by candle-end.
They have an unconscious fear of their own electricity.
They are embarrassed, like the sorcerer who has conjured up spirits he is unable to control.'
Vladimir Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America, 1925



Futurism historically appears where the ‘future’ is a spectral presence rather than a norm- Russia and Italy and not the US and UK. Those societies most infused with technology have seemingly lost interest in it, as Mayakovsky, baffled, pointed out. The most obvious period of British Futurism, the 1950s- 1970s, were necessitated by a need for reconstruction, to piece back together a decimated, ruined industry. As such, the ferocity of a Marinetti is replaced by a calm, rational radicalism, one based on optimism, popular science- its iconography often shows the figure subtly distorted and xeroxed. As soon as ‘reconstruction’ was complete there was no longer a need for this municipal utopianism or the social democracy that came with it. The importance of destruction, of the recent memory of near-obliteration, can be seen in the progressivism in the face of Fascist barbarism of the later Coventry Cathedral- and conversely in the 21st century, the historical revisionism (or ‘reconciliation’) behind the restoration of the Marienkirche in Dresden, the imminent demolition of Berlin’s Palast der Republik to make way for a reconstructed castle, or even the Clinton’s Cards Classicism of London’s Paternoster Square. The Disneyfication of Europe continues apace.

Far richer than the current conception of evolution is a development that, as it were, repeats stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis- a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes and revolutions; ‘breaks in continuity’…the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history ever revealing new aspects)- these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is superior to the conventional one.’
V.I Lenin, ‘Dialectics’, 1914



As against the cataclysmic rupture, retro-futurism or post-modern attempts to think history away, there is the idea of revolution as tradition and arguably as mythic tale, filtering down from generation to generation. This lies behind the critique of artistic Futurism from the standpoint of revolutionary practice in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution (1924); ‘a Bohemian nihilism exists in the exaggerated Futurist rejection of the past, but not a proletarian revolutionism. We Marxists live in traditions, and we have not stopped being revolutionists on account of it. …the October revolution appeared to the intelligentsia, including its literary left-wing, as a complete destruction of its known world, of that very world from which it broke off from time to time…to us, on the contrary, the revolution appeared as the embodiment of a tradition, internally digested. From a world which we rejected theoretically, and which we undermined practically, we entered into a world which was already familiar to us, as a tradition and a vision’ - i.e., this is a discontinuity based on an alternative continuum. The last point stresses that they both necessitate a ‘new world’ of some sort- except that the revolutionary knows what the new world is going to be, has prepared for it, and has no delusions about the possibility of creating it in the midst of the old one. The parallel continuum is that of the failed attempts, the experiments, the disastrous utopias, all dormant and ripe for reactivation.